EV drivers may relish that charging networks are climbing over each other to provide needed juice alongside roads and highways.

But they may relish even more not having to make many recharging stops along the way, as their EV soaks up the bountiful energy coming straight from the sun.

That’s the bet from Aptera Motors, a crowdfunded, California-based maker of solar-powered electric vehicles.

Aptera says it just completed a successful test drive of ‘PI-2’, the first production-intent version of its futuristic-looking two-seater, three-wheel solar electric vehicle. The EV’s latest version was engineered to rigorously test performance metrics such as range, solar charging capability, and efficiency, Aptera says.

“Driving our first production-intent vehicle marks an extraordinary moment in Aptera’s journey,” said Steve Fambro, Aptera’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO in a statement. “It demonstrates real progress toward delivery a vehicle that redefines efficiency, sustainability, and energy independence.”

Aptera says it already has over 50,000 reservations for its EV, which are scheduled to start being delivered in the second quarter of 2025. Last year, it unveiled a $33,200 launch version featuring an under 6-seconds 0-60 mph acceleration time, a battery pack providing a range of 400 miles, and a solar charge range of 40 miles per day.

The Aptera EV also features Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) port to charge its battery.

The company said its production-intent models will continue to evolve over time as they undergo further tests, including for key metrics such as solar charging rates and watt-hours per miles.

Other versions of the Aptera EV were said to provide as much as 1,000 miles of range with a 0-60 mph acceleration in 3.5 seconds.

Aptera has so far raised over $100 million since launching a crowdfunding program three years ago.

Solar-powered electric vehicles are also being developed by the likes of Germany’s Sono Motors and the Netherlands’ Lightyear, and by big automakers such as Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz.

Well, the time has finally come! After months of waiting and speculation, the rumored ChatGPT search feature has finally landed. With that, OpenAI is properly set to take on Google.

We first got news about this feature a few months ago, and people who use ChatGPT often for information will love this feature. If you’re a free user, then we have some bad news. The ChatGPT Search feature is only for ChatGPT Plus users for the moment. OpenAI will make this functionality available for its free and Enterprise users over the next couple of weeks. So, you’ll need to wait a bit if you want to use this feature.

ChatGPT now has a search feature

Since the beginning of this whole AI explosion, one of the things that companies fantasized about was the AI-powered search engine. The AI search engine already exists, thanks to Perplexity. Well, OpenAI’s search engine is similar to that one.

When you search for something, you’ll see an AI-generated explanation of what you searched for. This section will take up most of the screen. That’s not very different from what we’ve seen so far. However, off to the right side, you’ll see a Citations section. This will house the sources where ChatGPT got its information. In the image provided by The Verge, we see a list of five sources listed to the side. We’re not sure if the list includes more sources off-screen.

Five sources is not a bad amount, and they’re shown pretty prominently. ChatGPT isn’t hiding them behind a button. This shows that the company is thinking about the sources it’s surfacing.

In the screenshot, we see image results as well. This is good, as it shows that ChatGPT is trying to be a proper search engine.

Another way this feature is great is that ChatGPt can now access current events. Before, if you used the chatbot, you’d have to deal with a knowledge cut-off date. For example, when ChatGPT first launched, the model it used was more than a year out of date.  However, if you’re using ChatGPT for research, you’ll have access to more modern events.

Should Google be worried? Probably not yet. However, with ChatGPT’s massive user base, it may only be a matter of time.

There’s a great deal on Apple’s over at Amazon right now. The earbuds are currently 28 percent off, bringing them down to $179. That’s just $10 more than the all-time-low price we saw during October Prime Day, and will save you $70. The AirPods Pro 2 got an update earlier this year that , most notably a suite of hearing health tools and the capability to be used as hearing aids. On top of that, they now offer new gesture-based Siri Interactions and Voice Isolation to reduce background noise when you’re on a call.

Apple

Siri Interactions allow for hands- and voice-free Siri controls; you can respond to Siri’s questions simply by nodding or shaking your head. The second-generation AirPods Pro are users, with better sound quality than their predecessors and seamless integration with the other devices in the Apple ecosystem. The AirPods Pro 2 offer active noise cancellation and transparency mode, which allows for more natural conversations while they’re in your ear. They also support spatial audio and Dolby Atmos for certain media.

