Nearly three out of every four restaurant orders are no longer eaten in a restaurant, according to the National Restaurant Association. The share of customers using delivery more than doubled from 2019 to 2024, and 41% of respondents in a recent poll said delivery was an essential part of their lifestyle. The transformation has fundamentally altered restaurant economics. Delivery companies charge restaurants commissions between 5 and 30%, along with fees for payment processing, advertising, and search placement.

Shannon Orr runs an eight-restaurant group on the West Coast. One of her restaurants generated $1.7 million in delivery sales last year. Of that, $400,000 went to delivery companies. The restaurant, previously among her most profitable, made no money in 2024, she told the Atlantic.

About a third of full-service restaurants have modified their physical spaces to accommodate the delivery boom, installing dedicated entrances, bike parking, and banks of lockers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The number of victims paying ransomware threat actors has reached a new low, with just 23% of the breached companies giving in to attackers' demands. With some exceptions, the decline in payment resolution rates continues the trend that Coveware has observed for the past six years. In the first quarter of 2024, the payment percentage was 28%. Although it increased over the next period, it continued to drop, reaching an all-time low in the third quarter of 2025.

One explanation for this is that organizations implemented stronger and more targeted protections against ransomware, and authorities increasing pressure for victims not to pay the hackers. [...] Over the years, ransomware groups moved from pure encryption attacks to double extortion that came with data theft and the threat of a public leak. Coveware reports that more than 76% of the attacks it observed in Q3 2025 involved data exfiltration, which is now the primary objective for most ransomware groups. The company says that when it isolates the attacks that do not encrypt the data and only steal it, the payment rate plummets to 19%, which is also a record for that sub-category.

The average and median ransomware payments fell in Q3 compared to the previous quarter, reaching $377,000 and $140,000, respectively, according to Coveware. The shift may reflect large enterprises revising their ransom payment policies and recognizing that those funds are better spent on strengthening defenses against future attacks. The researchers also note that threat groups like Akira and Qilin, which accounted for 44% of all recorded attacks in Q3 2025, have switched focus to medium-sized firms that are currently more likely to pay a ransom. "Cyber defenders, law enforcement, and legal specialists should view this as validation of collective progress," Coveware says. "The work that gets put in to prevent attacks, minimize the impact of attacks, and successfully navigate a cyber extortion -- each avoided payment constricts cyber attackers of oxygen."

Apple is preparing to roll out a new Apple Wallet feature that lets U.S. users create digital IDs linked to their passports, usable at select TSA checkpoints. TechCrunch reports: The feature, previously announced as part of the iOS 26 release, comes on the heels of Apple's expansion of Wallet as more than a payment mechanism or ticket holder, but also a secure place to store a user's digital identity. Currently, support for government IDs in Apple Wallet has rolled out to 12 states and Puerto Rico, or roughly a third of U.S. license holders. However, the passport-tied Digital ID feature didn't arrive with the debut of iOS 26, as Apple said it would come in a future software update. [...]

The coming launch of passport-associated Digital IDs was announced on Sunday by Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, at the Money 20/20 USA conference, where the exec also shared other stats about Wallet's adoption.

Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi on Saturday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. From a report: The new global legal framework aims to strengthen international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries were seen to sign the declaration Saturday, which means it will go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an "important milestone", but that it was "only the beginning".

"Every day, sophisticated scams, destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy... We need a strong, connected global response," he said at the opening ceremony in Vietnam's capital on Saturday. The UN Convention against Cybercrime was first proposed by Russian diplomats in 2017, and approved by consensus last year after lengthy negotiations. Critics say its broad language could lead to abuses of power and enable the cross-border repression of government critics.

OpenAI's rival Anthropic has a different approach — and "a clearer path to making a sustainable business out of AI," writes the Wall Street Journal. Outside of OpenAI's close partnership with Microsoft, which integrates OpenAI's models into Microsoft's software products, OpenAI mostly caters to the mass market... which has helped OpenAI reach an annual revenue run rate of around $13 billion, around 30% of which it says comes from businesses.

