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Way to go, Waymo! The Alphabet-owned robotaxi service has hit a 100-million-mile autonomous driving milestone, the company announced Tuesday to much fanfare. That figure is 10 times what it was two months ago. Take that, Elon Musk, whose Tesla has barely launched its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas.
Waymo’s success reflects a growing acceptance of self-driving cars as taxis—one that’s increasingly global. Indeed, also on Tuesday, Uber and Baidu announced a partnership to roll out Baidu’s autonomous vehicles on Uber’s network in Asia and the Middle East. Having said all that, it’s hard to interpret how fast Waymo is really growing. As it is expanding into new markets steadily—adding Austin and Atlanta most recently, with Miami and Washington coming soon—you’d expect the number of miles driven to be going up very fast.
Notably, though, the number of trips per week isn’t expanding as fast as the number of miles driven. In February, for instance, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X that Waymo was doing 200,000-plus trips per week in three cities. In late April, Waymo said that had grown to “more than 250,000 trips” per week, representing five times growth from a year earlier. But today Waymo’s co-CEO, Dmitri Dolgov, used the same trip-per-week number in a post on X. That implies Waymo hasn’t hit a big new number it wants to disclose, like 300,000 trips per week.
In other words, the growth of completed trips is slowing even as total miles driven skyrockets. Perhaps as Waymo moves into more sprawling cities like Los Angeles, the average length of each trip is expanding. The discrepancy between the numbers is a little puzzling, although the bigger point is that we won’t really be able to gauge Waymo’s success until it has been in every market for at least a year and can release year-on-year growth that is roughly comparable. Right now, it’s too early for these press releases to mean much. Incidentally, Lyft, the No. 2 ride-hailing service in the U.S., did the equivalent of 18.2 million rides per week in the first quarter, putting Waymo’s number of 250,000-plus into perspective.
None of this is to detract from Waymo’s success, of course. Anyone who’s ridden in one knows it’s an impressive service. But let’s not overdo the congratulations, at least not yet.
Are Meta Investors Getting Cold Feet?
Shares of Meta Platforms dipped 1.5% on Tuesday, even as other big tech names gained ground, a rare moment in recent months in which the Facebook parent company has sold off amid a broader rally. Could it be that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s chatter about spending “hundreds of millions” on artificial intelligence development is finally penetrating investors’ consciousness?
Meta stock has outperformed other big tech stocks in spite of its heavy AI spending, and despite the fact that it hasn’t yet explained how it will get a return on that investment. Questions about how it will turn its AI into revenue may have increased since Zuckerberg’s interview with The Information’s TITV, which ran in full today. In the interview, he explained that his vision for AI was different from that of other companies, who see ways of making money from selling services that automate work and improve productivity.
Meta, in contrast, wants to develop what Zuckerberg calls “personal superintelligence,” which people could use in their everyday lives for everything from managing their personal relationships to keeping track of what they’re doing each day. The question is whether people will pay for this—and if so, how much?
In Other News
• Tesla’s top North America sales executive has left the company, The Wall Street Journal reported, as the company faces declining vehicle sales. Troy Jones had been with Tesla for 15 years and oversaw sales, service and delivery in the company’s largest market, according to the Journal.
• Nvidia will resume selling an AI chip to China after President Donald Trump’s administration reversed a block it imposed earlier this year.
• Blackstone plans to invest $25 billion in data centers and energy production in Pennsylvania, the investment firm’s president, Jon Gray, said.
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