The robotaxi wave is catching speed
And: Politics for me, not for thee
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
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It’s Monday! Yes, a happy Father’s day to all the dads out there. I got in a massive nap, which was a treat. Kicking off the week there’s lots to discuss, but I think this Anthropic paper is worth your time. At a minimum scroll to the first diagram, and ask yourself what will happen when we can parallelize the shown multi-agent setup massively. If we had 10x the compute, I think we could do some wild things.
Elsewhere, here are good resources to catch up on the Israel-Iran conflict, the Israel-Hamas conflict, and the Russia-Ukraine war. Investors are betting that the Iran situation won’t upset the global economic apple cart. Meanwhile crypto price changes are muted, and we have a quiet earnings week ahead. To work! — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Just kidding … good news … local AI rules … datacenter spend … selling to the Navy … Clay … rare Earth supplies? … grift … retail sales in China … Swiss-EU ties … Sure, Jan … violence in Nigeria …
📉 Trending Down: Jobs … IP theft … Google-Scale, post Meta-Scale … manufacturing in China … China-Taiwan economic ties …
The robotaxi wave is catching speed
Picking through the inbox this morning, news from WeRide caught my eye. The self-driving company from China went public in October of 2024, followed by Pony.AI in November. Since going public here in the States, WeRide has been busy. Apart from expanding a deal with Tencent Cloud, the company has started charging for its L4 robobus in “the Heart of Guangzhou,” expanded service in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, and even launched a $100 million buyback.
The buyback is opportunistic — after going public at $15.50 per share, WeRide stock is worth $7.85 per unit this morning, in advance of pre-market trading.
The latest from WeRide is an early deal with Uber and Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority that will see “pilot operations of autonomous vehicles will commence later this year via the Uber app in Dubai,” featuring safety drivers on the road to “full-scale commercial rollout of driverless services in 2026,” per the company.
Pony is busy, too, announcing a new deal to deploy robotaxis in Shenzhen, and extending its founders post-IPO lockup period.
Finally in this little update to my favorite market, Insider took a Uber-Wayve ride in London which went pretty darn well. For a city famous for its mess of roads and rules, that’s impressive. Perhaps more so than doing well in San Francisco, frankly.
All this is to say that while I am breath-bated when it comes to getting new growth numbers from Waymo, and seat-edged to see how well — or not — Tesla’s own self-driving push goes when it launches in a few days in Austin, there’s a lot of other activity taking place just outside the mainstream technology headlines.
Media-nomics
There are a few companies in the market working to create a marketplace where IP holders can charge for access to their work, allowing AI companies to compensate data owners for use of their information. A few that I have kept an eye on include Human Native, Created by Humans, and TollBit. The last in the batch is executing along my favorite PR strategy for startups, namely using their first-party data to explain the world to the public at large.
To that end, a recent TollBit report underscores just how brutal the sea-change afoot on the Internet is proving for media concerns. A few choice datapoints:
RAG > Training: AI data scrapes are now majority RAG-related, with training scraping still growing, but less quickly.
What does that mean? That AI models are more frequently pinging online data to answer user queries than foundation AI model companies are hoovering up the Internet for training purposes. TollBit summarizes: “This is a clear signal that AI tools require continuous access to content and data for RAG [versus] for training.”
AI traffic is skyrocketing: Driven in part by huge growth in pings from AI models seeking to answer user queries with third-party data, “AI bot traffic” as a whole rose 87% in the first quarter for “websites with TollBit Analytics set up before January 2025.” Sure, it’s a limited partner sample set — TollBit is a startup, after all — but the trend is clear. AI companies need information to perform.
AI companies are getting crafty: If an AI model needs a piece of information, but the website that holds that information has a big ‘No AI Bots’ sign hung outside the door, what can AI companies do? Simply go around the banner, by classifying RAG calls as non-robotic, as they somewhat come from a human. This is an incredibly gross abrogation of IP holder rights, but TollBit reports that “numerous major AI companies” have updated their TOS to explicitly carve a huge exception precisely where they need one.
And, finally, AI apps are shit traffic drivers, providing 0.04% of total traffic to sites on TollBit’s network.
Jesus. The media game is suffering today from a decline in referral traffic, an advertising market still largely locked up by major technology platform companies, and an AI revolution predicated on publisher information that tech shops are hellbent to avoid paying for.
The outcome? Frantic ideation.
Yes, it is ironic that the companies with the most at stake in the AI game are also the same companies that own the online advertising market and are the same companies working to find a way to not pay for online content. The argument remains that the search-era value exchange between data-surfacing tools and online IP holders is good enough for the AI era. The counterargument is that it is not, a take backed up by TollBit’s data-based argument that AI products are desperate for information to serve their users, and are giving little to nothing in return.
Fintech rising?
Speaking of AI, Abacum recently raised $60 million (AI business planning), Knowunity raised €27 million (AI tutoring), Autonomize raised $28 million (AI health agents), while Pactum raised $54 million (AI logistics) and AIM raised $50 million (AI construction machines).
Notably AI rounds are not the only dominant theme in recent venture round reporting. Fintech is taking a big bite of the news cycle as well. Here’s a taste:
Aspora gets $50M from Sequoia to build remittance and banking solutions for Indian diaspora [TechCrunch]
Payrails raises $32M Series A to boost payment performance for global enterprises [Tech.EU]
Stablecoin startup Noah raises $22 million, adds Adyen vet as cofounder [Fortune]
I don’t want to call it Fintech Summer or anything so word-coining, but it is interesting to watch financial technology startups earn more ink. Back in April, friend of the blog Mary Ann Azevedo noted that some nineteen US-based fintech startups had raised $50 million or more through late-April. We’re now in mid-June, and the trend isn’t slowing down.
Why the boomlet? Apart from a run of strong IPOs — eToro, Circle — I think fintech is simply rebounding back to venture-neutrality. I takes four years, then, to fully digest a sectoral bubble.
No politics for thee, not me
Closing today, the following image is living rent-free in my head:
POTUS finally got his toy parade over the weekend, which it turned out was sponsored by a number of technology companies. These include, the Journal writes, Coinbase, Palantir, and Amazon.
The above image is humorous not merely because of how it looks — let’s be honest — but also because Coinbase has famously taken a non-political viewpoint, apart from what the company considers to be its core remit. Coinbase wrote back in 2020 that it was mission-driven, focusing on creating “an open financial system for the world.” That meant, the company said, that it wanted to “bring economic freedom to people all over the world.”
Noting that there were several ways to interpret that mission, Coinbase explained that it was more focused on “trying to create infrastructure for the cryptoeconomy” than interpreting the mission to include “all forms of equality and justice” that could stem from bringing economic freedom.
Fair enough: If it’s not helping build an open financial system for the world, it’s not Coinbase’s business. You could fairly pile all of Coinbase’s political agitation during the last electoral cycle under that umbrella.
Returning to the above image, however, what the fuck? The argument, I think, is that POTUS is notoriously transactional, and therefore if you pay him off by supporting his whims, you will get better regulatory vibes. Maybe. But what I see above is a company far outside its own stated mission brief.
Politics for me, not for thee.