Android Auto support has abruptly stopped for older phones. Google had previously revised the minimum version of Android required for the platform, but the company had allowed it to run on older versions of Android.

Google stopped support for Android Auto on older versions of Android

Android Auto is one of the most powerful platforms for in-car navigation. It allows using an Android phone’s functions via the infotainment console.

Modern versions of Android have Android Auto baked in. However, older versions of Android and the platform had a dedicated and optional app. In other words, before Android 9, users had to download the Android Auto app from the Google Play Store and then sync it with their vehicle’s infotainment system.

Google had ensured Android Auto worked all the way back on Android 6. However, back in July 2022, Google revised the minimum Android version required for Android Auto.

From Android 6, the search giant mandated Android 8 as the lowest version of the OS. The same happened recently. Google has reportedly stopped supporting Android Auto on Android 8 and lower versions of the OS.

What is the minimum version of Android needed to run Android Auto?

Earlier this year, Google raised the minimum requirement for Android Auto to Android 9. It is, however, interesting to note that several Android 8 users were able to use Android Auto on their devices. This concession seems to have stopped.

According to a Reddit thread, Google seems to be strictly enforcing the minimum requirement rule. In other words, smartphones running Android 8 are being greeted by a notification that says, “This phone no longer supports Android Auto.”

It seems Google had been lenient, and it was not enforcing the requirement, presumably to offer people more time for an upgrade. Although the chances are rather slim, there could be a few Android smartphones running Android 8 in 2024. After all, the version arrived way back in 2019.

Google could be enforcing the requirement because Android 9 and newer versions of the OS have Android Auto integrated within. This offers a streamlined experience. Additionally, it is possible that Google might be removing Android Auto from the Play Store as a standalone app, and keeping it as an updatable system app.

Android Auto has had multiple bugs recently, and it even stopped functioning in one of the beta versions of Android 15. Moreover, the app could be breaching EU rules. Google could be enforcing the rule to limit such issues as ensuring backward compatibility is often very complex.

It’s getting harder and harder not to view the Humane AI Pin as destined to go down as one of tech’s all-time stinkers and cautionary tales. After reviews questioning why it existed, returns that outpaced its sales and a warning that its Charge Case could pose a “fire safety risk,” the company is now recalling the latter. The issue stems from the case’s battery cells, supplied by a third-party vendor, which could overheat and cause a fire hazard.

Humane posted on Thursday that it’s conducting the voluntary recall “out of an abundance of caution.” The startup says its charging case is the only accessory affected — not the battery booster, charging pad or Pin itself. “The issue is isolated to battery cells used in the Charge Case Accessory,” Humane wrote. “It is not related to its hardware design.”

The company says one of its battery suppliers is to blame. “Our investigation determined that the battery supplier was no longer meeting our quality standards and that battery cells supplied by this vendor can pose a fire risk,” Humane wrote. The company says it’s severed ties with the supplier and is currently evaluating a new one.

In fairness to Humane, the recall was (in its words) the result of only one incident where a user plugged it into a third-party USB-C cable and power source. It hasn’t received reports of injuries or damage. As easy as it is to poke fun at an overhyped company’s other shoe dropping, at least it’s informing consumers and conducting the recall voluntarily rather than trying to bury it for the sake of PR. Perhaps Humane can look to Samsung for inspiration on rebounding from a product that catches on fire — and not in a good way.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) posted a blurb about the recall with more detail. It says consumers who bought the Charge Case separately will receive a $149 refund. Those who got the case as part of the Humane AI Pin Complete System will get $129 back. In addition, Humane will supply replacement charging cases, but don’t expect them anytime soon: The estimated wait is three to six months. The CPSC says about 10,500 units are affected.

Humane advises charge case owners to “dispose of the product in accordance with any local and state laws” rather than chucking it in the trash. Presumably, that’s to avoid a real dumpster fire to match the metaphorical one at Humane.

OpenAI transformed its popular ChatGPT service into a powerful search engine today, marking the company’s boldest move yet to compete with Google. The upgrade lets users ask questions in plain English and get real-time information about news, sports, stocks, and weather — features that until now required a separate search engine.

“We believe finding answers should be as natural as having a conversation,” an OpenAI spokesperson told VentureBeat. The company will roll out the feature first to paying subscribers, with plans to expand to free users in coming months.

ChatGPT Search: How OpenAI’s new AI-powered web search actually works

Unlike traditional search engines (i.e. Google and Bing) that return a list of links, ChatGPT now processes questions in natural language and delivers curated answers with clear source attribution. Users can click through to original sources or ask follow-up questions to dig deeper into topics.

The technology builds on OpenAI’s SearchGPT experiment from July, which tested the search features with 10,000 users. That limited release helped the company refine how its AI processes web information and attributes sources.

The system runs on a specialized version of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s most advanced AI model. The company trained it on massive amounts of web data and fine-tuned it to understand context across longer conversations.

Major news publishers partner with OpenAI to power next-generation search results

Major news organizations including the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and Vox Media have partnered with OpenAI to provide content. The deals aim to address long-standing concerns about AI systems using publishers’ work without permission or payment.

“ChatGPT search promises to better highlight and attribute information from trustworthy news sources, benefiting audiences while expanding the reach of publishers like ourselves who produce premium journalism,” said Pam Wasserstein, President of Vox Media, in a statement. Publishers can opt out of having their content used for AI training while still appearing in search results.

