A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives along a street on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
Waymo is now providing more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the US, according to a LinkedIn announcement by its co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. That’s double the 50,000 weekly paid trips the company reported in May.
A spokesperson for the Alphabet-owned driverless vehicle venture told CNBC on Tuesday that San Francisco now “serves the most trips” among the cities where Waymo operates its commercial service: San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles.
Last month, Alphabet announced that it was investing an additional $5 billion into Waymo, which started as a self-driving project at the company in 2009.
On Monday, Waymo revealed details about its new, “generation 6” self-driving system, which should enable the company to offer driverless services in a wider array of weather conditions and without requiring as many costly cameras and sensors in its vehicles.
Waymo, which boasts around 700 vehicles in its fleet today, operates the only commercial robotaxi service in the U.S., Waymo One.
Waymo previously partnered with the ridehailing giant Uber in Phoenix to bring its service to the app’s existing users there. In a statement on Tuesday, Waymo noted that in June 2024, it added 90 square miles to its service in Phoenix as well, making it the largest autonomous ride-hailing “territory” in the states.
This month, Waymo also expanded its San Francisco robotaxi service into three new California areas — Daly City, Broadmoor and Colma — and is now testing its driverless vehicles on freeways around the San Francisco metro area.
While CNBC could not independently confirm the company’s safety claims, Waymo also says that “over 14.8 million rider-only miles driven, the Waymo Driver was 3.5x better in avoiding crashes that caused injuries and 3x better in avoiding police-reported crashes than human drivers.”
Although commercial robotaxi services from Didi and Pony.ai are up and running in China, Waymo currently faces limited domestic competition. GM-owned Cruise experienced setbacks that took its driverless vehicles off the road temporarily, and companies including Uber and Ford have shuttered their efforts to develop robotaxis.
Elon Musk’s electric vehicle maker, Tesla, has been promising it would turn customers’ existing vehicles into driverless cars with a software update for years. However, the company has not yet produced a car capable of serving as a robotaxi. Tesla plans to unveil its CyberCab, or dedicated robotaxi, at a hotly-anticipated event on October 10.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia announced Tuesday that it hopes to resume sales of its H20 general processing units to clients in China, saying that the U.S. government had assured the company would be granted licenses.
Nvidia’s sales of the H20 chips, which had been designed specifically to keep them out of export controls on China, were halted in April.
“The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement.
This comes against the backdrop of a preliminary trade deal between Washington and Beijing last month that sought China to resume rare earth exports and the U.S. to relax tech export controls.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in recent months has ramped up his lobbying against export controls, arguing that they inhibited American tech leadership. In May, Huang said chip restrictions had already cut Nvidia’s China market share nearly in half.
Huang also announced a new “fully compliant” GPU, NVIDIA RTX PRO, saying it was ideal for smart factories and logistics.
The potential change in U.S. stance follows a meeting between Huang and U.S. President Donald Trump last week.
In his meeting with Trump and U.S. policymakers, Huang had reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s job creation and onshoring efforts, as well as the aim for America to lead in global AI, the company said.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, it was confirmed that Huang has met with government and industry officials to discuss the benefits of AI and ways for researchers to advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.
In this photo illustration, a man seen holding a smartphone with the logo of US artificial intelligence company Cognition AI Inc. in front of website.
Timon Schneider | SOPA Images | Sipa USA | AP
Artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced it’s acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding company that lost its CEO and several other senior employees to Google just days earlier.
Cognition said on Monday that it will purchase Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and talent, but didn’t disclose terms of the deal. It’s the latest development in an AI talent war, as companies like Meta, Google and OpenAI fiercely compete for top engineers and researchers.
OpenAI had been in talks to acquire Windsurf for about $3 billion in April, but the deal fell apart, and Google said on Friday that it hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO Varun Mohan. Google is paying $2.4 billion in licensing fees and for compensation, as CNBC previously reported.
“Every new employee of Cognition will be treated the same way as existing employees: with transparency, fairness, and deep respect for their abilities and value,” Cognition CEO Scott Wu wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “After today, our efforts will be as a united and aligned team. There’s only one boat and we’re all in it together.”
Cognition didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Windsurf directed CNBC to Cognition.
Cognition is best known for its AI coding agent named Devin, which is designed to help engineers build software faster. As of March, the startup had raised hundreds of millions of dollars at a valuation of close to $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Other investors in Windsurf include Greenoaks, Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst.
“I’m overwhelmed with excitement and optimism, but most of all, gratitude,” Jeff Wang, the interim CEO of Windsurf, wrote in a post on X on Monday. “Trying times reveal character, and I couldn’t be prouder of how every single person at Windsurf showed up these last three days for each other and for our users.”
Wu said that the acquisition ensures all Windsurf employees are “treated with respect and well taken care of in this transaction.” All employees will participate financially in the deal, have vesting cliffs waived for their work to date and receive fully accelerated vesting for their, according to the memo.
“There’s never been a more exciting time to build,” Wu wrote.
The Grok logo is being displayed on a smartphone with Xai visible in the background in this photo illustration on April 1, 2024.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto | Getty Images
The European Union on Monday called in representatives from Elon Musk‘s xAI after the company’s social network X, and chatbot Grok, generated and spread anti-semitic hate speech, including praise for Adolf Hitler, last week.
A spokesperson for the European Commission told CNBC via e-mail that a technical meeting will take place on Tuesday.
xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandro Gozi, a member of Italy’s parliament and member of the Renew Europe group, last week urged the Commission to hold a formal inquiry.
“The case raises serious concerns about compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA) as well as the governance of generative AI in the Union’s digital space,” Gozi wrote.
X was already under a Commission probe for possible violations of the DSA.
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Grok also generated and spread offensive posts about political leaders in Poland and Turkey, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
Over the weekend, xAI posted a statement apologizing for the hateful content.
“First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced. … After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot,” the company said in the statement.
Musk and his xAI team launched a new version of Grok Wednesday night amid the backlash. Musk called it “the smartest AI in the world.”
xAI works with other businesses run and largely owned by Musk, including Tesla, the publicly traded automaker, and SpaceX, the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor.
Despite Grok’s recent outburst of hate speech, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded xAI a $200 million contract to develop AI. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI also received AI contracts.