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Flying often first requires crawling, in a car, in slow or stopped traffic that eventually treats you to a view of airplanes soaring away from your ground-anchored vehicular misery. After decades of hype about flying cars, the past 10 years have seen a pivot to something of a car-plane hybrid: an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that provides taxi-like service. In conceptall we have to go by, since the only way to watch an eVTOL speeding somebody to LAX is in a computer-rendered videothis can look appealing. But after years of promising services that have yet to take off, eVTOL startups need to go beyond impressing investors. They need to prove to regulators that they can deliver safe, reliable service in already-crowded airspace. And then they need to earn the business of paying customers who have other transportation choices. Their basic bet that enough people will spend potentially large sums of money to save time is not crazy. But its hardly a sure thing, either. To understand the gap between a private demo and public service, consider Joby Aviation, a Santa Cruz, California, firm that says its within months of launching commercial operations. At Novembers Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, the company pitched its vision for the eVTOL future. This is not just a rendering, this is not just an idea, vouched Eric Allison, chief product officer. Joby Aviations Eric Allison at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal [Photo By Ramsey Cardy/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images] But the first use case he laid out did not involve whisking people to San Francisco International Airport. Instead, he talked up how Jobys six-rotor eVTOL aircraftwhich seats four passengers and a pilot, can hit 200 mph, and offers a maximum range of 150 miles on a chargecould replace the driving commute he endured from Mountain View to downtown San Francisco. That trip that took me one and a half hours on a daily basis could maybe take 15 minutes if we don’t go on the road but we fly, he said. Outside of the opening credits of Futurama, however, the idea of large numbers of people packing into air taxis to get to a crowded business district doesnt scale. Plus, we already know how to upgrade a commute like that: not with expensive aircraft transporting a few people each but with fast and frequent train service. Like, for example, the quick, quiet electric-powered trains now plying Caltrain routes up and down the peninsula. Product-market fits Allison expanded on Jobys plans for service to airportsdestinations that already feature landing facilities and have traffic spread more evenly throughout the dayand its partnerships with Delta Air Lines, Virgin Atlantic, and All Nippon Airways (ANA). Predicting passenger service in Dubai next year, Allison emphasized that Joby isnt flying vaporware: This is something that we are executing on. In an interview after his presentation, he offered a more grounded version of Jobys pitch for its S4 battery-electric air taxi. The companys ambitions for its eVTOL do include speedy aerial commutes for the well-heeled, something Joby is already exploring via the Blade Air Mobility helicopter service it bought in August in a transaction valued at $125 million. In November, Blade announced the start of weekday helicopter commuting flights between Westchester County Airport and Manhattan at fares of $125 to $225 per ride. Allison said the company aims to beat those rates with its eVTOL service and instead roughly match Uber Black pricing on a per-seat basis. We think there’s a ton of potential in most of the highly congested big cities, not just in the U.S. but around the world, he said. Uber isnt merely a comparison point but a partner; in 2021, Joby bought the ride-hail companys Uber Elevate division while Uber deepened its investment in Joby from $50 million to $125 million and agreed to integrate Jobys future services into its apps. Jobys business model doesnt assume software will replace a human pilot, although Allison allowed that in the long run, we think autonomy plays a big role in this. Competing costs But airport trips constitute the bulk of Jobys pitch. On that front, Allison acknowledged that the company will have to compete with existing tansit options. Thats a reality often left out of eVTOL pitches that pretend single-seat airport rides like Chicagos CTA Blue Line to OHare, San Franciscos BART to SFO, and Washingtons Metro to Dulles International Airport dont already offer traffic-immune service between city centers and international airports at fares as low as $2.50. We’re not looking to replace public transport, Allison said. Were creating a new option that has unique features that you can’t get through any of the other modes. [Photo: Joby Aviation] First among them is speed, but theres also the view that Blade passengers enjoy today: You just get this fantastic view of the skyline as you’re flying down the river and swinging over to go to the airport, Allison said. For what Blade chargesits site lists fares from $195 to $295 for flights from Manhattan to JFKthat view had better be exceptional. Uber, meanwhile, quoted about $145 for an Uber Black ride from midtown Manhattan to JFK and $100 for UberX early on the Tuesday afternoon of Thanksgiving week. Taking New Yorks subway or the Long Island Rail Road to the AirTrain that links those transit systems to JFK (a two-seat itinerary less convenient and pricier than the airport-rail options in Chicago, D.C., or San Francisco) costs $11.40 to $15.50 for most riders. Infrastructure weaknesses Efficient eVTOL rides will demand a long series of sign-offs from local infrastructure operators and authorities. The easiest looks to be agreements with airports to streamline a passenger connection apart from the usual passenger entrances. Joby is working with Delta and other airline partners on that, Allison said. He added that Joby is assuming airport transfers will need time for travelers to clear security at their departing terminal. Its eVTOL, meanwhile, will need time for a quick, 10-minute battery charge. Joby will also need to build out vertiports for its aircraft across its target markets, which will be a lot more involved than clearing space for its operations at airports. A lawsuit the company filed against its rival Archer Aviation offered a peek at one part of that strategy: exclusive deals with property developers, one of which Joby alleges its former executive George Kivork disrupted by taking sensitive data about