After soaking in just what had happened, Ryan got the Model 3 towed out of the water and is, likely with a twisted stomach, awaiting the repair estimate…

This is what happens when delivery robots operate in crime-ridden blue cities.

Cruisin’ into robo-bankruptcy;

The bad news continues for Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company owned by GM.

Last month Cruise’s ability to operate in San Francisco was suspended after their cars were involved in two separate accidents. One of the accidents was very serious and involved a woman who was hit by a car driven by a person in an adjacent lane. The victim was sent flying into the lane of the Cruise taxi which braked but wound up running over the woman. Even worse, the taxi performed an automated procedure to move itself out of the way and wound up dragging the victim under the car.

In the wake of that event, Cruise suspended its operations throughout the US.

It gets worse.

G.M. has spent an average of $588 million a quarter on Cruise over the past year, a 42 percent increase from a year ago. Each Chevrolet Bolt that Cruise operates costs $150,000 to $200,000, according to a person familiar with its operations.

Half of Cruise’s 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems.

Galactica was supposed to help “organize science.”

The tool is pitched as a kind of evolution of the search engine but specifically for scientific literature. Upon Galactica’s launch, the Meta AI team said it can summarize areas of research, solve math problems and write scientific code.

At first, it seems like a clever way to synthesize and disseminate scientific knowledge. Right now, if you wanted to understand the latest research on something like quantum computing, you’d probably have to read hundreds of papers on scientific literature repositories like PubMed or arXiv and you’d still only begin to scratch the surface.

Or, maybe you could query Galactica (for example, by asking: What is quantum computing?) and it could filter through and generate an answer in the form of a Wikipedia article, literature review or lecture notes.

h/t KP

There are bound to be hiccups.

On April 6, an autonomously driven truck fitted with technology by TuSimple Holdings Inc. suddenly veered left, cut across the I-10 highway in Tucson, Ariz., and slammed into a concrete barricade.

The accident, which regulators disclosed to the public in June after TuSimple filed a report on the incident, underscores concerns that the autonomous-trucking company is risking safety on public roads in a rush to deliver driverless trucks to market, according to independent analysts and more than a dozen of the company’s former employees. A TuSimple spokesman said safety is a top priority for the company and that nobody was injured in the accident. […]

The April incident involved a rig with a TuSimple driver and engineer aboard, and the company has repeatedly blamed the accident on human error. But details in the June regulatory disclosure, along with internal company documents, show what autonomous-driving-system specialists say are fundamental problems with the company’s technology.”

An internal TuSimple report on the mishap, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, said the semi-tractor truck abruptly veered left because a person in the cab hadn’t properly rebooted the autonomous driving system before engaging it, causing it to execute an outdated command. The left-turn command was 2 1/2 minutes old—an eternity in autonomous driving—and should have been erased from the system but wasn’t, the internal account said.

But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said it was the autonomous-driving system that turned the wheel and that blaming the entire accident on human error is misleading. Common safeguards would have prevented the crash had they been in place, said the researchers, who have spent decades studying autonomous-driving systems.

Via Phantom Soapbox