New York governor clears path for robotaxis everywhere, with one notable exception

New York Governor Kathy Hochul plans to introduce legislation that would effectively legalize robotaxis in the state — except for its most populous metropolis: New York City.  Hochul, who made the comments Tuesday during her State of the State address, said the legislation would advance the next phase of the state’s autonomous vehicle pilot program.  … Read more

Why Egnyte keeps hiring junior engineers despite the rise of AI coding tools

Egnyte, the $1.5 billion cloud content governance company, has embedded AI coding tools across its global team of more than 350 developers — but not to reduce headcount. Instead, the company continues to hire junior engineers, using AI to accelerate onboarding, deepen codebase understanding, and shorten the path from junior to senior contributor. The approach … Read more

Meta has closed three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts

Several of Meta’s VR studios have been affected by the company’s metaverse-focused layoffs. The company has shuttered three of its VR studios, including Armature, Sanzaru and Twisted Pixel. VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer be updated with fresh content. Employees at Twisted Pixel, which released Marvel’s Deadpool VR in November, and Sanzaru, known for … Read more

Motional puts AI at center of robotaxi reboot as it targets 2026 for driverless service

Nearly two years ago, Motional was at an autonomous vehicle crossroads.  The company, born from a $4 billion joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, had already missed a deadline to launch a driverless robotaxi service with partner Lyft. It had lost Aptiv as one of its financial backers, prompting Hyundai to step up … Read more

Elon Musk says X’s new algorithm will be made open source next week

X may soon provide more insight into how its algorithm works. On Saturday, Elon Musk posted on the platform to say that the company “will make the new X algorithm, including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users, open source in 7 days.” X’s recommendation algorithm has been … Read more

I met a lot of weird robots at CES — here are the most memorable

CES has always been a robot extravaganza, and this year’s event saw the announcement of a number of important robotics developments, including the new, production-ready debut of Atlas, the humanoid from Boston Dynamics. Then there were all the robots on the showroom floor, where bots often serve as good marketing for the companies involved. If … Read more

Anthropic cracks down on unauthorized Claude usage by third-party harnesses and rivals

Anthropic has confirmed the implementation of strict new technical safeguards preventing third-party applications from spoofing its official coding client, Claude Code, in order to access the underlying Claude AI models for more favorably pricing and limits — a move that has disrupted workflows for users of popular open source coding agent OpenCode. Simultaneously but separately, … Read more

Waymo is rebranding its Zeekr robotaxi

Waymo has spent the past three years refining and testing a minivan-like vehicle made by Chinese automaker Zeekr. And now, before this robotaxi joins Waymo’s official commercial fleet, it’s getting a new name, the company told TechCrunch. The Zeekr RT robotaxi will now be named Ojai (pronounced “oh-hi”) — after the village in the Topatopa … Read more