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A California bill that would require a trained human safety operator to be present any time a heavy-duty autonomous vehicle operates on public roads in the state is getting traction. The bill, first introduced in January , passed the state’s Assembly Wednesday and will now face a committee review and vote in the Senate. Advocates of the bill want to ensure both the safety of California road users and the job security of truck drivers. AV companies and industry representatives say the move is unreasonable, threatens California’s competitiveness in the AV and trucking space, and hinders the advancement of a technology that can save lives. “ AB 316 is a preemptive technology ban that will put California even further behind other states and lock in the devastating safety status quo on California’s roads, which saw more than 4,400 people die last year,” said Jeff Farrah, executive director of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, in a statement. “AB 316 undermines California’s law...

Capillary Technologies , an Indian SaaS startup that offers solutions for loyalty management and customer engagement, has raised $45 million in a funding round, as it plans to expand into global markets and widen its reach through mergers and acquisitions. The funding arrives at a crucial time amidst the prevailing market slowdown, where startups, particularly those at the late stage, are facing a capital crunch. Capillary’s Series D funding round was led by Avataar Ventures and its LPs Pantheon, 57Stars and Unigestion. It also saw participation from Filter Capital and Innoven Capital. The round comprises $40 million in equity and about $5–$7 million in debt. With the latest capital injection, the startup has raised nearly $150 million in capital to date. Founded in 2012, Capillary Technologies initially focused on the retail vertical in India and Southeast Asia. In recent years, it has broadened its offerings and launched in more markets including the Middle East and South Africa, ...

Capillary Technologies , an Indian SaaS startup that offers solutions for loyalty management and customer engagement, has raised $45 million in a funding round, as it plans to expand into global markets and widen its reach through mergers and acquisitions. The funding arrives at a crucial time amidst the prevailing market slowdown, where startups, particularly those at the late stage, are facing a capital crunch. Capillary’s Series D funding round was led by Avataar Ventures and its LPs Pantheon, 57Stars and Unigestion. It also saw participation from Filter Capital and Innoven Capital. The round comprises $40 million in equity and about $5–$7 million in debt. With the latest capital injection, the startup has raised nearly $150 million in capital to date. Founded in 2012, Capillary Technologies initially focused on the retail vertical in India and Southeast Asia. In recent years, it has broadened its offerings and launched in more markets including the Middle East and South Africa, ...

Photonic computing startup Lightmatter is taking its big shot at the rapidly growing AI computation market with a hardware-software combo it claims will help the industry level up — and save a lot of electricity to boot. Lightmatter’s chips basically use optical flow to solve computational processes like matrix vector products. This math is at the heart of a lot of AI work and currently performed by GPUs and TPUs that specialize in it but use traditional silicon gates and transistors. The issue with those is that we’re approaching the limits of density and therefore speed for a given wattage or size. Advances are still being made but at great cost and pushing the edges of classical physics. The supercomputers that make training models like GPT-4 possible are enormous, consume huge amounts of power and produce a lot of waste heat. “The biggest companies in the world are hitting an energy power wall and experiencing massive challenges with AI scalability. Traditional chips push the ...

Photonic computing startup Lightmatter is taking its big shot at the rapidly growing AI computation market with a hardware-software combo it claims will help the industry level up — and save a lot of electricity to boot. Lightmatter’s chips basically use optical flow to solve computational processes like matrix vector products. This math is at the heart of a lot of AI work and currently performed by GPUs and TPUs that specialize in it but use traditional silicon gates and transistors. The issue with those is that we’re approaching the limits of density and therefore speed for a given wattage or size. Advances are still being made but at great cost and pushing the edges of classical physics. The supercomputers that make training models like GPT-4 possible are enormous, consume huge amounts of power and produce a lot of waste heat. “The biggest companies in the world are hitting an energy power wall and experiencing massive challenges with AI scalability. Traditional chips push the ...

Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty as well as “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards” to avoid charges of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI. Amazon’s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent who has one knows that kids love to play with it, make it tell jokes, even use it for its intended purpose, whatever that is. In fact it was so obviously useful to kids who can’t write or have disabilities that the FTC relaxed COPPA rules to accommodate reasonable usage: certain service-specific analysis of kids’ data, like transcription, was allowed as long as it is not retained any longer than reasonably necessary. It seems that Amazon may have taken a rather expansive view on the “reasonably necessary” timescale, keeping kids’ speech data more or less forever. As the FTC puts it: Amazon retained children’s recordings indefinitely—unless a parent requeste...

Amazon will pay the FTC a $25 million penalty as well as “overhaul its deletion practices and implement stringent privacy safeguards” to avoid charges of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to spruce up its AI. Amazon’s voice interface Alexa has been in use in homes across the globe for years, and any parent who has one knows that kids love to play with it, make it tell jokes, even use it for its intended purpose, whatever that is. In fact it was so obviously useful to kids who can’t write or have disabilities that the FTC relaxed COPPA rules to accommodate reasonable usage: certain service-specific analysis of kids’ data, like transcription, was allowed as long as it is not retained any longer than reasonably necessary. It seems that Amazon may have taken a rather expansive view on the “reasonably necessary” timescale, keeping kids’ speech data more or less forever. As the FTC puts it: Amazon retained children’s recordings indefinitely—unless a parent requeste...

Few lawyers would be foolish enough to let an AI make their arguments, but one already did, and Judge Brantley Starr is taking steps to ensure that debacle isn’t repeated in his courtroom. The Texas federal judge has added a requirement that any attorney appearing in his court must attest that “no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence,” or if it was, that it was checked “by a human being.” Last week, attorney Steven Schwartz allowed ChatGPT to “supplement” his legal research in a recent federal filing, providing him with six cases and relevant precedent — all of which were completely hallucinated by the language model. He now “greatly regrets” doing this , and while the national coverage of this gaffe probably caused any other lawyers thinking of trying it to think again, Judge Starr isn’t taking any chances. At the federal site for Texas’s Northern District, Starr has, like other judges, the opportunity to set specific rules for his courtroom. An...

Ten years ago, Elizabeth Holmes’ biotech startup, Theranos, was valued to be worth $10 billion . Five years ago, she was indicted for wire fraud. Finally, today, Holmes reported to prison to begin serving her sentence of 11 years and 3 months. It usually doesn’t take so long after an indictment for a defendant to be found guilty and sent to prison. But the fall of the woman formerly hailed as the next Steve Jobs has been painfully drawn out, with Holmes’ legal team playing every card in the deck to delay this inevitable day. The story of Theranos is all too familiar now: A young Stanford dropout set out to revolutionize healthcare with cutting-edge blood testing technology, scored high-profile investors and fawning press coverage, but it all came crashing down in 2015, when Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou revealed that Theranos’ technology didn’t actually work. To make matters worse, unsuspecting patients were getting blood tests on Theranos machines, endangering their h...

Ten years ago, Elizabeth Holmes’ biotech startup, Theranos, was valued to be worth $10 billion . Five years ago, she was indicted for wire fraud. Finally, today, Holmes reported to prison to begin serving her sentence of 11 years and 3 months. It usually doesn’t take so long after an indictment for a defendant to be found guilty and sent to prison. But the fall of the woman formerly hailed as the next Steve Jobs has been painfully drawn out, with Holmes’ legal team playing every card in the deck to delay this inevitable day. The story of Theranos is all too familiar now: A young Stanford dropout set out to revolutionize healthcare with cutting-edge blood testing technology, scored high-profile investors and fawning press coverage, but it all came crashing down in 2015, when Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou revealed that Theranos’ technology didn’t actually work. To make matters worse, unsuspecting patients were getting blood tests on Theranos machines, endangering their h...

Blackrock, a minority investor in Byju’s, has yet again cut the valuation of its holding in the Bengaluru-based startup, this time to about $8.4 billion, even as the most Indian valuable startup continues to raise capital at a better price. Blackrock cut the value of Byju’s share by 62% in the quarter ending March this year, from a year ago, it disclosed in a filing. Nonetheless, a series of qualifications merit attention: Blackrock is not a substantial stakeholder in Byju’s, and owns less than 1% equity in the startup. A similar move from Prosus, one of the more prominent investors in Byju’s, would have raised greater alarms for the Indian edtech leader. Additionally, it’s worth noting that valuation methodologies may vary across different investors. Thus, other portfolio investors could potentially hold vastly contrasting views. Furthermore, Byju’s recently secured a $250 million in fresh funding at a valuation cap of $22 billion earlier this month, indicating that the startup ...

After shutting down its food delivery business last year , Amazon India is now experimenting with dine-in payments. The company has initiated a limited introduction of bill payments at restaurants using Amazon Pay. The facility is currently active in select areas of Bengaluru with a limited set of restaurants. Users can head to Amazon Pay > Dining in the Amazon app to make payments using credit/debit cards, net banking, UPI, or Amazon Pay Later. At the moment, Amazon India is offering discounts on bill payments at almost all listed restaurants. Image Credits: Amazon It’s not clear if the e-commerce group is testing this in any other city. Amazon India spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment. Image Credits: Amazon Food delivery bigwigs Zomato and Swiggy both offer in-restaurant payments and discounts as they attempt to attract more customers. Earlier this month, Zomato launched its own UPI service in partnership with the ICICI bank for quicker checkout and ...

After shutting down its food delivery business last year , Amazon India is now experimenting with dine-in payments. The company has initiated a limited introduction of bill payments at restaurants using Amazon Pay. The facility is currently active in select areas of Bengaluru with a limited set of restaurants. Users can head to Amazon Pay > Dining in the Amazon app to make payments using credit/debit cards, net banking, UPI, or Amazon Pay Later. At the moment, Amazon India is offering discounts on bill payments at almost all listed restaurants. Image Credits: Amazon It’s not clear if the e-commerce group is testing this in any other city. Amazon India spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment. Image Credits: Amazon Food delivery bigwigs Zomato and Swiggy both offer in-restaurant payments and discounts as they attempt to attract more customers. Earlier this month, Zomato launched its own UPI service in partnership with the ICICI bank for quicker checkout and ...

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Happy Memorial Day everyone. In this issue: Astranis’ novel approach to GEO satellites Virgin Galactic’s return to the skies News from SpaceX, and more Astranis’ novel approach to internet satellites is starting to pay off Astranis , a satellite internet startup based in San Francisco, said Wednesday that its first spacecraft completed a milestone test and will start bringing broadband access to rural Alaskans as soon as mid-June. It’s a major step for the company, which was founded in 2015 by John Gedmark and Ryan McLinko. By taking a first principles approach to satellite development, the pair bet that they could make a smaller, cheaper spacecraft for geosynchronous orbit — the orbit farthest from Earth and arguably the most inhospitable — and use them to bring internet to millions, or even billions, of people around the globe. Their bet is paying off: The company’s first satellite, Arcturus, launched on a Falcon Heavy at the end of April. W...