In Brief

Amazon closes more of its cashierless convenience stores

Amazon continues to scale back efforts around its cashierless checkout technology, Just Walk Out. The e-commerce giant closed three of its Go convenience stores in New York last week, The Information confirmed on Friday, leaving just 17 across the nation. (Amazon notes it recently opened one in Washington.) These convenience stores use AI systems to […]

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Elon Musk’s xAI moves into OpenAI’s old HQ

San Francisco’s Mission district isn’t known for corporate offices, but it’s now home to two of the world’s most well-funded AI startups. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, recently moved into a new office in the Mission: the same building that served as OpenAI’s headquarters for several years, according to the San Francisco Business Times.

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A hidden microphone on a San Francisco street pole is spotting ‘bops’ in the wild

In San Francisco’s Mission district, good music is all around you. That’s why, high up on a street pole at an undisclosed location in the Mission, Riley Walz installed a solar-powered box containing an old Android phone running the song identifying service, Shazam, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The so called “Bop

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Microsoft HoloLens 2 discontinued with no successor in sight

In the wake of big augmented reality announcements from Meta and Snap, Microsoft has confirmed that its HoloLens 2 has been quietly discontinued. Interested parties can still pick up a unit until stock is depleted. Then it’s lights out for the 5-year-old headset. Microsoft told UploadVR that it will continue to issue critical security and

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A Waymo robotaxi stalled in front of VP Harris’ motorcade

A Waymo robotaxi got stuck making a U-turn in front of Vice President Kamala Harris’ motorcade Friday evening in San Francisco.  ABC 7 reported that a San Francisco police officer had to manually drive the vehicle out of the way.  Waymo has not yet responded to TechCrunch’s questions, including what went wrong on the backend

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Tesla’s Cybertruck gets Supervised Full Self-Driving

Tesla’s end-of-September deadline for bringing Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) to Cybertruck owners has arrived. In typical Tesla fashion, the superfans are getting first access. Members of the Cybertruck Owners Club say they’ve been able to install the FSD update on their vehicles, according to Electrek. FSD is Tesla’s advanced driving assistance system that still requires

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Brian Williams might host a live election night special for Amazon

Amazon Prime Video could be getting into the live news business, if only for one night. Variety reports that the company is in talks with longtime NBC and MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams to host a live Election Night special, competing with more traditional TV news broadcasts to offer non-partisan coverage of the U.S. presidential

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A Russian warlord said he’s taking Cybertrucks into Ukraine; some experts think that’s unwise

In August, a Russian warlord posted a video on Telegram, showing a pair of Cybertrucks patrolling a road in Chechnya, armed seemingly with heavy machine guns. Leaving aside unanswerable (for now) questions about how the vehicles were obtained, Wired thought it worth digging into whether a Cybertruck actually makes sense as a “technical,” the term

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