that deal to Archer. Archer denied the allegations in a statement from Eric Lentell, chief legal and strategy officer, that read, in part: Joby alleges we used their trade secrets to win a deal with a developer but the reality is that Archer has no deal with this developer and Mr. Kivork did not bring any Joby confidential information to Archer. Joby, in turn, declined to comment beyond the details of its complaint, filed in Santa Cruz Superior Court on November 19. The regulatory road ahead Getting this far has not been cheap for Joby. On November 5, the firm reported a Q3 loss of $401 million, versus $144 million in the year-ago quarter, with $978 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. Securing U.S. regulatory approval of its eVTOL will clear the companys path to revenue service. On the day of its earnings release, it announced that it had begun powered-up testing of the first aircraft built to the final design that the Federal Aviation Administration will need to certify. Joby aims to have test flights, conducted by its own and FAA pilots, start later this year. Allison declined to predict when the FAA will issue a type certification for its eVTOL. The company is exploring ways to launch pre-commercial operations in Dubai ahead of that certification. In the U.S. it plans to apply for a new eVTOL pilot-operations program announced by the FAA in Septemberthe latest in a series of moves by the air-safety agency to adapt its regulations for this new category of aircraft. [Photo: Joby Aviation] But overall, Jobys plans envisage FAA certification
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A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio.“Welcome to the talking baby podcast,” says the infant, wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster. “On today’s episode, we’ll be talking to the weird-looking person who lives at my house.”So begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that’s attracted millions of views on social media. They’re a nod to the 1989 movie “Look Who’s Talking” but produced in a matter of hours and without a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget.AI helped do all of that, but it didn’t craft the punch lines. It’s a relief to comedian Jon Lajoie, who made the videos, that AI chatbots just aren’t “inherently funny.”“It can’t write comedy,” said Lajoie. “It can’t do any of that.”For now, at least, they won’t take his job.Lajoie’s viral videos have gained him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer that’s he’s not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what all this means for the future of his very human craft of making people laugh.King Willonius is not feeling so cautious. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called “BBL Drizzy” that made fun of rapper Drake during the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. He’s since moved into making AI video parodies like “I’m McLovin It (Popeye’s Diss Song)” and “I Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel song).”“It’s very similar to somebody who’s writing for The Onion or SNL,” Willonius said. “I try to find out, OK, what’s my comedic angle on this particular topic? And then I’ll generate a video from that.”He starts with writing his own notes on an idea, then refines it with a chatbot, and puts that language known as a prompt into AI tools that can generate imagery, video, music and voices. The key, he says, is to keep iterating.But he wouldn’t just ask it for a joke Willonius says most chatbot-generated comedy lacks the “nuances or complexities that it takes for jokes to really land.”A scholar of comedy, Michelle Robinson, said “a lot of the stuff that I’ve seen AI produce is corny as hell.”“It does seem fluent in the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes they’re slightly off,” said Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They may be moderately funny, but I think they’re really missing an important element of what makes us laugh.”What are they missing? She’s not totally sure, except that most good jokes are a little edgy or dangerous and chatbots can’t seem to calibrate “whatever provocation is in the joke to the moment that we’re living in.”Caleb Warren, a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona, said that leaves comedy writers with an opportunity to make use of tools that can’t completely outsource their skills.“The ideas that are driving the humor are coming from the human comedian,” but the AI tools can help them execute and illustrate them, Warren said.Willonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during Hollywood’s actor and writer strikes in 2023.“I leaned all the way into AI because I didn’t know what else to do with my free time,” he said. “I was doing everything I could to try to break into Hollywood. And once the writers’ strike happened, that kind of shut that down. I started to learn these AI tools and get really good at them and started to cultivate an audience.”While Willonius saw an opening, the rise of generative AI has stoked division and posed challenges to other professional comedians.Sarah Silverman joined book authors in suing leading chatbot makers, alleging they infringed the copyright of her “The Bedwetter” memoir. The daughter of the late Robin Williams called it “gross” and “maddening” when users of OpenAI’s AI video generator Sora conjured up realistic “deepfakes” of the beloved actor to churn out what she described as “horrible TikTok slop puppeteering.”“You’re not making art, you’re making disgusting, overprocessed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else’s throat hoping they’ll give you a little thumbs-up and like it,” Zelda Williams wrote in October.And the estate of legendary comic George Carlin last year settled a lawsuit against podcasters who purportedly cloned his voice to make a fake hourslong comedy special.Comics have also relished mocking AI tools. A recent “South Park” episode called “Sora Not Sorry” had a bumbling police detective investigate a scourge of fake videos.Lajoie, known for his work on the TV series “The League” and comic songs on YouTube, tried to see what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to help craft a bizarre movie script idea. He said it gave him something “super boring” about “grandma’s dentures and a talking raccoon.”