Rivian: United States based electric car manufacturer Rivian has received backing by Uber. Uber will invest up to $1.25 billion to help launch around 50,000 robotaxis. Uber itself is expected to purchase about 10,000 fully autonomous Rivian R2s, with the option to buy an additional 40,000 in 2030. The R2s provided to Uber will have Rivian’s third generation autonomy, along with five radar sensors, 11 cameras and a LiDAR sensor. To analyze this data, Rivian’s own chip system will be used, offering about 1600 trillion operations per second, which allows the car to rapidly process information when operating autonomously. Rivian has a custom Large Driving Model (LDM) that is able to analyze objects up to 1,000ft away and plan multiple paths to choose the safest one.
Book Publishing/AI: “Shy Girl” a horror novel due to be published in the United States, has been shelved, after allegations that parts of the novel were generated using artificial intelligence (AI). The decision was made by Hachette Book Group, the book’s publisher, which said in a statement that the company “remains committed to protecting original creative expression and storytelling.” The novel’s author, Mia Ballard, has denied using AI tools, claiming, instead, that an editor she hired used AI. Ballard’s book had been published in the United Kingdom, selling around 1,800 copies. It has since been discontinued in that market, as well as being pulled from Amazon and the official Hachette website.
Donut Lab: Finnish company Donut Lab has recently begun to release the results of independent tests performed on its solid-state battery. A solid-state battery promises battery cells that are light, energy-dense, fast charging and thermally efficient. Tests have shown that a 26 Ah battery cell is able to be charged from 0-80% in under 10 minutes and that the cell is able to retain 97.7% of its charge over a ten day period. When the cell was damaged and operated at high temperatures, it did not catch fire, a trait that traditional lithium-ion batteries are susceptible to. The cell did, however, lose about 55% of its capacity and swell 17% in thickness. Still, Donut Lab has yet to prove that their battery can survive 100,000 cycle life (how many times the battery can be fully discharged and charged) and that it has a 400Wh/kg energy density (competitors have solid-state batteries rated at 375Wh/kg, but without the fast charging capability). A solid-state battery could improve electric vehicles’ range and offer much quicker charging, drastically boosting the bottom line of the first company to mass produce such a product.
Sora: ChatGPT creator OpenAI has announced that its video generation platform, Sora, will be discontinued. Released in 2024, Sora allowed users to generate photorealistic videos from a text prompt. The Walt Disney Company’s $1 billion deal with OpenAI to bring characters into videos has also ended. The move comes at a time when OpenAI is facing increased competition from other AI companies like Anthropic, which recently debuted productivity tools geared towards coders.
