Tesla’s Robotaxis Roll Out, Google Elevates Gemini

Pivot 5
June 11, 2025

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Tesla Sets June 22 Austin Launch for Its First Robotaxi Rides

Elon Musk says Tesla will begin its robotaxi service in Austin on June 22. He adds that the first driverless trip from the factory to a customer’s house is planned for his birthday on June 28, but the timeline could slip if safety concerns arise.
Tesla will start with only 10 to 20 Model Y SUVs equipped with an “unsupervised” version of its Full Self-Driving software. The company will geofence the service in Austin and have employees monitor the cars remotely.
Safety critics are already mobilizing against the plan. The Dawn Project, along with Tesla Takedown and Resist Austin, will stage a June 12 downtown protest to publicize alleged safety issues with Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features.

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Google rolled out nine new features in its Home app, now available to users in public preview. The release bundles Nest Cam picture-in-picture on Google TV, expanded Gemini controls, streamlined automations, and other upgrades.
Picture-in-picture keeps live camera feeds on-screen while Gemini can broadcast messages and search camera clip history through text commands. Automations now tap phone location and Soli sensors for presence detection, while Nest Protect alerts, Matter smart-lock settings, and expanded Favorites all move under the Home umbrella.
The update consolidates tasks previously split among the Nest app, device menus, and Google Assistant into a single Home interface. It also elevates Gemini as the central AI for smart home control, reflecting Google’s stated shift away from Assistant for these functions.

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Researchers at MIT CSAIL and Stanford unveiled SketchAgent, a system that converts text prompts into human-style sketches within seconds. It guides multimodal language models to draw stroke by stroke rather than outputting finished images.
Instead of training on human sketch datasets, the team created a “sketching language” that maps each numbered stroke to specific parts of a drawing, letting the model generalize to unseen objects. Tests showed Claude 3.5 Sonnet produced the most recognizable sketches and that the AI’s strokes were essential in human-AI collaborations.
In trials, deleting SketchAgent’s strokes left collaborative images like a sailboat unrecognizable, underscoring the tool’s critical role in co-creation. The work will be presented at this month’s CVPR, spotlighting stroke-based sketching as a fresh channel for human-AI idea exchange.

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LVMH says artificial intelligence and autonomous agents are now central to its plan for weathering a global dip in luxury demand. The group spent the past four years with Google Cloud building a unified data platform for all 75 maisons.
The platform feeds predictive and generative AI that guides supply-chain planning, pricing, product design, marketing, and customer personalization. By pooling data, LVMH can accelerate decisions and deliver more tailored experiences for brands such as Christian Dior.
The company aims to preserve or expand market share while raising operational efficiency, directly addressing waning consumer appetite. Making AI integral to core functions shows the technology’s move from experimental tool to daily operating system in high-end retail.

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In April, CEO Luis von Ahn declared Duolingo would go “AI-first,” using AI to generate learning content and restructure workflows. The plan phases out repetitive contractor tasks and ties employee reviews to their AI usage.
Users took the announcement as a move to replace staff with machines and posted mass cancellation vows, the Financial Times reports. Under mounting subscription losses, von Ahn now emphasizes that only a small pool of hourly contractors is affected and that the company is still hiring for non-automatable roles.
The messaging blunder turned a tech strategy into a brand crisis, erasing Duolingo’s once-strong social media goodwill. Von Ahn admits he misread public anxiety about AI and should have communicated the changes far more clearly.

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