Anthropic has generated much less mass-market appeal. The company has said about 80% of its revenue comes from corporate customers. Last month it said it had some 300,000 of them... Its cutting-edge Claude language models have been praised for their aptitude in coding: A July report from Menlo Ventures — which has invested in Anthropic — estimated via a survey that Anthropic had a 42% market share for coding, compared with OpenAI's 21%. Anthropic is also now ahead of OpenAI in market share for overarching corporate AI use, Menlo Ventures estimated, at 32% to OpenAI's 25%. Anthropic is also surprisingly close to OpenAI when it comes to revenue. The company is already at a $7 billion annual run rate and expects to get to $9 billion by the end of the year — a big lead over its better-known rival in revenue per user.

Both companies have backing in the form of investments from big tech companies — Microsoft for OpenAI, and a combination of Amazon and Google for Anthropic — that help provide AI computing infrastructure and expose their products to a broad set of customers. But Anthropic's growth path is a lot easier to understand than OpenAI's. Corporate customers are devising a plethora of money-saving uses for AI in areas like coding, drafting legal documents and expediting billing. Those uses are likely to expand in the future and draw more customers to Anthropic, especially as the return on investment for them becomes easier to measure...

Demonstrating how much demand there is for Anthropic among corporate customers, Microsoft in September said Anthropic's leading language model, Claude, would be offered within its Copilot suite of software despite Microsoft's ties to OpenAI.
"There is also a possibility that OpenAI's mass-market appeal becomes a turnoff for corporate customers," the article adds, "who want AI to be more boring and useful than fun and edgy."

America's largest university system, with 460,000 students, is the 22-campus "Cal State" system, reports the New York Times. And it's recently teamed with Amazon, OpenAI and Nvidia, hoping to embed chatbots in both teaching and learning to become what it says will be America's "first and largest AI-empowered" university" — and prepare students for "increasingly AI-driven" careers.

It's part of a trend of major universities inviting tech companies into "a much bigger role as education thought partners, AI instructors and curriculum providers," argues the New York Times, where "dominant tech companies are now helping to steer what an entire generation of students learn about AI, and how they use it — with little rigorous evidence of educational benefits and mounting concerns that chatbots are spreading misinformation and eroding critical thinking..."

"Critics say Silicon Valley's effort to make AI chatbots integral to education amounts to a mass experiment on young people." As part of the effort, [Cal State] is paying OpenAI $16.9 million to provide ChatGPT Edu, the company's tool for schools, to more than half a million students and staff — which OpenAI heralded as the world's largest rollout of ChatGPT to date. Cal State also set up an AI committee, whose members include representatives from a dozen large tech companies, to help identify the skills California employers need and improve students' career opportunities... Cal State is not alone. Last month, California Community Colleges, the nation's largest community college system, announced a collaboration with Google to supply the company's "cutting edge AI tools" and training to 2.1 million students and faculty. In July, Microsoft pledged $4 billion for teaching AI skills in schools, community colleges and to adult workers...

[A]s schools like Cal State work to usher in what they call an "AI-driven future," some researchers warn that universities risk ceding their independence to Silicon Valley. "Universities are not tech companies," Olivia Guest and Iris van Rooij, two computational cognitive scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, recently said in comments arguing against fast AI adoption in academia. "Our role is to foster critical thinking," the researchers said, "not to follow industry trends uncritically...."

Some faculty members have pushed back against the AI effort, as the university system faces steep budget cuts. The multimillion-dollar deal with OpenAI — which the university did not open to bidding from rivals like Google — was wasteful, they added. Faculty senates on several Cal State campuses passed resolutions this year criticizing the AI initiative, saying the university had failed to adequately address students using chatbots to cheat. Professors also said administrators' plans glossed over the risks of AI to students' critical thinking and ignored troubling industry labor practices and environmental costs.

Martha Kenney, a professor of women and gender studies at San Francisco State University, described the AI program as a Cal State marketing vehicle helping tech companies promote unproven chatbots as legitimate educational tools.
The article notes that Cal State's chief information officer "defended the OpenAI deal, saying the company offered ChatGPT Edu at an unusually low price.

"Still, California's community college system landed AI chatbot services from Google for more than 2 million students and faculty — nearly four times the number of users Cal State is paying OpenAI for — for free."

