TechCrunch Top 3

SpaceX cleared to fly Starship again after booster failure in May: This will be the first Starship test flight for SpaceX as a public company, testing the market's appetite for the company's "fly, fail, fix" approach to rocket development, which often ends in fireballs. Read More

Uber’s robotaxi lobbying effort puts it on a collision course with Waymo: Washington, D.C. has become a battleground for Uber and Waymo's competing views. Read More

LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire, citing 'serious concerns' over civil liberties and privacy: The LAPD, one of Flock's biggest government customers, is ending its contract with the company citing civil liberties concerns. Read More

A message from General Compute

General Compute is making a $300m bet against GPUs

General Compute raised $15m to build the worlds first ASIC cloud. By removing the GPU bottleneck, it runs frontier LLMs up to 16x faster than standard GPU clouds. ASIC silicon is also far more energy efficient, so it deploys in air-cooled data centers, making growth and expansion dramatically easier.

Learn more here

Morning Must-Reads

Waze adds new AI-powered features and customization updates: Some of the new features are powered by Google's Gemini AI assistant, which reflects the the tech giant's broader push to integrate Gemini across its products while also better positioning Waze to compete with rival services such as Apple Maps. Read More

Reed Jobs would rather talk about curing cancer than his last name: When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, his firm Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the venture outfit has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs' words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. "I didn't expect Yosemite to be moving this fast," he said. Read More

TechCrunch Mobility: A robotaxi ultimatum: Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. Read More

Smart glasses without a camera? Even Realities bets productivity beats recording everyone: The glasses are targeted at people who might be constantly in meetings, giving presentations, and traveling to countries where different languages are spoken. Read More

This slushie machine was a lifesaver during NYC's heat wave: Ninja's latest slushie machine builds on the popularity of the original Slushi, but with a big upgrade. Read More