Unpacking ‘Good Quests,’ Christianity, and Caviar Bumps

This week on Uncanny Valley, we look ahead into a future where driverless cars are mainstream.

Some up-and-comers are pushing to make agents that can actually place wagers instead of just supplying tips, but the field is off to a rough start. Tom Fleetham formerly worked as the head of business development for a blockchain platform called Zilliqa that experimented with an AI gambling agent called Ava, focused on picking horse…

Stanford’s report shows Chinese AI is on the rise overall, with models from Chinese companies scoring similar to their US counterparts on the LMSYS benchmark. It notes that China publishes more AI papers and files more AI-related patents than the US, although it does not assess the quality of either. The US, in contrast, produces…

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a “disruptive” innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft Shuttle of its biggest competitor….

Denza was originally founded in 2010 as a joint venture between BYD and Mercedes-Benz, launching its first car into the Chinese market in 2014. Now wholly owned by BYD, it went through a significant rebrand in 2021, with Wolfgang Egger—who previously led design teams at Audi and Lamborghini—joining at the helm as chief designer. The…

US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the internet’s prime real estate. In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch…