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Elon Musk has been making headlines recently for his political activities and rocket launches, but that hasn’t stopped the six-company owner/operator from moving forward with xAI, his artificial intelligence startup.
Today, Musk announced via his social network X (formerly Twitter) that xAI now offers an application programming interface (API) that third-party developers can now use to access and build applications and features powered by xAI’s Grok large language models.
Musk posted a simple message on his X account, “The @xAI API is now live!” around 12 pm ET on Monday, October 21, following up with a reply post that included a link to the xAI API sign-on page.
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According to xAI’s documentation, its API give developers access to Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, xAI’s latest multimodal language models, which also include the capability to generate permissive images with Black Forest Labs’ Flux.1 diffusion model.
However, in my limited test of it, I was only able to access a model named “Grok-beta.” Notably, the entire API website is labeled at the top as a “public beta,” so presumably the xAI developers and engineers will be working out various bugs and adding new features in the coming days.
Positioning and pricing
Releasing the xAI API is helpful for xAI and Musk’s greater quest to go head-to-head against his former company OpenAI (which he co-founded and left), which offers an API as well.
The xAI API offers a web-based console for creating API keys, exploring endpoints, and integrating models into applications.
It supports REST, gRPC, and SDKs, and is compatible with other AI services such as OpenAI, enabling smooth integration with existing systems.
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I signed up to check out the pricing and spent $25 on prepaid credits to see if I could get access to the models, but was only able to access “grok-beta” at the time of this article’s publication.
It provides 131,072 tokens of context, and the API can handle 1 request per second (RPS) and up to 10 requests per minute (RPM).
For now, OpenAI’s pricing for its AI models is largely cheaper than xAI’s, with GPT-4o costing developers $2.50 per 1 million input tokens/$10 per 1 million output tokens, versus Grok’s $5 per million input/$15 per output (though OpenAI’s new reasoning model o1 is more expensive than both at $15/$60).
• Text and Code Generation: The Grok models can handle tasks like generating code, summarizing content, and performing data extraction. This flexibility makes them valuable for a wide range of use cases, including software development and data analysis.
• Vision: The models can analyze and generate images, expanding their use beyond text-based tasks to multimedia and visual content generation.
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• Function Calling: The xAI API allows models to interact with external tools, such as APIs and databases. This enables real-world tasks like booking a flight, accessing IoT devices (e.g., unlocking a Tesla), or fetching live data from websites.
New dev features
Toby Pohlen, a founding member of xAI, shared additional details about building the new xAI API in a thread on the social network X today, writing, “Creating a scalable API from scratch was a massive effort. Here are some of my favourite engineering highlights.”
As he explained, xAI’s API includes:
• Usage Explorer: The xAI Console includes a usage explorer that tracks API consumption, similar to what’s found in major cloud provider platforms, giving developers insights into their resource usage and costs.
• Simplified Team Management: Small businesses can bind an email domain to their teams, making it easier to manage users and teams in the platform.
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• Enhanced Security: Users can view all active sessions in the account app, and log out of any unrecognized devices. In addition, every time the account is accessed from a new IP address, the user is notified by email.
The platform also supports two-factor authentication via TouchID, security keys (e.g., Yubikey), and authenticator apps.
How to get started with xAI’s new API
To begin using the xAI API, developers must sign up via the xAI Console, onboard their teams, and configure billing.
Each team is assigned its own API keys and billing setup, ensuring that enterprises can track costs and manage resources effectively.
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As Pohlen highlighted, team management is streamlined for smaller companies through the ability to bind an email domain to their teams.
Whether devs flock to xAI’s API and adopt it alongside or in place of other compelling alternatives in the gen AI age such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and more, remains to be seen. But at least, now xAI is giving them the option.
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HONOR announced the world’s slimmest and lightest book-style foldable smartphone a couple of months ago, the HONOR Magic V3. That phone went global in September, and in this article, we’ll compare it with a device that is considered to be one of the best, if not the best foldable smartphones out there still. In this article, we’ll be comparing the HONOR Magic V3 vs OnePlus Open.
