Uber will invest 300m in electric vehicle maker Lucid in a robotaxi deal that aims to start with one major US city late next year. The two companies announced the new partnership on Thursday. Over six years starting in 2026, Uber will acquire and deploy over 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs that will be equipped with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology from startup Nuro, the three companies said in a statement. The agreement illustrates the renewed plans and push for financing for self-driving cabs, years after a first wave of autonomous driving investment produced only a limited number of vehicles. Tesla has recently launched a robotaxi trial in Austin, and Alphabet's driverless taxi unit, Waymo, is speeding up its expansion.

Kurt Knutsson reports World ID's iris scanning tech launches in six U.S. cities to verify identity, fight AI bots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, known for creating ChatGPT, has launched World, a project that uses an eye scan to prove you are a real person online. The idea is to help people stand out from bots and AI by creating a digital ID with a quick scan from a device called the Orb. While Altman says this technology keeps humans central as AI advances, it also raises serious concerns about privacy and the security of sensitive biometric data, with critics and regulators questioning how this information will be used and protected. Join the FREE "CyberGuy Report": Get my expert tech tips, critical security alerts and exclusive deals, plus instant access to my free "Ultimate Scam Survival Guide" when you sign up! World ID relies on a device called the Orb, a spherical scanner that captures a person's iris pattern to generate a unique IrisCode.

While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is having an unprecedented impact on creative domains. By transforming random noise into coherent patterns, diffusion models can generate new images, videos, or speech, guided by text prompts or other input data. The best ones can create outputs indistinguishable from the work of people, as well as bizarre, surreal results that feel distinctly nonhuman. Now these models are marching into a creative field that is arguably more vulnerable to disruption than any other: music. Music models can now create songs capable of eliciting real emotional responses, presenting a stark example of how difficult it's becoming to define authorship and originality in the age of AI.

'Our model enables discovery of these connections. 'We demonstrate the importance of discovering city-specific patterns for the prediction of reported crime, which generates a fresh view on neighbourhoods in the city, allows us to ask novel questions, and lets us evaluate police action in new ways.' According to results published yesterday in Nature Human Behaviour, the model performed just as well in data from seven other US cities as it did Chicago.

Walmart has been America's biggest retailer since the 1990s, its focus on low costs and ultra-efficient logistics helping it edge out competitors and keep customers coming back. But Amazon has been gaining on Walmart, and the pandemic gave the online retail giant a huge boost. Both companies are continuously searching for ways to cut costs while meeting consumer needs. It seems one of the needs that's steadily increasing is delivery. Whether due to busy schedules, health or safety concerns, or simply avoiding the stress of steering a loaded shopping cart up and down countless aisles, more people are trading in-store shopping for online shopping.

A distant future involving robotic package deliveries is now very much a reality. Advances in robotics, GPS tracking, automation, and navigation now mean you might not find a delivery person at your door with your package. You might find a delivery robot instead. With semi-autonomous robots beginning to enter the world, here's a look at how delivery robots work. A delivery robot is an automated robot that brings your delivery directly to your door.

In 2016, Columbus, Ohio, beat out 77 other small and midsize US cities for a pot of $50 million that was meant to reshape its future. The Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge was the first competition of its kind, conceived as a down payment to jump-start one city's adaptation to the new technologies that were suddenly everywhere. Ride-hail companies like Uber and Lyft were ascendant, car-sharing companies like Car2Go were raising their national profile, and autonomous vehicles seemed to be right around the corner. "Our proposed approach is revolutionary," the city wrote in its winning grant proposal, which pledged to focus on projects to help the city's most underserved neighborhoods. It laid out plans to experiment with Wi-Fi-enabled kiosks to help residents plan trips, apps to pay bus and ride-hail fares and find parking spots, autonomous shuttles, and sensor-connected trucks.

Waymo, the autonomous car unit of Google-parent Alphabet, opened its robo-taxi project to the general public in the US city of Phoenix on Thursday, becoming the first widely available driverless ride service. Now that the project has shifted out of its test phase, anyone signed up through the Waymo One smartphone app can summon autonomous vehicles to travel throughout the Arizona city's metro area, chief executive John Krafcik said. "Members of the public service can now take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world," he added. "We'll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app." The Waymo One app is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Portland's 2016 entry for a $50 million federal contest called the Smart City Challenge described a Pacific Northwest tech-topia. It promised autonomous shuttles, trucks, and cars on city streets, through partnerships with Daimler and Lyft. Sensors from Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs would monitor people walking and biking around the city to analyze traffic patterns. The Rose City didn't win, and four years later there are no self-driving Lyfts on its streets. One thing that has changed: Portland's conception of what makes a city smart. This month, Portland adopted the nation's most restrictive laws on face recognition, banning private as well as government use of the technology.

We recently put together a trilogy of articles with the insights of a few dozen experts in order to map out the key events of 2019, and to lay out predictions on where things are headed in 2020 (and likely beyond). And in what has become somewhat of a tradition, friend of KDnuggets Xavier Amatriain has once again written up his end-of-year retrospective of advances in AI/ML, which you can find here. What this article will do is take a snapshot of where we are in terms of data science and related salaries as we come to the end of another year. In order to find some single point of comparison, and try our best to find apples to compare to one another, we will be focusing on the role of a data scientist in the United States, but will also take a few related roles and a couple of additional countries into account further on. To get an idea, let's have a look at Payscale, which reports (most recently updated Oct 22, 2019) that the median data scientist salary in the US is $91,260, with a range of $62k - $138k (see Figure 1).