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Rivian began officially handing over the first R2 SUVs to paying customers on Tuesday, marking the beginning of a new chapter for the buzzy all-electric automaker as it tries to reach mass-market scale. Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe has said the R2 is “maybe the most important thing we’ve launched to date,” and it’s particularly crucial to the company’s ambitions in the world of autonomous vehicles. Starting at around $58,000, the R2 takes a lot of what Rivian did with the R1 SUV and shrinks it down into a more approachable and affordable form factor. The company plans to offer…

Anthropic is bringing its most powerful AI model to the general public for the first time, but it’s doing it with guardrails.  On Tuesday, the AI firm launched Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its Mythos model. Anthropic says Fable 5 excels at software engineering, knowledge work, and vision, but it comes with hard safety limits. In high-risk areas like cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and distillation, the model blocks responses and falls back to Claude Opus 4.8. Launched as a preview in April, Mythos was initially limited to a handful of partners due to cybersecurity concerns. Last week,…

Emad Dlala, a top executive at EV-maker Lucid Motors, has left the company just months after being promoted to a leading role, TechCrunch has learned. Dlala’s exit is the first major executive departure since Lucid Motors selected Silvio Napoli as its new CEO in April. Napoli joined Lucid after spending a career in various leadership positions at escalator and elevator company Schindler Group. He formally started in the CEO role just last week. In a statment to TechCrunch, Lucid Motors confirmed Dlala’s departure and said the company is “transforming its organization to accelerate innovation and strengthen execution under CEO Silvio…

Last year, Justin Ernest noticed a massive gap in how venture capital was working: Family offices and smaller institutional investors were eager to invest in the fastest-growing AI companies but couldn’t get access to those cap tables.  Having spent over five years at Playground Global investing in deep tech and helping lead fundraising, Ernest was confident his connections to both investors and founders would allow him to bridge that gap. Instead of launching a formal VC fund, a process he says takes new managers anywhere from 12 to 18 months, Ernest used his network to secure allocations of stock in…

Since I first stepped into the category of hair supplements 8 months ago, I’ve been struck by how the modern media and ecommerce environment makes credibility easy to imitate, and difficult for consumers to evaluate.A combination of AI, automation, and low-barrier platforms have made it simple for any company to harness the buzzwords, claim the right credentials, and show up on the same stage as brands that spent years earning theirs. The noise is overwhelming and customers end up paying the cost of trying to figure out which company is backed by something real. For brands that are doing the actual work,…

Google just made its budget AI subscription plan a lot more budget-friendly, bringing a price war that’s been brewing in emerging markets squarely to American consumers. The company announced Monday that it is cutting the monthly price of Google AI Plus from $7.99 to $4.99 — while doubling the storage included at that tier, from 200 gigabytes to 400 gigabytes. Vikas Kansal, product lead for Gemini AI subscriptions, said on X that the storage updates would roll out to users over the next several days. Google AI Plus launched in January as the most affordable paid AI subscription in the…

Canadian intimates and apparel brand Knix, known for body-positive and taboo-breaking marketing around period underwear, has a new chief marketing officer in Cyntia Leo.Leo joined the company on May 27. Most recently head of brand marketing and communications at Urban Outfitters, Leo brings more than a decade of experience from Nike, where she oversaw marketing for various parts of the business.That experience, in addition to the five years she spent at Disney early in her career, will shape her approach as the the top marketer for Knix as it aims to further expand its business, which surpassed $1 billion in…

Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its closely watched Mythos model. What can Fable actually do? All kinds of things, it turns out. Ethan Mollick, a notable AI researcher and University of Pennsylvania scholar, has been playing around with the model and seems to be having a lot of fun. In his testing, Fable consistently “outperformed basically every other public model I have used by a considerable margin,” Mollick wrote Tuesday on his Substack. He added that it was “capable across many problems and produced some startling results — it would work up to…

Online shopping has come a long way from banner ads and shopping carts, while stores are doing much more than simply stocking products on their shelves. As every way of buying what we need (and want) has changed in recent years, ADWEEK’s inaugural Commerce All-Stars list is celebrating exceptional talent in the growing commerce and retail media space.Through innovation in measurement solutions, opening up retail media to smaller players, and crafting the invisible infrastructure that is redefining how brands, retailers, and technology partners collaborate, these executives are driving results—making the shopper journey more exciting than ever. Kristi Argyilan Global Head of…

