Polygon’s list of the best animated movies of 2024 is full of the best animation from around the world, ranging from surreal French movies to Pixar sequels. My top three personal favorites were The Wild Robot, Flow, and Robot Dreams. All three are vastly stylistically different, which definitely appealed to me. But there was something […]

Waymo’s autonomous vehicles cause less property damage and fewer bodily injuries when they crash than human-driven vehicles, according to a study that relies on an analysis of insurance data.

The study is the product of the collaboration between Waymo and insurer Swiss Re, which analyzed liability claims related to collisions from 25.3 million fully autonomous miles driven by Waymo in four cities: Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin. They then compared those miles to human driver baselines, which are based on Swiss Re’s data from over 500,000 claims and over 200 billion miles traveled.

They found that the performance of Waymo’s vehicles was safer than that of humans, with an 88 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily injury claims. Across 25.3 million miles, Waymo was involved in nine property damage claims and two bodily injury claims. The average human driving a similar distance would be expected to have 78 property damage and 26 bodily injury claims, the company says.

Waymo’s vehicles also performed better when compared to new vehicles equipped with all the latest safety tech, including automatic emergency braking, lane-keep assist, and blind spot detection. When compared to this group, Waymo’s autonomous driving system showed an 86 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 90 percent reduction in bodily injury claims.

The last time Waymo did a comparison with Swiss Re’s liability data, it only had 3.8 million fully autonomous miles in California and Arizona. Now, it has a much bigger dataset, with 25.3 million miles. The company recently announced that it had driven 4 million trips in 2024 alone.

Waymo says it has submitted its latest comparisons with Swiss Re’s insurance data to a scientific journal for publication.

The data is important because there is still a fierce debate about the safety of driverless cars. Companies like Waymo and others say driverless cars are necessary as an antidote to the crisis of traffic fatalities, of which there are around 40,000 a year in the US. They point out that driverless cars never get drunk, tired, or distracted and are able to avoid the human errors that so often lead to crashes and deaths.

But there is a lack of certainty around the safety of driverless vehicles, mainly because there are far fewer AVs on the road than human-driven vehicles and, thus, less data from which to draw conclusions. Humans drive close to 100 million miles between fatal crashes, so we’re likely to need hundreds of millions of miles from autonomous vehicles before we can start to make more meaningful comparisons about safety.

Many urbanists and safety advocates say the real solution is actually fewer cars altogether as well as communities that are designed to support more car-free transportation, like bikes, public transportation, and walking.

Waymo is part of a rapidly dwindling number of companies that’s convinced that autonomous vehicles will play a key role in reducing crashes and improving safety. And it’s one of the few willing to publicize its own collisions in order to make that case.

The AMD Strix Point CPU in the Zephyrus G16 gives this gaming laptop a battery life boost over the Intel version. Unfortunately, the price is also boosted.

Read the full story at The Verge.

“Kindled Inspiration: Friendship Glow” is one of the limited-time random quests in Infinity Nikki, and this one requires you to inspire an NPC by showing them a specific article of clothing. While the NPC does give hints as to what they’re looking for (in this case, a “bunny hair accessory”), if you don’t have an […]

Instagram is planning to introduce a generative AI editing feature next year that will allow users to “change nearly any aspect of your videos.” The tech is powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model according to a teaser posted by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and aims to provide creators with more tools to help transform their content and bring their ideas to life without extensive video editing or manipulation skills.

Mosseri says the feature can make adjustments using a “simple text prompt.” The announcement video includes previews of early research AI models that change Mosseri’s outfit, background environments, and even his overall appearance — in one scene transforming him into a felt puppet. Other changes are more subtle, such as adding new objects to the existing background or a gold chain around Mosseri’s neck without altering the rest of his clothing.

It’s an impressive preview. The inserted backgrounds and clothing don’t distort unnaturally when Mosseri rapidly moves his arms or face, but the snippets we get to see are barely a second long. The early previews of OpenAI’s Sora video model also looked extremely polished, however, and the results we’ve seen since it became available to the public haven’t lived up to those expectations. We won’t know how good Instagram’s AI video tools truly are by comparison until they launch.

Meta unveiled its Movie Gen AI video generator in October, which promises to “preserve human identity and motion” in the videos it creates or edits. The announcement was made months after similar models from competitors like OpenAI’s Sora and Adobe’s Firefly Video model, the latter of which is already powering beta text-to-video editing tools inside Premiere Pro. Meta hasn’t announced when Movie Gen will be available but Instagram is the first platform that the company has confirmed will utilize the text-to-video model.