A woman crossing a normally busy stretch of downtown San Francisco suffered serious injuries Monday night after a hit-and-run driver struck her, throwing her into the path of an oncoming driverless Cruise car, which then ran her over, according to video recorded by the autonomous vehicle that Cruise showed to the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit.
Courtesy NBC Bay Area
Federal regulators have opened a preliminary investigation into whether Cruise autonomous cars exercised “appropriate caution” in and around pedestrians, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wrote in a filing.
The NHTSA probe was prompted by two reports involving pedestrian injuries and Cruise vehicles in recent months. The agency also cited two other incidents that it identified through “videos posted to public websites,” according to the filing. The probe was formally opened Monday.
One incident on October 2 involved a situation where a pedestrian was thrown by another vehicle into the path of a driverless Cruise vehicle. That incident matches the details of a hit-and-run crash in San Francisco, which resulted in one pedestrian being transported to the hospital.
At the time of the incident the company said its autonomous vehicle braked “aggressively” and that it was “actively working” with San Francisco police to identify the hit-and-run driver. Cruise said it had spoken with the NHTSA about the October 2 incident and provided them with video footage, adding that the regulator had not raised further questions.
The other incident occurred in August. According to the incident report, a Cruise autonomous vehicle moving at a speed of about 1.4 miles per hour struck a pedestrian who stepped into a crosswalk after the stoplight had turned green, and the vehicle was allowed to proceed, according to the incident report. The pedestrian was then transported by emergency medical services.
Cruise said that the NHTSA had not spoken with the company about the August incident or the two incidents apparently posted on social media. The company also said the pedestrian was transported after experiencing knee pain.
“Cruise’s safety record over 5 million miles continues to outperform comparable human drivers at a time when pedestrian injuries and deaths are at an all-time high,” Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow said in a statement to CNBC. “Cruise communicates regularly with NHTSA and has consistently cooperated with each of NHTSA’s requests for information – whether associated with an investigation or not – and we plan to continue doing so.”
Proponents have argued that driverless vehicles are safer than human-driven ones. Other companies, including some based in China, are also testing driverless vehicles on San Francisco streets.
A mockup of Tesla Inc.’s planned humanoid robot Optimus on display during the Seoul Mobility Show in Goyang, South Korea, on Thursday, March 30, 2023. The motor show will continue through April 9. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted that Optimus robots, which have yet to hit the market, will eventually make up more than three-quarters of his automaker’s value.
In a post on X on Monday, Musk wrote, “~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.” In mid-2024, Musk predicted that Optimus robots would someday turn Tesla into a $25 trillion company, which was equal to more than half of the entire value of the S&P 500 at the time of his comment.
With Tesla in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to competition from lower-cost Chinese competitors, an aging lineup of electric vehicles and Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric and involvement with the Trump administration, the world’s richest person has been trying to convince Wall Street to look to the future.
For Tesla, that dream revolves around a world filled with robotaxis and humanoid robots, powered by artificial intelligence.
“It is important to note that Tesla is by far the best in the world at real-world AI,” Musk said in the company’s second-quarter conference call with analysts in July.
The problem for Tesla is that it’s behind in those key markets.
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In robotaxis, Tesla has only recently started tests in Austin, Texas, and San Francisco, while Alphabet’s Waymo is live in numerous markets and reached 10 million paid trips in May. Baidu’s Apollo Go is live in China.
Meanwhile, competition in humanoid robots is coming from the likes of Chinese companies like Unitree, which won multiple medals at the World Humanoid Robot Games. Others in the space include Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, 1X and Figure.
Musk said in March that Tesla plans to make 5,000 of its Optimus robots this year. In its first-quarter shareholder deck, Tesla said it was on target for “builds of Optimus on our Fremont pilot production line in 2025, with wider deployment of bots doing useful work across our factories.”
Tesla recently lost the person running the division.
Milan Kovac, Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, announced his departure in June after nine years at the company.