"Snippets of proprietary or copyleft reciprocal code can enter AI-generated outputs, contaminating codebases with material that developers can't realistically audit or license properly."

That's the warning from Sean O'Brien, who founded the Yale Privacy Lab at Yale Law School. ZDNet reports: Open software has always counted on its code being regularly replenished. As part of the process of using it, users modify it to improve it. They add features and help to guarantee usability across generations of technology. At the same time, users improve security and patch holes that might put everyone at risk. But O'Brien says, "When generative AI systems ingest thousands of FOSS projects and regurgitate fragments without any provenance, the cycle of reciprocity collapses. The generated snippet appears originless, stripped of its license, author, and context." This means the developer downstream can't meaningfully comply with reciprocal licensing terms because the output cuts the human link between coder and code. Even if an engineer suspects that a block of AI-generated code originated under an open source license, there's no feasible way to identify the source project. The training data has been abstracted into billions of statistical weights, the legal equivalent of a black hole.

The result is what O'Brien calls "license amnesia." He says, "Code floats free of its social contract and developers can't give back because they don't know where to send their contributions...."

"Once AI training sets subsume the collective work of decades of open collaboration, the global commons idea, substantiated into repos and code all over the world, risks becoming a nonrenewable resource, mined and never replenished," says O'Brien. "The damage isn't limited to legal uncertainty. If FOSS projects can't rely upon the energy and labor of contributors to help them fix and improve their code, let alone patch security issues, fundamentally important components of the software the world relies upon are at risk."

O'Brien says, "The commons was never just about free code. It was about freedom to build together." That freedom, and the critical infrastructure that underlies almost all of modern society, is at risk because attribution, ownership, and reciprocity are blurred when AIs siphon up everything on the Internet and launder it (the analogy of money laundering is apt), so that all that code's provenance is obscured.

Can YouTube capture the hours people spending watching "traditional" TV? YouTube's CEO recently said its viewership on TV sets has "surpassed mobile and is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S.," writes The Hollywood Reporter. And YouTube is shelling out big money to stay on top: It's come a long way since the 19-second "me at the zoo" video was uploaded in April 2005. Now, per a KPMG report released Sept. 23, YouTube is second only to Comcast in terms of annual content spend, inclusive of payments to creators and media companies, paying out as much as Netflix and Paramount combined, $32 billion... The only question is what genres it will take over next, and how quickly it will do so. From talk shows to scripted dramas to, yes, live sports, there are signs that the platform's ambitions will collide with the traditional TV business sooner rather than later...

YouTube has slowly, then all at once, become the de facto home for what had been late night, not only for the shows on linear TV, but for an emerging crop of new talent born on the platform. As it happens, late night itself transformed YouTube when the Saturday Night Live skit "Lazy Sunday" went viral 20 years ago on the platform, which had only been live for a few months... As consumer preferences collide with a burgeoning ecosystem of video podcasts (YouTube now claims more than 1 billion podcast users monthly), the world of late night, and for that matter TV talk shows more generally, increasingly revolves around the platform. One current late night producer says that almost every A-list booking now includes some sort of sketch or bit that they think will play well on YouTube, but booking those guests in the first place has become less of a sure thing. A veteran Hollywood publicist says that for many of their clients, they are now recommending that YouTube podcasts or shows become the first stop, or at least a major stop, on press tours...

Nielsen has been tracking the streaming platforms that consumers watch on their TV screens ever since it launched what it calls The Gauge in 2021. But over the past year, YouTube's domination of The Gauge has unnerved executives at some competitors. The most recent Gauge report showed that YouTube was by far the most watched video platform, holding 13.1 percent share. Netflix, in second place, was at 8.7 percent.
The article suggests YouTube's last challenge may be "scripted" entertainment — where their business model is different than Netflix or HBO.

"On YouTube, it is up to the creator to finance and produce their content, and while the platform regularly releases new tools to help them (including AI-enabled tech that suggests video ideas and can create short background videos for use in Shorts), scripted entertainment is a particularly tricky challenge, requiring writers, directors, sets, costumes, lighting, editing, special effects and other production requirements that may go beyond the typical creator-led show."

