TechPulse USA

Somewhere in London, fifteen people have spent two years teaching computers to rebuild the world from photographs. Rivian just bought all of them — not for a game, not for a film, but to answer the question that will decide whether its driverless taxis are ever allowed to carry strangers. That is the strange inversion at the heart of this deal. A tool built to make video-game worlds faster to construct now has to prove that a two-tonne electric SUV is safe on a road it has never driven. If it works, Rivian stops waiting for rare crashes to happen in real life and starts rehearsing them in advance. If it does not, no amount of clever rendering will save the company's robotaxi timetable — and the clock, as we will see, is already running. Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a UK startup founded in 2024 that uses AI to turn images and video into lifelike 3D worlds, TechCrunch reported on October 22. Terms were not disclosed. The startup's 15-person team, most of them based in ...

By Daniel Rao Bolt wants to put driverless taxis on the streets of Paris — and it wants to do it with French-built vans, Chinese self-driving software, American chips, and the blessing of the Greater Paris regional government. If that sounds like a geopolitical jigsaw puzzle, welcome to the European robotaxi race, where the vehicles are local but almost nothing else is. Here's what was actually announced. On Friday 23 October 2026, Estonian ride-hailing firm Bolt, carmaker Stellantis and the Métropole du Grand Paris said in a joint statement that they will launch an autonomous-driving pilot in the French capital in 2028, with the aim of starting commercial operations across Greater Paris by 2030. The pilot — officially "The Greater Paris Autonomous Driving Living Lab" — will use Stellantis vehicles, run on Bolt's app through its Bolt Autonomous Driving Solutions subsidiary, and be independently evaluated on safety, user acceptance and integration with public tran...

By Daniel Rao Stellantis didn't make one autonomous-driving announcement in France today. It made two. The first — unveiled at noon in Paris alongside the French government — pairs the carmaker with London AI startup Wayve and NVIDIA to build a driverless ecosystem on French soil. The second, a robotaxi pilot for Greater Paris with Bolt, landed hours apart. If that looks like a company hedging its bets, that's because it is. And honestly? It's the smartest thing Stellantis has done in years. Here's the first deal. Wayve, Stellantis and NVIDIA announced a collaboration at the Assises du Véhicule Autonome in Paris on 23 October 2026, with the French government standing beside them, aimed at getting autonomous vehicles deployed across France and accelerating the technology across the EU. Stellantis brings its L4-Ready Platforms and the small matter of knowing how to actually build cars at scale. Wayve brings its AI Driver — the end-to-end embodied-AI system it's ...

Tesla Beat Estimates While Profit Sank 43% — a Software Beat By TechPulse USA | Thursday, October 22, 2026 Tesla beat Wall Street on Wednesday, and lost 43% of its profit in the same quarter. Read that sentence twice — both halves are true, and together they tell you everything about what this company has quietly become. Revenue landed at $28.046 billion, roughly flat with last year, past LSEG's $27.88 billion consensus (other data shops printed $27.78–$28.34B, so treat the size of the "beat" as an estimate, not gospel), and non-GAAP earnings of $0.48 a share cleared the $0.43–$0.45 range — even as GAAP net income collapsed to $787 million, down 43% from $1.37 billion a year ago. GAAP operating margin: 2.6%. Here is the twist that matters more than any of those numbers: Tesla's car business barely grew, and deliveries actually shrank. More than 75% of new North American buyers added Full Self-Driving to their cars, active FSD subscriptions jumped 67% year over yea...

By Daniel Rao, TechPulse USA — covering the companies, models, and money moves shaping artificial intelligence. We read the fine print so you don't have to. Photo: Starship ignites during its fifth test flight in October 2024. Credit: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The biggest merger in history now has a deadline. Sort of. On Thursday, Barclays analyst Dan Levy told clients that Elon Musk could announce a Tesla–SpaceX combination within weeks — before Tesla's annual meeting, which must happen by December 6. And here is the twist: Wall Street's reaction to the biggest deal ever conceived was, somehow, a shrug. Both stocks finished the day red, caught in a broad AI selloff, because traders were too busy marking down data-center debt to care about a rocket company swallowing a car company. This is the deal the market has whispered about for months, ever since SpaceX went public in June with the largest IPO on record. But a deadline changes everyt...

'Pet Destroyers': Musk Taunts Waymo While NHTSA Eyes Tesla By TechPulse USA Elon Musk has a new insult for Waymo: the company's driverless cars, he says, are "pet destroyers". He dropped it on a Saturday livestream, to laughs and clip-ready delight. Within 48 hours, his own company was facing its third federal action in five weeks. Welcome to the robotaxi war. One chief executive throwing schoolyard taunts, regulators circling both fleets, and a San Francisco corner store still grieving a cat named KitKat. The technology is genuinely impressive. The behaviour of the people selling it is not. What Musk Actually Said During a livestream hosted by the Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley on Saturday, October 11, Musk was walking through Tesla's robotaxi expansion plans — how the company tests software before entering new cities — when he took a swing at the market leader. "Maybe what a lot of people don't know is that Waymos are like pet destroyers...

For seventeen years, Waymo has been a money furnace with a remarkably patient set of donors: first Google, then Alphabet, then a parade of equity investors willing to write billion-dollar checks in exchange for a promise. On Thursday, the company did something it had never done in its entire corporate life. It borrowed money. Real debt. From people who expect to be paid back. That's the actual story here — not the $5 billion, though yes, five billion dollars, in a term loan, announced on October 8. The story is that a self-driving car company finally grew up enough to qualify for grown-up money. And Wall Street's biggest credit desks lined up to lend it: PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street as lead lenders, Goldman Sachs running the books. For a company that has always been funded by people betting on the future, this is the first time it's been funded by people who get a say when the future doesn't arrive on schedule. Photo: A Waymo Jaguar I-PACE robotaxi on San ...