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Waymo is expanding its teen account program, launched in Phoenix last year, to Nashville, letting riders aged 13-17 use its robotaxis with a parent or guardian linked to the account. Teens can hail rides anywhere within Waymo's Nashville service area and bring up to three friends aged 13-17 along. A company spokesperson said this is the first of many such launches planned across additional markets in coming months.
CNET's daily Wordle guide confirmed that the solution for puzzle #1916, released Sept. 17, is THETA, the Greek letter often used in Greek life symbols. The site also provided hints beforehand, noting the word starts with T, ends with A, contains two vowels and one repeated letter. Wednesday's answer, WISPY, and other recent solutions were listed for reference.
Research led by former SEC chief economist Susan Wachter finds that hyperscalers—Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Oracle—must boost their own productivity nearly threefold by 2030 to cover the cost of the roughly $5 trillion they're projected to spend on AI infrastructure over four years. Current AI revenues sit around $150-200 billion annually, far short of the buildout's scale, according to former SEC chair Gary Gensler.
Waymo has started letting select members of the public hail rides from its self-driving fleet in Las Vegas, weeks after Nevada regulators granted final approval. The service launches with dozens of its new Ojai minivans covering part of the Strip and Boulder Junction, with riders needing an access code before wider rollout in coming months.
Fast Company named Google a winner in its 2026 Innovation by Design Awards for the way it is shaping AI-powered interfaces. The recognition points to Google's role in redefining user interaction patterns beyond the classic search box it introduced decades ago.
A new analysis finds Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet collected roughly $28 billion in federal contracts between 2018 and 2022, with the five largest tech contracts from 2019-2022 carrying combined ceilings of at least $53 billion. Separately, venture capital poured nearly $100 billion into defense tech startups from 2021 to 2023, a 40 percent jump over the prior seven years combined.
In December 2025, the Japanese government formally adopted Hepburn romanization as the national standard for writing Japanese in the Latin alphabet, marking the first update to romanization rules in roughly seventy years. Hepburn, popularized by missionary James Curtis Hepburn in an 1867 dictionary but originally developed by a scholarly group called the Rōmaji-kai, transcribes Japanese sounds so English speakers can approximate correct pronunciation just by reading the letters.
Lyft has launched Waymo robotaxi access in Nashville, marking the first city where Waymo vehicles appear on both the Lyft and Waymo apps simultaneously. Riders requesting Standard, Priority Pickup, Wait & Save or Extra Comfort trips may be matched with a driverless Waymo car, provided both pickup and drop-off fall within a designated central Nashville zone covering areas like Downtown, East Nashville and Midtown.
Google Cloud and Accenture are forming the Accenture Gemini Enterprise Business Group, a joint unit that will place trained engineers directly inside client companies to help them adopt Google's AI tools. Google plans to train up to 1,000 Accenture engineers for this 'forward-deployed' role, following similar moves by OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Google unveiled Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash-tier model release in six weeks, alongside a new cybersecurity model for government and enterprise clients. The launch coincided with a federal judge rejecting the Justice Department's demand that Google divest its ad exchange, and with Berkshire Hathaway's Greg Abel publicly praising Alphabet's AI standing.
Big Tech's hyperscalers—Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft—are increasingly relying on debt issuance, equity sales, and off-balance-sheet financing arrangements to fund surging AI infrastructure investment. Capital expenditures have exceeded 100% of operating cash flow at some of these firms, prompting Amazon and Alphabet to sell bonds globally, Alphabet to issue equity, and Meta to pursue bond sales and partnerships with alternative asset managers for data center funding.
Salesforce's fiscal second-quarter results topped Wall Street estimates, with revenue up 11% to $11.35 billion and net income jumping 87% to $3.53 billion, partly fueled by a $2.6 billion gain on its investment in Anthropic. The company also raised its full-year revenue outlook to $46.1-$46.4 billion and unveiled Claudeforce, a Claude-powered plugin that automates sales tasks like email drafting and record updates.