CALIFORNIA'S LATEST BATTLE OVER AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES
Rebecca Bellan examines the debate over SB 915, a bill in California's state Senate that would give cities more power to set their own robotaxi rules — rules like hours of operation and appropriate pickup and drop-off locations. When introducing the bill, state senator Dave Cortese presented it as a way to give local governments more of a say in how robotaxis are deployed in their communities, while the CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association told TechCrunch that it will create unnecessary complications and obstacles. Read More
MONGODB'S CEO WEIGHS IN ON AI HYPE
Dev Ittycheria, who's been CEO of MongoDB for the past decade, talked to Paul Sawers about how the company has evolved, what's next, and how it responded to a recent cybersecurity incident. He also weighed in on the current AI hype, arguing, "My life has not been changed by AI." Read More
CLIMATE STARTUPS FACE A VALLEY OF DEATH
While there's been an exciting explosion of startups tackling different aspects of the climate crisis, as well as a greater willingness from VCs to fund those startups in their early stages, Tim De Chant argues that the real challenge comes when the companies need money to scale. That's especially true if they're building hardware — but as Nest and Mill co-founder Matt Rogers told Paul, "You can't solve climate with SaaS." Read More
THE PLUSES AND MINUSES OF AI-GENERATED VIDEO
Production team Shy Kids is sharing more details about their work with OpenAI to create promotional videos using OpenAI's generative tool Sora. Devin Coldewey's main takeaway from their comments: The demo films that attracted all that attention last month didn't just emerge fully formed from Sora. Instead, they needed professional work like storyboarding, editing, and color correction. Read More