The Associated Press reports that "North Korean hackers have pilfered billions of dollars" by breaking into cryptocurrency exchanges and by creating fake identities to get remote tech jobs at foreign companies — all orchestrated by the North Korean government to finance R&D on nuclear arms.

That's according to a new the 138-page report by a group watching North Korea's compliance with U.N. sanctions (including officials from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom). From the Associated Press: North Korea also has used cryptocurrency to launder money and make military purchases to evade international sanctions tied to its nuclear program, the report said. It detailed how hackers working for North Korea have targeted foreign businesses and organizations with malware designed to disrupt networks and steal sensitive data...

Unlike China, Russia and Iran, North Korea has focused much of its cyber capabilities to fund its government, using cyberattacks and fake workers to steal and defraud companies and organizations elsewhere in the world... Earlier this year, hackers linked to North Korea carried out one of the largest crypto heists ever, stealing $1.5 billion worth of ethereum from Bybit. The FBI later linked the theft to a group of hackers working for the North Korean intelligence service.

Federal authorities also have alleged that thousands of IT workers employed by U.S. companies were actually North Koreans using assumed identities to land remote work. The workers gained access to internal systems and funneled their salaries back to North Korea's government. In some cases, the workers held several remote jobs at the same time.

A web browser linked to Chinese online gambling websites and downloaded millions of times routes all internet traffic through servers in China and covertly installs programs that run in the background, according to findings published by network security company Infoblox. The researchers said the Universe Browser, which advertises itself as offering privacy protection, includes features similar to malware such as key logging and surreptitious connections.

Infoblox collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on the research. The investigators found links between the browser and Southeast Asia's cybercrime ecosystem, which has connections to money laundering, illegal online gambling, human trafficking and scam operations using forced labor. The browser is directly linked to BBIN, a major online gambling company that has existed since 1999. Infoblox researchers examined the Windows version of the browser and found that it checks users' locations and languages when launched, installs two browser extensions, and disables security features including sandboxing.

Airbus, Leonardo, and Thales are merging their space divisions into a new France-based company that aims to create a "leading European player in space." The joint venture, expected to launch operations by 2027 pending regulatory approval, will pool R&D resources to accelerate satellite development and strengthen Europe's technological sovereignty in space. Engadget reports: The companies Airbus, Leonardo and Thales have finalized this deal. The new unnamed entity will be based in France and will employ around 25,000 people. Airbus will own 35 percent, while the other two companies will each own 32.5 percent. Executives are hoping this company will better serve Europe's need for "sovereignty" in space and help it create a rival to SpaceX's Starlink communications network. Increasing a presence in space is also seen as a good thing for security and defense.

This isn't just bluster. Thales and Airbus have long been rivals in the satellite market, but it looks like they are friends now. Leonardo is known for space systems and services. Combining all three could actually give SpaceX a run for its money, but we will have to wait and see. There are no planned site closures, as the companies say that each home country will keep its existing capabilities. This will be a standalone company, so think of it as an extremely well-financed startup. The first task for the upstart? Reporting indicates it'll be to find more efficient ways to develop and manufacture satellites.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Donald Trump is eyeing taking equity stakes in quantum computing firms in exchange for federal funding, The Wall Street Journal reported. At least five companies are weighing whether allowing the government to become a shareholder would be worth it to snag funding that the Trump administration has "earmarked for promising technology companies," sources familiar with the potential deals told the WSJ.

IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are currently in talks with the government over potential funding agreements, with minimum awards of $10 million each, some sources said. Quantum Computing Inc. and Atom Computing are reportedly "considering similar arrangements," as are other companies in the sector, which is viewed as critical for scientific advancements and next-generation technologies. No deals have been completed yet, sources said, and terms could change as quantum-computing firms weigh the potential risks of government influence over their operations. [...]

