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San Francisco Chronicle
16 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump administration pulls $4 billion in federal funding for California high-speed rail
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration plans to pull the plug on federal funding to California's high-speed rail project. Following a review of the $4 billion in federal funds allocated to California's bullet train project launched in February, the Transportation Department said it plans to terminate federal funding for the project, according to a report released Wednesday. 'We have $4 billion that has been authorized to go to California to build this project and we don't want to invest in boondoggles,' Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy told Fox News Wednesday. The state will have 30 days to make the case that it has complied with the grant's terms and any corrective action it plans to take before the federal government can terminate funding. The Transportation Department is not asking for the state to repay federal funding previously given for the project, but said it could do so in the future — although any attempts to do so would likely be unsuccessful. 'What started as a proposed 800-mile system was first reduced to 500 miles, then became a 171-mile segment, and is now very likely ended as a 119-mile track to nowhere. In essence, (the California High-Speed Rail Authority) has conned the taxpayer out of its $4 billion investment, with no viable plan to deliver even that partial segment on time,' Drew Feeley, acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, said. The federal government 'cannot continue to commit taxpayer dollars to (the California High-Speed Rail Authority's) Sisyphean endeavor,' Feeley said. California's high-speed rail project is a 'story of broken promises and of waste of Federal taxpayer dollars.' The Trump administration has 'been laying the groundwork for this for month. They're completely hostile, not just to California high-speed rail, but rail in general and public transportation,' state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, told the Chronicle. 'This is a Neanderthal administration that probably thinks public transportation is a communist plot.' Wiener, a staunch proponent of the bullet train, acknowledged the project's challenges. 'We certainly have to do better in California in terms of project delivery, but … it's not a reason to start canceling major, transformative public infrastructure projects. We need to find a way to get these projects done more efficiently and more effectively,' Wiener said. The first Trump administration pursued terminating the project's funding in 2019, but the Biden administration negotiated a 2021 settlement with the state to continue supporting the segment from Bakersfield to Merced. The project's costs — initially estimated to be $33 billion and now expected to cost between $89 billion and $128 billion — have ballooned and its timelines have been repeatedly delayed. Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Democrats have not backed down on funding for high-speed rail in past budgets, despite opposition from Republicans. Newsom has acknowledged for months that Trump would try to claw back money for the project, just as Trump did during his first term. Newsom has promised to fight any efforts to revoke the money. The high-speed rail funding is just one bucket of federal money Trump has threatened to withhold from California, along with federal health care and education funding. 'There still is the rule of law, still the court system, there's still due process,' Newsom told reporters in January when he unveiled an initial version of his 2025-26 state budget proposal. 'You can threaten, as Trump has consistently done ... but ultimately those federal dollars will be recovered.' Since January, California's budget outlook has deteriorated significantly, and the Newsom administration now predicts California faces a $12 billion shortfall, which will make it harder for state officials to backfill any federal funding cuts. Newsom and lawmakers are negotiating over the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year and must reach a deal on how to balance the budget this month to meet constitutional deadlines. Even with the state's difficult financial situation this year, Wiener said he expected the project to move forward because 'it's not about one year, this is about the long-term health and economic strength of California.' Republicans have for years decried the project's skyrocketing costs and lack of progress. President Donald Trump told reporters Feb. 5 that he would personally investigate the high-speed rail project. Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin (Placer County), introduced legislation on Jan. 6 to make the project ineligible for further federal funding, the same day Newsom drove a symbolic spike in the ground to celebrate the rail line's first 22-mile segment, from the border of Tulare and Kern counties to Poplar Avenue in Wasco (Kern County). Republicans in the Legislature sent a letter to Trump Feb. 13 expressing support for his probe and saying they have a duty to constituents to 'carefully examine the viability of this project.' 'I want to see high-speed rail in America,' Duffy said. 'Why it can't be built in America and why it can't be built within time frames that work for the people that invest in these projects makes no sense to me.' State leaders have focused largely on finishing the stretch of high-speed rail track from Merced to Bakersfield, with the idea of linking it to two other bullet train lines: the High Desert Corridor in Los Angeles, and the privately owned Brightline West route from Las Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga (San Bernardino County). Ultimately, they also want to connect to Caltrain's commuter line on the Peninsula, patching together a network that somewhat resembles the original vision from the mid-1990s. The loss of this funding would 'certainly be a setback, but it is a relatively small percentage of the overall budget of the project,' Wiener said. 'It's not a death knell.'