Last year, Justin Ernest noticed a massive gap in how venture capital was working: family offices and smaller institutional investors were eager to invest in the fastest-growing AI companies but couldn’t get access to those cap tables.   Having spent over five years at Playground Global investing in deep tech and helping lead fundraising, Ernest was confident his connections to both investors and founders would allow him to bridge that gap.  Instead of launching a formal VC fund, a process he says takes new managers anywhere from 12 to 18 months, Ernest used his network to secure allocations of stock in high-profile, later-stage companies.  He then offers these individual deals to a group of about 30 smaller institutional investors using Special Purpose Vehicles, or SPVs, which act as single-deal funds.  Over the last 12 months, his firm, Sabertooth VC, has invested nearly $400 million into 10 companies, including Anthropic, Anduril,…

An encounter with a great white shark is undoubtedly a “thrilling” experience, considered especially rare in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The latest sighting, which has attracted media attention and made headlines around the world, occurred during a dive in the Strait of Sicily carried out by volunteers from Ghost Diving and Healthy Seas, organizations dedicated to protecting marine ecosystems.The encounter was documented by diver Derk Remmers, who told the BBC that he struggled to switch on his camera because of the excitement. The footage—the first ever recorded of a great white shark in its Mediterranean Sea habitat—shows a…

In this episode of Brave Commerce, Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter speak with Stefan Kovačević, global retail media and digital shelf lead at Nestlé, about how AI is changing the way consumers discover, evaluate, and purchase products. As AI becomes a more active participant in the path to purchase, Stefan explores what this shift means for brands and why marketers need to rethink how they build trust and differentiation.Stefan introduces the concepts of “human equity” and “machine equity,” arguing that future brand success will depend on winning trust from both people and AI. He discusses the growing role of operational excellence…

Two years and a $250 million lawsuit later, Apple’s AI Siri revamp is on its way to your phones and laptops and even your mixed reality headset, if you happen to be one of like three people who actually uses the Apple Vision Pro. Apple revealed a slew of new information at Monday’s WWDC keynote about these long-awaited, AI-powered updates that can take advantage of the fact that our hardware is supposedly “built for Apple Intelligence.” To be honest, it’s hard for AI to impress me enough that I’ll use it in my day-to-day life. I still don’t trust LLMs…

When you go to the Cannes Lions, you get blasted—not just with rosé, but with a whole lot of noise. ADWEEK is going to try to help you process it in a cool new way.We’ve partnered with Code and Theory to supply the articles that will power ai.rwaves, an AI-powered radio station broadcasting live coverage of Cannes Lions, from June 21-26.Built with ElevenLabs and powered by Stagwell’s AI operating system, The Machine, ai.rwaves is an always-on audio stream, sharing the news that’s continuous, curated, and has a sharp point of view—the best of all worlds, really. So you’ll be equipped with everything…

The race to secure power for AI data centers has spilled over into some unusual places, including the automotive world.  Battery recycler Redwood Materials kicked off the trend last year with a new energy storage division and a project that attached old EV packs to a Crusoe data center in Nevada. Then, Ford said it was repurposing some of its battery manufacturing capacity to make grid-scale batteries. And now GM is announcing its own — arguably more ambitious — plans for an energy storage system (ESS).  GM unveiled on Tuesday two new phases in its attack on the energy storage…

Still, Wade Scheffer, GM Energy’s vice president, insists: The reason more people aren’t using their cars to power their lives comes down to “awareness, awareness, and awareness.” To that end, at Tuesday’s event the subsidiary announced two partnerships with utilities: a “stress test” of bidirectional charging capabilities with 30 GM employees, enabled by Michigan’s DTE Energy, and a plan to get 52,000 GM EVs on PG&E’s major Northern California grid by 2030. The automaker says it’s worked out dozens of partnerships with other utilities.Still, getting all of those GM cars hooked up and contributing to the grid will be a…