Artificial Intelligence

 Lightyear , a Dutch startup developing a long-range hybrid solar-powered car, today announced that it has raised €81 million ($81 million) as it prepares to begin production of its first vehicle in the coming months. While recent history is littered with examples of prototype solar-powered vehicles, the burgeoning electric car movement has so far been mostly limited to automobiles that need to be plugged into the grid to charge, or hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) that self-charge while driving. A number of companies are pushing to make solar-powered cars a mass-market reality, however, such as Germany’s Sono Motors which recently revealed the final production design of its inaugural solar electric vehicle, scheduled to launch some time in 2023. And Lightyear, a six-year-old startup that debuted its prototype back in 2019, which had previously raised more than $100 million in funding. Driving change Introducing solar-charging to the electric v...

  iPhone 14, Apple Watch Series 8, new AirPods Pro and maybe, just maybe, an AR/VR headset preview (but probably not) As ever, there may be one or two wildcards at the event. It will be interesting to see precisely how much Apple ends up announcing next week. The company was more than happy to spread announcements across events, in the two+ years when everything suddenly went online. The simple truth is it’s a lot easier to ask people to drop everything to cover your event when it involves sitting in front of a computer instead of flying across the U.S. This one, on the other hand, is most likely going to be worth the flight (I mean, I hope — no refunds on the tickets). The company sent out invites earlier this month, sporting a galaxy formed into the Apple logo and the words “Far Out.” A subsequent animation shows the constellation spinning around to reveal a heart. There’s often some meaning hidden in the invite art, and speculation has been rampant in the intervening week. My fi...

  Toyota said Wednesday it will triple its planned investment for its first U.S. battery factory due to rising consumer demand for electric vehicles. The automaker now plans to spend $3.8 billion, up from the initial $1.3 billion announced, to build a plant near Greensboro, North Carolina. Toyota Battery Manufacturing North Carolina is expected to begin producing batteries for hybrid and battery-electric vehicles in 2025. The additional funding brings Toyota’s global investment to $5.6 billion as it aims to go carbon-neutral by 2035. Automakers have staged a land grab across the country this month, announcing multibillion-dollar battery projects slated to begin bearing fruit by the middle of the decade. The cadence of declarations has accelerated since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides incentives and tax credits for EV manufacturers. On Monday, Honda announced a $4.4 billion joint venture with LG Energy Solutions to make batteries for i...

  Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced this morning that the company behind Snapchat will reduce its staff by 20% as part of larger restructuring. Snap has struggled financially for months. In May, Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company would  miss its revenue goals  for the second quarter of the year. Sure enough, even though revenue for the quarter was $1.11 billion, up 13% year over year, the company  badly missed  its previous guidance of 20% to 25% growth. “Our forward-looking revenue visibility remains limited, and our current year-over-year QTD revenue growth of 8% is well below what we were expecting earlier this year,” Spiegel wrote in a  company memo , which was also posted on Snap’s website. “For planning purposes we have modeled a range of outcomes, some of which assume that low revenue growth continues into next year, and we have built our 2023 plan to generate free cash flow even in a low growth scenario.” Laid off employees in the U.S....

  Following a preview in April, Microsoft this morning   announced   the general availability of virtual machines (VMs) on Azure featuring the   Ampere   Altra, a processor based on the Arm architecture. The first Azure VMs powered by Arm chips, Microsoft says that they’re accessible in 10 Azure regions today and can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service beginning on September 1. The Azure Arm-based VMs have up to 64 virtual CPU cores, 8 GB of memory per core and 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as SSD local and attachable storage. Microsoft describes them as “engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads,” including open source databases, Java and .NET applications and gaming, web, app and media servers. Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise and Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Debian are available on the VMs day...

  The first pitching machine dates back well over 100 years. Obviously things have come a long way since that injury-inducing, gunpowder-fueled machine made its debut at Princeton University, but most modern systems are more or less the same. A ball is manually or mechanically dropped into a spinning wheel or wheels, which propel it toward the battery at high velocity. It’s gotten the job done, so why quibble, right? But there’s a lot of potential room for innovation here. Advances in AI, stat tracking, advanced metrics and robotics could fit together nicely for a proper 21st-century twist on a classic. This is my first time seeing the Trajekt Arc, but the product seems to speak for itself. It’s a pitching robot designed to learn and re-create real-world pitches from real-world pitchers. The Athletic  ran a nice spot  the other week about how the Cubs are using the system to mimic Madison Bumgarner in practice. The system adjusts to the World Series hero’s left arm releas...

  Super Troopers premiered at Sundance to a receptive, giggling crowd but if you judged it based on its Rotten Tomato score and reviews, you’d think it flopped. Writer, director, comedian, and recent founder Jay Chandrasekhar never felt right about the critiques from random strangers online. So he set about creating  Vouch Vault, an app in which friends can recommend media, restaurants, and products to each other and users can trust those reviews because they’re coming from people with similar tastes. He talks with Darrell and Jordan about using a Hollywood approach to funding a tech company and how he is thinking about changing user behavior. LO MEDIA Blogs