The driverless Toyota Sienna minivan came to a halt in a parking lot when it detected a garbage truck blocking its path.

A human driver might have noticed that the garbage truck hadn’t started collecting trash from the nearby dumpster and opted to go around the vehicle.

But the autonomous vehicle played it safe. It waited for the truck to finish its job and move.

“The vehicle might not have done the perfect thing, but it did a safe thing,” Edwin Olson, co-founder and CEO of AV startup May Mobility, told Tech Brew during a recent ride-along in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This is exactly the sort of somewhat tricky but all-too-common driving scenario that May Mobility’s proprietary technology, Multi-Policy Decision Making, is designed to navigate.

The ride-along was fully driverless, meaning there was no safety driver behind the wheel, unlike a similar trip we took last year. It’s one of the latest signs of progress for a startup that is now positioning itself to become the sector’s leading autonomy-as-a-service provider.

“I think right now, May Mobility is in pole position to be the No. 1 provider of autonomy technology to other companies—the companies that need an autonomy play, and view Waymo as more of a threat,” he said.

Keep reading here.—JG

Members of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources took a field trip this week to Utah to visit a new Fervo Energy geothermal development and hold a hearing about geothermal energy being developed on federal land.

In his opening statement, Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) highlighted geothermal’s potential to help satisfy the “unprecedented growth in energy demand” the US will face as a result of data center load growth—and the importance of its inclusion in Republicans’ “all of the above” energy dominance strategy. But, he said, federal permitting timelines for geothermal development are too slow and “mired by duplicative requirements and lengthy regulatory delays.”

“We can and must do better to address these barriers,” Stauber said. “I’m proud to say that House Republicans are leading the charge to end these inefficiencies and unleash geothermal energy on federal lands.”

Tim Latimer, the CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy, said in his testimony that permits can delay construction up to 10 years, thereby delaying geothermal energy’s “positive impact.”

“We’ve had numerous projects where we’ve had community support, we’ve had high-quality geology, we’ve looked at and had some sort of transmission solution,” Latimer said, “but we haven’t even prioritized investing in the project yet because we didn’t see a viable pathway to getting permits.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Sam Altman made waves two years ago when he endorsed independent licensing requirements on certain AI models during a Senate appearance. But in the same building last week, with another political party in power, the OpenAI CEO had a different message for senators asking how that process would position the US to win a global AI race: Prior approval of models by the government would be “disastrous.”

The hearing—in which Altman appeared alongside AMD CEO Lisa Su, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, and CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator—struck a different tone from that May 2023 questioning session.

While discussions touched on some of the potential risks that AI poses, safety concerns seemed to take a backseat to another all-encompassing goal from some members of Congress: how to beat China in an increasingly heated AI arms race.

“We need the space to innovate and to move quickly,” Altman said. “If we can’t build the products that people want that naturally win in the market…people will use a better product made from somebody else that is not stymied in the same way.”

Keep reading here.—PK

Vibe coding is redefining software development by replacing rigid precision with AI-driven creativity, enabling developers to build faster, experiment more, and lower the barrier to coding—all with a new mindset powered by tools like Replit, Cursor, and Windsurf. Read about vibe coding’s origins, how it’s used, and what it means for the future of coding.