And we’re back. To the future?
The year of physical AI. Waymo hit 22% market share in SF in 6 months.
Is this the year of physical AI? Kicking the trend off strong is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pointing towards Physical AI as the trend du jour after Agentic AI.
Hype aside: what’s clear is that by moving towards AI in the physical world, AI is rapidly mapping out the expansion of its TAM. It will take years — if not decades — to unfold, but the pace and impact across humankind is unparalleled.
Given the rising popularity of Waymo, the robotaxi from Alphabet / Google, who now has a whopping 22% market share in San Francisco, on par with Lyft. Uber still dominates at 55% market share, but that may change rapidly as Waymo expands its fleet. That’s pretty impressive growth in roughly 6 months, since June 2024 when Waymo opened its service to everyone in SF.
2025 is off to an eventful start — hang on tight!
The Latest This Week
NVIDIA advances its frontier with CES 2025 announcements: NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang took the stage for a keynote at CES 2025 to outline the company’s vision for the future of AI in gaming, autonomous vehicles (AVs), robotics, and more. The highlights:
Introduction of the GeForce RTX 50 Series, powered by NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. The flagship RTX 5090 GPU, boasts 92 billion transistors and achieves an impressive 3,352 trillion AI operations per second (TOPS) with advanced features, including dual cooling fans and its ability to leverage AI for revolutionary real-time graphics.
Introduced DLSS 4 – featuring ‘Multi-Frame Generation’ technology – which boosts gaming performance up to eightfold by generating three additional frames for every frame rendered.
Cosmos platform that represents a new frontier for AI applications in robotics and autonomous systems. Cosmos integrates generative models, tokenisers, and video processing frameworks to enable robots and vehicles to simulate potential outcomes and predict optimal actions. By ingesting text, image, and video prompts, Cosmos can generate “virtual world states,” tailored for complex robotics and AV use cases involving real-world environments and lighting.
Project DIGITS, NVIDIA’s smallest yet most powerful AI supercomputer, powered by the cutting-edge GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. Project DIGITS enables developers and engineers to train and deploy AI models directly from their desks, providing the full power of NVIDIA’s AI stack in a compact form.
New AI foundation models for RTX PCs, which aim to supercharge content creation, productivity, and enterprise applications. These models, presented as NVIDIA NIM (Neural Interaction Model) microservices, are designed to integrate with the RTX 50 Series hardware.
Announced the release of Llama Nemotron, designed for developers to build and deploy powerful AI agents.
Microsoft makes powerful Phi-4 model fully open-source on Hugging Face: Microsoft is releasing its Phi-4 model as a fully open-source project with downloadable weights on Hugging Face, the AI code-sharing community. Phi-4 is available outside that proprietary service to anyone who has a Hugging Face account, and comes with a permissive MIT License, allowing it to be used for commercial applications as well.
Google is building its own ‘world modeling’ AI team for games and robot training: Google DeepMind is assembling a new team of AI researchers to develop “world models” that can simulate physical environments. The initiative will be led by Tim Brooks, a former co-lead for OpenAI’s Sora project who joined DeepMind in October to work on Google’s video generation and world simulators. World models are a relatively new development within AI that could serve a variety of purposes, such as creating real-time interactive media environments for video games and movies, and realistic training scenarios for robots and other AI systems.
AI startup Anthropic is in talks that could value it at $60 billion: Anthropic is is in talks to raise a new round of funding that could value the company at $60 billion, up from about $16 billion less than a year ago, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has raised more than $11.3 billion from venture firms like Menlo Ventures and tech giants like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.
Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a 'community notes' system similar to X's: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's moderation policies and practices, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech. Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.
Smoke, reflections and portals: Adobe’s TransPixar takes AI VFX to the next level: A team of Adobe Research and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed an AI system that could change how visual effects are made for films, games and interactive media. The technology, called TransPixar, adds a crucial feature to AI-generated videos: the ability to create see-through elements like smoke, reflections, and ethereal effects that blend naturally into scenes.
StabilityAI introduces Stable Point Aware 3D (SPAR3D) in partnership with NVIDIA, setting a new standard in 3D generation: Ideal for running on @NVIDIA RTX AI PCs, SPAR3D enables real-time editing and complete structure generation of 3D objects from a single image in under a second. SPAR3D transforms 3D prototyping for game developers, product designers, and environment builders with advanced capabilities, including: Unprecedented Control that allows users to directly edit the point cloud by deleting, duplicating, stretching, adding features, or recoloring points; Complete Structure Prediction that enhances 3D construction by providing accurate geometry and detailed predictions for full 360-degree views; and Lightning-Fast Generation that converts edited point clouds into final meshes in just 0.3 seconds, enabling seamless real-time editing.
Sam Altman says OpenAI knows how to build AGI: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that the company is confident that it knows “how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” referring to the tech industry’s long-sought benchmark of artificial general intelligence. And he predicts that AI agents capable of autonomously performing certain tasks may start to “materially change the output of companies” this year. The company’s next goal is “superintelligence in the true sense of the word,” he says.
AI researcher François Chollet is co-founding a nonprofit to build benchmarks for AGI: Former Google engineer and influential AI researcher François Chollet is co-founding a nonprofit to help develop benchmarks that’ll probe AI for “human-level” intelligence. The nonprofit, the ARC Prize Foundation, will be led by Greg Kamradt, an ex-Salesforce engineering director and founder of the AI product studio Leverage.
Getty Images and Shutterstock to merge to form $3.7B stock photo giant:Getty Images has agreed to merge with its rival Shutterstock in a cash-and-stock deal. The combined entity is expected to be valued at $3.7 billion.