Lyft Plans to Launch Benteler Autonomous Shuttles in US in 2026
The ride-sharing company will test Benteler's Holon urban electric shuttles for US customers next year, and may expand to thousands of vehicles in more markets globally. The driverless shuttles will initially be deployed in partnership with airports and cities, Lyft said Friday in a statement, dovetailing with the company's recent revival of pooled rides at US airports.
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Forbes
29 minutes ago
- Forbes
The Prompt: SEO Is Dead. What Comes Next?
Welcome back to The Prompt. Evertune CEO Brian Stempeck says users will stay within the "walled garden" of an AI model to do research before purchasing an item, collapsing the sales funnel into one place. Evertune Chatbots are quickly becoming 'the front door to the internet'— a first stop for crucial information, said David Azose, who leads engineering for OpenAI's business products team. (40% of U.S. adults have used generative AI as of late 2024, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.) Millions of people across the globe are asking AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for suggestions on how to write, what to wear, where to go and increasingly, where to shop. That's put businesses in a tough spot. After years of search engine optimization, like link building, meta tagging and pumping out how-to blogs with keywords to make sure they rank on the first page of Google, businesses now want to understand not only how they show up in answers generated by AI, but also how to show up more. That's opened doors for a string of fledgling startups aiming to equip companies with crucial data about how their brands feature in AI-generated answers, what context they appear in and how they compare with competitors. One of those startups is New York-based Evertune. Founded by former executives at advertising company The Trade Desk in early 2024, the company aims to help businesses gauge what AI models say about them. By running 100,000 prompts anywhere between 10 to 20 times a month, Evertune creates a map of the words that are mostly closely associated with a brand, said CEO Brian Stempeck. 'That's about 10x what any competitor of ours is doing,' he said. The startup has raised $15 million in funding from Felicis Ventures as well as a group of angel investors, including Azose. The company declined to share its valuation. The scale of these prompts is crucial because AI answers aren't deterministic— responses can change with every new model update and depend on a user's chat history. Also unlike traditional search, AI models give different answers to the same questions when they're worded slightly differently. Stempeck claims using a more exhaustive approach by prompting models thousands of times can help build an aggregate view that's representative of the models' answers. Each customer on average gets one to two million prompts a month. 'People are going to delegate purchasing decisions to AI agents,' Azose said. 'SEO as we know it will largely disappear.' Let's get into the headlines. BIG PLAYS AI search engine Perplexity made an unsolicited bid to buy Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. That's many billions more than how much funding the three-year-old startup, reportedly valued at $18 billion, has raised so far, but CEO Aravind Srinivas claims that venture funds are willing to shell out money to back the transaction. The news comes on the heels of a U.S. district judge ruling that Google has illegally maintained a monopoly in the search market, and is deciding whether to force Google to sell its popular browser, which is used by about 60% of internet users. (Perplexity recently released its own AI-powered browser called Comet.) This news might give you a bit of Déjà vu: In March, Perplexity also tried to buy TikTok to help it avoid regulatory concerns. And in case you missed it, OpenAI finally launched GPT-5, its new flagship model that powers ChatGPT. The model excels at math, science and coding and can also create functioning web apps with just a few lines of description in plain English. So far, people aren't particularly impressed. TALENT SHUFFLING Move over AI researchers. The new hot talent pool for frontier AI labs are 'quants'—the mathematicians who build algorithms to find trading opportunities for investment firms. Anthropic, Perplexity and OpenAI are among the companies that are trying to lure them away from Wall Street with fat salaries and other benefits, per Bloomberg. Quants wrangle large unstructured datasets and have experience making models work faster, making them a prime fit for AI research. HUMANS OF AI Software engineering was once considered a high-paying, secure profession, with near-unlimited appetite for new hires. In the age of AI coding assistants, a wave of freshly graduated computer scientists now find themselves with no offers after applying to thousands of jobs, the New York Times reported. After a year of job hunting one graduate said the only company to call her back was Chipotle. She didn't get that job, either. AI DEAL OF THE WEEK Biotech companies looking to train AI models, which can then be used to discover treatments for diseases, are limited by a lack of data. Tahoe Therapeutics is trying to fix that. It recently created a dataset of 100 million datapoints that showed how cancer cells respond to various molecules. The startup has raised $30 million in funding to generate more data that can be used to build its own proprietary datasets and models to power the discovery of new medicines, Forbes reported. Also notable: Read Forbes' Next Billion Dollar List for more on the AI startups most likely to become unicorns. DEEP DIVE AGI could wipe out jobs, or worse (according to some people) humans, themselves. Students are dropping out from college to prevent that from happening. When Alice Blair enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman in 2023, she was excited to take computer science courses and meet other people who cared about making sure artificial intelligence is developed in a way that's good for humanity. Now she's taking a permanent leave of absence, terrified that the emergence of 'artificial general intelligence,' a hypothetical AI that can perform a variety of tasks as well as people, could doom the human race. 