تقنية المستقبل: بين توسع السيارات ذاتية القيادة ومخاوف سلامة الذكاء الاصطناعي

In Brief Waymo has pulled the human safety driver from its autonomous test vehicles in Nashville, as the Alphabet-owned company moves closer to launching a robotaxi service in the city. Waymo, which has been testing in Nashville for months, is slated to launch a robotaxi service there this year in partnership with Lyft. Riders will initially hail rides directly through the Waymo app. Once the service expands, Waymo will also make its self-driving vehicles available through the Lyft app. Lyft has said it will handle fleet services, such as vehicle readiness and maintenance, charging infrastructure, and depot operations, through its wholly owned subsidiary Flexdrive. Waymo has accelerated its robotaxi expansion and today operates commercial services in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Phoenix. It also has driverless test fleets in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. The company tends to follow the same rollout strategy in every new market, starting with a small fleet of vehicles that are manually driven to map the city. The autonomous vehicles are then tested with a human safety operator in the driver’s seat. Eventually, the company conducts driverless testing, often allowing employees to hail rides, before launching a robotaxi service.

A former Anthropic employee said in a departure letter published Monday that he is leaving the company as he reckons with a "world in peril." Mrinank Sharma, who said he led the safeguards research team at Anthropic, posted on Monday a letter he sent to colleagues announcing his departure. Sharma explained why he was leaving the artificial intelligence company and outlined his future plans. "I achieved everything I wanted here," Sharma wrote, citing projects like developing defenses to reduce the risks of AI-assisted bioterrorism and a final project on understanding the effects of AI on humanity. He also said it was time to move on because he was constantly grappling with the perils of AI, bioweapons, and a "whole series of interconnected crises unfolding at this very moment." "We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences," he wrote. He added: "Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions. I've seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout the broader society too." Sharma said he plans to pursue work aligned with his integrity, explore a degree in poetry, and devote himself to courageous speech. Neither Sharma nor Anthropic immediately responded to requests for comment from Business Insider. Sharma is the latest Anthropic employee to publicly announce a departure. Harsh Mehta, who worked in research and development, and leading AI scientist Behnam Neyshabur, said in X posts last week that they'd left Anthropic to "start something new," while praising the company for its talent and strong culture. Dylan Scandinaro, a former AI safety researcher at Anthropic, recently joined OpenAI as its head of preparedness. Anthropic, meanwhile, has announced other recent hires, including CTO Rahul Patil, who previously served in the same role at Skype, in October. The AI company has been in talks to raise a new round of funding that could value Anthropic at $350 billion. On Thursday, Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 4.6, an upgraded model designed to boost office productivity and coding performance, with a larger context window to handle longer documents and more complex work in a single session. Read Sharma's full letter below.

Lidar-maker Ouster has acquired StereoLabs, a company that makes vision-based perception systems for robotics and industrial applications, for a combination of $35 million and 1.8 million shares. The deal is the latest in a march toward consolidation among perception sensor suppliers. Just last month, MicroVision bought the lidar assets of the buzzy-but-now-bankrupt Luminar for $33 million. Ouster itself has played the M&A game a fair amount, too. In 2022, the company merged with rival player Velodyne. The year before that, it bought lidar startup Sense Photonics. This consolidation is happening right as companies and investors rush to build businesses around “physical AI” — a broad term that encompasses everything from humanoid robotics and drones to self-driving cars and automated systems in warehouses. Even more obscure suppliers are raising big funding rounds as these technologies develop. Some startups are even trying to spin up entirely new sensor modalities. Ouster co-founder and CEO Angus Pacala told TechCrunch in an interview that he had been eyeing StereoLabs for years. He said he sees lidar as “the core component of safety-critical, capable systems,” but that he wanted to “move up the stack.” The “obvious additional sensors” to start working with in addition to lidar, Pacala said, are cameras. Pacala said 15-year-old StereoLabs is “best in class” on the hardware side, but he was especially drawn to how the company has been getting the most out of those cameras by being “incredibly savvy in adopting the cutting edge of AI models and edge compute.” In particular, Pacala highlighted StereoLabs’ development of a foundational AI model that can determine depth of objects from stereo cameras. “It was a no-brainer for us to go out and approach them and basically pitch this vision of working with us to become a unified sensing and perception platform — a tier one [supplier] for these advanced physical AI systems,” Pacala said. Techcrunch event TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026: Tickets Live On June 23 in Boston, more than 1,100 founders come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately Save up to $300 on your pass or save up to 30% with group tickets for teams of four or more. TechCrunch Founder Summit: Tickets Live On June 23 in Boston, more than 1,100 founders come together at TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 for a full day focused on growth, execution, and real-world scaling. Learn from founders and investors who have shaped the industry. Connect with peers navigating similar growth stages. Walk away with tactics you can apply immediately Save up to $300 on your pass or save up to 30% with group tickets for teams of four or more. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Despite the focus on integration, Ouster said StereoLabs will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary. And while the hype has been feverish, Pacala said he didn’t buy StereoLabs simply because of the attention and money being thrown at physical AI. In fact, he committed maybe the gravest sin one can during a hype cycle: he poured some cold water on the buzz, especially around humanoid robotics. “The business model here is not to just sell the fervor, it’s to actually make working systems that are certified, that are safe, that are really solving customer problems,” he said. “There’s going to be a little bit of disillusionment in physical AI as it turns out that it’s much longer time to market for all these humanoids.” Pacala isn’t the only one trying to take a realistic view. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, MicroVision CEO Glen DeVos said the sensor industry is “ripe for consolidation” because he believes there isn’t enough revenue to support all the current competition. “You’re going to get consolidation, or you’re going to get kind of a weeding out of the industry as people fall to the wayside,” he said.

