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DoorDash is making its own drones

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  Look, up in the sky! It’s not a bird or a plane…it’s a drone carrying your burrito. The company that lets you order takeout with just a few clicks because calling a restaurant is too much effort is now refining even more sophisticated tech for its new drone delivery business, DoorDash Air. The US’ largest delivery company said yesterday that it received a certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate a commercial drone delivery service. However, DoorDash doesn’t expect to launch these deliveries until the fall. If you want futuristic food delivery before then, you’ll need to be in one of the locales where DoorDash currently partners with Alphabet’s Wing or Flytrex—partnerships the company said it will keep even as it becomes a competitor. DoorDash plans to pull off an act of coordination even more complicated than getting your whole family to agree on which restaurant to order from. It aims to use its software edge and build “the full stack” to facilitate d...
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Star AI hedge fund sells majority of its public profile to Citadel

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  It’s times like these when it’s very important to have a company name that doesn’t dunk on itself if something goes wrong. AI hedge fund Situational Awareness put out an emergency call to unload more than $10 billion from its public portfolio this week after absorbing massive losses. Billionaire Ken Griffin’s fund Citadel promised to buy a majority of the stock at a heavy discount yesterday. Situational Awareness was founded two years ago by 25-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI staffer who wrote the popular essay “Situational Awareness” in 2024 about how he expected AI to change everything. The fund invested huge amounts of leveraged cash in the software and hardware companies that it believed the AI revolution would depend on: The hedge fund grew its portfolio to $45 billion in early July. But recent investor jitters about the sustainability of the industry have cratered many of the fund’s biggest holdings, like Nebius, Micron, and Sandisk. (All three rebounded y...
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Investors have the AI jitters again

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  Investors are once again worried that AI is on the verge of falling apart. The Nasdaq 100 briefly fell into correction territory yesterday, after several hyperscalers, chipmakers, and storage providers’ stocks sank, dragging down the rest of the tech-heavy index. It ultimately finished the day down by less than 1%, underscoring the industry’s constant whiplash as investors jump at every sound. What happened: The sell-off started Tuesday in Asian markets, specifically Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, major memory manufacturers, each dropped by over 15%, while storage provider Kioxia fell by 18%. Korea’s Kospi index, often seen as an early barometer for US AI stocks, sank by more than 10%, and trading was briefly halted. Then, on Tuesday morning stateside, US companies started dropping: Memory company Micron fell by almost 9%, while semiconductor manufacturer Sandisk closed more than 14% in the red. Despite massive AI server sales and lucrative new gove...
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US bans foreign-made robots, China threatens to retaliate

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  The tiny little robot getting trapped under your couch while attempting to suck up balls of cat hair is now being banned from entering the US as a national security threat. The FCC issued a ban this week on new, foreign-made humanoid robots, quadrupeds (like those robot dogs), and a broad swath of bots that can recognize their surroundings—including robovacs and sidewalk delivery robots. In response, China threatened retaliation, claiming the ban “severely damages China–US economic and trade stability,” according to a statement translated by CNBC. The ban doesn’t actually name China, but you’d be hard pressed to find another country that churns out as many sophisticated, inexpensive robots or robot parts. The country currently controls about 85% of the global humanoid robot market, according to a recent research report by Barclays cited by the Associated Press. Besides Terminator -level destruction, what is there to fear? The Trump administration cited privacy concerns related...
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Uber is building an autonomous vehicle empire, and here’s every company it’s using to do it

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  Uber has partnered with — and in some cases made direct investments in — more than 30 autonomous vehicle companies over the past two years. And it’s taking a global approach. Here, TechCrunch tracks every one of those moves in one place. But first, a bit of history.  Uber was, at one time, developing and testing its own autonomous vehicle (AV) technology. The company, then led by Travis Kalanick, created Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in 2014 and recruited dozens of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics program.  Two years later, Uber acquired Otto, a self-driving truck company founded by former Google self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron, Don Burnette (who has since gone on to found Kodiak AI), and Claire Delaunay. Uber also began testing its AVs on public streets in 2016 across California, Pittsburgh, and Arizona.  All of that progress unraveled across three defining moments: Waymo’s trade secrets lawsuit against Uber, the ...
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