The same technology that puts AI chatbots on your phone and computer is coming to the car.

Why it matters: Having a powerful voice assistant at a time when you can't afford to take your eyes off the road could be enormously beneficial.

Driving the news: Qualcomm announced yesterday that it is bringing its next-generation Oryon processor to its in-car computer systems for both entertainment and automated driving.

• Already used in PCs and coming soon to high-end smartphones, Oryon puts a tremendous amount of computing power inside the car.
• Mercedes said it would use Qualcomm's Snapdragon Cockpit Elite chip to power future in-car information systems.
• Qualcomm also announced a partnership with Google to jointly promote Android Auto and Qualcomm's digital cockpit to automakers.

Zoom in: Generative AI in the car will ideally help drivers with everything from finding the nearest cheap gas to pointing out landmarks to understanding a dashboard warning light.

• "We think people will be able to truly converse with their cars, not just like an AI chatbot, but actually with intelligence around what the vehicle can see, what the vehicle knows about itself and what it knows about the driver," Patrick Brady, VP of engineering for Android at Google, said in an interview.
• The power increases further when AI is combined with self-driving abilities. In a concept video, Qualcomm featured a car's AI assistant telling the driver: "There is no parking nearby. You can unload here and I will park the car."
• China's Li Auto showed an AI assistant that can answer all the questions that kids ask while you are in the car, while also powering travel-related and entertainment tasks and remembering its owner's preferences.
• Other demos featured in-car assistants rerouting drivers, identifying nearby restaurants and purchasing tickets to a museum after confirming its hours.

Yes, but: Despite efforts already underway, genAI in the car will take some time to arrive. Carmakers design new models years before they arrive in the showroom.

• Qualcomm said the new car chips will be "sampling" in 2025, suggesting the first cars with the processors won't hit the road until after that. That said, Qualcomm says its previous generation of chips can also support genAI experiences.
• "We designed our [older] Snapdragon Digital Cockpit for cars that are launching right now," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Axios in an interview earlier this week. "Now, genAI arrived and we can retrofit in software."

Between the lines: In-car use is likely to require models running both in the car and from the cloud, with the former needed for time-sensitive tasks and the latter for broader queries.

TollBit, a two-sided marketplace for publishers and AI companies, has raised a $24 million series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, executives told Axios.

Why it matters: TollBit hopes its marketplace can reduce the legal and business friction that have made data-sharing between the media industry and AI firms tense and complicated.

• "As AI agents become more accessible and proliferate at an exponential rate, publishers and digital content owners need a way to monetize content that doesn't rely simply on eyeballs and clicks," said Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano. TollBit, he said, is the solution.

Zoom in: The new round will help TollBit hire more people and expand internationally, TollBit CEO Toshit Panigrahi told Axios.

• S32, a venture firm, also participated in the new round, alongside investments from Google AI lead Jeff Dean and Roblox product chief Manuel Bronstein.
• The Series A round follows a $7 million seed round in March, bringing the startup's total funding to $31 million. No valuation was publicly disclosed during either funding period.

State of play: The new funding round coincides with the official launch of TollBit's marketplace out of beta.

• The marketplace allows publishers to monitor AI bot traffic and monetize when it scrapes their verified content. AI companies can manage relationships with many publishers at once in real time, based on marketplace demand.
• TollBit also said yesterday that it has struck deals with its first set of publishing partners, including Penske Media Corporation, Time, Mumsnet, Trusted Media Brands, Candr Media Group and Adweek.
• Fittingly, the first piece of content to be licensed out using TollBit as a platform was Time's 100 Most Powerful People in AI list, Panigrahi said.

The big picture: OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity and other AI firms are brokering licensing deals with publishers where they pay upfront for the right to use their content.

• But Panigrahi believes a marketplace solution is more sustainable and scalable because it allows AI companies to pay a fair market value for access to the content they need, rather than try to negotiate hundreds of subjective deals with many different publishers simultaneously.

What to watch: On Monday, the Wall Street Journal and New York Post parent News Corp sued genAI search engine Perplexity for copyright infringement. The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity last week.

• OpenAI hired Aaron Chatterji as chief economist and Scott Schools as chief compliance officer. Chatterji was previously chief economist at the Commerce Department, and Schools led compliance efforts at Uber. (TechCrunch)
• Anthropic announced an update to Claude that allows the chatbot to take actions on a user's computer. (Tom's Guide)
• OpenAI and its minority owner Microsoft are funding a $10 million AI fellowship program operated by the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit that supports local journalism. (Axios)
• ARM has canceled a key license with Qualcomm, escalating a legal battle with one of its largest customers. (Bloomberg)
• Canva has added a text-to-image generator, among other new AI features. (The Verge)
• Enterprise AI vendor Cohere expanded its capabilities to include computer vision. (VentureBeat)
• The mother of a teenager who died by suicide in February is expected to file a lawsuit this week against Character.AI, claiming that the company is responsible. (New York Times)

Yesterday marked what should have been one of the coolest nights in pro hockey when all 32 teams played in nationally televised games. The downsides were twofold. One, it took place on a Tuesday. Two, both the Sharks and the Oilers lost.