New York Times
17 minutes ago
- New York Times
Cincinnati Reds place starter Hunter Greene on IL, sign veteran lefty Wade Miley
CINCINNATI — Just minutes before a scheduled MRI, the Cincinnati Reds placed starter Hunter Greene on the injured list with a right groin strain. Greene said he felt discomfort on his last two pitches in the fifth inning of Tuesday's victory over the Milwaukee Brewers and left the game. Tuesday was his third start back from the IL, which was one of the reasons the team returned him to the IL. Advertisement 'We stayed here for a while last night, we talked to him, we talked to trainers,' Reds manager Terry Francona said. 'Since it happened once and this is twice, we've got to figure this out. And then his lower back was starting to (affect him) and we're trying to figure out if it's related. We've got to get him healthy. It was kind of an easy decision even without seeing the MRI.' The Reds signed veteran left-hander Wade Miley to fill Greene's spot in the rotation and transferred right-hander Rhett Lowder to the 60-day injured list. Sunday, Miley exercised the opt-out of his minor-league deal and became a free agent. The 38-year-old is coming back from a hybrid ulnar collateral ligament surgery, which combines traditional Tommy John surgery with an internal brace, that he underwent last May while with the Brewers. Miley made seven minor-league starts this year, including a five-inning, two-run performance last Friday for the Triple-A Louisville Bats. Because he wouldn't be ready to pitch again until Wednesday, Miley said Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall told him he'd have a place in the team's bullpen, but wanted to let Miley explore an opportunity to start elsewhere. Miley said he talked to a couple of other teams, but was happy to return to the Reds. Miley's family is in Cincinnati for the season, so he spent the time 'being dad' and coaching baseball games and practice for his son Jeb. Miley was already expected to be in the Reds' bullpen on Wednesday, but Greene's injury created an opening for him in the rotation. Francona said Miley would be available to pitch out of the bullpen Wednesday, but if he didn't, he'd start Monday in Cleveland. In 2021, Miley threw a no-hitter for the Reds against then-Cleveland manager Francona's Guardians at Progressive Field. Advertisement 'It was a situation where the five starters here were throwing the ball great, and I was pretty open with Nick, like I don't want to mess with that,' Miley said. 'Physically, I think I'll be fine in the bullpen, but they allowed me to see if there were any starting jobs out there, and at the end of the day, here we are.' Miley, a Red in 2020 and 2021, was a consistent and popular figure in spring training, and Wednesday's news generated excitement in the Reds' clubhouse. 'He was in full uni at 8:30 this morning when I thought I was the only one here,' Francona said. 'It's really welcome. We've been waiting for him, there's no getting around it. He's a bright light, man.'
WIRED
18 minutes ago
- WIRED
Perplexity's CEO Sees AI Agents as the Next Web Battleground
Jun 4, 2025 12:25 PM Aravind Srinivas says agents need access to apps and claims that letting OpenAI take control of Chrome would be a disaster for the open Web. Aravind Srinivas attends the 2025 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at Barker Hangar on April 05, 2025, in Santa Monica, California. Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph:Perplexity has tapped into the power of generative artificial intelligence—with all its problematic tendencies—in an effort to challenge Google as the dominant way people find information online. The AI search tool rose in prominence in 2024 and was lauded as a promising alternative to Googling. Like other AI players though, the service has been sued for alleged copyright infringement. It has been accused by Forbes of plagiarizing its news articles, closely paraphrasing other websites, and hallucinating incorrect information. Despite the furor, Perplexity today says that its service gets 650 million queries per month and is said to be chasing investment that would value the company at $18 billion. The company is pushing AI assistants for mobile devices and working on its own web browser. In April, Motorola announced that Perplexity would come bundled with its new Razr Ultra phones. Last month the company partnered with PayPal to make it easier for users to buy products using its assistant. Samsung is also said to be in talks to possibly include Perplexity on its devices, according to a report from Bloomberg. (Perplexity declined to comment on this after the interview.). Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas spoke with Will Knight, senior writer at WIRED, by phone and email. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. WIRED: The PayPal deal seems important to the vision that everyone has for agents. Is ecommerce the killer 'agentic' app? Aravind Srinivas: Agents are the killer app for everything. Agents allow users to have the experience that's best for them. Some people like shopping and researching, and some people want it done for them. There's a spectrum in between, and our focus is what is the best experience for the user. Speaking of the experience, agents still make mistakes. What happens when they buy something by accident? Merchants and buyers have adapted to every new technology since ancient times. We just show both of them what is possible, and they choose. Every successful technology has had to take security and error-resolution very seriously, and that won't change. Integrating AI with personal devices is another big theme. Why does the Motorola deal matter to you? It's a big deal because Motorola is one of the largest phone brands in the world. This partnership gives us the ability to make trustworthy AI more accessible than ever. Now, by introducing Perplexity to millions of people around the world, in a native and seamless way, more people will get to see how much more really is possible with search. Would you consider developing your own devices eventually? We are focused on building the best AI assistant and answer engine. Motorola will offer other AI assistants, so how will Perplexity distinguish itself? As AI assistants become more common, accuracy and trust will become even more important. An assistant isn't very useful if it's unreliable. Worse, if an assistant is misleading or sycophantic, then it isn't an assistant—it's a manipulator. That's not just useless, it's dangerous. Inaccurate AI has a negative compounding effect, and we have always been