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A Google Waymo self-driving Lexus on the road in Arizona

Alphabet-owned Waymo said Wednesday it plans to expand its self-driving ride-hailing service, Waymo One, to Los Angeles. It’s unclear when that will happen.

Waymo currently only operates its service to the public in the East Valley region of Phoenix. The announcement comes as critics question the progress made by the company and industry.

“When we think about our next cities, Los Angeles jumps out,” said Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana in Wednesday’s blog post. “LA is a remarkable, vibrant place – and Waymo’s experience leaves us best positioned to tackle its driving complexity.”

The company said it has already started driving around the city to collect mapping data. That process involves humans driving the cars down streets while sensors gather information on crosswalks, road edges, curb heights and intersections, according to a Waymo spokesperson.

Waymo said service will first begin with safety drivers behind the wheel and, later, with just Waymo employees as riders. It will begin public testing after it gathers permits and feedback. The company declined to provide even a rough timeline of when it expects those milestones to happen.

The timeline is still unclear

The self-driving car industry has been slow to progress and live up to lofty promises, but that’s especially true of Waymo.

The 12-year-old company launched its ride-hailing service in 2018 in Phoenix and has been slow to make progress outside of the limited East Valley Phoenix region.

Waymo assured the press and public that the technology was coming rapidly, even back in 2012 when it was still known as Google’s self-driving car project. “Fully self-driving cars are here,” former CEO John Krafcik said at the 2017 Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, where he presented a video of a man who fell asleep in one of the Waymo vehicles. “It’s not happening in 2020, it’s happening today.” 

In 2019, Morgan Stanley cut its valuation on Waymo by 40%, from $175 billion to $105 billion, saying that it underestimated the heavy reliance the company still had on human drivers after CNBC reporting found that Waymo still largely relied on human safety drivers and still required community buy-in.

In August of last year, the company announced it was coming to San Francisco. But, the cars, most of which still have safety drivers, are still not available to the public or people outside of its approved testing participants. Those riders took tens of thousands of manned trips in the last year, according to a spokesperson. Waymo announced plans in March to remove safety drivers for fully-autonomous rides, but those are still only available to Waymo employees, the spokesperson confirmed.

Anthony Levandowski, a well-known albeit controversial self-driving vehicle engineer who co-founded Waymo’s self-driving program before it was renamed, said the lack of progress in the industry shows it won’t be a viable business anytime soon. He added that the industry still has “such a long way to go.”  

Some investors have still shown interest in recent years.

Waymo announced in March 2020 that it raised $2.25 billion in its first external funding round. By July 2020, it said it raised a total of $3.2 billion after an extension of that round. Last year, it raised another $2.5 billion from investors including parent company Alphabet and Andreessen Horowitz. 

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

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EBay shares soar after Meta allows listings on Facebook Marketplace in U.S., Europe

A sign is posted in front of the eBay headquarters in San Jose, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Shares of eBay soared 8% Wednesday as Meta said it will allow some listings to show up on Facebook Marketplace, its popular platform connecting consumers for local item pickups and more.

EBay stock reached its highest level since November 2021.

The rollout will begin with a test in Germany, France and the United States, where buyers will be able to view listings directly on Marketplace and complete the rest of their transactions on eBay, Meta said in a release.

The partnership could provide a boost to eBay’s marketplace business, which has struggled to compete with e-commerce rivals like Amazon, Walmart, Temu and even Facebook’s own marketplace platform that lets users buy and sell items.

EBay has recently embraced niche categories like collectibles and luxury goods to try and keep buyers and sellers returning to its site. CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC in an October interview that shoppers were coming to the site, known for its used and refurbished goods, as they sought out discounts amid a rocky macroeconomic environment.

Meta’s move is an attempt to appease the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, after the regulator fined the company 797 million euros ($821 million) in November for tying its Marketplace product to the main Facebook app.

Read more CNBC tech news

At the time, the Commission said that Meta’s bundling of Marketplace with Facebook could mean competitors are effectively “foreclosed” given the distribution reach of the platform. Facebook counts more than 3 billion users globally.

The Commission also said that Meta imposes “unfair trading conditions” on other online classified ads service providers who advertise on its platforms, especially Facebook and Instagram. It added that these conditions allow Meta to use data generated from other advertisers to benefit Marketplace.

Meta appealed the ruling at the time, saying that it “ignores the realities of the thriving European market for online classified listing services.”

“While we disagree with and continue to appeal the European Commission’s decision on Facebook Marketplace, we are working quickly and constructively to build a solution which addresses the points raised,” the company said Wednesday.

EBay touted its integration with Facebook Marketplace as a way for the e-commerce site to “increase exposure to our sellers’ listings, on and off eBay, as part of our strategy to engage buyers and deepen customer loyalty.”

