Cruise disputes claim that its autonomous vehicle delayed first responders

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2 years ago

September 2, 2023

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A Cruise self-driving car, which is owned by General Motors Corp, is seen outside the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

Heather Somerville | Reuters

The company Cruise is pushing back against an accusation from the San Francisco Fire Department, which claims that one of the company’s autonomous vehicles delayed an ambulance after a deadly accident.

According to SF Fire, on Aug. 14, a driver hit a pedestrian in the city at around 11 p.m. The department said emergency medical service crews faced a problem getting to the collision: two Cruise taxis blocking the road.

That blockage, according to SF Fire, caused a delay in getting the pedestrian to the hospital, where they later died.

In a report, the department wrote of the incident: “This delay, no matter how minimal, contributed to a poor patient outcome…The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable.”

But Cruise is pushing back on that narrative of events. A spokesperson for the company said videos from those AVs show a different story.

“The first vehicle promptly clears the area once the light turns green and the other stops in the lane to yield to first responders who are directing traffic,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “Throughout the entire duration the AV is stopped, traffic remains unblocked and flowing to the right of the AV. The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including the ambulance, proceeded to do so. As soon as the victim was loaded into the ambulance, the ambulance left the scene immediately and was never impeded from doing so by the AV.”

Cruise wouldn’t share that video, saying that it was proprietary material.

But NBC Bay Area was able to review a nearly 13 minute video which is purportedly the incident in question. It appears to show what the company describes, including the ambulance managing to squeeze by the stopped Cruise car.

The incident happened just four days after the California Public Utilities Commission approved an expansion for Cruise, as well as the company Waymo, allowing both to operate AVs at all hours in San Francisco.

It’s a move Supervisor Aaron Peskin has been critical of. And while he couldn’t speak to the events on Aug. 14 , Peskin did tell NBC Bay Area there are now more than 70 documented incidents of AVs interfering with first responders.

“In those cases seconds and minutes can make a difference in whether somebody bleeds out or is able to be resuscitated from a heart attack or other emergency,” he said. “And it’s not a question of ‘if,” it’s a question of ‘when.’ “

Peskin is asking the state for more regulation over the emerging AV industry. He said the city is set to talk to legislators and DMV leadership later this month.

Technology

ChatGPT outage: OpenAI’s chatbot is down for some users

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2 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI's chatbot is down for some users

OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is down for some users.

The company said it is “currently experiencing issues,” including “increased ChatGPT error rates,” according to an update on OpenAI’s status page.

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the status page said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Roughly 3,000 people reported issues with the chatbot on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.

The outage comes days after OpenAI disclosed a security breach at Mixpanel one of OpenAI’s data analytics providers.

The breach compromised user information, such as names, emails and other details tied to the OpenAI API.

OpenAI did not disclose how many users were affected, saying in a blog post that an attacker “exported a dataset containing limited customer identifiable information and analytics information.”

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago. As of October, OpenAI said more than 800 million people use the chatbot each week.

Beta stock jumps 9% on $1 billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Published

5 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Beta stock jumps 9% on billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies strikes $1B electric motor manufacturing deal with Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.

Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.

Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.

Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.

“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.

Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Published

6 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.

DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.

The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.

SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.

Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.

“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.

The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.

AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.

Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.

WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software