Last year during Tesla's AI Day, the automaker unveiled its Dojo supercomputer. At the time, Tesla claimed the supercomputer was the world's most powerful training machine and would help the automaker teach its vehicles how to drive without any inputs from a human driver. While Tesla officially announced the system last year, the automaker provided more information on its Dojo supercomputer this year at the Hot Chips conference. Dojo's job is to take all of the video Tesla gathers from its fleet of Tesla cars on the road today and process it to learn how cars drive in the real world. The training process is what represents the base for Tesla's Full Self Driving System.

Waymo and Tesla are locked in a battle to reach the holy grail of full, level five autonomous driving first. Waymo, which started life as Google's self-driving car project, has started trials of self-driving taxis in the Phoenix area. Tesla, with hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles already on the road, instead wants to upgrade existing cars with software updates to gradually enable autonomous driving for customers. The competition intensified this week as Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed his company will achieve full autonomy in 2019. Musk went as far to tell Recode that "I don't wanna sound overconfident, but I would be very surprised if any of the car companies exceeded Tesla in self-driving."

A new U.K. self-driving car startup founded by Amar Shah and Alex Kendall, two machine learning PhDs from University of Cambridge, is de-cloaking today. Wayve -- backed by New York-based Compound, Europe's Fly Ventures, and Brent Hoberman's Firstminute Capital -- is building what it describes as "end-to-end machine learning algorithms" to make autonomous vehicles a reality, an approach it claims is different to much of the conventional thinking on self-driving cars. Specifically, as Wayve CEO Shah explained in a call last week, the young company believes that the key to making an autonomous vehicle that is truly just that (i.e. In other words, self-driving cars is an AI problem first and foremost, and one that he and co-founder Kendall argue requires a very specific machine-learning development skill set. "Wayve is building intelligent software to decide how to control a vehicle on all public roads," he tells me.

Intel is all-in on autonomous cars. The company's autonomous vehicle division, Mobileye, has signed a deal to provide self-driving technology to eight million cars for a "European automaker," Reuters reports, citing a company official. The terms of the deal, and the identity of the automaker in question, have not been disclosed. Mashable reached out to Intel for clarification but did not hear back immediately. The contract's terms will kick in in 2021, when Intel's new EyeQ5 chip, designed to power fully autonomous vehicles (i.e.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Last fall, Zipcar founder Robin Chase released a 10-point manifesto with this philosophy: Let's not make the same mistakes with driverless cars that we made the first time we introduced the automobile into cities. It's an urbanist's platform in support of a future where we devote less city space to cars, not more. To that end, the 10th principle is that autonomous vehicles in dense urban areas should be operated only in shared fleets--as taxis, not as private cars. In addition to its role in American folklore, personal vehicle ownership has exerted enormous influence on the shape and feel of our cities, requiring expressway construction, surrounding restaurants and shops with moats of parking spaces, and injecting traffic and parking concerns into the heart of urban politics.

Some are philosophical: What do we owe the people whose jobs will be annihilated? Do robo cars need ethics lessons? At least one question is practical and philosophical: How do we know when these things are ready to ditch their human safety drivers and roll about unattended? No one has much of a response. You could say that as soon as the robot is safer than the average human driver--who crashes once every 238,000 miles or so--it's wrong to keep it in the lab.

The news professionals are talking about now, curated by LinkedIn's editors. Waymo's self-driving cars logged the most miles of all driverless vehicle companies in California, according to a report from the state's DMV. Waymo drove 352,545 miles in the year ending in November 2017 (roughly 50% less than the year prior, due to shifting much of its fleet to Phoenix). In second place, GM's Cruise division logged 131,676 miles. "This is still Waymo (née Google) and GM's party, and everyone else is playing catch-up," says The Verge.

One would expect that the vast majority of Waymo's autonomous miles will come in Phoenix in 2018, where the company is launching a commercial pilot of its self-driving taxi service. Soon, however, Waymo will be expanding that trial to more cities. Chrysler recently reported that they are set to deliver "thousands" of the customized minivans that Waymo uses over the next year "to support Waymo as it expands its service to more cities across the United States." All this to say: Waymo's been at it the longest and is certainly furthest along in developing a real autonomous service. The only company that's even in the same order of magnitude, in terms of miles driven in California, is Cruise, which was acquired by GM.

The self-driving car market is set to reach $42 billion by 2025 and a new report has revealed that Samsung wants a piece of the action. The South Korean electronics maker has recently been approved to test it deep-learning based autonomous vehicles on public roads. Although the firm has been very quiet about the project, it has developed a'commercialized Hyundai vehicle equipped with the latest cameras and sensors' that will be used during testing. Samsung received approved to test it deep-learning based autonomous vehicles on public roads. It plans to use a'commercialized Hyundai vehicle (stock image) equipped with the latest cameras and sensors' that will be used during testing The news was first shared online by The Korea Hearald, which said Samsung received its approval from the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

The addition of 500 vehicles will dramatically increase Waymo's ability to capture critical mapping data ― and to use that data to improve its software (read more about that here) ― launching the company even further ahead of competitors like Uber and Lyft (though probably not Tesla, which has a couple billion miles under its belt, compared with Waymo's 3 million).