The Robots That Are Taking Over Your Food Delivery
Billions of dollars in investment and years of research are going into efforts to fix a modern convenience: food delivery.
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Yahoo
4 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Union Pacific expands domestic intermodal service
Union Pacific has announced a pair of new domestic intermodal lanes, with new service linking the Pacific Northwest with Chicago as well as between Memphis and Dallas. On Saturday, UP (NYSE: UNP) will launch daily service from Tacoma, Wash., to its Global 4 terminal in Joliet, Ill., outside Chicago. 'This service will be complementary and in addition to the current domestic service from TacSim to Global 2. Service into the heart of the southern Chicago warehouse district offers shorter drays and more cost-effective access to a wide range of the metro and seamless drayage to reach markets beyond Chicago,' UP said in a customer advisory. Service has already begun between UP's terminal in Marion, Ark., across the Mississippi River from Memphis, and the railroad's intermodal terminal in Mesquite, Texas, in the Dallas area. 'We've recently initiated service between Memphis, TN (Marion, AR) and Dallas, TX (Mesquite, TX) to offer a solution to convert over-the-road freight to intermodal. This service is also available seven days per week — streamlining your logistics in the South,' UP said. Subscribe to FreightWaves' Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your Pacific posts record financial results Five takeaways from the State of Freight for July: What earnings and the indices are saying about the market Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern confirm advanced merger talks CSX profits fall on lower revenue, higher costs The post Union Pacific expands domestic intermodal service appeared first on FreightWaves.
Yahoo
4 minutes ago
- Yahoo
AI referrals to top websites were up 357% year-over-year in June, reaching 1.13B
AI referrals to websites still have a way to go to catch up to the traffic that Google Search provides, but they're growing quickly. According to new data from market intelligence provider Similarweb, AI platforms in June generated over 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites globally, a figure that's up 357% since June 2024. However, Google Search still accounts for the majority of traffic to these sites, accounting for 191 billion referrals during the same period of June 2025. One particular category of interest these days is news and media. Online publishers are seeing traffic declines and are preparing for a day they're calling 'Google Zero,' when Google stops sending traffic to websites. For instance, The Wall Street Journal recently reported on data that showed how AI overviews were killing traffic to news sites. Plus, a Pew Research Center study out this week found that in a survey of 900 U.S. Google users, 18% of some 69,000 searches showed AI Overviews, which led to users clicking links 8% of the time. When there was no AI summary, users clicked links nearly twice as much, or 15% of the time. Similarweb found that June's AI referrals to news and media websites were up 770% since June 2024. Some sites will naturally rank higher than others that are blocking access to AI platforms, as The New York Times does, as a result of its lawsuit with OpenAI over the use of its articles to train its models. In the news media category, Yahoo led with 2.3 million AI referrals in June 2025, followed by Yahoo Japan (1.9M), Reuters (1.8M), The Guardian (1.7M), India Times (1.2M), and Business Insider (1.0M). In terms of methodology, Similarweb counts AI referrals as web referrals to a domain from an AI platform like ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Perplexity, Claude, and Liner. ChatGPT dominates here, accounting for more than 80% of the AI referrals to the top 1,000 domains. The company's analysis also looked at other categories beyond news, like e-commerce, science and education, tech/search/social media, arts and entertainment, business, and others. In e-commerce, Amazon was followed by Etsy and eBay when it came to those sites seeing the most referrals, at 4.5M, 2.0M, and 1.8M, respectively, during June. Among the top tech and social sites, Google, not surprisingly, was at the top of the list, with 53.1 million referrals in June, followed by Reddit (11.1M), Facebook (11.0M), Github (7.4M), Microsoft (5.1M), Canva (5.0M), Instagram (4.7M), LinkedIn (4.4M), Bing (3.1M), and Pinterest (2.5M). The analysis excluded the OpenAI website because so many of its referrals were from ChatGPT, pointing to its services. Across all other domains, the No. 1 site by AI referrals for each category included YouTube (31.2M), Research Gate (3.6M), Zillow (776.2K), (992.9K), Wikipedia (10.8M), (5.2M), (1.2M), Home Depot (1.2M), Kayak (456.5K), and Zara (325.6K). Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
TechCrunch
5 minutes ago
- TechCrunch
Meta names Shengjia Zhao as chief scientist of AI superintelligence unit
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao will lead research efforts at the company's new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Zhao contributed to several of OpenAI's largest breakthroughs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the company's first AI reasoning model, o1. 'I'm excited to share that Shengjia Zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs,' Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads Friday. 'Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one. Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.' Zhao will set a research agenda for MSL under the leadership of Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who was recently hired to lead the new unit. We are excited to announce that @shengjia_zhao will be the Chief Scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs! Shengjia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team. Let's go 🚀 — Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) July 25, 2025 Wang, who does not have a research banckground, was viewed as a somewhat unconventional choice to lead an AL lab. The addition of Zhao, who is a reputable research leader known for developing frontier AI models, rounds out the leadership team. To further fill out the unit, Meta has hired several high-level researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Safe Superintelligence, Apple, and Anthropic, as well as pulling researchers from Meta's existing FAIR and GenAI units. Zuckerberg notes in his post that Zhao has pioneered several breakthroughs, including a 'new scaling paradigm.' The Meta CEO is likely referencing Zhao's work on OpenAI's reasoning model, o1, in which he is listed as a foundational contributor alongside OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Meta currently doesn't offer a competitor to o1, so AI reasoning models are a key area of focus for MSL. The Information reported in June that Zhao would be joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside three other influential OpenAI researchers, including Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. Meta has also recruited Trapit Bansal, another OpenAI researcher who worked on AI reasoning models with Zhao, as well as three employees from OpenAI's Zurich office that worked on multimodality. Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to set MSL up for success. The Meta CEO has been on a recruiting spree to staff up his AI superintelligence labs, which has entailed sending personal emails to researchers and inviting prospects to his Lake Tahoe estate. Meta has reportedly offered some researcher eight and nine figure compensation packages, some of which are 'exploding offers' that expire in a matter of days. Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They're here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don't miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW Meta has also upped its investment in cloud computing infrastructure, which should help MSL conduct the massive training runs required to create competitive frontier AI models. By 2026, Zhao and MSL's researchers should have access to Meta's one gigawatt cloud computing cluster, Prometheus, located in Ohio. Once online, Meta will be one of the first technology companies with an AI training cluster of Prometheus' size — one gigawatt is enough energy to power more than 750,000 homes. That should help Meta conduct the massive training runs required to create frontier AI models. With the addition of Zhao, Meta now has two chief AI scientists, including Yann LeCun, the leader of Meta's FAIR. Unlike MSL, FAIR is designed to focus on long-term AI research — techniques that may be used five to 10 years from now. How exactly Meta's three AI units will work together remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Meta now seems to have a formidable AI leadership team to compete with OpenAI and Google.