Both of these smartphones are truly compelling, but they’re also quite different. That goes for both their designs, their internals, and so on. As we usually do, we will first list the spec sheets of both smartphones. Following that, we will compare them across a number of categories, including design, display, performance, battery, cameras, and audio, With that being said, let’s get to it.
Specs
HONOR Magic V3 & OnePlus Open, respectively
– Screen size (main): 7.92-inch Foldable LTPO AMOLED (120Hz, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, 1,800 nits) 7.82-inch LTPO 3 AMOLED (120Hz, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, 2,800 nits) – Screen Size (cover): 6.43-inch LTPO OLED (120Hz, 5,000 nits) 6.31-inch LTPO3 OLED (120Hz, 2,800 nits) – Display resolution (main): 2156 x 2344 2268 x 2440 – Display resolution (cover): 2376 x 1060 2484 x 1116 – SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 – RAM: 12GB/16GB (LPDDR5X) 16GB (LPDDR5X) – Storage: 256GB/512GB/1TB (UFS 4.0) 512GB (UFS 4.0) – Rear cameras: 50MP (wide, f/1.6 aperture, 1/1.56-inch sensor size, OIS, PDAF), 40MP (ultrawide, f/2.2 aperture, 112-degree FoV), 50MP (periscope telephoto, 1/2.51-inch sensor size, OIS, 3.5x optical zoom) 48MP (wide, f/1.7 aperture, multi-directional PDAF, OIS), 48MP (ultrawide, 114-degree FoV), 64MP (periscope telephoto, 3x optical zoom, 6x “in-sensor” zoom, macro) – Front cameras: 20MP (main display, f/2.2 aperture), 32MP (cover display, f/2.4 aperture) 20MP (main display, f/2.2 aperture), 32MP (cover display, f/2.4 aperture) – Battery: 5,150mAh 4,805mAh – Charging: 66W wired, 50W wireless, 5W reverse wired (charger included) 67W wired, 5W reverse wired (charger included) – Dimensions (unfolded): 156.6 x 145.3 x 4.35 mm or 4.4 mm 153.4 x 143.1 x 5.8 mm – Dimensions (folded): 156.6 x 74.0 x 9.2 mm or 9.3 mm 153.4 x 73.3 x 11.7 mm – Weight: 226/230 grams 239/245 grams – Connectivity: 5G, LTE, NFC, Wi-Fi, USB Type-C, Bluetooth 5.3 – Security: Side-facing fingerprint scanner – OS: Android 14 with MagicOS 8.0.1 Android 13 with OxygenOS (upgradable) – Price: €1,999 $1,699 – Buy: HONOR Magic V3 (HONOR) OnePlus Open (Best Buy)
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HONOR Magic V3 vs OnePlus Open: Design
Both of these phones are book-style foldables, but they do both look and feel different in the hand. The HONOR Magic V3 comes in both glass and vegan leather models, while the same goes for the OnePlus Open. Both phones also use aluminum and some other materials in their build, though. The back side of the OnePlus Open is flat, as are its sides. The same cannot be said for the HONOR Magic V3. Its back side does have a bit more of a curve towards the edges, while its sides are definitely not flat.
Both devices do have a flat cover display with a centered display camera hole on it. The bezels are quite thin on both of their displays, actually. You will also spot a display camera hole on their main displays, but they’re located in different spots. The HONOR Magic V3’s display camera hole is centered on the right side of the main display, so it’s about three-quarters to the right. On the OnePlus Open, it’s in the top-right corner.
There is a camera oreo located on the back of both phones. The one on the OnePlus Open does protrude a bit more, though, and it’s also physically larger. It is a good anchor for your finger when you’re holding the phone, though, so I definitely appreciated it being there during my use. The in-hand feel with these two phones is considerably different. Depending on the variant you get, they can be slippery.
The HONOR Magic V3 is the lighter device of the two, that much is obvious. It is also thinner, and it feels as much in the hand. The HONOR Magic V3 is IPX8 rated for water resistance. The OnePlus Open, on the flip side, comes with an IPX4 rating, which means it’s splash resistant.
