GeekWire gets its Zoox on: There were lights on the ceiling, Cher on the stereo and comfortable butts in the climate-controlled face-to-face seats as we took a smooth and futuristic autonomous taxi ride in Las Vegas. The Amazon-owned company’s carriages lacked a few of the comforts found in Waymo self-driving vehicles, but the overall experience was easy — and free for now.
Read more. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman remembers thinking, just six or seven years ago, that the company would eventually need to hire a million developers to deliver on its product roadmap. The demand was so great that he considered the shortage of software development engineers the company’s biggest constraint. With the rise of AI, he no longer thinks that’s the case. Read more.
Does Seattle hate AI — or just corporate AI? A spicy blog post from a former Microsoft engineer described the city’s apparent hostility toward AI — largely because of the employee experience at Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon. Some agreed with the sentiment, but others say the real story is a tale of two Seattles: corporate burnout vs. startup momentum. Read more and join the discussion.
Microsoft’s shareholder meeting Friday morning highlighted a sharp divide: executives promoting a “planet-scale” AI future while investors voiced concerns about censorship, bias, privacy, and geopolitical entanglements. All six outside shareholder proposals — focused largely on AI risks — were voted down based on early results. Read more.
A new statewide payroll tax proposal would target high-wage compensation at large employers — and could hit Washington’s biggest tech companies. Rep. Shaun Scott argues the measure would protect the core services that help companies recruit and retain talent, even as business groups warn it could raise costs and push jobs elsewhere. Read more.
Hot Links:
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AI’s failure to reliably detect pediatric pneumonia on X-ray underscores risk of using publicly available large language models in clinical settings. (UW Medicine)
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Washington state government websites were hit with a breach that promoted links to explicit apps. (Tacoma News Tribune)
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Brinc founder and CEO Blake Resnick on the “surreal” nature of seeing his face on the cover of Forbes, and the success of his Seattle drone company. (LinkedIn)
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A solar project in south-central Washington state, expected to generate enough power for thousands of homes, gets the governor’s OK. (Washington State Standard)
- Microsoft exec Sarah Bird says that as AI becomes part of everyday life, customers are already demanding responsible, human-centric development. (Axios)
Thanks for subscribing to the GeekWire newsletter and have a great weekend. — GeekWire editor Taylor Soper, taylor@geekwire.com; and reporter Kurt Schlosser, kurt@geekwire.com. 
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