Bolt Data and Energy, a data center development firm that was cofounded late last year by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is negotiating a deal that would allow it to begin construction on a large data center project it is planning in West Texas. Schmidt's firm is in discussions with Google, his former employer, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks. The tech giant, one of the leaders in the race to develop and commercialize artificial intelligence, is considering a commitment of 250 megawatts, according to one of the people. The other person said it was too early to characterize the exact size of the potential transaction because it was still under discussion. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because the potential transaction is still being arranged and the talks are confidential. "We don't comment on rumors," a Google spokeswoman told Business Insider, declining to comment further. Google announced last year that it plans to build $40 billion of cloud and AI infrastructure in Texas by 2027. The potential deal highlights how Big Tech is racing to secure the power, physical infrastructure, and land needed to fuel AI, even as the costs and financial risks of those bets loom. In December, Bolt completed its first funding round, raising $150 million from investors, including $50 million from Texas Pacific Land Corporation, a public company that owns large tracts of land in West Texas. As part of the investment from TPL, Bolt will develop data centers on land in TPL's portfolio. A presentation detailing Bolt's development plans, shared with Business Insider, said that TPL's land would give it access to abundant power and water for cooling. These commodities have become increasingly strained as data center development has boomed around the country. The presentation states that Bolt's development would begin with an "initial 250 megawatt facility" and expand in 250-500 megawatt increments into a 5 gigawatt campus. Bolt's plan is one of several large-scale projects that have been envisioned in Texas to cater to the AI race. Fermi, a public company co-founded by former Texas governor and US Energy Secretary Rick Perry, has plans for an 11-gigawatt campus in Amarillo. In December, Business Insider revealed that Amazon had pulled back a $150 million cash advance it had pledged as part of a preliminary deal to anchor the project. Fermi's disclosure of the reimbursement of that advance caused its stock to fall by 50%. Fermi's CEO, Toby Neugebauer, told Business Insider that although Amazon had reclaimed its advance, the negotiations for it to take space with Fermi were still ongoing. Major bank lenders who extended $38 billion to finance the construction of data center campuses in Shackleford County, Texas, and Port Washington, Wisconsin, for Oracle and OpenAI, meanwhile, have had difficulty selling off pieces of the huge loan to other banks and investors. Those troubles stem, in part, from worries about whether Oracle's credit will be strained by its massive AI spending. To help allay concerns, Oracle announced it would raise as much as $50 billion in debt and equity in 2026 to continue to pursue its AI buildout while also maintaining "a solid investment-grade balance sheet." Last week, Alphabet, Google's parent company, revealed in its fourth-quarter earnings report that it plans to spend between $175 and $185 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, roughly double its outlay in 2025. The spending is being done largely to pay for AI equipment and infrastructure.