Technology

Hot Wheels will ship you a Cybertruck long before Tesla is likely to make any deliveries on their electric retro-future wheeled trapezoid: The toy maker just unveiled two different RC Cybertruck models, including a 1:64 scale model at just $20, and a much larger 1:10 scale version for $400.

These are available to pre-order now, but like most of Teslacars, just because they&re introduced doesn&t mean you can go out and buy one immediately. They&re set to ship in time for the holidays, however, with a December 15, 2020 estimated availability date, according to the Hot Wheels website.

These look like very faithful representations of the Cybertruck that Tesla unveiled at a special event back in November, and the large version includes a &reusable cracked window vinyl sticker& that you can use to recreate the onstage flub that happened at the actual reveal. You&ll have to supply your own large metal medicine ball.

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Other features of the 1:10 scale Cybertruck include functioning headlights and taillights, all-wheel drive, true to form &Chill& and &Sport& modes, a removable tonneau cover, a working telescopic tailgate and more.

The smaller and much more affordable version is just three inches long, which is basically what you&d expect from a traditional Hot Wheels mini model, and it can achieve an &up to 500mph scale speed,& which someone who is better than me at math can figure out what that translates to.

These are available to people in the U.S. and Canada, but I expect them to be pretty hot sellers based on the general fervor and interest around all things Cybertruck to date.

The 3D-printed car, called the Czinger 21C comes with a whopping £1.3 million price tag, and just 80 will be built

Pay as you go customers can finally join Vodafone's 5G network at no extra cost. Or pick up a new 5G enabled smartphone and take advantage of the network's introductory 'big bundle' deal

A few days ago, Andreessen HorowitzMartin Casado and Matt Bornstein published an interesting piece digging into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) startups, and, more specifically, how those companies perform as businesses. Core to the argument presented is that while founders and investors are wagering &that AI businesses will resemble traditional software companies,& the well-known venture firm is ¬ so sure.&

Given that TechCrunch cares a lot about startup business fundamentals, the notion that one oft-discussed and well-funded category of venture-backed startup might sport materially less attractive economics than we expected captured our attention.

The Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) perspective is straightforward, arguing that AI-focused companies have lesser gross margins than software companies due to cloud compute and human-input costs, endure issues stemming from &edge-cases& and enjoy less product differentiation from competing companies when compared to software concerns. Today, we&re drilling into the gross margin point, as itsomething inherently numerical that we can get other, informed market participants to weigh in on.

If a16z is correct about AI startups having slimmer gross margins than SaaS companies, they should — all other things held equal — be worth less per dollar of revenue generated; or in simpler terms, they should trade at a revenue multiple discount to SaaS companies, leaving the latter category of technology company still atop the valuation hierarchy.

This matters, given the amount of capital that AI-focused startups have raised.

Is a16z correct about AI gross margins? I wanted to find out. So this week I spoke to a number of investors from firms that have made AI-focused bets to get a handle on their views. Read the full a16z piece, mind. Itinteresting and worth your time.

Today we&re hearing from Rohit Sharma of True Ventures, Jeremy Kaufmann of Scale Venture Partners, Nick Washburn of Intel Capitaland Ben Blume of Atomico. We&ll start with a digest of their responses to our questions, with their unedited notes at the end.

AI economics and optimism

We asked our group of venture investors(selected with the help of research from TechCrunchArman Tabatabai) three questions. The first dealt with margins themselves, the second dealt with resulting valuations and, finally, we asked about their current optimism interval regarding AI-focused companies.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has been sharing a number of updates about his companyprogress on Starship this week. Along with footage of the assembly process of the current &SN1& prototype of Starship, he explained on Twitter some of the other considerations and strategies the company is working with as it works on the new spacecraft and tries to fly it to space this year.

Musk said that SpaceX is iterating at a much faster pace with Starship than it has recently with Falcon, as Falcondesign more or less stabilized once it started working consistently. He noted that the ability to progress with the design toward having a production vehicle is dependent on the number of interactions of the prototypes of the spacecraft, multiplied by the progress achieved between each version.

Thatbeen the way that SpaceX has worked in the past, and one of the key reasons itbeen able to upend the traditional rocket launch industry. It moves fast, iterating as it goes and making changes based on failures quickly, whereas the industry has largely focused on more stop/start development cycles where things are mostly fixed with brief periods of intense focus on improvement between long-lived vehicle generations.

Starship presents the companybiggest challenge yet when it comes to this model, if only because of the scale of the rocket. Starship is by far SpaceXlargest rocket, and building a number of them quickly is actually a significant challenge just from a mechanical perspective, especially when you factor in the considerable changes between generations, and the eventual addition of the very large Super Heavy rocket booster.

On top of the scale of the spacecraft, therealso the nature of the vehicle, which SpaceX aims to make fully reusable — with quick turnaround between each flight. Itfairly easy (relatively speaking, of course) to build a spacecraft that only really needs to work once; itanother thing entirely to build one that you want to reuse tens or even hundreds of times.

Last year, Musk had said at the unveiling of the first completed full-scale prototype of the Starship that they&d aim to have an orbital flight in as few as six months& time. Itincreasingly looking like that was yet another extremely optimistic timeline from the SpaceX founder, and SN1 is still aiming to complete a high-altitude suborbital flight before future versions actually make the trip to space. Musk suggested SN3, SN4 or SN5 could be the one to take that trip, according to Ars TechnicaEric Berger.

Berger also reports that SpaceX is considering one of three options for actually launching the orbital Starship prototype, which will be powered by six of the companyRaptor engines. These will include either flying from Boca Chica, Texas (this is most likely), where the spacecraft are being built, or from Florida, where SpaceX maintains a launch facility for its Falcon rockets, or as a third option, from a sea-based floating launch platform.

SpaceX will need to increase the rate at which it is building, testing and flying these prototypes if it aims to make 2020 for an orbital flight, but italso hiring up to help it speed up production. Earlier this year Musk sent out a call for job applicants to staff up additional production shifts for round-the-clock operations, and SpaceX hosted a job fair for interested applicants at its Texas site earlier this month.