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HONOR Magic V3 vs OnePlus Open: Display
The main display on the HONOR Magic V3 is a 7.92-inch Foldable LTPO AMOLED panel with a resolution of 2156 x 2344. That panel can project up to 1 billion colors and supports HDR10+ content. It also supports Dolby Vision, and its refresh rate goes up to 120Hz. The peak brightness of this panel is 1,800 nits, and the screen-to-body ratio is at around 88%. The cover display measures 6.43 inches, and it’s an LTPO OLED display. It can project up to 1 billion colors, and Dolby Vision is supported. Its refresh rate goes up to 120Hz, while the peak brightness here is 5,000 nits, on paper. The resolution is 2376 x 1080.
The OnePlus Open, on the other hand, has a 7.82-inch Foldable LTPO3 Flexi-fluid main display. That is an AMOLED panel that can project up to 1 billion colors. Dolby Vision is supported too. The refresh rate here goes up to 120Hz, while the peak brightness is 2,800 nits. This display has a resolution of 2268 x 2440 and a screen-to-body ratio of 89%. The cover display measures 6.31 inches, and it’s an LTPO3 Super Fluid OLED display. Its resolution is 2484 x 1116, and it can project up to 1 billion colors. Dolby Vision is supported here too.
All four of these displays are very good. They do look a bit different out of the box, but both phones allow you to tweak their displays. They’re both more than sharp enough, and they’re well-optimized for a high refresh rate. The touch response is good, and the colors are vivid. The viewing angles are great on all displays. All four displays do get bright enough for all conditions, even though there is some difference in that regard too. The bottom line is, you’ll be happy with all of these displays. Both companies used quality panels and did a great job balancing them.
HONOR Magic V3 vs OnePlus Open: Performance
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC fuels the HONOR Magic V3. That is Qualcomm’s 4nm processor, which is, at this moment in time, still the company’s flagship SoC. HONOR paired that with up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and UFS 4.0 flash storage. The OnePlus Open is fueled by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which is also a 4nm chip, but a year older than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This phone comes with 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 flash storage. Neither device offers storage expansion, by the way.
The performance that both phones offer is outstanding, though. You’ll be hard-pressed to notice the difference between these two chips in day-to-day use. Both phones offer snappy performance without any lag, even though their software implementations are notably different. They open apps really fast, and they’re also great for multitasking of any kind. Both companies also have rather snappy and well-executed animations thrown into the mix.
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What about gaming? Well, despite the fact the OnePlus Open has an older chip, it still holds up in the gaming department, even when the most demanding games are concerned. Both of these phones can run anything the Google Play Store has to offer, and they can do a great job of running those games, even at the highest graphical settings. The bottom line is, the performance is not an issue on either of these two smartphones.
HONOR Magic V3 vs OnePlus Open: Battery
A 5,150mAh silicon-carbon battery sits inside the HONOR Magic V3. The OnePlus Open, on the flip side, offers a 4,805mAh battery pack. A larger battery doesn’t always mean better battery life, but in this case, it does. The HONOR Magic V3 did manage to offer better battery life for us, even though the OnePlus Open’s battery life is not bad at all. You can cross the 6-hour screen-on-time threshold on the OnePlus Open, and even go beyond that, depending on what you’re doing on the phone during your use.
The HONOR Magic V3, however, goes above and beyond that, usually. It can go over the 7-hour screen-on-time mark, once again, depending on your usage. The point is, it does offer better battery life, though the mileage may vary in your case. The battery life depends on a ton of factors, so… it will vary from one person to the next, of course. Both of these phones will offer more than enough juice for most people, but if you want a phone with better battery life, the HONOR Magic V3 is the one to get.
The HONOR Magic V3 is more versatile when it comes to charging. However, both phones charge similarly fast, at least in terms of wired charging, as that’s the only charging OnePlus’ foldable offers. The Magic V3 supports 66W wired, 50W wireless, and 5W reverse wired charging. The OnePlus Open only supports 67W wired charging. Both smartphones do come with a charger in the box.
