It’s been a bumpy ride for Cruise, the self-driving car company majority-owned by GM.

Cruise’s latest series of setbacks began on Oct. 2 when one of the company’s robotaxis in San Francisco dragged a woman underneath the car after she was struck by another vehicle. Cruise acknowledged that although the driverless car stopped when it struck the pedestrian, it pulled to the side of the road and proceeded to drag her 20 feet, Wired reported.

Cruise now could be looking at a fine of up to $100,000 for every time it failed to disclose information to regulators about the incident, according to Bloomberg, and California state regulators accused the company of misrepresenting key facts about the incident.

In August, San Francisco began allowing robotaxis to carry passengers without restrictions or human supervision, the first city in the country to do so, Financial Times reported.

After the October incident, California revoked Cruise’s operating permits, and it pulled its robotaxi fleet off the streets. Cruise had been operating robotaxis in several other cities, including Phoenix and Austin, with plans to further expand.

“The most important thing for us right now is to take steps to rebuild public trust,” the company said in a LinkedIn post announcing the decision to “proactively pause driverless operations across all of our fleets.”

Keep reading here.—JG

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A major mobile provider and a cable and media conglomerate are among the first companies to sign on to a new initiative aimed at lowering unemployment rates among military spouses.

T-Mobile and Comcast NBCU joined 10 other signatories Wednesday at the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC, where First Lady Jill Biden helped announce the 4+1 Commitment, which she said is for “the husband who feels like he’s lost his purpose, the wife who has to explain the gaps in her resume again and again, the dad who can’t interview because he can’t find childcare.”

The commitment, helmed by military support organization Blue Star Families and the Chamber of Commerce’s Hiring Our Heroes program, asks businesses to make at least one of the following pledges:

• Facilitate job transfers
• Make remote work options available
• Offer flexible work hours
• Accommodate time off for moves

The commitment also asks employers to consider joining one of two existing government spouse employment programs. Other participating companies include Starbucks, Nextdoor, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Biden said the private sector-led pledge dovetails with President Joe Biden’s June executive order that prioritizes military spouses for federal jobs, supports federal job transferability, and offers a flexible spending account for childcare.

“But not all spouses work for the federal government. And not all of them want to. They want to work for you,” Biden said of the private sector. “I want to ask you to reach maybe just a little bit higher, and push just a little bit harder. Because we don’t just need spouses to have jobs. We need them to be able to keep those jobs and turn them into careers.”

Keep reading here.—KG

ChatGPT now has company in the tier of all-purpose AI bots that can juggle audio, imagery, and text.

Google released its long-awaited Gemini large language model (LLM) this week, kicking off what the company claims is a “new era” for its AI offerings. The search giant reported that the multimodal AI—meaning it can understand image, text, video, and audio input—can slightly outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4 on tasks like mathematical reasoning, understanding documents, and deciphering infographics.

The company is likely hoping that Gemini, which actually consists of a set of three different versions of the same LLM (Ultra, Pro, and Nano), will give it an edge or at least keep it competitive in the race to own the next phase of generative AI for consumers, in which experts say multimodality will be key. The debut follows OpenAI’s release of a similarly dexterous version of ChatGPT in September.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai claimed in an announcement accompanying the rollout that the news is just the start of the “Gemini era.”

“These are the first models of the Gemini era and the first realization of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind earlier this year,” Pichai said in the announcement. “This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company.”

Keep reading here.—PK

We’re tech journalists, yes, but we’re also consumers. This week, we’re rounding up the tech we *actually* purchased for our loved ones this year. (No affiliate links here, just earnest recommendations!)

Reporter Kelcee Griffis: I just got a Garmin Forerunner 245 and love it so far. It’s handy because you can download music to it, and it also tracks all your stats and syncs with Strava.

I bought this Birdie personal safety alarm for myself two years ago, and it lives on my keychain. Luckily, I’ve never had to deploy it IRL, but it’s always wise to have a ready-made distraction in case you need to escape an unsafe situation. (I pulled it accidentally and can confirm it’s super loud!)

Reporter Jordyn Grzelewski: I recently bought this digital picture frame as a wedding gift for a close friend. I thought it would be cool for her to be able to upload her wedding photos, but it would make a great gift for any occasion. She loves it, and there’s a function where you can email photos to it, so she’s been requesting pet photos from friends.

This was a gift I bought for myself, but it could make a good stocking stuffer: an electric lighter. It was on a bunch of product rec lists, and it works pretty well and seems like a more sustainable option than a traditional lighter.

Senior Reporter Patrick Kulp: I bought a smart light bulb as a gift a couple years ago, and they are kind of fun! It seems like there are a lot more options available now.

This worm-like booklight is very good if you are reading flimsy paperbacks. I also bought my partner a Kindle e-reader, which is kind of a basic rec, but it was a great gift.

Editor Annie Saunders: During a fall outing to a pumpkin patch, my 5-year-old son, Arthur, got his hands on my iPhone and really seemed to enjoy snapping photos of his surroundings and family. So I did a bit of poking around and purchased a Kidamento digital camera. I worried the Polaroid-like model would result in a lot of bad pictures that are nevertheless printed out, so I went with the all-digital Model K. I already have a Google account for him, so I’ll upload the photos and order prints of the ones he really wants to display, and he’ll still have an album of all his photographs. I also snagged an SD card reader and extra memory cards as stocking stuffers.

Arthur’s also very into Legos and making things that go, and if I’ve learned anything in my years working for tech-focused publications, it’s that I should embrace and encourage any burgeoning interest in STEM fields. He’s already torn through Lego builds that should be too advanced for him based on the age guidance, so I got him a Lego Gadgets set that will (hopefully) allow him to both follow instructions and get creative.