The administration will lean on Deputy Commerce Secretary Paul Dabbar to extend Trump's industry meddling into the quantum computing world, the WSJ reported. A former Energy Department official, Dabbar co-founded Bohr Quantum Technology, which specializes in quantum networking systems that the DOE expects will help "create new opportunities for scientific discovery." While the firm he previously headed won't be eligible for funding, Dabbar will be leading industry discussions, the WSJ reported, likely hyping Trump's deals as a necessary boon to ensure US firms dominate in quantum computing. A Commerce Department official denied the claims, saying: "The Commerce Department is not currently negotiating equity stakes with quantum computing companies."

In August, the Trump administration took a 10% stake in Intel to help fund factories that Intel is currently building in Ohio.

A UK tribunal ruled that Apple abused its dominant position by charging app developers unfair commissions through its App Store, potentially costing the company hundreds of millions in damages. It marks the first major tech "class action" victory under the UK's collective lawsuit regime. Reuters reports: The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) ruled against Apple after a trial of the lawsuit, which was brought on behalf of millions of iPhone and iPad users in the United Kingdom. The CAT ruled that Apple had abused its dominant position from October 2015 until the end of 2020 by shutting out competition in the app distribution market and by "charging excessive and unfair prices" as commission to developers.

Apple -- which has faced mounting pressure from regulators in the U.S. and Europe over the fees it charges developers -- said it would appeal against the ruling, which it said "takes a flawed view of the thriving and competitive app economy." The case had been valued at around $2 billion by those who brought it. A hearing next month will decide how damages are calculated and Apple's application for permission to appeal. "This ruling overlooks how the App Store helps developers succeed and gives consumers a safe, trusted place to discover apps and securely make payments," an Apple spokesperson said.

President Donald Trump has pardoned the Founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering violations and served prison time. The Associated Press reports: Zhao has deep ties to World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that the Republican president and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. launched in September. Trump's most recent financial disclosure report reveals he made more than $57 million last year from World Liberty Financial, which has launched USD1, a stablecoin pegged at a 1-to-1 ratio to the U.S. dollar. World Liberty Financial also recently announced that an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates would be using $2 billion worth of USD1 to purchase a stake in Binance. Zhao also has publicly said that he had asked Trump for a pardon that could nullify his conviction.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Thursday that the Biden administration prosecuted Zhao out of a "desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry." She said there were "no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims," though Zhao had pleaded guilty in November to one count of failing to maintain an anti-money-laundering program.

Banks face a hit to their bottom lines of as much as $170 billion if they don't adapt their business models to respond to customers turning to AI to optimize their finances. From a report: The consultancy firm predicted that customer uptake of agentic AI -- effectively autonomous bots -- would hit the profits banks earn from customer money in low interest accounts, according to a report from McKinsey published Thursday. "Imagine you have an AI agent that says: 'Hey, you could save $2,000-a-year by moving your money,'" Pradip Patiath, a senior partner at McKinsey, said. "It automates a lot of the inertia that is in the system today."

Consumers hold $23 trillion out of a total of $70 trillion in accounts with close to zero interest rates, while the remainder is held in accounts that often pay relatively low rates, according to the research. Customer use of AI agents could lead to a 9% profit drop for banks, some $170 billion, if they do not change their business models. That could push average returns for banks below their cost of capital, the consultants said.

Google is migrating all its internal workloads to run on both x86 and its custom Axion Arm chips, with major services like YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already running on both architectures. The Register reports: The search and ads giant documented its move in a preprint paper published last week, titled "Instruction Set Migration at Warehouse Scale," and in a Wednesday post that reveals YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery already run on both x86 and its Axion Arm CPUs -- as do around 30,000 more applications. Both documents explain Google's migration process, which engineering fellow Parthasarathy Ranganathan and developer relations engineer Wolff Dobson said started with an assumption "that we would be spending time on architectural differences such as floating point drift, concurrency, intrinsics such as platform-specific operators, and performance." [...]

The post and paper detail work on 30,000 applications, a collection of code sufficiently large that Google pressed its existing automation tools into service -- and then built a new AI tool called "CogniPort" to do things its other tools could not. [...] Google found the agent succeeded about 30 percent of the time under certain conditions, and did best on test fixes, platform-specific conditionals, and data representation fixes. That's not an enormous success rate, but Google has at least another 70,000 packages to port.

