There has been a lot of recent chaos in the world of electric vehicles, and Ford has capitalized on it to build out its secretive low-cost EV team.
It also hired around 10 employees from Lucid Motors, and a handful from Apple’s recently disbanded EV team known as Project Titan.
The company declined to respond to specific questions about how it’s building out the team, which is known internally as Ford Advanced EV.
It also noted that some of the work being done by Ford Advanced EV could be applied to other efforts across the company, not necessarily just to the low-cost EV project.
“The Ford Advanced EV team is part of a global effort to build focused technology and product development teams local to the best talent centers.
Combined with around $24 million of its own money, Tesla wanted to build nine electric semi-truck charging stations between Laredo, Texas and Fremont, California.
“The project will help create a hydrogen corridor from southern California to Texas,” the Department of Transportation wrote in a statement in January.
“Funding hydrogen stations will go down as purely wasted money,” Patel told TechCrunch this week.
While he no longer speaks on behalf of Tesla, he also criticized funding hydrogen infrastructure when he was still with the company.
Despite all this, the Tesla Semi program is still slowly attracting customers.
Google has terminated the employment of 28 employees following a prolonged sit-in protest at the company’s Sunnyvale and New York offices.
The protests were in response to Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract inked by Google and Amazon with the Israeli government and its military three years ago.
So many workers don’t know that Google has this contract with the IOF [Israel Offensive Forces].
Those of us sitting in Thomas Kurian’s office repeatedly requested to speak with the Google Cloud CEO, but our requests were denied.
Hundreds and thousands of Google workers have joined No Tech for Apartheid’s call for the company to Drop Project Nimbus.
The Google parent’s moonshot factory X this week officially unveiled Project Bellwether, its latest bid to apply technology to some of our biggest problems.
Here that means using AI tools to identify natural disasters like wildfire and flooding as quickly as possible.
“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” the Guard’s Col. Brian McGarry notes.
Google has been exploring the use of machine learning models and AI to predict natural disasters for some time now.
Project Bellwether’s partnership with the National Guard could well prove an important validation of that work.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Ron has been working from home as a writer for almost as long as I’ve been alive.
Moar transpoLook, I’m trying my best to have a balance of everything here on Startups Weekly.
The Apple falls far from the car: Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
I’d pay good money to see the prototypes …Apple, after packing in its electric car project, let go of 600 staff who were reportedly working on the project.
Apple is laying off 614 employees in California after abandoning its electric car project.
According to the WARN notice posted by California, Apple notified the affected employees on March 28 and the changes will go into effect on May 27.
Affected employees worked at eight locations in Santa Clara, roughly 45 miles south of San Francisco.
The company first started working on its car project, known internally as “Project Titan,” in 2014, and told employees that it was cancelling it on February 27.
Bloomberg reported at the time that some remaining employees who were working on the car project would be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects.
Dubbed ‘Caracal,’ this new release emphasizes new features for hosting AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.
Indeed, as the OpenInfra Foundation announced this week, its newest Platinum Member is Okestro, a South Korean cloud provider with a heavy focus on AI.
But Europe, with its strong data sovereignty laws, has also been a growth market and the UK’s Dawn AI supercomputer runs OpenStack, for example.
“All the things are lining up for a big upswing and open-source adoption for infrastructure,” OpenInfra Foundation COO Mark Collier told TechCrunch.
That’s in addition to networking updates to better support HPC workloads and a slew of other updates.
News that Yahoo is buying Artifact stirred the technology watercooler yesterday.
Artifact was an interesting app, employing AI to help its users find and consume more, and more targeted news.
It had some devoted fans, but never reached the sort of scale that would have made it an attractive long-term project.
Regardless of whether or not you were an Artifact user — I was for a time — that Yahoo is still feeling acquisitive under its current ownership structure matters.
Artifact is hardly the only startup project in the market today that might be looking for a new home, after all.
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers.
The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents.
The newly released documents reveal how Meta tried to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors, including Snapchat and later Amazon and YouTube, by analyzing the network traffic of how its users were interacting with Meta’s competitors.
Given that Snapchat encrypted the traffic between the app and its servers, this network analysis technique was not going to be effective.
Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the program to Amazon and YouTube.
Mermaid, the open source diagramming and charting tool, has long been popular with developers for its ability to create diagrams using a Markdown-like language.
They were watching ‘The Little Mermaid.’ That’s why I named that eight years ago.”Early on, Mermaid was mostly about flowcharts, but over time Sveidqvist added other diagram types — and the community quickly made it its own, too.
Firestone told me that the cloud version of the open source project had 4 million users last year.
That’s a market Mermaid Chart is looking to address by building easier-to-use tools for this group of users.
“Mermaid Chart is expanding the community by bringing the benefits of Mermaid to all types of business users, leveraging AI as a catalyst.
