James Peng, co-founder and CEO of Pony.ai Inc., during an event in Hong Kong on July 10, 2019.Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg/Getty Images


Robotaxis will be a common sight on the world’s streets within five years, predicted James Peng, founder and CEO of the Chinese autonomous driving firm Pony.ai. 

“I think the technology problem is pretty much already solved,” he said at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Tuesday. “You’ll be able to hail a robotaxi just like a normal taxi.”

While Waymo dominates the robotaxi conversation in the U.S., Chinese robotaxi firms like Pony.ai are gaining ground almost everywhere else. 

Pony.ai, founded in 2016, runs commercial robotaxi services across Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.

“Our riders are very diverse across different age groups, different professions,” Peng said. “It’s definitely not something unique, just for the tech-savvy people to try.”

The company is pushing abroad in places where taxis are expensive and regulations are favorable. In August, Pony.ai announced an expanded partnership with Uber to deploy more than 2,000 robotaxis across Europe and agreed to bring 200 robotaxis to South Korea by 2028. It also has partnerships in the Middle East and Singapore.

Other robotaxi providers, like WeRide and Baidu, are also pushing abroad with new ventures in Southeast Asia and Europe.

More widespread robotaxis could reshape how cities work. “Most private cars are used for two hours a day,” Peng said. “If robotaxis are more ubiquitous, we’ll save on parking spaces.”

“The implications will be profound,” he added. “It will change the whole urban planning and change the way of our life.” —Anjali Tsui

If Apple executives feel any trepidation about altering the iPhone’s time-tested design with a foldable model, they may find reassurance from their top competitor: Samsung. 

The Korean electronics company has been selling foldable smartphones for seven years. And sales of Samsung’s newest foldables, the Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8, are up 30% by volume year over year, the company tells Fortune exclusively. 

That’s only one month’s worth of data, but it comes on the back of roughly 30% growth in the category last year, and despite the new models’ higher prices because of memory costs. 

“The response to foldables has been tremendous,” says Samsung’s Dave Das in an interview with Fortune.

According to Das, who runs the company’s mobile business in the U.S., foldable phones have a consumer appeal that’s driving sales among new, fold-curious users and causing existing foldable converts to upgrade more frequently.

Plus, the number of new Samsung customers who previously owned a smartphone made by a competitor is 25% higher with foldables than with its traditional bar-type phones, Das says.

While the majority of Samsung’s smartphone sales are still traditional handsets, the foldable category is growing at a “much much faster rate,” and is now a significant enough portion of sales that Das says they are considered a “mainstream” part of the business. 

Still, with some prices exceeding $2,000, foldables are clearly a premium product. According to Counterpoint Research, foldable phones represented less than 2% of the global smartphone market by unit sales last year, though that number is expected to grow. —Alexei Oreskovic

Google DeepMind said Tuesday that it has used artificial intelligence to predict the biological consequences of all 9 billion possible single-letter changes to human DNA. 

It’s making the resulting database available free to academic researchers worldwide.

AlphaGenome Atlas, as DeepMind calls it, is a precomputed catalogue of what each substitution of a single DNA base is likely to do to the machinery that switches genes on and off. 

Until now researchers had to run such a model one variant at a time or had to test variants in the laboratory, a process that was painstakingly slow. It would have taken many human lifetimes to discover the consequences of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations. 

The Atlas promises to make the job of biologists and medical researchers considerably easier, potentially speeding up the understanding of genetic diseases and the hunt for possible cures. 

Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind’s vice president for research and head of its AI for science team, told reporters on a briefing call that the release helps to complete the unfinished business of the Human Genome Project, which in 2003 succeeded in mapping the entire human DNA sequence. 

“As the saying goes, we bought the book,” he said, “but we did not understand how to read it.”

Atlas is available for non-commercial use from today through a website Google DeepMind has set up for it. The company said it would be available for commercial use through a licensing arrangement through Google Cloud “soon.” —Jeremy Kahn

—AI coding startup Cognition raises $2 billion, at a $48 billion valuation, from a murderer’s row of Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

—Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent built on the models overseen by Alexandr Wang.

—Chinese AI companies are conducting “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns, warns the CISA, FBI, and NSA.

—ASML wins commitments from Samsung and TSMC to use its next-gen chipmaking equipment.

—Amazon and Qualcomm do a data center infrastructure deal. Custom silicon for AI inference and $4 billion in warrants to Amazon for Qualcomm shares. 

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