The pale-blue Ojai vehicles will start picking up members of the public in California and Arizona today. Starting today, Alphabet self-driving vehicle developer Waymo will start picking up members of the public in its new Ojai vehicles (pronounced "oh hai")--pale blue boxy minivans studded with sensors and complete with steering wheels, even though they're designed to travel without drivers. For now, the rides in these new cars, which can be summoned through Waymo's app, will be free. It's been a long road for the vehicle, first announced by Waymo in 2021 and tested on public streets since 2024. It's also a weird time for Waymo: The self-driving-vehicle company, which is trying to expand quickly across the US and the world, shut down service in six US cities last week due to issues with how its vehicles react to flooding.

King's College team wins access to cutting-edge Google quantum chip Scientists from King's College London have become the first UK academic research team to gain access to Google's cutting-edge quantum computer chip Willow as part of a scheme launched with the UK's national quantum lab last year. Quantum computers can in theory solve problems which the most powerful conventional computers cannot. King's lead for the project Dr Eleanor Crane said its use of Willow would light a torch for research to answer questions about the most important natural processes. It would be useful if society could understand how plants transform sunlight into energy, find materials which transport electricity quickly, or how molecules bind to each other, said Crane, who will co-lead the research team alongside Dr Alexander Schuckert from ENS Paris. These natural processes rely on the interactions between many fundamental particles which made up the building blocks of life.

On Monday morning, a jury in Oakland, California, announced its verdict in one of the most-watched tech feuds between billionaire Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The nine-member jury handed a decisive victory to Altman, saying Musk had waited too long to bring his claims against the artificial intelligence company and its top executives. Musk, who cofounded OpenAI as a nonprofit, had filed a $150bn lawsuit against the organisation, Altman and its president, Greg Brockman, accusing them of turning it into a for-profit entity for personal enrichment. Instead, the case became focused on a procedural issue. After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury unanimously found that the statute of limitations had expired before Musk filed the lawsuit in 2024, meaning jurors concluded he had waited too long to bring his claims under the applicable legal deadline.

OpenAI has signed deals with fintech startups, tech giants and even Disney, but it's breaking new ground by announcing a world's first partnership with the country of Malta. In a post on its website, OpenAI said that it would provide ChatGPT Plus for one year to every Maltese resident or citizen. Malta is the first country to launch a partnership of this scale because we refuse to let our citizens stay behind in the digital age, Silvio Schembri, Malta's minister for Economy, Enterprise and Strategic Projects, said in a statement. We are putting our people at the very forefront of global change. For the approximately 574,250 residents living in Malta, they'll have to complete a course developed by the University of Malta before launching the ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month in the US.

A new collaboration with Alphabet's Wing will only deliver sandwiches. It demonstrates the tricky parts of taking to the sky. Starting today, eager customers of the US pizza restaurant chain Papa Johns living in one corner of southern North Carolina will have the opportunity to receive their food from the sky, thanks to a new collaboration with Alphabet's drone company, Wing . But Papa Johns' signature pizzas won't be on offer. Instead, drone-loving North Carolinians will have to choose between three kinds of sandwiches, a newer product for the fast-food chain: Philly cheesesteak, chicken bacon ranch, or steak and mushroom varieties.

The company behind the long-running space sim has entered into a partnership with Google in which the search giant will take a minority stake. In exchange, Google's DeepMind will train its AI technology on the game, according to a report by . CCP Games, the dev who made and maintains, has also been rebranded as Fenris Creations . This happened just after the company purchased the rights to the game back from Korean developer Pearl Abyss. Google's investment is in the millions of dollars, according to Fenris Creations Chief Executive Officer Hilmar Veigar Pétursson.

Partnership on AI has published a progress report on post-deployment governance practices pertaining to foundation models. The document, entitled " 2026 Transparency Report on Foundation Model Impacts ", measures the progress of 13 foundation model providers* in publicly documenting the impacts of their foundation models. In carrying out their analysis, authors Jacob Pratt and Albert Tanjaya reviewed more than 150 papers, articles, websites, and reports. For assessment, these four practices were broken down into 19 processes, or activities, that support how foundation model providers adopt practices. Although several leading organizations are defining what information to share and how, the rest are slow in adopting information-sharing practices.

OpenAI is racing to catch up to its greatest rival. OpenAI does not like to be left out. The week after Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview --an AI model that has put governments around the world on edge because of its potential ability to hack into banks, energy grids, and military systems--OpenAI shared a program that is uncannily similar. And just like Anthropic did with its model, OpenAI has, for cybersecurity purposes, restricted access to this new bot, called GPT-5.4-Cyber, to a small group of trusted users. This sequence has become something of a pattern: First Anthropic will make an announcement, and then OpenAI will follow suit.

The two companies announced an amended partnership that lets OpenAI use other cloud platforms and offer its models to other companies. OpenAI is opening up its partnership with Microsoft in the latest amendment to the major multi-year collaboration between the tech giants. The latest changes allow OpenAI to offer its latest AI models to other companies and through other cloud providers, stripping Microsoft of its exclusivity rights. In a joint announcement posted on OpenAI and Microsoft's websites, Microsoft will still be OpenAI's primary cloud partner with the latest products shipping first on Azure, but OpenAI is now allowed to use any cloud provider. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, posted on X that the company is now able to make our products and services available across all clouds.

Fans want to reclaim the music and myth of Michael Jackson in the new biopic while critics call for accountability. Still from, which opened April 24. Is truth determined by the size of the audience it reaches? If so, --a new film about the pop singer Michael Jackson that is on track to have the biggest-ever opening for a music biopic, with projected earnings of $70 million at the US box office, despite critics saying it sanitizes the reality of who Jackson actually was--intends to supplant the King of Pop as the apotheosis of artistic virtue. The film's release has sparked a familiar but newly intensified civil war online, between those eager to reclaim the music and myth of Jackson, and those who see any celebration of him as a failure of accountability.