For self-driving-car developers, like many iPhone and Google Photos users, the growing cost of storing files on the cloud has become a nagging headache. Early on, robocar companies pursued a brute-force approach to maximize miles and data. "We could take all the data the cars have seen over time, the hundreds of thousands of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles, [and] take from that a model of how we expect them to move," said Chris Urmson, an early leader of Google's self-driving project, in a 2015 TED Talk. Urmson spoke at a time when autonomous vehicle prototypes were relatively few and the handful of companies testing them could afford to keep almost every data point they scooped up from the road. But nearly a decade later, Google's project and many others have fallen far behind their own predictions of the timeline for success.

Aurora Innovation Inc.'s chief executive officer recently laid out a range of options for the self-driving company to respond to worsening market conditions and partners pushing out timelines, including a possible sale to Apple Inc. or Microsoft Corp., according to a document seen by Bloomberg. Chris Urmson, who co-founded Aurora after running Google's self-driving car project, also outlined cost cuts and floated measures including taking the company private, spinning off or selling assets and pursuing a small capital raise in a memo labeled "board discussion pre-read" dated Aug. 3. Urmson inadvertently sent this to staff and asked them on Aug. 9 not to open it, the document shows. A representative for Aurora confirmed the authenticity of the memo and said the company is considering ways to stay competitive in a challenging marketplace. "Given the current macro conditions, every company should be going through the exercise of evaluating its options and long-term strategy," a company spokesperson said Friday in an email. "We think that thinking through things like this is a positive sign and a mark of good governance."

Aurora, the startup that was founded by the former head of Google's self-driving car project, has officially begun trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol "AUR." It's a significant milestone for the AV industry, which has struggled with overinflated expectations, missed deadlines, shuttered businesses, and a host of technological challenges. Last summer, Aurora announced that it would go public through a reverse merger with a special acquisition company, or SPAC, called Reinvent Technology Partners Y. Upon closing this deal, Aurora said it has $1.8 billion in "gross proceeds and cash in hand," which will help its quest to become a provider of self-driving hardware and software to companies in the trucking and ride-hailing industries. "This is a thrilling moment," said Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, at an event celebrating the company's public listing. We're working to launch an incredible product in trucking.

In 2016, three veterans of the still young autonomous vehicle industry formed Aurora, a startup focused on developing self-driving cars. Partnerships followed with major automakers, including Hyundai and Volkswagen. CEO Chris Urmson said at the time that the link-ups would help the company bring "mobility as a service" to urban areas--Uber-like rides without a human behind the wheel. But by late 2019, Aurora's emphasis had shifted. It said self-driving trucks, not cars, would be quicker to hit public roads en masse. Its executives, who had steadfastly refused to provide a timeline for their self-driving-car software, now say trucks equipped with its "Aurora Driver" will hit the roads in 2023 or 2024, with ride-hail vehicles following a year or two later.

The top-funded companies on the recently-released list of top 100 most-promising AI companies to watch from CBInsights, a market intelligence company based in New York, include companies offering autonomous driving software, an AI System on a chip, endpoint security with AI, and a drug discovery company. The list, selected from a base of 6,000 companies, is based on business relations, investor profile, news sentiment analysis, R&D activity, a proprietary scoring system, market potential, competitive landscape, team strength and tech novelty, according to an account in TechRepublic. "This year's cohort spans 18 industries, and is working on everything from climate risk to accelerating drug R&D," stated CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal. Companies on last year's list went on to raise $5.2 billion in additional financing, including 16 of over $100 million each. Some companies exited via merger or acquisition, IPOs or SPACS.

Airbnb has raised the price of its shares ahead of its initial public offering this week, betting investors will pay more given its resiliency during the pandemic. In a government filing Monday, Airbnb said it expects to price its shares between $56 and $60 each, up from a range of $44 to $50 earlier this month. Airbnb is expected to issue a final share price late Wednesday ahead of its Thursday IPO on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The new price would let the San Francisco-based home sharing company raise up to $3.4 billion in the offering. That's more than double the $18 billion the company was valued at during a private fundraising round in the spring, when the pandemic shut down global travel and its prospects were uncertain.

Building a self-driving car was never going to be easy. But Karl Iagnemma says he didn't expect it to be this hard. "Vehicles are these massively complex systems, and to [build self-driving cars], we need to integrate them with another very complex system and do it in a way that's reliable and cost-optimized. It's really, really hard," says Iagnemma, the president and CEO of a joint venture formed in March between South Korea's Hyundai and self-driving startup Aptiv. "I think that's one of the things that most players in the industry underappreciated, myself included."

Brandon Moak felt as if a freight train had hit him. It was mid-March, and the cofounder and CTO of the autonomous- trucking startup Embark Trucks had been keeping tabs on the emergence of covid-19. As a shelter-in-place order went into effect throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, where Embark is based, Moak and his team were forced to ground almost all their 13 self-driving semi-trucks (a few stayed on the road moving essential freight but weren't in autonomous mode) and send home the majority of their workforce, with no idea how long it'd be before they could return. For safety reasons, autonomous vehicles typically have two operators apiece. That's a no-go in the age of social distancing, and leaders of autonomous-vehicle companies knew they'd have to mothball their fleets.

Twelve years later, even some of his former Carnegie Mellon University teammates have become business competitors of Salesky, who with CMU alumnus and faculty adviser Peter Rander founded Argo AI and went on to attract substantial investments from Ford Motor Co and Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE). At the 2007 self-driving competition staged by DoD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in remote Victorville, California, Salesky's CMU team and one from rival Stanford University included the future founders of at least four self-driving startups. Those competitors were Chris Urmson and Drew Bagnell of self-driving vehicle startup Aurora, Dave Ferguson of Nuro, Apex.ai's Jan Becker and Anthony Levandowski of Pronto.ai. Sebastian Thrun, who with Levandowski and Urmson helped build Google's self-driving business, also participated in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, as did Dmitri Dolgov, who now heads engineering at Google's self-driving spinout Waymo.

For all the hype about, 2017 saw some notable strides in artificial intelligence. A bot called Libratus, for example. Out in the real world, machine learning is being put to use and widening access to . But have you talked to recently? Then you'll know that despite the hype, and, there are many things that artificial intelligence still can't do or understand.