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HONOR Magic V3 vs OnePlus Open: Cameras
The two devices have considerably different camera hardware on the back. Still, both are quite compelling and amongst the best camera smartphones in the foldable world. The HONOR Magic V3 includes a 50-megapixel main camera (1/1.56-inch sensor), a 40-megapixel ultrawide unit (112-degree FoV), and a 50-megapixel periscope telephoto unit (1/2.51-inch sensor, 3.5x optical zoom). The OnePlus Open has a 48-megapixel main camera (1/1.43-inch sensor), a 48-megapixel ultrawide camera (114-degree FoV), and a 64-megapixel periscope telephoto unit (3x optical zoom, 1/2.0-inch sensor size).
Both devices are rather capable in the camera department, but the results are different. The HONOR Magic V3 offers well-saturated images, but they’re usually less contrasty than the shots from the OnePlus Open. We preferred the color science of the OnePlus Open most of the time. Their ultrawide cameras do a good job of keeping the color profile of the main cameras, while both telephoto cameras are quite capable. Both of them have a periscope telephoto camera, though the OnePlus Open has a larger camera sensor. Both cameras do a good job, but we preferred telephoto shots from the OnePlus Open, as it balanced them out a bit better.
What about low light? Well, both do a good job in such situations too, it’s also a matter of preference. The Magic V3 tends to brighten up such scenes more than the OnePlus Open, for better or worse. The styles are entirely different, but quite compelling on both sides. The Magic V3 is a major improvement over the Magic V2, that’s for sure. The HONOR Magic V2’s camera was not all that impressive.
Audio
You will find stereo speakers on both of these smartphones. The thing is, the volume that both sets of speakers provide is average at best. It’ll be enough for most people, but don’t expect them to be as loud as you may be used to. The sound quality output is good, though.
There is no audio jack on either one of these two phones. You can use their Type-C ports to hook up your wired headphones, though, if you want. Bluetooth 5.3 is supported on both smartphones.
Meta is bringing facial recognition tech back to its apps more than three years after it shut down Facebook’s “face recognition” system amid a broader backlash against the technology. Now, the social network will begin to deploy facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight scams and help users who have lost access to their accounts, the company said in an update.
The first test will use facial recognition to detect scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. “If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad against the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures,” Meta explained in a blog post. “If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we’ll block it.”
The company said that it’s already begun to roll the feature out to a small group of celebs and public figures and that it will begin automatically enrolling more people into the feature “in the coming weeks,” though individuals have the ability to opt out of the protection. While Meta already has systems in place to review ads for potential scams, the company isn’t always able to catch “celeb-bait” ads as many legitimate companies use celebrities and public figures to market their products, Monika Bickert, VP of content policy at Meta, said in a briefing. “This is a real time process,” she said of the new facial recognition feature. “It’s faster and it’s more accurate than manual review.”
Separately, Meta is also testing facial recognition tools to address another long-running issue on Facebook and Instagram: account recovery. The company is experimenting with a new “video selfie” option that allows users to upload a clip of themselves, which Meta will then match to their profile photos, when users have been locked out of their accounts. The company will also use it in cases of a suspected account compromise to prevent hackers from accessing accounts using stolen credentials.
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The tool won’t be able to help everyone who loses access to a Facebook or Instagram account. Many business pages, for example, don’t include a profile photo of a person, so those users would need to use Meta’s existing account recovery options. But Bickert says the new process will make it much more difficult for bad actors to game the company’s support tools “It will be a much higher level of difficulty for them in trying to bypass our systems,” Bickert said.
With both new features, Meta says it will “immediately delete” facial data that’s used for comparisons and that the scans won’t be used for another purpose. The company is also making the features optional, though celebrities will need to opt-out of the scam ad protection rather than opt-ion.
That could draw criticism from privacy advocates, particularly given Meta’s messy history with facial recognition. The company previously used the technology to power automatic photo-tagging, which allowed the company to automatically recognize the faces of users in photos and videos. The feature was discontinued in 2021, with Meta deleting the facial data of more than 1 billion people, citing “growing societal concerns.” The company also faces lawsuits, notably from the Texas and Illinois, over its use of the tech. Meta paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit related to the Illinois law and $1.4 billion to resolve a similar suit in Texas.