The buds come with four pairs of silicone tips in different sizes and are IP54 rated for protection against dust and sweat. They get up to 6 hours of listening time (though this will be less with certain features, like ANC, enabled) and up to 30 hours with a little help from the USB-C MagSafe Charging Case.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

A customer service chatbot confidently describes a product that doesn’t exist. A financial AI invents market data. A healthcare bot provides dangerous medical advice. These AI hallucinations, once dismissed as amusing quirks, have become million-dollar problems for companies rushing to deploy artificial intelligence.

Today, Patronus AI, a San Francisco startup that recently secured $17 million in Series A funding, launched what it calls the first self-serve platform to detect and prevent AI failures in real-time. Think of it as a sophisticated spell-checker for AI systems, catching errors before they reach users.

Inside the AI safety net: How it works

“Many companies are grappling with AI failures in production, facing issues like hallucinations, security vulnerabilities, and unpredictable behavior,” said Anand Kannappan, Patronus AI’s CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat. The stakes are high: Recent research by the company found that leading AI models like GPT-4 reproduce copyrighted content 44% of the time when prompted, while even advanced models generate unsafe responses in over 20% of basic safety tests.

The timing couldn’t be more critical. As companies rush to implement generative AI capabilities — from customer service chatbots to content generation systems — they’re discovering that existing safety measures fall short. Current evaluation tools like Meta’s LlamaGuard perform below 50% accuracy, making them little better than a coin flip.

Patronus AI’s solution introduces several innovations that could reshape how businesses deploy AI. Perhaps most significant is its “judge evaluators” feature, which allows companies to create custom rules in plain English.

“You can customize evaluation to exactly [meet] your product needs,” Varun Joshi, Patronus AI’s product lead, told VentureBeat. “We let customers write out in English what they want to evaluate and check for.” A financial services company might specify rules about regulatory compliance, while a healthcare provider could focus on patient privacy and medical accuracy.

From detection to prevention: The technical breakthrough

The system’s cornerstone is Lynx, a breakthrough hallucination detection model that outperforms GPT-4 by 8.3% in detecting medical inaccuracies. The platform operates at two speeds: a quick-response version for real-time monitoring and a more thorough version for deeper analysis. “The small versions can be used for real-time guardrails, and the large ones might be more appropriate for offline analysis,” Joshi told VentureBeat.

Beyond traditional error checking, the company has developed specialized tools like CopyrightCatcher, which detects when AI systems reproduce protected content, and FinanceBench, the industry’s first benchmark for evaluating AI performance on financial questions. These tools work in concert with Lynx to provide comprehensive coverage against AI failures.

Beyond simple guard rails: Reshaping AI safety

The company has adopted a pay-as-you-go pricing model, starting at $10 per 1000 API calls for smaller evaluators and $20 per 1000 API calls for larger ones. This pricing structure could dramatically increase access to AI safety tools, making them available to startups and smaller businesses that previously couldn’t afford sophisticated AI monitoring.

Early adoption suggests major enterprises see AI safety as a critical investment, not just a nice-to-have feature. The company has already attracted clients including HP, AngelList, and Pearson, along with partnerships with tech giants like Nvidia, MongoDB, and IBM.

What sets Patronus AI apart is its focus on improvement rather than just detection. “We can actually highlight the span of the specific piece of text where the hallucination is,” Kannappan explained. This precision allows engineers to quickly identify and fix problems, rather than just knowing something went wrong.

The race against AI hallucinations

The launch comes at a pivotal moment in AI development. As large language models like GPT-4 and Claude become more powerful and widely used, the risks of AI failures grow correspondingly larger. A hallucinating AI system could expose companies to legal liability, damage customer trust, or worse.

Recent regulatory moves, including President Biden’s AI executive order and the EU’s AI Act, suggest that companies will soon face legal requirements to ensure their AI systems are safe and reliable. Tools like Patronus AI’s platform could become essential for compliance.

“Good evaluation is not just protecting against a bad outcome — it’s deeply about improving your models and improving your products,” Joshi emphasizes. This philosophy reflects a maturing approach to AI safety, moving from simple guard rails to continuous improvement.

The real test for Patronus AI isn’t just catching mistakes — it will be keeping pace with AI’s breakneck evolution. As language models grow more sophisticated, their hallucinations may become harder to spot, like finding increasingly convincing forgeries.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Every time an AI system invents facts, recommends dangerous treatments, or generates copyrighted content, it erodes the trust these tools need to transform business. Without reliable guardrails, the AI revolution risks stumbling before it truly begins.

In the end, it’s a simple truth: If artificial intelligence can’t stop making things up, it may be humans who end up paying the price.

Getty Images

Getty Images

Getty Images

What was agreed at the summit?

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder’s seat, working on an in-person social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his $310 million Bonobos exit don’t have as much to do with entrepreneurship as they do with staying sane.

When Dunn was in college, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he didn’t get adequate treatment until 2016, when he was hospitalized during a manic episode for the second time.

“The manic state is just a disaster — that’s like being in psychosis, you know, messianic delusions. … You can’t accomplish anything in that state,” Dunn said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. The incident was enough of a wakeup call that 16 years after his initial diagnosis, he finally took his condition seriously and started going to therapy, taking medication, and monitoring his sleep.

Dunn wrote a book called “Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind,” documenting the parallel processes of building Bonobos and figuring out how to accept and then manage his bipolar disorder. But the lessons from the book are applicable for entrepreneurs beyond those with Dunn’s diagnosis.

“We all have mental health, right? It doesn’t take a diagnosis to suffer or struggle,” he said.

Still, entrepreneurs tend to report a higher incidence of mental health issues throughout their lives than the average person.

“There’s definitely a correlation between neurodivergence and creativity,” he said. “I don’t know if entrepreneurship attracts people who are neurodivergent, or it makes them more neurodivergent, but there’s certainly some kind of a virtuous and sometimes unvirtuous cycle there.”

That interplay between mental illness and entrepreneurship is even more palpable for Dunn, who says that the state of hypomania — the high of bipolar disorder, as opposed to the crushing depressive periods — could be conducive to running a startup.

“Here are the DSM criteria for [hypomania]: rapid speech, increased ideation, grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, ability to be more creative … more or less the central casting traits of an entrepreneur having a good day,” he said. “I was able to benefit from that, but the price that I paid was ultimately too high. I was depressed with suicidal ideation for between two to three months a year, and then ultimately, the full mania and psychosis came raging back, which was catastrophic.”

But even in an astonishingly productive hypomanic state, Dunn doesn’t think he was the greatest boss or colleague. He said that one of the side effects of hypomania is becoming irritable when people disagree with you, which is essential to running a collaborative company. Now, running Pie, Dunn welcomes this debate.

“When we disagree, let’s go, let’s disagree even more, because we’re going to be able to make a better decision coming out of it,” he said.

While discussions about mental health have become more mainstream, founders still worry about the stigma of revealing a diagnosis to colleagues and investors. Dunn is an adviser to the Founder Mental Health Pledge, which asks investors to advocate for the mental health of the founders they invest in. But he’s not naive that the stigma is still present — when founders ask for his advice about when to disclose a mental health concern to investors, he says to wait six weeks until after the deal closes.

“We raised $125 million at Bonobos — would you give $125 million to someone who can either be psychotic or catatonically depressed?” Dunn said. “But also, you shouldn’t do what I did and hide it, because then, you know, when there is a crisis, it’s a surprise.”

Dunn’s discussion of his experience with bipolar disorder doesn’t seem to have hurt his ability to fundraise, though — Pie just raised a $11.5 million Series A. As public as he is about the severity of bipolar disorder, he’s also open about how his regimen of therapy and medication have helped him live a stable life.

“I treat bipolar as my Olympic regimen. For Simone Biles, it’s how to navigate and win the gold,” he said. “For me, the gold medal is to die of something else, right? Because the horrible thing about bipolar is the suicide rate.”

Now, the next test for Dunn is to do the work it takes to make Pie a success without sacrificing his stability.

“Here’s the challenge,” Dunn said. “We want to have good mental health, and we want our teams to have balance in mental health, and yet a 40-hour workweek doesn’t cut it. You can’t change the world with a bunch of people working 40 hours a week.”

One way Dunn has navigated this fine line is to be open with job candidates about what the work will entail, as well as how he will support them with company benefits.

“I have a new spiel I give when recruiting, which is, this is a 50- to 60-hour-per-week job, and in return, you’re going to get two awesome things. One, you’re going to learn more and grow more and develop more. Two, you’ve got equity,” he said.

Like any startup leader, Dunn wants his team to work hard, but he believes there’s a way to do that without it backfiring. In describing his time at Bonobos in “Burn Rate,” Dunn writes, “I came to a classic mistaken conclusion of an immature startup founder: if the business isn’t working, then we must not be working hard enough.”

There’s no denying that founders need to work hard — but taking care of oneself is part of that hard work.