Waymo had a big year in 2024.

The Alphabet-owned AV tech company reached 150,000 paid trips per week on its ride-hailing service, completed more than 4 million rides, expanded its service area, and saw one of its biggest competitors bite the dust.

During a keynote conversation with Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow at CES 2025, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana had a message to share about Waymo’s 2025 ambitions: “Stay tuned. This is a really exciting time for autonomy.”

One of Waymo’s would-be competitors in the robotaxi business is Tesla, which is preparing to debut its “Cybercab.” Tesla has taken a markedly different approach to AV tech than its competitors; it relies solely on cameras rather than on the various other types of sensors that companies like Waymo use to build redundancies into their AV systems.

Asked about Waymo’s strategy versus Tesla’s, Mawakana said the issue isn’t a matter of debate within Waymo. Instead, she said, Waymo is focused on integrating large language models with visual language models to “create an end-to-end, very, very robust, and large end-to-end system that’s multi-modal in its foundation so that perception planning and prediction…can become even more robust than it is today.” Waymo, she said, is focused on using AI advancements to improve its system.

Keep reading here.—JG

Two recent events showcased the disastrous consequences of the climate crisis: Hurricane Helene, a storm that North Carolina “wasn’t prepared for,” and the ongoing wildfires in Southern California.

One way that states, municipalities, and businesses prepare for natural disasters and extreme weather events is by using data that can simulate potential climate outcomes to make decisions, such as how best to construct buildings and where to place equipment. A comprehensive set of this type of data, ClimRR, was made available to the public as part of a partnership between the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Argonne National Laboratory, and telecom giant AT&T in 2022.

Over the last two years, Argonne, AT&T, and the Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment—Project IN-CORE for short—worked with state and local governments across the country to help them navigate ClimRR and apply its findings to their emergency management and mitigation plans. The result was increased awareness of climate-related disasters and the effects of the climate crisis.

Kentucky’s Barren River Area Development District (BRADD), in the area surrounding Bowling Green, has dealt with tornadoes, severe flooding, and a sinkhole—and the ClimRR data has helped the area update its hazard mitigation plan so it can better handle events like those in the future. In addition to the data, Argonne, AT&T, and Project IN-CORE provided BRADD with free consulting.

“While we have really great employees, we do not have scientists on our team. We have people who know how to use data, but [not] to really understand the source of data and to understand how climate plays a role,” BRADD executive director Eric Sexton told Tech Brew.

Keep reading here.—TC

With AI companies rolling out models more gradually, transparency about each update has tended to suffer.

That “documentation drift” is one of the findings from a policy group called Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), which advocates for AI regulation. The report also found that closed models tended to be more tight-lipped about technical details, but that tech giants are generally more open than AI startups.

The findings were based on an analysis of seven different models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and xAI across 21 different transparency metrics.

ARI policy analyst and report author David Robusto said there are a number of factors behind why companies might be reluctant to flesh out documentation details for every update. Doing so takes extensive time and resources, and the pace of progress makes it hard to maintain, he said. There’s also the possibility that rivals might reverse-engineer work based on certain details, Robusto said.

“There is a large competitive advantage to be gained from secrecy,” Robusto told Tech Brew. “Any sort of inch that is given by these companies can be picked up by their competitors. And so as a result, there is at least a partial incentive to maybe not keeping all of this stuff as up to date as they might want to, for example, if they were in a more traditional academic context.”

Keep reading here.—PK