Cameras were first installed on the windshields of some Metro buses last year, but the first tickets were issued in mid-February. Initially, the only buses to have cameras were along line 212, from Hollywood/Vine to Hawthorne/Lennox stations via La Brea Avenue, and line 720, from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. via Wilshire Boulevard. Line 70, which services Olive Street and Grand Avenue, and lines 910 and 950 that serve Metro's J Line have since been included. The AI-powered cameras scan for illegally parked cars and compile a video of each violation, a photo of the license plate and the time and location, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Each citation is reviewed by a human.

An arson suspect was arrested on suspicion of starting four separate fires across the city of Santa Monica earlier this month, police said Wednesday. Marco Antonio Rubio, 36, is accused of the spate of fires that began around 1 p.m. on Sunday with the use of a lighter and an aerosol can to set them, Santa Monica police said in a news release. No one was injured in the incidents. Police said Rubio is alleged to have lighted a discarded pillow and some cardboard in the 1000 block of Colorado Avenue, ignited a discarded mattress on 16th Street and Michigan Avenue, set fire to a net on a little league batting cage at Memorial Park and also a parked vehicle in the 1500 block of 18th Street. Investigators located the suspect using aerial drone technology, police said.

Santa Monica Police spotted and stopped a man who was burglarizing vehicles in a parking lot near the pier by using a drone. On July 6, a Santa Monica police officer was directing the department's drone back to the station from a radio call when the officer decided to survey the Fourth of July weekend crowd near the pier and the nearby parking lots. As the drone flew over Lot 1 North, the parking lot next to the pier, he noticed a man wandering the lot, according to a video the department posted on their YouTube account. "As [the pilot] watched, the subject approached an unoccupied parked vehicle, pulled out tools from his sweatshirt and quickly punched open the lock of the driver's side door," the department said in the video. The drone footage shows the suspected burglar break the lock of the driver's side door of a black SUV then climb into the car.

Just a few weeks after DoorDash announced plans to begin delivering some orders via drone, Uber Eats has announced a similar feature – although this one is a little more grounded. Starting on Wednesday, Uber Eats customers in the Phoenix metro area, including Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler, could potentially have their order matched with a Waymo self-driving car and delivered with nobody behind the wheel. This marks the seventh site where Uber Eats is testing autonomous deliveries, but the first one that uses Waymo vehicles. The company tested driverless delivery in Santa Monica in 2022 and in Japan in March 2023, among other locations. Not every Phoenix area restaurant on Uber Eats will have access to Waymo deliveries, Uber said.

Los Angeles commuters: Don't be alarmed, but driverless taxis may soon become a more common site on local streets. On March 1, state regulators gave Waymo, the self-driving taxi company owned by Google's parent, Alphabet, the green light to expand its robotaxi service to Los Angeles County, clearing the way for the company's expansion into one of the biggest markets in the country. While local transportation agencies deal with day-to-day traffic operations in their respective jurisdictions, the California Public Utilities Commission oversees the regulation of driverless vehicles across the state, superseding local governments. Waymo has not disclosed a timeline for when its service will become widely available, but a handful of Waymo vehicles are already roaming about the county, including around the USC campus, as part of its ongoing testing and promotion program. Under its new approval agreement, Waymo's driverless fleet can operate in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, East Los Angeles, Compton and many more locales.

State regulators on Friday gave the green light for Waymo to expand into Los Angeles and San Mateo counties, clearing the way for the driverless taxi service to launch in the coming months. Exactly when Waymo services will be available in Los Angeles is still to be determined, but the decision by the California Public Utilities Commission will open the streets of America's second-largest city to a fleet of autonomous vehicles -- even as self-driving cars continue to be the subject of safety concerns and some public criticism. Waymo, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, and already operates in parts of San Francisco. Waymo's driverless taxi launch in Santa Monica attracted both excited enthusiasts and concerned critics. The company is allowed to operate fully autonomous vehicles and carry public passengers as part of its testing and promotion, and has been testing its driverless white Jaguars in Los Angeles for more than a year.

Planning has been part of the core pursuit for artificial intelligence since its conception, but earlier AI agents mostly focused on constrained settings because many of the cognitive substrates necessary for human-level planning have been lacking. Recently, language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have shown interesting capabilities such as tool use and reasoning. Are these language agents capable of planning in more complex settings that are out of the reach of prior AI agents? To advance this investigation, we propose TravelPlanner, a new planning benchmark that focuses on travel planning, a common real-world planning scenario. It provides a rich sandbox environment, various tools for accessing nearly four million data records, and 1,225 meticulously curated planning intents and reference plans. Comprehensive evaluations show that the current language agents are not yet capable of handling such complex planning tasks-even GPT-4 only achieves a success rate of 0.6%. Language agents struggle to stay on task, use the right tools to collect information, or keep track of multiple constraints. However, we note that the mere possibility for language agents to tackle such a complex problem is in itself non-trivial progress. TravelPlanner provides a challenging yet meaningful testbed for future language agents.

As companies race to implement AI capabilities onto our most personal gadgets, one Santa Monica startup may have everyone beat by taking the road less traveled. At CES today, Rabbit Inc. launched R1, a 199 consumer device powered by a natural-language operating system, with the goal of making app interactions obsolete. ZDNET sorts through the wave of CES news and announcements to identify innovations that will make the most impact on professionals. Learn about the newest products and trends that transform the future of work and life. "We've come to a point where we have hundreds of apps on our smartphones with complicated UX designs that don't talk to each other. As a result, end users are frustrated with their devices and are often getting lost," said Rabbit CEO, Jesse Lyu.

The future of driverless cars in America is a promotional booth with a surfboard and a movie director's clapboard. Robotaxis have officially arrived in Los Angeles, and last week, residents lined up in Santa Monica's main promenade to get a smartphone code needed to ride them. For now, the cars, from the Alphabet-owned start-up Waymo, won't leave the tame streets of Santa Monica. But in the coming months, they'll embark on a multi-month "tour" of the city, heading to West Hollywood, downtown L.A., and several other neighborhoods. For the past decade, the two leading robotaxi companies, Waymo and Cruise, have been focused primarily on San Francisco and Phoenix, where they both already take paid passengers.

After months of testing, the Silicon Valley-based driverless car company began offering Waymo One -- its 24/7 robotaxi service -- to the public Wednesday. Those interested can get an activation code that will allow them to ride free for one week at an in-person pop-up event or by signing up online. In November, Waymo One will move on to Century City, then West Hollywood, Mid-City, Koreatown and downtown L.A. Autonomous vehicle enthusiasts, many of whom received emails about the event ahead of time, lined up at the Waymo stand in Santa Monica on Wednesday morning before it opened at 8 a.m., said Waymo product marketing manager Julianne McGoldrick. What happens when autonomous vehicles invade the traffic capital of the country? They collected their "ticket to ride" with an activation code and snagged T-shirts and tote bags.