It’s notable, then, that the new tools won’t be available in either Illinois or Texas to start. It also won’t roll out to users in the United Kingdom or European Union as the company is “continuing to have conversations there with regulators” in the region, according to Bickert. But the company is “hoping to scale this technology globally sometime in 2025,” according to a Meta spokesperson.
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Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon 8 Elite, which it claimed is the world’s fastest mobile centralized processing unit (CPU).
The CPU features Qualcomm’s second-generation custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which the company said will power new era of on-device generative AI. It’s built to handle the complexities of multi-modal AI seamlessly while prioritizing privacy. This means you’ll soon see amazing Unreal Engine 5 visuals in your mobile games.
Speaking at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui this week, Qualcomm said leading manufacturers and smartphone brands including Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and more, are poised to launch devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, in the coming weeks.
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Cisco Cheng, senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm, said in a press briefing that the new system-on-chip product is slated for mobile devices coming later this year where the priority is to balance efficiency and performance.
Cheng said that the Hexagon NPU has 12 times the performance of the previous generation. The Oryon CPU has three times the performance. And the Adreno GPU has three times the performance.
Overall, the device has more than 40 components embedded in a system-on-chip design, where customers can mix and match the features they want in their final designs.
Cheng also said the Oryon’s Prime core is a brand new microarchitecture that is 46% more efficient than the prior version. It runs at 4.32GHz.
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“This ground-up approach and our well-established understanding of mobile experiences allow us to optimize every aspect of the CPU and all that it is attached to it,” Cheng said.
It also fetches data faster than in the past, allowing the core to execute the next instruction faster. Along side two Prime cores are six performance cores. Over the years, Qualcomm has reduced its number of “efficiency” cores and it has now replaced them altogether with the performance cores. The performance cores offer a balance of performance and efficiency, reaching higher speeds of 3.53GHz. It has a 24MB cache.
Qualcomm has also optimized for in-app experiences, multitasking, generative AI, video rendering and streaming, as well as gaming.
“No other use case will benefit more than gaming,” he said.
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It will provide smoother gameplay with higher framerates and extend gaming time as much as 2.5 hours with 40% better battery efficiency and 40% better GPU performance. It supports Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system, running the game physics simulations on device in real time.
There can be as many as 9,000 objects on screen at once. The chip can store 12 megabytes of data directly on GPU. The result is longer sustained gameplay sessions, as well as better ray-tracing benchmark performance.
The Snapdragon mobile team has been working with Feral Interactive on the Grid Legends mobile racing game. It will launch exclusively with Qualcomm Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0 for Snapdragon 8 Elite users.
And for the first time ever, Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite solution will run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. It enables a massive increase in film-quality environments in mobile games.
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This platform debuts industry technologies such as the latest Qualcomm Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU) and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, all of which deliver game changing performance improvements.
These new components empower the Snapdragon 8 Elite to transform user experiences with their devices – making on-device multi-modal generative AI applications a reality on smartphones powered by Snapdragon.
These technologies also fuel many other experiences across camera capabilities, with our most powerful AI-ISP, as well as next level gaming, super-fast web browsing and more.
Gen AI applications that have emerged in the past two years will run on Snapdragon 8 Elite. It is integrating multimodal gen AI applications and delivering these experiences directly on device, swiftly and with ultra-low latency.
Cheng said the new Qualcomm AI Engine will tap the Oryon CPU for latency-critical AI tasks. The Hexagon NPU has higher throughput across accelerators for faster inferencing performance. It lets AI and computer vision workloads to coexist in the memory. AI assistant experiences can run entirely on the device.
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AI assistants running on your smartphone can also be tailored to you, running on the device itself to ensure privacy, Cheng said. AI expansion will expand a photo beyond your device’s borders, AI super resolution boosts clarity, and AI segmentations enhances and identifies individual objects in each scene.
The AI ISP (image signal processing) works with the Hexagon NPU for tasks like auto white balance. The ISP used to process an image and pass it to the NPU. Now the NPU can access the native raw sensor data and implement real-time AI enhancements at 4K and 60 frames per second. This results in more accurate results and flexibility for device makers to implement their own algorithms at any stage.
It also brings AI features previously only available on the cloud right into the device.
“We call this Insight AI” to elevate photography to new heights, Cheng said. You can capture natural skintones in the toughest lighting conditions, like when you’re heavily backlit, Cheng said. You can eliminate objects in a video using an “eraser” feature. You highlight the object and you can erase it without ever having to send video to the cloud.
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It has a second-generation 5G AI processor, as well as AI-enhanced WiFi 7, for better connectivity at lower power consumption.
“We are so excited to bring the power of Qualcomm Oryon to our Snapdragon mobile platforms for the first time. Earlier this year we debuted it in PCs, delivering remarkable experiences and unparallel battery life to PC users, energizing the industry and getting the attention of consumers,” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm, in a statement. “Today, our second generation of the Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts in our flagship mobile platform – it’s a major leap forward and we expect consumers to be thrilled with the new experiences enabled by our CPU technology.”
He added, “With leading CPU, GPU and NPU capabilities, the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers dramatic performance enhancements and power efficiency. In addition, it revolutionizes mobile experiences by offering personalized, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device enabling the understanding of speech, context, and images to enhance everything from productivity to creativity tasks while prioritizing user privacy.”
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Los Angeles is known for glitz, but there’s also a lot of grit in the air — literally. Thousands of containers are moved off and on ships at the area’s two major ports every day, almost always transferred via pollution-spewing diesel trucks. This has made Los Angeles a hotbed for all kinds of new electric vehicle and charging infrastructure projects.
A new startup called Nevoya is pouncing on the opportunity.
“It’s the best place in the country” for electric trucks, founder Sami Khan told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “The incentives are the strongest,” he remarked, “and there’s just a huge market here.”
It appears Nevoya is already making some headway. The startup’s carrying goods on electric trucks in the LA area for Fortune 500 companies that Khan declined to disclose. Nevoya also revealed to TechCrunch that it raised $3 million in a seed round led by Third Sphere and RedBlue Capital, with Necessary Ventures, Ciri Ventures, and Never Lift coming aboard as well.
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Nevoya is billing itself as the “first zero-emissions technology and trucking platform” in the U.S. The startup is exclusively buying electric trucks — all Freightliner eCascadias, so far — to offer to shippers who want to move goods cleanly. It’s also using artificial intelligence software to optimize the usage, routing, and charging of its trucks, which Nevoya says allows it to keep its prices lower than diesel.
Khan and his co-founders make up a triumvirate of complementary expertise that seems appropriate for such an endeavor. Khan spent a few years at McLaren Applied, the British automaker’s innovation arm, but he also spent a half-decade working in private equity. John Verdon led business development and commercial partnerships at Waymo. And Tom Atwood built a predictive analytics startup that sold to supply chain company Project44, where he spent the last two years working on route optimization and infrastructure planning software.
The funding will go toward growing operations, but not to acquiring trucks. Khan said those purchases will be made with debt — a strategy he’s comfortable with following his experiences in private equity. Khan believes this approach also makes Nevoya more attractive to investors in an environment where there’s still a lot of hesitance around hard tech. While he said his team “kissed a lot of frogs,” that process led them to investors like RedBlue — which is run by the former founding partner of transportation startup fund Maniv Mobility, Olaf Sakkers.
“Those guys were people that we had a first conversation with, and within a week it was at a term sheet, because they got it, and they understood,” he said. “The size of the pie, and the opportunity, is so, so huge.”
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Khan stressed that competing with diesel trucks on cost will be hard. But that pressure is mitigated by how easy it has been to strike up conversations with companies that ship goods through the LA area.
“All of these Fortune 500 brands are looking to reduce their Scope 3 emissions (indirect emissions) and effectively have no solutions,” he said. With Nevoya, the promise Khan makes to these companies is: “There is no difference to your business, because we take care of the charging. We have the drivers. We have the trucks.”
Even as Nevoya is still working to get to cost parity with diesel, Khan said these big companies almost don’t care. “They want to decarbonize so badly that they are willing to pay a premium, and so for those [customers], we are actually going out at a rate that is higher than diesel.”
