On the way home from San Francisco’s Moscone Center on a Tuesday afternoon in June, the Waymo robotaxi I was riding in made an unusual maneuver. Instead of turning right toward my apartment when we reached Golden Gate Park, it made four left turns, including one across a lane of traffic that had slowed for a pedestrian. The car was still mid-turn when traffic resumed, earning me a few honks and one spirited middle finger.

If you’ve seen the headlines about robotaxi traffic debacles, you might be surprised to hear that other than a friendly cyclist who stopped me to ask about the Waymo waitlist, being flipped off was the most exciting thing to happen in a week of driverless rides.

San Francisco, whose persistent fog and steep hills make for challenging driving at the best of times, has been at the center of a national conversation about driverless cars. It’s a debate that’s evolved since 2021, when Tech Brew ventured to the desert to ride around suburban Phoenix in Waymo’s fleet of Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans.

We decided it was time to get back behind the wheel, so to speak.

Keep reading here.—MA

How? With Morning Brew’s engaged audience of 22m+ monthly readers, of course.

Our unique community of young, hard-to-reach readers (who are 1.7x more likely to have a household income of $150k+) can give your B2B offerings the valuable visibility you’re looking for.

B2B decision-makers know how crucial it is to get their business’s potential in front of the right s, and the Brew’s paid advertising opportunities connect your brand to our audience by leveraging our popular B2B-centric franchise newsletters, specialized events, and skyrocketing cache of multimedia content.

Morning Brew is powered by the knowledge our readers trust us to deliver. From Retail Brew’s trending insights to Healthcare Brew’s timely updates, we’ve got a B2B Brew for you. Which one will you choose to grow with?

Advertise with us.

Between testimony on Capitol Hill from AI’s household names and the recent set of voluntary safety agreements signed by tech bigwigs, the conversation around how to regulate artificial intelligence might be overlooking a key element: open-source models.

Open-source code—freely available to use, share, or modify—is a component in around 96% of all software today, but is invisible to most of the public, Peter Cihon, senior policy manager at software collaboration platform GitHub, told Tech Brew.

“Too often people don’t really understand the role that open-source is playing in their lives,” he said.

Keep reading here.—MA

Dell is rolling out a new set of services designed to help businesses build their own generative AI systems and host them in on-premise data centers.

The computer giant worked with longtime partner Nvidia to expand on the Project Helix offering it debuted earlier this year to help companies run large language models (LLMs) from on-site servers.

The new additions include infrastructure and software for setting up an LLM or image generation model, and workstations equipped with tools for data scientists and developers to build AI models locally before deploying them at scale.

The rollout comes as businesses of all sizes have rushed to figure out ways the much-hyped generative AI technology can fit into their operations and internal workflows.

Keep reading here.—PK

Stat: 80%. That’s how much of the AI chip and GPU market Nvidia controls, and they’re still pumping out patents that will continue their reign. We got this inside scoop from Patent Drop, a twice-weekly newsletter that sifts through hundreds of patents (so you don’t have to). Subscribe for free, thank us later.*

Quote: “I really at some point thought that we had finally moved on from this whole ‘move fast and break things’ mentality...If there’s any company that should have learned the lessons of the real damage that can be done by not building in the proper safety mechanisms, privacy assurances, and integrity products, it should be Meta.”—Yael Eisenstat, a vice president at the Anti-Defamation League and a former Facebook policy official, to the Washington Post in an article about how Meta built Threads so quickly

Read: The little search engine that couldn’t (The Verge)

*This content is provided by a Morning Brew partner.