Rivian’s autonomy gamble faces its first real test (The Verge)

GRANT BRICKMAN: Rivian wants to rival Tesla's self-driving, and it talked about that more than the car it actually has to build.

GRANT BRICKMAN: Breaking news, just in. Rivian held its earnings call last night, and the car company mostly wanted to talk about cars that drive themselves. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Now the full story. The CEO spent nearly half of an hourlong call on autonomy, and less time on the production ramp of the R2 SUV. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: Hands-free driving, Greta. It sounds like my VCR timer. You set it once and then you trust nobody. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Slightly different. Let's go to Kai. ▶

KAI: Huge, Greta. Rivian is designing its own silicon chips, buying pricey lidar sensors, and going after Tesla's Full Self-Driving. Huge. Ambitious. Very USB-C of them. ▶

KAI: The timeline: point-to-point hands-free driving goes to Rivian's own employees for testing in 2026, then to customers in 2027. Robotaxis with Uber follow in 2028. ▶

KAI: And Tesla has a head start. Its supervised system is already in over 1.7 million active customer cars. That is a lot of miles to catch up on. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: The catch, per the report: rising tech costs threaten the margins of the R2, the mass-market SUV that is still scaling up. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: So the car is ambitious and the margin is nervous. Greta, what did the finance people say? ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: A VP for finance said autonomy is a primary product differentiator, market share driver and long-term value creator. The report says success is not guaranteed. ▶

Google's AI Mode doesn't drive traffic "for anybody," Reddit CEO Huffman warns the entire web (The Decoder)

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Reddit's shares fell over 25 percent after Google sent fewer visitors. The CEO says it's a warning to the whole web.

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Now the full story, in today's Deep Dive. Reddit's stock fell more than 25 percent after earnings, even though the earnings were strong. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: What happened: Reddit lost more than one million Google search referrals per week in October, according to its CEO, Steve Huffman. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: Huffman blames Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Reddit says demand for the platform hasn't changed. Google simply stopped sending people there. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: Vera, so the AI took Reddit's visitors? I assumed the AI was one guy. Was it a very busy guy? ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: Not one guy, Grant. A product feature. Huffman's words: AI Mode does not drive traffic, not for us, and not to anybody as far as I know. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: Why it matters: the report calls this a warning for the entire web. Any business that depends on Google for traffic faces the same structural risk. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: Reddit is now testing login walls outside the U.S. to curb scraping and reduce its dependence on the open web. Huffman calls it a trade-off: less reach, deeper engagement. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: The catch: data licensing talks with AI providers continue, but it is not certain Reddit closes further deals. It already had one with Google. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: So the open question is whether a direct destination can replace a search crowd. The report doesn't say. Back to you, Grant. ▶

THE FEED (PXL)

GRANT BRICKMAN: What is trending on GitHub in Python right now, with numbers straight off the board.

GRANT BRICKMAN: The Feed. Today we check GitHub, Python edition. Yes, Greta, the language, not the snake. I was briefed. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: Number one: HKUDS/DeepTutor, 2,282 stars today. Eighty-eight releases, the last one two days ago, and 252 contributors. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: MemPalace/mempalace has 357 stars today and 163 contributors. PyPI shows 13,750 downloads last week. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: And anthropics/skills: 287 stars today, no releases, 17 contributors, 1,450 open issues and pull requests, and 21,873 forks. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: MemPalace calls itself the best-benchmarked open-source AI memory system. That is its own description, Kai. The board doesn't verify it. ▶