The Weekly Beat

April 30th - May 6th, 2023

Hello and welcome to the inaugural issue of The Weekly Beat from Pittsburgh Tech Beat! Every Sunday morning, I will bring you a summary of what went down in the Pittsburgh tech scene in the past week for you to read with your morning coffee. All companies mentioned are local to Pittsburgh unless otherwise noted. To listen to this summary, rather than read it, click play on the voiceover above. Here’s the latest:

• On Monday, the sixth annual AI & Robotics Fair was held at the Fairmont Hotel Downtown. 18 startup executives pitched to a group of potential investors in hopes of securing funding for their mostly Pittsburgh-based companies.

• Lots of news from Tuesday:

  • Self-driving company Aurora Innovation partnered with a refrigerated trucking company, Hirschbach, to use their self-driving tech for the delivery of delicious snacks and other things that need to be kept cold. These trucks will still only be on their existing test lanes between Dallas and Houston Texas, but seems like another important milestone towards their goal of fully automated trucking.

  • Astrobotic Technology announced it was no longer targeting a May 4th launch date for its lunar lander due to a test article anomaly. (In case you’re like me, who didn’t know what a test article was before reading this press release, check out this Wikipedia page!) The company’s launch partner, United Launch Alliance, will complete an investigation into the anomaly before a new launch date will be scheduled.

  • College search company Niche received an Honorable Mention from Fast Company in Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards for Niche’s Direct Admissions product, which is currently in beta.

• On Saturday, Preamble AI, a firm building an AI safety platform, sponsored an online competition called HackAPrompt, inviting contestants to trick large language models.

  I’m still getting together my sources for this project, so if you have any tips for news I may have missed, feel free to send them my way in the comments.

  Have a great rest of your weekend!