the leader in developing AI and AI assistants focused on accuracy and verifiability. That will have a positive compounding effect. Wait though … Perplexity—like other AI search engines—has been criticized for hallucinating and getting things wrong. We welcome this criticism, because it's the best way for us to continually improve. In reality, errors account for a small fraction of results, and our answers are far more accurate than 10 blue links polluted by decades of SEO-optimized content. [In response to a follow-up request, Perplexity did not provide further details on error rates, but Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman, said that reliability is improving constantly]. But the fact is, accuracy and trust will only become more important as AI integrates into more of our lives, so this is something we're relentlessly focused on. We can't get there without this feedback. Perplexity also cribs from copyrighted news articles with its 'discover' section. Do you understand why some publishers are upset? We've answered that before. See our blog post on how we respect [a file added to websites that specifies whether web crawlers should access their content]. The Perplexity assistant for Android and iOS seems 'agentic' because it can take actions. How big of a shift is this? AI is pretty good at answering questions now. What really needs to be done is get AI to take actions. People use the word 'agents'; you can go with whatever you want—'agent' or 'assistant'—but in the end, it needs to string together tools and execute actions. That's why we're [also building a] browser, and an assistant on iOS, Android. Do Apple and Google have too much control over their mobile platforms compared to outsiders looking to build agents? With iOS it's particularly challenging, because you have to string together a bunch of event APIs. On iOS, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, Podcasts, all that stuff is natively available through the Apple SDK [software development kit used to build applications], so you can actually at least draft emails, schedule meetings, move meetings, set reminders, all this stuff, open podcasts pretty easily. You can do searches for podcasts … 'get me the one where Mark Andreessen discusses de-banking with Joe Rogan.' It can get you that pretty quickly. It's mostly difficult because you cannot access other apps. iOS is not very different from Android, because AI cannot access most apps on Android either (meaning that the Perplexity assistant can interact with some apps more easily than others). [But] third-party apps can build their SDKs to be accessible on the Android SDK. For example, our Android system can display a song on Spotify. On iOS, you can only link to a specific Spotify song, and you have to manually start playing the audio. Oh, so it's app-makers that are holding AI agents back? That's the challenge. If people are offering us APIs—say, Open Table, Uber, DoorDash, or Instacart—where we can access information within the app without even having to open the app. On the back end, that's pretty powerful. For example, if we can access information on Uber and find that Uber comfort doesn't cost more than 5 or 10 percent of Uber X, then we can just book Uber comfort for you—if that's a preference that you set on Perplexity. Or similarly [we can] find the best Thai place near you and get me a dash [delivery] a lot faster than going to DoorDash app, searching for Thai food and scrolling through all these options, reading all those reviews and then putting your address, doing the checkout, all that stuff. We could honestly do all that in our system and just make the experience a lot more seamless and simple. I think that's where things are headed, but people need to open up their apps to us, and we'll have to see who's willing to do what. Isn't the biggest problem that AI agents just aren't very smart and useful yet? My analogy [for AI agents] is that we are at a point where Perplexity was in 2022 [just before it took off]. It's not like we got all the answers right, people made fun of hallucinations and some people call it 'Google in macro seconds.' It was not quite there. It only took off many months later, when models got better, and I expect the same trend with the agents and assistants. There's going to be some set of things that really work, daily use cases, and there'll be a long tail of things that don't work, that we're going to keep fixing over time. But that's exactly why we are building a [web] browser, because the browser front end will let you do the work on your own too, if you're not happy with what the AI did. So, then we can learn from that and fix that over time. Waymo and Tesla self driving did not work for a long time. Now, people take them for granted. I think it is a similar trajectory for us. Is this why you floated the idea of Perxplexity taking control of Chrome—if Google were forced to divest it? We're not saying we're interested in buying Chrome. We're saying that if there's no other path, if Google is put in a situation where they have to divest Chrome, then we'd be open to running it. But Google should not have to divest Chrome, because Chrome and Chromium are tied to each other. Chromium is an open source project that's being run very [well] by Google, and it is the reason for Microsoft Edge and the Brave browser. OpenAI has also shown an interest in taking control of Chrome. Giving ownership of Chrome or Chromium to a company like OpenAI would be a disaster, because open source and OpenAI are an oxymoron at this point. [OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The company says it will release an open source AI model this summer.] There are only two companies that can really potentially run Chrome: Microsoft and Meta. Honestly, Microsoft would spoil it, just like it spoiled Edge. And transferring Chrome to Meta is transferring Chrome from one monopoly to another. [The FTC has filed a lawsuit that accuses Meta of acting as a social networking monopoly; the company argues this is not the case.] What do you expect agents to be useful for first? I think [they will make] a lot of your personal searches a lot better. Like asking, 'What was the article I read last week about this one particular company?' or 'Can you summarize my X feed for me so that I know what's trending?' because you don't want to go to X and get distracted by it. Or 'Can you schedule this meeting for me with this person and if there's a conflict send them an email asking for a different time?' All these boring things, I feel we will be able to automate [them] pretty quickly [in future].
