Randy Ksar

Important column from Timothy Lee in his latest Understanding AI column unpacking how the decisions policymakers make over the near term will have a major impact on where autonomous driving tech is deployed. Improving road safety - with over 40,000 people losing their lives on American roads every year - can and should be a common goal we all urgently work toward. 🇺🇸 "The most obvious reason this debate matters is safety. Waymo estimates that over the first 70 million miles, Waymo’s vehicles got into major crashes—those serious enough to cause an injury or trigger an airbag—about 80 percent less often than comparable human-driven vehicles. "It’s always worth taking a company’s own statistics with a grain of salt. But I’ve consulted multiple traffic safety experts over the last two years and they’ve consistently told me Waymo’s research is credible. A large majority of crashes involving Waymo vehicles have been clearly the result of a human driver in another vehicle. For example, one of the most common crash types involves a human driver rear-ending a Waymo. "So while opponents of autonomous vehicles sometimes claim that banning robotaxis is a pro-safety move, it’s more likely to cost lives than to save them." https://lnkd.in/gvJtRbuq

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Last week, we hosted our annual Build developer conference. Looking back with perspective after a weekend of grounding myself by spending time outside in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, I wanted to share a couple of my takeaways: 1) Developers are not one monolithic audience. They’re creators—deeply docked to their communities, building in real time, iterating in public. Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what we’re navigating across media, influencers, and the way we show up on every channel. Understanding fragmentation isn't a problem—it’s the new norm. 2) Striking the right balance takes a village. You need proximity to the creators and media who know their audiences best. Centralize too much and you lose that edge. Decentralize too far and you risk incoherence. The magic is in getting it right, and it can’t be outsourced. 3) Speed is expected. Creators, communities, and the news cycle are evolving by the minute. Engagement isn’t a campaign—it’s a capability. Something you do daily, with curiosity, and a lot of iteration. This year at Build, I left inspired at how we, as communicators, are evolving to meet the moment. Knowing who we reach, how they engage, and doing it all with clarity in an environment that never slows down. If you weren't at Build, here's a picture I shared at an influencer briefing of me giving an influencer briefing but make it look like Minecraft. It's media briefings all the down. :)

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Ahead of Rivian Autonomy & AI Day on Thursday, Kirsten Korosec at TechCrunch published a curtain raiser piece based on a series of conversations with Wassym Bensaid -- "Rivian is building its own AI assistant." Some excerpts below: "The company will likely share more during its upcoming AI & Autonomy Day, which will be livestreamed starting at 9 a.m. PT December 11. "Rivian’s plans are reflective of the moment as the pace of development from foundational AI companies — the tech giants and startups like Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI that are building the core models and infrastructure — accelerates and industries scramble to keep up. But as Bensaid noted to TechCrunch earlier this year, this isn’t some slapdash effort to stay on trend. Nor is it simply a chatbot thrown into the infotainment system. The company has put considerable thought, resources, and time into the product, Bensaid said, noting that it’s designed to be integrated with all vehicle controls. The company started with an underlying philosophy to build an overall architecture that is model and platform agnostic, according to Bensaid. The Rivian AI assistant team, which is based out of the company’s Palo Alto office, soon realized effort and attention should also be directed toward developing the software layers that help coordinate various workflows as well as the control logic that resolves conflicts. “And that’s the in-vehicle platform we have built,” Bensaid said. “We use what the industry loves to now call an agentic framework; but we thought about that architecture since very early so that we can interface with different models.” Kudos Evan Barbour Grippi for helping to make this happen. "https://lnkd.in/eb96hiGu

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WEKA’s Liran Zvibel explores why memory efficiency is now the key to AI innovation and shares how new architectures like token warehouses can help AI systems think, remember, and reason at scale, for Forbes . A great read for anyone building the next generation of #AIInfrastructure: http://spr.ly/60427ndgg

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Gemini 2.5 Flash just dropped last week and you preview in the Gemini API via Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. What’s different? This new version delivers a major upgrade in reasoning capabilities, while still prioritizing speed and cost. Learn more about it at https://lnkd.in/e-nCjZ9d #AI #Google #Gemini

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Big M&A news in Seattle startup land as Palo Alto Networks plans to acquire 3-year-old cybersecurity company Protect AI, ranked No. 10 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top tech startups across the Pacific Northwest. It's part of a growing cohort of cybersecurity startups that are based in the Seattle region or have a significant presence in the area. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gfx_pXkS

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🍰 "Speaking with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Huang framed AI not as a single technology but as a “a five-layer cake,” spanning energy, chips and computing infrastructure, cloud data centers, AI models and, ultimately, the application layer. Because every layer of AI’s five-layer stack must be built and operated, Huang said the platform shift is creating jobs across the economy — from energy and construction to advanced manufacturing, cloud operations and application development." 🍰

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Our CTO and co-founder, John Bicket, sat down with diginomica to talk about how AI is reshaping connected operations. John's insights on navigating the AI revolution and leveraging our data to create real-world impact are enlightening. We're not just watching the future unfold; we're building it, hand-in-hand with our customers. https://bit.ly/3RsbzA3

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“High morale centers retain people longer and get more new hires.” — Jenn Reidy Jenn Reidy, now Director of Emergency Communications at Montgomery County PD, shares how real-time transcription is helping telecommunicators, supervisors and QA teams work smarter. 🎧 Watch the full episode for real insights that are making a difference in 9-1-1 centers: https://lnkd.in/gtGHjUxN

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