Blackouts Take Waymo Out - Techmeme Ride Home Recap

Podcast: Techmeme Ride Home

Published: 2025-12-22

Duration: 22 minutes

Summary

Power outages disrupted Waymo's autonomous vehicle operations in San Francisco, highlighting challenges in adapting to infrastructure failures. Meanwhile, Larry Ellison's financial involvement in a Paramount bid and a massive Spotify data scrape by a pirate group are discussed.

What Happened

Waymo's autonomous vehicles faced significant challenges during a recent power outage in San Francisco. The outage affected 130,000 customers, and videos on social media showed Waymo cars stalled in traffic. A spokesperson stated that while most trips were completed, the scale of the outage caused vehicles to remain stationary longer than expected.

Larry Ellison has pledged an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion to back Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers Discovery. Despite concerns about whether Ellison's financial support would be reliable, Paramount has reiterated the strength of their bid. Ellison's backing is designed to clear any doubts about the deal's viability.

Instacart has decided to end its item price tests after backlash from customers and a report showing significant price discrepancies. The report indicated that price differences reached up to 23% in some cases. Instacart denies using dynamic pricing but has agreed to settle FTC allegations concerning deceptive practices.

A pirate activist group, Anna's Archive, scraped 86 million music files from Spotify, creating 300 terabytes of torrent files. Spotify has responded by disabling the accounts involved and enhancing safeguards against such activities. The group claims their efforts aim to preserve cultural knowledge.

OpenAI has introduced new customization options for ChatGPT, allowing users to adjust the chatbot's personality traits. Users can now modify ChatGPT's warmth and enthusiasm and choose from different personalities. The update also allows for more precise text formatting and editing within the chat.

The episode concludes with an analysis of Google's TPUs and their potential impact on NVIDIA and OpenAI. While Google's TPUs have gained attention, NVIDIA's established infrastructure and strategic advantages maintain its competitive edge. The debate continues over whether TPUs can disrupt the current dominance of GPUs in AI workloads.

Key Insights

• Waymo's autonomous vehicles experienced operational difficulties during a power outage in San Francisco, which affected 130,000 customers and caused the cars to remain stationary longer than expected.
• Larry Ellison has provided an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion to support Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, aiming to eliminate doubts about the deal's financial backing.
• Instacart halted its item price tests following backlash and a report showing price discrepancies of up to 23%, while denying the use of dynamic pricing and settling FTC allegations of deceptive practices.
• Anna's Archive, a pirate activist group, scraped 86 million music files from Spotify, resulting in 300 terabytes of torrent files, prompting Spotify to disable involved accounts and enhance security measures.