“That level of human creativity, it can’t mimic yet or at least maybe I’m not great at prompting,” he said. Instead, he found it useful to cheaply animate ideas he would otherwise never have pursued such as the talking baby, birds wearing jeans, or a podcasting Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny who’s never heard of him.The prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Willonius to exhibit their video creations this fall at a new AI gallery space in Manhattan, part of a promotion of AI creativity tool startups that the firm invests in.Willonius obliged. Lajoie ended up bowing out, after an interview with The Associated Press in which he voiced doubts about what he described as AI’s “Napster phase.” The music-sharing website shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations.The investment firm’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has been bullish about AI’s potential to bring new life into filmmaking and comedy. On a November podcast, he blamed Hollywood opposition to its adoption on “woke activists (who) have picked up AI as the new thing they’re going to agitate about.” He compared it to resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became commonplace.Lajoie said he shared his early AI video experiments with a few friends who are “anti-AI; real, real, anti-AI” and they were surprised by how well the sketches retained Lajoie’s own comedic voice.He insists he’s no AI expert, just “a creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other.” But even editing the sketches requires understanding comedic timing, and he has no interest in ceding tht part to a machine.“The thing with comedy is it’s so related to performance, delivery and point of view,” Lajoie said. “Do AIs have a point of view? They can grab a few points of view from different people.”“And when it does have a point of view, I think that’s when we all should be afraid for all of the reasons that the Terminator has taught us,” he said. Matt O’Brien, AP Technology Writer
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More than a decade ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished without a trace, sparking one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries.Despite years of multinational searches, investigators still do not know exactly what happened to the plane or its 239 passengers and crew.On Wednesday, Malaysia’s government said American marine robotics company Ocean Infinity would resume a seabed hunt for the missing plane on Dec. 30, reigniting hopes that the plane might finally be found.A massive search in the southern Indian Ocean, where the jet is believed to have gone down, turned up almost nothing. Apart from a few small fragments that washed ashore, no bodies or large wreckage have ever been recovered.Here’s what we know about the deadly aviation tragedy. ‘Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero’ The Boeing 777 disappeared from air-traffic radar 39 minutes after departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8, 2014.The pilot’s last radio call to Kuala Lumpur “Good night, Malaysian Three Seven Zero” was the final communication before the plane crossed into Vietnamese airspace and failed to check in with controllers there.Minutes later, the plane’s transponder, which broadcasts its location, shut down. Military radar showed the jet turn back over the Andaman Sea, and satellite data suggested it continued flying for hours, possibly until fuel exhaustion, before crashing into a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean.Theories about what happened range from hijacking to cabin depressurization or power failure. There was no distress call, ransom demand, evidence of technical failure or severe weather.Malaysian investigators in 2018 cleared the passengers and crew but did not rule out “unlawful interference.” Authorities have said someone deliberately severed communications and diverted the plane. Passengers came from many countries MH370 carried 227 passengers, including five young children, and 12 crew members. Most passengers were Chinese, but there were also citizens from the United States, Indonesia, France, Russia and elsewhere.Among those aboard were two young Iranians traveling on stolen passports, a group of Chinese calligraphy artists, 20 employees of U.S. tech firm Freescale Semiconductor, a stunt double for actor Jet Li and several families with young children. Many families lost multiple members. Largest underwater search in history Search operations began in the South China Sea between Malaysia and Vietnam, then expanded to the Andaman Sea and the southern Indian Ocean.Australia, Malaysia and China coordinated the largest underwater search in history, covering roughly 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) of seabed off western Australia. Aircraft, vessels equipped with sonar and robotic submarines scoured the ocean for signs of the plane.Signals thought to be from the plane’s black box turned out to be from other sources, and no wreckage was found. The first confirmed debris was a flaperon discovered on Réunion Island in July 2015, with additional fragments later found along the east coast of Africa. The search was suspended in January 2017.In 2018, U.S. marine robotics company Ocean Infinity resumed the hunt under a “no find, no fee” agreement, focusing on areas identified through debris drift studies, but it ended without success. The challenge of locating remains One reason why such an extensive search failed to turn up clues is that no one knows exactly where to look. The Indian Ocean is the world’s third largest, and the search was conducted in a difficult area, where searchers encountered bad weather and average depths of around 4 kilometers (2.5 miles).It’s not common for planes to disappear in the deep sea, but when they do remains can be very hard to locate. Over the past 50 years, dozens of planes have vanished, according to the Aviation Safety Network. US company resumes search Malaysia’s government gave the green light in March for another “no-find, no-fee” contract with Ocean Infinity to resume the seabed search operation at a new 15,000-square-kilometer (5,800-square-mile) site in the ocean. Ocean Infinity will be paid $70 million only if wreckage is discovered.However, the search was suspended in April due to bad weather. The government said Wednesday that Ocean Infinity will resume search intermittently from Dec. 30 for a total of 55 days, in targeted areas believed to have the highest likelihood of finding the missing aircraft.It is unclear if the company has new evidence of the plane’s location. It has said it would utilize new technology and has worked with many experts to analyze data and narrow the search area to the most likely site.
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