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For all the attention Nvidia gets for its relentless pace of new business partnerships, it can’t hold a candle to Uber. The ride-hailing giant seems to be on a quest to go into business with anyone who’s ever thought about developing a self-driving car. On Thursday, it announced a robotaxi deal with Rivian, the electric truck maker that is developing autonomous driving software. It’s the fifth self-driving car related announcement Uber has made in the past eight days!
Over the past 12 months, Uber has announced more than a dozen self-driving–car partnerships, building on a couple of earlier arrangements with industry leader Waymo and others. Uber now has deals with firms ranging from Momenta, WeRide, PonyAI, Nuro, Baidu, Zoox, Wayve, Hyundai’s Motional, Nvidia, May Mobility and Volkswagen. And that’s not all: We reported on Friday that Uber is backing its cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick in a venture with autonomous driving ambitions, among many others.
Uber’s chief financial officer, Balaji Krishnamurthy, told a Morgan Stanley investment conference earlier this month that the company’s strategy is “to ensure that by 2029, Uber has the largest [autonomous vehicle] deployment globally, and we’ll be facilitating more trips than anyone else.”
As he and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have explained, adding self-driving cars boosts the Uber service’s usage. And while the profit margins on autonomous vehicles operating on Uber might be lower than for Uber’s standard UberX vehicles at first, over time executives expect margins to improve.
Uber’s strategy makes a lot of sense. You can imagine that riders will find it more convenient to use one app that has access to a bunch of different cars, as availability times and seating capacity will vary. Still, there’s one big gap in Uber’s array of partnerships: Tesla. If Tesla’s still-nascent robotaxi service takes off, the fact that it’s not on Uber could undermine the ride-hailing firm’s market share.
On the other hand, will its absence from Uber dampen Tesla’s hopes of taking off? Khosrowshahi acknowledged last year that “we would love to partner” with Tesla, but Tesla CEO Elon Musk wanted to go it alone—for now.
Uber has plenty of time to hone its approach. While Waymos have proved popular, we’d bet more than a few consumers are nervous about getting into self-driving cars. And it will take a long while before robotaxis are available everywhere. Still, Uber’s partnership strategy seems promising.
AI’s Marijuana-Like Qualities
How is AI like weed? Heavy use of both can cause cognitive problems.
Anthropic on Thursday published a study of how people are using AI, drawn on interviews with more than 80,000 people around the world. One of the most startling findings was that 17% of respondents were worried “about cognitive atrophy from AI use.”
And it’s not just a worry. While students cited learning benefits from using AI, students and academics alike mentioned the negative effects of overuse. “Troublingly, educators were 2.5-3 times more likely than average to report having witnessed cognitive atrophy firsthand, presumably in their students,” the study said.
What does that remind you of? Studies about the impact of marijuana use: This 2022 article from Harvard Medical School cited research—done on people aged 3 to 45—that long-term cannabis users’ IQs “declined by 5.5% on average from childhood and there were deficits in learning and processing speed compared to people that did not use cannabis.”
Just imagine what happens to people using AI while they’re high!
In Other News
• Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu said Thursday that the Chinese tech giant aims to generate more than $100 billion in annual cloud computing and AI revenue within the next five years. In the 11 months through February, such revenue at Alibaba stood at about $14.5 billion.
• Crypto.com, a digital-asset exchange headquartered in Singapore, reduced its workforce by about 12%, joining the list of companies using AI to drive efficiencies across its business.
• Meta Platforms is shutting down Horizon Worlds for its virtual reality headset users, the company announced Tuesday. The VR social network will continue to operate via its mobile app, but users accessing it through the Meta Quest headset will no longer be able to create, publish or update virtual environments starting in June. Horizon Worlds was once a central part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.
• Meta is also scaling back on its use of third-party vendors for content moderation in favor of AI systems, the company announced Thursday.
• Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund aiming to automate manufacturing companies with AI, the Wall Street Journal reported.
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