“What is so exciting about building this business is that you will get through the door at any shipper in the United States,” Khan said. “We have not failed there once — as soon as you say you have electric vehicles, they pick up the phone. They escalate.”
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As it signs on more companies, Nevoya’s software can efficiently piggyback shipments from different customers to get the most out of the electric trucks in its fleet. That helps it lower costs.
Khan said Nevoya is currently hopping around different charging locations — this is another place where the optimization software will really have to shine — but eventually wants to build its own charging infrastructure. At that point, Khan said he could see Nevoya moving into smaller-class trucks, too.
Nevoya is also eyeing geographic expansion in the United States. It’s starting that push with a market that is about as different as its home base as one can find: Texas.
Despite the myriad social and political differences, Khan views Texas as a similarly well-suited state to drum up business. It may not have the pot-of-gold incentives like California, but Khan said Texas’ looser regulatory framework and cheaper electricity put it on par with the financial modeling his team has done for operating in Nevoya’s home state.
If you want to subscribe to Disney Plus or Hulu on your iPhone, you can’t do that anymore. Support documents for Disney Plus and Hulu now say that new and returning subscribers to those streaming services can’t sign up through Apple, as reported by MacRumors.
I’m not currently paying for Disney Plus, so out of curiosity, I tried logging into my account through the iOS app to see what would happen. After entering my email and password, I was greeted by a message that says: “Unfortunately, this app doesn’t support in-app sign up. Finish setting up your account on the website. Create and manage your account at disneyplus.com/next.” Hulu’s iOS app also pushes you to the Hulu website if you try to log in without an active subscription.
Screenshots by Jay Peters / The Verge
Presumably, the company is making this change to stop Apple from taking a cut of new subscription revenues for Disney Plus and Hulu. However, if you already subscribe to those services through Apple, Disney says you’ll still be billed through Apple.
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Disney didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Disney is just the latest company to stop new subscriptions through its iOS apps. Netflix stopped letting users subscribe through its iOS app in 2018 and cut off Apple billing for legacy subscribers earlier this year. Spotify also doesn’t let people subscribe through the iOS app — in the app, it includes the cheeky message that “we know, it’s not ideal.”
Tons of reports and rumors have gone flying around concerning the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, including release dates, clock speeds, and more. But thanks to a new leak from the motherboard manufacturer, we may now have a good idea of the specs it’s packing.
Maxsun, which manufactures the motherboard for the processor, has seemed to reveal some juicy information regarding the chip. Interestingly enough, it’s referred to as the AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D in the leak but most likely it’s the Ryzen 7. According to the listing, it has a TDP of 120W and 96MB of cache, including 32MB of L3 cache and 64MB of 3D V-Cache. This means the cache size is still the same as in previous models, which honestly isn’t great.
The leaked document also reveals that the base clock speed is 4.7 GHz — 900 MHz faster than the 9700X. Most likely this is due to the TDP being higher in the 9800X3D. The leak also states that it’ll have a boosted clock speed of 5.2 GHz, which would oddly be 300MHz slower than the 9700X. This all lines up with an earlier leak that confirms the same information. As for single-core clock speed, that hasn’t been revealed at this time but it’s assumed to be 5.4/5.5GHz.
If past reports are to be trusted, then we should have official confirmation of the 9800X3D’s specs on October 25, 2024. Though most likely the actual launch date would be sometime in November 2024.
Disappointing rumored performance
Though base clock speeds seem to be promising enough (while boosted not so much), a recent report from a German tech site seems to point to rather unimpressive benchmark scores. In gaming comparisons, the Ryzen 9800X3D is 11% faster than the 7800X3D in Far Cry 6. Shadow of the Tomb Raider sees an uptick of only 4% and Black Myth: Wukong a dismal 2%.
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Cinebench does look a bit more promising in this regard, with a huge performance increase of around 18% and 28% faster than its predecessor for single-core and multi-core, respectively. But still, considering this is supposed to be a next-gen chip, the overall results are rather lackluster.
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