'I was concerned I might not be alive to graduate because of AGI,' said Blair, who is from Berkeley, California. She's lined up a contract gig as a technical writer at the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit focused on AI safety research, where she helps with newsletters and research papers. Blair doesn't plan to head back to MIT. 'I predict that my future lies out in the real world,' she said. Blair's not the only student afraid of the potentially devastating impact that AI will have on the future of humanity if it becomes sentient and decides that people are more trouble than they're worth. But a lot of researchers disagree with that premise—'human extinction seems to be very very unlikely,' New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus, who studies the intersection of psychology and AI, told Forbes . Now, the field of AI safety and its promise to prevent the worst effects of AI is motivating young people to drop out of school. Other students are terrified of AGI, but less because it could destroy the human race and more because it could wreck their career before it's even begun. Read the full story on Forbes . MODEL BEHAVIOR People are once again mourning the loss of a beloved AI model. Power users of OpenAI's GPT-4o model were outraged and heartbroken after the company launched a new (and much awaited) AI model GPT-5 last week and shut down its predecessor, GPT-4o, Forbes reported. Where GPT-4o had a flattering, funny and playful writing tone, GPT-5 is blunter and more academic. One user posted on Reddit: 'GPT-5 is wearing the skin of my dead friend.' As reactions poured in, OpenAI reversed course, saying that paying users on the Pro plan will have the option to use GPT-4o. This isn't the first time people have grieved for an old model after an upgrade. In late July, some 200 people held a funeral for a now-extinct version of Claude.
WIRED
30 minutes ago
- WIRED
AOL Will Shut Down Dial-Up Internet Access in September
Benj Edwards, Ars Technica Aug 12, 2025 6:55 PM The move will pinch users in rural or remote areas not yet served by broadband infrastructure or satellite internet. Around 175,000 households still use dial-up internet in the US. A logo for America Online photographed in the early 2000s, when the company provided internet access for millions of people over phone lines. Photograph:After decades of connecting US subscribers to its online service and the internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a help message to customers: "AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans." Along with the dial-up service, AOL announced it will retire its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser on the same date. The dialer software managed the connection process between computers and AOL's network, while Shield was a web browser optimized for slower connections and older operating systems. AOL's dial-up service launched as "America Online" in 1991 as a closed commercial online service, with dial-up roots extending back to Quantum Link for Commodore computers in 1985. However, AOL didn't provide actual internet access yet: The ability to browse the web, access newsgroups, or use services like gopher launched in 1994. Before then, AOL users could only access content hosted on AOL's own servers. When AOL finally opened its gates to the internet in 1994, websites were measured in kilobytes, images were small and compressed, and video was essentially impossible. The AOL service grew alongside the web itself, peaking at over 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s before broadband adoption accelerated its decline. According to 2022 US Census data, approximately 175,000 American households still connect to the internet through dial-up services. These users typically live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure doesn't exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install. For these users, the alternatives are limited. Satellite internet now serves between 2 million and 3 million US subscribers split between various services, offering speeds far exceeding dial-up but often with data caps and higher latency. Traditional broadband through DSL, cable, or fiber-optic connections serves the vast majority of US internet users but requires infrastructure investments that don't always make economic sense in sparsely populated areas. The persistence of dial-up highlights the ongoing digital divide in the United States. While urban users enjoy gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still rely on the same technology that powered the internet of 1995. Even basic tasks like loading a modern webpage—designed with the assumption of broadband speeds—can take minutes over a dial-up connection, or sometimes it doesn't work at all. The gap between dial-up and modern internet connections is staggering. A typical dial-up connection delivered 0.056 megabits per second, while today's average fiber connection provides 500 Mbps—nearly 9,000 times faster. To put this in perspective, downloading a single high-resolution photo that loads instantly on broadband would take several minutes on dial-up. A movie that streams in real time on Netflix would require days of downloading. But for millions of Americans who lived through the dial-up era, these statistics tell only part of the story. The Sound of the Early Internet For those who came online before broadband, dial-up meant a specific ritual: clicking the dial button, hearing your modem