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Apr 24, 2025
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Happy Thursday! Tesla starts testing its robotaxi service with employees in Austin and San Francisco. Google's court hearing reveals the company's Gemini AI chatbot had 350 million monthly active users last month. Neuralink is raising $500 million at a valuation of $8.5 billion.
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Tesla’s planned robotaxi service has begun testing with employees in Austin and San Francisco, the company said Wednesday on X. The announcement followed Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s statement on Tuesday evening that the service was on track to launch in a pilot stage in Austin in June, using a fleet that would likely be 10 to 20 Model Y cars, with the potential to scale to cars owned by individuals down the line. Tesla’s post on X said the ride-hailing service was “live for an early set of employees in Austin & San Francisco Bay area,” operating in what the company calls “supervised full self-driving mode,”
meaning with a human behind the wheel to intervene if necessary. The post added that Tesla robotaxis have completed 1,500 trips for a total of 15,000 driving miles. Musk told investors Tuesday that it takes about 10,000 miles to encounter an incident requiring a human to take over, limiting how quickly they can train the system. Tesla is jumping into a market already dominated by Alphabet’s Waymo, whose cars operate without a person behind the wheel. Waymo launched in Austin in March in a partnership with Uber. Tesla said testing with employees is helping to build out the app, choose what cars to use, and train its remote assistance team. Autopilot lead Ashok Elluswamy shared the video on X writing: “the overall experience will feel super snappy.”
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Google’s Gemini AI chatbot last fall was lagging rival services run by OpenAI and Meta Platforms but it was ahead of services from Microsoft, Anthropic and Perplexity, according to data shown in court on Wednesday. Usage has grown dramatically in the past six months although Gemini continues to lag ChatGPT. As of last month, Gemini worldwide was seeing 35 million daily active users and 350 million monthly active users, according to internal Google analysis. Google analysts estimated that ChatGPT was seeing 160 million daily active users and 600 million monthly active users, according to the slide. In October of last year, Gemini was seeing about 9 million DAUs compared with more than 90 million estimated for ChatGPT. The slide was shown on the third day of a hearing in a Washington D.C. courtroom considering how
Google should be overhauled to remedy its illegal search monopoly. The Justice Department is arguing that Google be constrained from extending its dominance of search into the nascent field of artificial intelligence. The slide was shown during testimony by Sissie Hsiao, a senior Google executive who most recently ran the group responsible for the Gemini chatbot.
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Elon Musk’s Neuralink is raising $500 million at a valuation of $8.5 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The brain-computer interface company wants to sell implantable devices that could help people, including those who are paralyzed, control computers directly from their brain. The Food and Drug Administration cleared Neuralink for human clinical trials in early 2023. Months later, the company closed a $280 million funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund at an unknown evaluation, Reuters reported. The company is also backed by Google Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund, a Founders Fund spinoff
that has also funded Musk’s Boring Company and SpaceX. The talks come as competitor Precision Neuroscience received FDA clearance for the main component of its own brain implant.
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A Perplexity executive on Wednesday testified that Google’s distribution contracts with phone manufacturers and mobile carriers have blocked his company’s efforts to achieve similar deals, as the Department of Justice attempts to convince a federal judge to end those contracts as part of remedies to address Google’s illegal search monopoly. Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer, said that in one case, he couldn’t reach a deal to set Perplexity as the default assistant on a device manufacturer’s phones because of the manufacturer’s agreements with Google, even though Shevelenko said the device manufacturer wanted to switch. Shevelenko didn’t name the company publicly. The government has proposed remedies including requiring Google to divest its Chrome browser, and share search data with
rivals. In response to a question, Shevelenko said that Perplexity would be interested in acquiring Chrome, although it’s unclear how the AI startup would be able to afford that. Perplexity also recently made a bid to acquire TikTok. Earlier in his testimony, Shevelenko said that he would be interested in striking a deal with an independent Chrome to distribute Perplexity. Later in the day, DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg also testified about how the government’s proposed remedies could benefit his company’s search engine. When users try to switch their default browser to DuckDuckGo on Chrome, Google popups encouraging users to switch back to Google Search have the effect of halving DuckDuckGo’s conversion rate, Weinberg said. Weinberg also said that data sharing remedies would help DuckDuckGo compete on “long tail queries” that DuckDuckGo doesn’t have enough scale to know how to handle.
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ServiceNow’s revenue rose 18.5% in the first quarter to $3.09 billion, the company said Wednesday, the second consecutive quarter topline growth has decelerated slightly. But the biggest part of ServiceNow’s business, software subscriptions, exceeded previous projections and the IT automation company slightly raised its subscription revenue forecast for the year. CFO Gina Mastantuono said in a press release the company’s internal use of artificial intelligence helped the firm reach profitability goals and “drive meaningful opex efficiencies.” The company maintained its 32% free cash flow margin projection for the year, marginally higher than its 2024 margin. (See The Information’s ServiceNow Org Chart.) The company’s shares jumped more than 8% after hours. Year-to-date, ServiceNow’s share price has fallen more than 20%, steeper than the decline in the same period for the Nasdaq Composite and other indices of major software and technology companies. ServiceNow is one of the earliest software firms to report first quarter results and suggests enterprise software spending was healthy in the first three months of the year. To be sure, macroeconomic concerns around how tariffs will affect business spending largely started in April, so they won’t be reflected in most companies’ March quarter results.
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ChatGPT has drawn away some search queries from Google, a senior Google executive testified on Wednesday, but primarily “homework and math” queries which don’t generate much in ad revenue. The executive, Sissie Hsiao, said “so far we have not seen cannibalization of commercial queries or [queries with] commercial intent.” Still, Hsiao said that Google’s ad chief, Vidhya Srinivasan, believes cannibalization of commercial queries was “inevitable”. Hsiao said Srinivasan wanted Google to speed up adding ads to its Gemini AI chatbot. In notes from an October 2024 meeting presented in court, Srinivasan was quoted noting that the “writing is on the wall.” Hsiao’s comments came on the third day of a hearing in a Washington D.C. courtroom considering how Google should be overhauled to remedy its illegal
search monopoly. The Justice Department is arguing that Google be constrained from extending its dominance of search into the nascent field of artificial intelligence. Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on how AI market leader OpenAI was affected by competition from Google. Hsaio said that search queries that drive ads tend to be those where someone intends to buy something. She said AI chatbots hope to make chatbots helpful for shopping but so far “they’re not really great at it.”
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