Save a horse, ride a Pony.ai?
Chinese autonomous driving company Pony.ai is planning to expand beyond its home country. The company announced potential overseas robotaxi deployments of more than 4,000 vehicles on Tuesday just as fellow autonomous driving firms fight to commercialize robotaxi services abroad.
The news comes only days after Pony announced an expanded contract with Uber for deployment of more than 2,000 robotaxis in Europe.
Self-driving cars aside, here’s what else happened in tech.
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OpenAI hits pause after going rogue
OpenAI says it has paused major AI training runs for two weeks in the wake of the July incident in which its AI models broke out of a sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face and other services. OpenAI also disclosed that an unreleased AI model called Astra, which was not involved in the hack, has hit a “critical” cybersecurity risk tier under its safety framework.
The company announced it’s tightening sandboxing and network isolation and expanding logging of models’ “chain-of-thought” planning so operators can see when agents start plotting around guardrails.
Fortune’s Emily Forlini reports the attacking agents had secretly coordinated for months via a private message board OpenAI hadn’t been monitoring, a lapse Hugging Face’s CEO likened to missing “agent monitoring 101.” —Emily Forlini
China’s robot dogs have an unlikely origin story
Did U.S. taxpayers unwittingly helped build China’s robot dogs? A Reuters investigation found that the $1,600 Go-series robots sold by Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics, bear a striking resemblance to the Mini Cheetah, a quadruped robot built by researchers at MIT and funded by the U.S. Army’s DEVCOM lab. Two researchers said Unitree’s design is “to the millimeter” nearly identical.
Those dogs now show up in Chinese military drills, sometimes armed, and have turned founder Wang Xingxing into a $2.7 billion billionaire even as Washington scrambles to bar his company from U.S. markets.—Lily Mae Lazarus
Apple rejiggers EU App Store fees, again
Apple overhauled its EU App Store fee structure, replacing its unpopular per-install Core Technology Fee with a flat 5% commission on apps and purchases made outside the App Store, as well as cutting its standard in-app purchase fee.
The company also loosened the requirements to run an alternative app marketplace, dropping the old bar of proving two years in Apple’s developer program with 1 million EU installs in favor of more flexible options like public company status or venture funding.
This marks at least the third rewrite of Apple’s EU terms since the Digital Markets Act took effect and could be a preview of the kind of pressure Apple will likely face as similar antitrust fights heat up in the U.S. and elsewhere. —Lily Mae Lazarus
More tech
—State attorneys told jurors that Meta intentionally designed Facebook and Instagram to “hook” kids, a claim which Meta denies.
—A U.S. congressional advisory body warned that China’s aggressive data collection across factories, cities, and connected devices is giving Beijing an edge.
—TikTok is testing a peer-to-peer payments feature that would let users send money to each other inside direct messages using TikTok Pay.
—OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens, a version of its chatbot for 13- to 17-year-olds with extra content filters, study tools, and parental controls.
—Alibaba is selling its Lingxi Games unit to private equity firm Trustar Capital for at least $1.5 billion as it allocates capital toward AI and cloud.
—AI chip startup Etched, valued around $21 billion, is poaching Nvidia engineers to build specialized AI inference chips.