Facebook in 2023 announced a similar partnership with Amazon that lets users browse and purchase products without leaving the app.

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Additional reporting by CNBC’s Annie Palmer.

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

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Amazon workers in North Carolina to vote on unionization next month

An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days, at an Amazon fulfillment center in Orlando, Florida, on Dec. 2, 2024.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images

Amazon warehouse workers at a site in North Carolina will vote next month on whether to join a union, setting the stage for the company’s latest labor battle.

Workers at the Garner, North Carolina, facility will cast their ballots from Feb. 10 to Feb. 15, according to a Tuesday post on X by Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity & Empowerment, the group seeking to organize staffers. Representatives from Amazon and the National Labor Relations Board didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Known as CAUSE, the grassroots group led by current and former employees has been working to organize Amazon employees at the warehouse, which is located in a suburb about 10 miles south of Raleigh, for the past three years.

If the election is successful, the warehouse, known as RDU1, would be only the second Amazon site in the U.S. to unionize. Workers at Amazon’s largest warehouse in New York City voted to join the Amazon Labor Union in 2022, but the group struggled to negotiate a contract with Amazon, and last June, the ALU voted to affiliate with the Teamsters.

A handful of union elections were held at Amazon warehouses in the U.S. in recent years but employees have either rejected unionization or the results continue to be disputed in lengthy court battles. Last November, a federal labor judge ordered a third rerun election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, after ruling the company improperly interfered in the vote.

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

CAUSE filed for a union election last month, saying in a press release that 30% of workers at the North Carolina site signed union authorization cards, which is the necessary threshold to trigger an NLRB vote. Organizers are seeking to boost wages and improve working conditions.

The union filing comes after Amazon delivery and warehouse workers went on strike at nine facilities last month to push the company to come to the bargaining table, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the employees. The action was intended to snarl Amazon’s operations during the busiest holiday shopping period of the year, referred to as peak season. An Amazon representative told Reuters the company expected to see a limited impact on deliveries from the strike.

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Apple’s inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

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Apple's inaccurate AI news alerts shows the tech has a growing misinformation problem

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

An artificial intelligence feature on iPhones is generating fake news alerts, stoking concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.

Last week, a feature recently launched by Apple that summarizes users’ notifications using AI, pushed out inaccurately summarized BBC News app notifications on the broadcaster’s story about the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final, falsely claiming British darts player Luke Littler had won the championship.

The incident happened a day before the actual tournament’s final, which Littler did go on to win.

Then, just hours after that incident occurred, a separate notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s AI system, falsely claimed that Tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

The BBC has been trying for about a month to get Apple to fix the problem. The British state broadcaster complained to Apple in December after its AI feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself — which never happened.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it’s working on an update to resolve the problem by adding a clarification that shows when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in the notifications. Currently, generated news notifications show up as coming directly from the source.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement shared with the BBC. Apple added that it’s encouraging users to report a concern if they view an “unexpected notification summary.”

The BBC isn’t the only news organization that has been affected by Apple Intelligence inaccurately summarizing news notifications. In November, the feature sent an AI-summarized notification wrongly claiming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

The mistake was flagged on the social media app Bluesky by Ken Schwencke, a senior editor at investigative journalism site ProPublica.

CNBC has reached out to the BBC and New York Times for comment on Apple’s proposed solution to its AI feature’s misinformation issue.

AI’s misinformation problem

Apple touts its AI-generated notification summaries as an effective way to group and rewrite previews of news app notifications into a single alert on a users’ lock screen.

It’s a feature Apple says is designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and cut down on the overwhelming barrage of updates many smartphone users are familiar with.

However, this has resulted in what AI experts refer to as “hallucinations” — responses generated by AI that contain false or misleading information.

“I suspect that Apple will not be alone in having challenges with AI-generated content. We’ve already seen numerous examples of AI services confidently telling mistruths, so-called ‘hallucinations’,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at tech-focused market research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC.

In Apple’s case, because the AI is trying to consolidate notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of information, it’s mashed the words together in a way that’s inaccurately characterized the events — but confidently presenting them as facts.

“Apple had the added complexity of trying to compress content into very short summaries, which ended up delivering erroneous messages,” Wood added. “Apple will undoubtedly seek to address this as soon as possible, and I’m sure rivals will be watching closely to see how it responds.”

Generative AI works by trying to figure out the best possible answer to a question or prompt inserted by a user, relying on vast quantities of data which its underlying large language models are trained on.

Sometimes the AI might not know the answer. But because it’s been programmed to always present a response to user prompts, this can result in cases where the AI effectively lies.

It’s not clear exactly when Apple’s resolution to the bug in its notification summarization feature will be fixed. The iPhone maker said to expect one to arrive in “the coming weeks.”

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