Tesla is developing Optimus with the aim of someday selling it as a bipedal, intelligent robot capable of everything from factory work to babysitting.
A person holds a smartphone displaying the logo of SAP, a German multinational software corporation known for its enterprise resource planning solutions.
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German software giant SAP on Tuesday announced it will invest over 20 billion euros ($23.3 billion) into its sovereign cloud capabilities in Europe over the next 10 years.
The company said it was expanding its sovereign cloud offerings to include an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform enabling companies to access various computing services via its data center network. IaaS is a market dominated by players like Microsoft and Amazon.
It will also roll out a new on-site option that allows customers to use SAP-operated infrastructure within their own data centers.
The aim of the initiative is to ensure that customer data is stored within the European Union to maintain compliance with regional data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
“Innovation and sovereignty cannot be two separate things — it needs to come together,” Thomas Saueressig, SAP’s board member tasked with leading customer services and delivery, said during a virtual press conference Tuesday.
He added that it was important for European companies to be able to access the latest technological advancements such as artificial intelligence “in a full sovereign context.”
Technological sovereignty is a topic that has been gaining momentum in the last year or so as geopolitical frictions have forced companies to assess their reliance on foreign technologies.
Countries around the world are increasingly looking to on-shore computing infrastructure needed to train and run powerful AI systems. That has led to major global tech players like Amazon and Microsoft to announce new sovereign cloud initiatives to ensure the data of European users is stored within the EU.
The European Commission, which is the executive body of the EU, has made AI a top priority for the bloc as it looks to ramp up competition with the U.S. and China. Europe has long lagged behind both countries when it comes to technologically more broadly.
Earlier this year, the Commission unveiled plans to invest 20 billion euros in the creation of new so-called “AI gigafactories,” facilities equipped with vast supercomputers to develop next-generation AI models.
Saueressig said that SAP is “closely” involved in the creation of the new AI gigafactories but would not be the lead partner for the initiative.
He added that the company’s more than 20-billion-euro investment in Europe’s sovereign cloud capabilities will not alter the company’s capital expenditure for the next year and has already been baked into its financial plans.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House in Washington on June 19, 2017.
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Microsoft has agreed to give the U.S. General Services Administration $3.1 billion in potential savings over the course of a year on cloud services used at government agencies.
Since President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, the GSA has sought to aggregate spending through a strategy called OneGov that’s meant to lower prices. Adobe, Amazon, Google and Salesforce have already come forward with discounts.
Agencies have to buy through the GSA to take advantage of the Microsoft savings through September 2026. The lower prices will be available for three years, resulting in total savings of over $6 billion, Microsoft said.
The discounts apply to Microsoft’s Office productivity subscriptions, as well as Azure cloud infrastructure, Dynamics 365 business applications and Sentinel cybersecurity software. Microsoft is throwing in a year of free access to the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant for millions of workers with Microsoft 365 G5 subscriptions, the company said.
Agencies can easily switch to the lower price, said Josh Gruenbaum, who left his director position at private equity firm KKR to become commissioner of the GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service after Trump’s second term began.
The GSA oversees about $110 billion in spending on common goods and services from many agencies, out of about $450 billion in total spending across the federal government, Gruenbaum said in an interview. The GSA is working to absorb procurement for NASA and the National Institutes of Health, to comply with an executive order Trump signed in March, Gruenbaum said.
Around $80 billion in spending is tied to IT, and Microsoft’s annual U.S. government revenue probably stands in the mid- to high-single-digit billions of dollars, Gruenbaum said.
“It’s no surprise that Microsoft is one of the most critical partners for the federal government in terms of its software and the tooling that we use around both the civilian side and the defense side,” Gruenbaum said.
Gruenbaum said he spoke numerous times about the deal with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
“I think the biggest piece is he wants to partner with this administration and get this right for AI adoption,” Gruenbaum said of Nadella. “But I also think he wants to go and take market share from some of the other tools and services that are out there.”