Los Angeles Dodgers fans celebrate in downtown Los Angeles as their team clinches another World Series title

A Los Angeles Dodgers fan stands on top of a Waymo as fans in downtown Los Angeles celebrate their team’s World Series title (Jason Armond/Getty Images)

Waymo Vehicles

Waymo to expand to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans

Waymo currently operates in five cities with plans for 20, while Tesla operates in two with named plans for seven so far.

Rani Molla

11/20/25 9:00AM

It’s been a big week for autonomous cars, and it’s only getting bigger.

Right on the heels of announcing this week that its driverless cars would be available to the public next year in five more markets — Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando — Google’s Waymo said Thursday that it’s also planning to expand to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans. It will begin manual testing there in the “coming days.”

Currently in five cities in the US, Waymo already plans to more than quadruple that number, and says there’s “more to be announced.”

The company did not provide a time frame for the most recent announced expansion, but typically Waymo follows a set of procedures in each city: it reveals that it will expand to that market, tests with — and then without — drivers, and finally opens to the public.

The time between Waymo announcing its expansion to a city and actually opening to the public in that city has been getting shorter. Most recently, Waymo became available through the Uber app in Atlanta in June, less than a year after the company said it would expand there.

Waymo’s biggest competitor, Tesla, also made some big progress this week. It got approval to launch its robotaxi service in Phoenix — one of the markets it said during its annual shareholder meeting that it was expanding to in addition to Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston, and Miami.

Currently, Tesla operates a ride-hailing service in Austin, with a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and in the Bay Area, with a driver using supervised Full Self-Driving tech. As of this week, the app is no longer invite-only in those cities but is now open to the iPhone-holding public. On the last earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said the company planned to operate in 8 to 10 markets by the end of the year.

Jon Keegan11h

AI leaderboard maker LMArena hits $1.7 billion valuation

If you want to know who’s up and who’s down in the AI model world, look no further than LMArena’s leaderboard. The startup has just raised a $150 million series A fundraising round, with a valuation of $1.7 billion.

In seven months, LMArena has raised $250 million, according to TechCrunch.

The leaderboard started as a research project by cofounders Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley.

The public leaderboard — formerly known as “Chatbot Arena” — shows the results of human evaluations of AI models for various tasks. Users can rate which model did a better job on one task in a sort of blind taste test.

The leaderboard is a hotly contested proving grounds for new models, and the company occupies a powerful position in an industry that lacks independent, industry-standard evaluations.

LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product | TechCrunch

The leaderboard started as a research project by cofounders Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley.

The leaderboard is a hotly contested proving grounds for new models, and the company occupies a powerful position in an industry that lacks independent, industry-standard evaluations.

Rani Molla16h

Uber jumps after unveiling Lucid robotaxi at CES

Uber shares jumped more than 5% after the company unveiled a production-intent robotaxi developed in partnership with Lucid and Nuro at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday. The autonomous vehicle runs on Nvidia’s Drive AGX Thor computer. Nvidia itself announced a slate of autonomous hardware and software announcements at CES.

The companies said this fall that the San Francisco Bay Area will be the first market for the joint effort. The robotaxi is already being tested on public roads, with a commercial launch planned for later this year.

Uber + Lucid + Nvidia is just another example of the tangled web of partnerships in the autonomous driving space, where Nvidia is now becoming more and more prominent.

This is Uber's new robotaxi from Lucid and Nuro | TechCrunch

Uber + Lucid + Nvidia is just another example of the tangled web of partnerships in the autonomous driving space, where Nvidia is now becoming more and more prominent.

Rani Molla17h

Meta delays international Ray-Ban Display expansion thanks to “unprecedented demand” and “extremely limited inventory”

Meta said today that it’s delaying the early 2026 international expansion of its Ray-Ban Display glasses because of “extremely limited inventory” and “unprecedented demand.” The company didn’t specify whether the issue was more supply or demand, but has previously insisted its smart glasses are a hit.

Waitlists for the smart glasses, which are controlled with a band you wear on your wrist, extend “well into 2026.”

“We’ll continue to focus on fulfilling orders in the US while we re-evaluate our approach to international availability,” the company wrote. Expansion had been planned for the UK, France, Italy, and Canada.

In order to buy the smart glasses, consumers must do an in-person product demo to ensure the tech is “properly fitted to you,” according to Meta. Demos in New York City are unavailable for the next few weeks, the company’s scheduling website shows. It also notes that “that due to high demand, the product may be sold out and unavailable for purchase after your demo.”

Nvidia’s autonomous tech gives other automakers a chance to take on Tesla

Nvidia made a number of autonomous vehicle announcements at CES yesterday that should have Tesla worried.

Rani Molla18h

Jon Keegan1/5/26

Report: Returns on Nvidia’s Omniverse business are underwhelming

Today in Las Vegas, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang will be taking the stage at the CES conference to show off his company’s latest innovations. If you’ve watched any of Huang’s impressive jargon-filled keynote speeches, you’ll notice that he gets extra animated when talking about “digital twins.”

Nvidia’s “Omniverse” platform allows companies to use Nvidia software and hardware to run large-scale simulations of factories and assembly lines.

The idea is that you can train your robots in Nvidia’s simulated environment, saving huge amounts of time and money. Huang is making a huge bet on this nascent product, and according to a new report, it isn’t exactly taking off.

The Information reports that much to Huang’s anger and frustration, the Omniverse offerings have yet to generate significant revenue.

According to the report, despite a long list of customers who Nvidia says are using Omniverse, some say the software is hard to use and fails to allow for simulating robot interactions with complex objects. The report also says Nvidia shuttered its Omniverse Cloud service in August of last year due to a lack of demand.

Nvidia has certainly successfully blazed trails into new categories before, but considering Huang’s enthusiasm for the Omniverse offerings, it is a rare stumble for the chip juggernaut.

Nvidia’s Big Ambitions to Solve Manufacturing Shows Slow Returns So Far