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Welcome back. This week in technology: General Motors says goodbye to robotaxis, but not to autonomous cars; one woman’s fight to keep AI out of housing applications; Salt typhoon; and technology donations to Donald Trump. Thanks for joining me.
GM closes Cruise robotaxis; Uber restarts robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi
When God closes one robotaxi business, he resurrects another. Last week, General Motors announced it would stop funding its Cruise subsidiary, which made software for autonomous vehicles and operated a robotaxi service. The unit had been a leader in autonomous vehicles until a near-fatal accident in late 2023, when a Cruise car struck a pedestrian and dragged her down the road under its chassis. Cruise was once on par with Google’s Waymo in its presence in San Francisco, but the crash prompted regulators to force Cruise’s fleet of vehicles off the streets. GM later filed a false report about the incident to regulators, complicating its comeback attempt. The division was a money sink for GM, taking in about $10 billion since 2016 and never turning a profit. That’s about the same as Apple invested in its ill-fated self-driving car, rejected earlier this year.
Cruise’s former CEO Kyle Vogt had said his company would make $1 billion in revenue by 2025, but the business never got there. He was quite angry after GM’s decision and posted on X: “In case it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: GM are a bunch of fools.”
Cruise’s trajectory mirrors that of Uber, which closed its robotaxi business in 2020 after one of its cars killed a pedestrian in Arizona. Since then, Uber has adopted a different strategy in the autonomous vehicle niche, opting instead to be a manufacturer to become a distributor. When I visited San Francisco last month and rode Waymo robotaxis, I ordered them through the Uber app and Waymo itself. Waymo appears to be not only finding success in the city by the Bay but also expanding: it announced it would begin serving Miami in 2026 two weeks ago; Shares of Uber and Lyft plummeted following the news. Just before Cruise announced its demise, Uber announced a new partnership with Chinese autonomous vehicle maker WeRide in Abu Dhabi. WeRide makes the cars, Uber ships them to you.
Like Uber, Cruise’s death is not the end of General Motors’ self-driving efforts. The automaker said it would focus its efforts on Super Cruise, which is not part of the Cruise business, but rather driver assistance software available on GM cars purchased individually.
GM now says it eventually wants to sell self-driving cars to individuals. It may be a hard sell. It would take hundreds of trips in a robotaxi to convince someone that they might want to own one. The most likely outcome will be a regular car that has a self-driving mode, similar to a Tesla with its full self-driving feature, although U.S. regulators have seriously questioned the effectiveness of that system due to its involvement in multiple fatal crashes. Unlike Cruise, Elon Musk’s company enjoys extreme brand loyalty, to the point that some owners seem willing to overlook the deaths of others.
In contrast to GM, Tesla announced a robotaxi in October. Musk has a great advantage over his competitors: Donald Trump’s ear. By ReutersTrump’s transition team has already recommended eliminating the requirement that companies that operate autonomous vehicles report accidents involving their cars. Tesla has argued that its cars have become an unfair target of the mandate. Musk has advocated for federal laws that uniformly govern autonomous vehicles rather than a patchwork of state-by-state statutes, but on the other side of his mouth he is pushing for federal deregulation.
My brother likes to say that our grandchildren ask us in disbelief, “Did you drive the death machine?” That is, one day it may be incredible that someone has driven a car by themselves from points A to B. However, it is not obvious how that future gets to point B. With Cruise’s twist, we see two different visions of our autonomous driving future. Will we all be transported in a company-owned fleet, a kind of privatized public transportation? Or will we each be locked in our own personal vehicles, driven by ourselves in our own Glinda-style bubbles? One might imagine that the future of Los Angeles, sprawling and reliant on personal transportation, may be different from that of London, where Waymos might look more like black cabs. One could also imagine a Los Angeles that would require less parking if autonomous vehicles could drop us off and drive away without needing a rest stop.
A woman’s fight against AI in housing
Artificial intelligence is not just robot chess games and strange, fake images. It is infiltrating fundamental areas of life: medicine, employment, policing and housing. One woman in the US encountered a particularly blunt assessment of her financial history when she applied for an apartment in 2021: “Mary, we regret to inform you that you have been denied rent by the third-party service we use to screen all potential tenants.” “, email read. “Unfortunately, the service’s SafeRent leasing score was lower than allowed under our leasing standards.”
Maria Luis demanded. Two years after the class action lawsuit, the company that generated your too-low score, SafeRent, agreed to a settlement. Unusually, the legal agreement involved changes to its core product and a commitment to refrain from qualifying future tenants through AI. It is a rare victory. My colleague Johana Bhuiyan reports:
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Tenant screening systems like SafeRent are often used in place of humans as a way to “avoid interacting” directly with applicants and shift the blame for a denial to a computer system, said Todd Kaplan, one of the attorneys representing to Louis and the class. of the plaintiffs who sued the company.
The property management company told Louis that the software was the only one that decided to reject her, but the SafeRent report indicated that it was the management company that set the threshold for how high the score someone had to get to qualify. that your request be accepted.
Louis and the other named plaintiff alleged that SafeRent’s algorithm disproportionately ranked Black and Hispanic renters who use housing vouchers lower than white applicants.
SafeRent has reached an agreement. In addition to making a $2.3 million payment, the company agreed to stop using a scoring system or making any recommendations when it comes to prospective tenants who used housing vouchers for five years.
Read the full story about Mary Louis’ fight against SafeRent here.
Updates: Tech CEOs and Trump; Salt typhoon
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Tech CEOs and Trump: In late October, I wrote about how Silicon Valley leaders were slyly and covertly reaching out to Trump before the election. Now that he won, they are doing it openly. Meta announced last week that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, as did Amazon. OpenAI boss Sam Altman said he would make a personal donation of $1 million to the fund. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook flew to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. Zuckerberg gave Trump a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, the company’s camera sunglasses. Google and Microsoft did not comment on their plans, although the Google CEO was reported to have visited Trump also.
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Salt typhoon: In last week’s edition, we delved into why China hacked the world’s telephone networks in a brazen and widespread cyberattack dubbed Salt Typhoon. A surprising update this week: Cellphone carriers like AT&T and Verizon have not notified most of the people whose phone records were stolen in the hack, nor is there any indication they will, according to NBC. Only powerful Washington DC residents whose phone networks were compromised, such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have been notified by the FBI. The agency has no plans to alert others, a spokesperson said last week.