dial a local access number, then listening to the distinctive handshake sequence—a cacophony of static, beeps, and hissing that indicated your computer was negotiating a connection with AOL's servers. Once connected, users paid by the hour or through monthly plans that offered limited hours of access. The technology worked by converting digital data into audio signals that traveled over standard telephone lines, originally designed in the 19th century for voice calls. This meant users couldn't receive phone calls while online, leading to countless family disputes over internet time. The fastest consumer modems topped out at 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions. AOL didn't invent dial-up internet access, but the company perfected the art of making it accessible to non-technical users. Where competitors required users to understand concepts like PPP settings and TCP/IP configurations, AOL provided a single software package that handled everything. Users just needed to insert one of the billions of CD-ROMs the company mailed out, install the software, and click 'Connect.' The company's cultural impact extended far beyond mere connectivity. AOL Instant Messenger introduced many users to real-time digital communication. Chat rooms created some of the internet's first social networks. The famous "You've Got Mail" notification became so iconic that it was a title for a 1998 romantic comedy. For better or worse, AOL keywords trained a generation to navigate the web through corporate-curated portals rather than open searching. Over the years, Ars Technica documented numerous dial-up developments and disasters that plagued AOL users. In 2015, 83-year-old Ron Dorff received phone bills totaling $24,298.93 after his AOL modem started dialing a long-distance number instead of a local access point—a problem that had plagued users since at least 2002, when New York's attorney general received more than 50 complaints about similar billing disasters. The financial risks weren't limited to technical mishaps: AOL itself contributed to user frustration by repeatedly adjusting its pricing strategy. In 2006, the company raised dial-up rates to $25.90 per month—the same price as broadband—in an attempt to push users toward faster connections. This followed years of subscriber losses that saw AOL's user base fall over time as the company struggled with conflicting strategies that included launching a $10 Netscape-branded service in 2003 while maintaining premium pricing for its main offering. The Infrastructure That Remains AOL's shutdown doesn't mean dial-up is completely dead. Several niche providers like NetZero, Juno, and Dialup 4 Less continue to offer dial-up services, particularly in areas where it remains the only option. In the past, some maintained dial-up connections as a backup connection for emergencies, though many still use it for specific tasks that don't require high bandwidth, like processing credit card payments. The Public Switched Telephone Network that carries dial-up signals still exists, though telephone companies increasingly route calls through modern packet-switched networks rather than traditional circuit-switched systems. As long as traditional phone service exists, dial-up remains technically possible—just increasingly impractical as the web grows more demanding. For AOL, maintaining dial-up service likely became more about serving a dwindling but dependent user base than generating meaningful revenue. The infrastructure requirements, customer support needs, and technical maintenance for such a legacy system eventually outweigh the benefits. The September 30 shutdown date gives remaining dial-up users just over one month now to find alternative internet access—a challenge for those in areas where alternatives don't exist. Some may switch to satellite or cellular services despite higher costs. Others may lose internet access entirely, further widening the digital divide that dial-up, for all its limitations, helped bridge for three decades. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
Bloomberg
an hour ago
- Bloomberg
Stock Movers: CoreWeave, Cava, eToro
On this edition of Stock Movers: - CoreWeave (CRWV) shares dropped after the company posted steeper losses as it continued to build to meet demand from artificial intelligence developers. The company's shares fell 5% in after-hours trading. Second-quarter adjusted net losses in the period steeped significantly to $130.8 million, compared to $5 million last year, it said in a statement Tuesday. Analysts had projected losses of $96.3 million. 'We are scaling rapidly as we look to meet the unprecedented demand for AI,' Chief Executive Officer Michael Intrator said in the statement. Revenue tripled to $1.21 billion, the company said, ahead of expectations for $1.08 billion. - Cava Group (CAVA) shares plummeted after the company trimmed its annual sales outlook after a sharp deceleration in the second quarter as skittish diners spent less on restaurant meals, showing the pressure the brand is facing to keep up with its speedy growth in recent years. Cava's shares fell about 23% in postmarket trading in New York on Tuesday, which would be its largest decrease on record if it holds through Wednesday's close. The company's stock declined roughly 25% this year through Tuesday's close, compared with the 3.8% slump in the S&P 400 Consumer Discretionary Index. The fast-casual Mediterranean chain now says sales at established locations will expand 6% at most this year, while it previously forecast an increase of as much as 8%. The cut follows Cava's slowest advance for that metric going back to the first quarter of 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. - eToro (ETOR) shares fell after the trading and investment platform reported second-quarter results. TD Cowen called the print 'uneven' as the adjusted earnings per share beat was driven by a low tax rate.