The company's aim is to finish the job so its famed Borg cluster manager -- the basis of Kubernetes -- can allocate internal workloads in ways that efficiently utilize Arm servers. Doing so will likely save money, because Google claims its Axion-powered machines deliver up to 65 percent better price-performance than x86 instances, and can be 60 percent more energy-efficient. Those numbers, and the scale of Google's code migration project, suggest the web giant will need fewer x86 processors in years to come.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The hack of Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India's Tata Motors, cost the British economy an estimated $2.55 billion and affected over 5,000 organizations, an independent cybersecurity body said in a report published on Wednesday. The report was produced by the Cyber Monitoring Centre, an independent, not for profit organization made up of industry specialists, including the former head of Britain's National Cyber Security Centre. It said losses could be higher if there were unexpected delays to the restoration of production at the vehicle manufacturer to levels before the hack took place in August.

"This incident appears to be the most economically damaging cyber event to hit the UK, with the vast majority of the financial impact being due to the loss of manufacturing output at JLR and its suppliers," the report said. JLR will report its financial results in November, according to the company's website. A spokesperson for JLR declined to comment on the report. [...] JLR, which analysts estimated was losing around 50 million pounds per week from the shutdown, was provided with a 1.5 billion pound loan guarantee by the British government in late September to help it support suppliers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A lot of critical financial and government infrastructure runs on Cobol. The more-than-60-year-old mainframe coding language is embedded into payments and transaction rails, even though there are very few Cobol-literate coders available to maintain them. The big argument in favor of sticking with Cobol systems is that they work. The catch is that, whenever they stop working, it is difficult to figure out why. That's not good in a crisis, which is exactly when they're most likely to break. Covid-19 put a lot of strain the US state benefit systems.

The ones that used Cobol for processing unemployment claims failed spectacularly, according to a new working paper from The Atlanta Fed: "States that used an antiquated [unemployment insurance]-benefit system experienced a 2.8 percentage point decline in total credit and debit card consumption relative to card consumption in states with more modern UI benefit systems. [...] Using this estimate in a back-of-the-envelope calculation, I find that the lack of investment in updating UI-benefit systems in COBOL states was associated with a reduction in real GDP of at least $40 billion (in 2019 dollars) lower during this [March 13 2020 to year-end] period

The paper uses Cobol as a proxy for old and inefficient IT, not the direct cause of failure. Claimants faced much longer delays in the 28 states that still used Cobol in 2020, both because of the unprecedented volume of claims and the difficulty updating systems with new eligibility rules, author Michael Navarrete finds. [...] As an aside, one oddity of the data is that Republican-controlled states were more likely to have replaced old IT systems, even though their standard unemployment insurance payments are lower on average. Why? Absolutely no idea, but here are the maps. And, once adjusted for state politics, here's the key finding.

The Sims is in a period of transition -- and as part of that, the ongoing mobile version will be shutting down in a few months. From a report: EA announced that today's update for The Sims Mobile will be its last, and that on January 20th, 2026 the game "will no longer be accessible to play and will be sunset." The mobile iteration of the franchise first launched in 2018, and has seen more than 50 updates since then. EA says that starting today players will no longer be able to spend real money in the game, and that it will be delisted on both iOS and Android tomorrow before the servers shut down completely next year, making it entirely unplayable.

"The gig economy is facing a reckoning," argues Business Insider's BI Today newsletter." Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company's AI models instead. On the same day, Waymo announced a partnership with DoorDash to test driverless grocery and meal deliveries.

Both moves point toward the same future: one where the very workers who built the gig economy may soon find themselves training the technology that replaces them.

Uber's new program allows drivers to earn cash by completing microtasks, such as taking photos and uploading audio clips, that aim to improve the company's AI systems. For drivers, it's a way to diversify income. For Uber, it's a way to accelerate its automated future. There's an irony here. By helping Uber strengthen its AI, drivers could be accelerating the very driverless world they fear... Uber already offers autonomous rides in Waymo vehicles in Atlanta and Austin, and plans to expand. Meanwhile, Waymo is rolling out its pilot partnership with DoorDash [for driverless grocery/meal deliveries] starting in Phoenix.