Inside OpenAI’s $5 billion bet on custom chips and AI infrastructure

The launch comes as OpenAI races to build its own technology infrastructure. The company recently announced deals with AMD, Broadcom, and TSMC to develop custom AI chips by 2026 — a move to reduce its reliance on Nvidia’s expensive processors.

These investments don’t come cheap. Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest backer with nearly $14 billion invested, said this week the partnership will cut into its quarterly profits by $1.5 billion. OpenAI itself expects to spend $5 billion this year on computing costs.

This massive investment in custom silicon and infrastructure signals a crucial shift in OpenAI’s strategy. While most AI companies remain dependent on Nvidia’s chips and cloud providers’ data centers, OpenAI is making an ambitious play for technological independence. It’s a risky bet that could either drain the company’s resources or give it an insurmountable advantage in the AI arms race.

By controlling its own chip destiny, OpenAI could potentially cut its computing costs in half by 2026. More importantly, custom chips optimized specifically for GPT models could enable capabilities that aren’t possible with general-purpose AI processors. This vertical integration — from chips to models to consumer products— mirrors the playbook that helped Apple dominate smartphones.

The new search features will appear on ChatGPT’s website and mobile apps. Enterprise customers and educational users will get access in the next few weeks, followed by a gradual rollout to OpenAI’s millions of free users.

For now, Google remains the dominant force in search. But as AI technology improves and more users grow comfortable with conversational interfaces, the competition for how we find information online appears poised for its biggest shake-up in decades.

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation is targeting April 2025 for commercial deployment of its autonomous trucks, pushing its timeline back by about a quarter. The company had originally planned to launch by the end of 2024. The company said it delayed the launch so it can continue to validate its self-driving technology. 

“While this is modestly later than we had intended, this timing remains within the margin of error we have anticipated and conveyed throughout 2024,” Aurora CEO and co-founder Chris Urmson wrote in his third-quarter earnings shareholder letter. “With our intention to introduce the Aurora Driver with a crawl, walk, run approach, this shift to our timeline will have a negligible financial impact.”

Aurora will go to market as a carrier, but its end goal is to pursue a driver-as-a-service model, wherein carriers purchase trucks with the Aurora Driver tech on board and then offer their services via those trucks to shippers. 

One of the ways Aurora measures the performance and commercial readiness of its Aurora Driver is its use of on-site support, which the company says will be the most expensive support provided. As of the end of the third quarter, the Aurora Driver was delivering commercial loads without the support of a remote human 80% of the time, which is up from 75% in the second quarter. The goal is to reach 90% by commercial launch in the spring. 

The startup intends to deploy up to 10 driverless trucks during commercial launch, with the goal of increasing to tens of trucks by the end of 2025.

Aurora has been testing commercial loads with pilot customers including FedEx, Werner, Schneider, Hirschbach, Uber Freight, and others. The company schedules roughly 160 commercial loads per week, which Aurora says is more than double the volume from last year. As of October 27, 2024, Aurora’s trucks have autonomously delivered more than 8,200 loads and driven over 2.2 million commercial miles — but all with a human behind the wheel.

Aurora, a pre-revenue company building pioneer tech, recorded an operating expense of $196 million in the third quarter, including stock-based compensation of $35 million. That’s less than the $212 million it spent in the same period last year, which Aurora says demonstrates its commitment to being frugal on its path to commercialization. 

The startup ended the quarter with $1.4 billion in cash and investments after raising almost half a billion dollars in August, which should give Aurora runway into 2026 and fund its initial stage of scaling and getting to a place of sustainability.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Aurora Driver was delivering commercial loads without a human driver 75% of the time in the second quarter.

“We will not achieve our target of $500 million in revenue for Gaudi in 2024,” CEO Pat Gelsinger just said on the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call today.

Though Intel just launched its recent Gaudi 3 accelerator this past quarter, said Gelsinger, “the overall uptake of Gaudi has been slower than we anticipated as adoption rates were impacted by the product transition from Gaudi 2 to Gaudi 3 and software ease of use.”

Despite the missed goal, Gelsinger says “we remain encouraged by the market available to us. There is clear need for solutions with superior [total cost of ownership] based on open standards, and we are continuing to enhance the Gaudi value proposition.”

Later on the call, Gelsinger seemingly had some sour grapes to share, pointing out how so far, the industry’s huge spend on AI chips has been focused on training AI models in the cloud. “Training is creating the weather model, not using it,” he says, suggesting once again that putting AI into all the chips, not just ones in the cloud, might be more important in the long run.

Intel reported $13.3 billion in revenue in quarterly earnings today, down 6 percent year over year but up compared to last quarter — and losses of a whopping $16.6 billion. But those losses were based on $18.5 billion of impairments and restructuring charges, the cost of Intel’s decision to rework itself for more profitability in the future.

Last quarter it announced a $10 billion cost reduction plan and over 15,000 layoffs, and it’s now detailing some of the structural shifts inside the company too — including moving its edge computing business into the Client Computing Group that generally handles its desktop and laptop chips, and integrating its software teams into the company’s core business units.

Gelsinger says Intel will “focus on fewer projects, with the top priority to be to maximize the value of our x86 franchise across the client, edge, and data center markets.”

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Wordle hints and answers, Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too.