Axios

Slack, the popular workplace chat service, has a new competitor: Google.

Hangout at work: On Thursday, the search giant announced that it's turning the business version of Hangouts, a chat and video-calling tool that always seemed to have more potential than how it was used, into a service for teams and coworkers to communicate. You know, like Slack. Hangouts Meet will be a video-conferencing tool, while Hangouts Chat will be a tool for messaging and sharing files. And like Slack and other similar services, Hangouts already has partnerships to easily integrate with other work tools like Asana and Zendesk.

Competitors: Sending chats to coworkers is nothing new. HipChat and Yammer, for example, have been around for years and in November, Microsoft announced it was working on a tool of its own which will become available next week. Though Slack's brand is well established and it's not a service that most organizations can easily switch given all the history and information already stored in it, Google could have an advantage because so many companies use its email and file storage products.

Uber, which said last year that it's interested not only in self-driving cars but also in flying cars, will host a conference on the topic in Dallas on April 25-27, the company confirmed to Axios.

The Information's Amir Efrati first tweeted about the event on Wednesday.

Flying ambitions: Like self-driving cars, Uber isn't interested in manufacturing its own vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles. Instead, it said in a white paper it published on the subject last year, it will host a big event this year to convene a "wide set of vehicle manufacturers, regulatory bodies and public and private sector city stakeholders" to explore the topic. Last month, Uber hired Mark Moore, who spent three decades at NASA, to lead its aviation efforts. Several other companies, including Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk (both financed by Google co-founder Larry Page), have been working on such vehicles for years.

The House Speaker went on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show last night, and one segment was noticeably pointed, with Carlson repeatedly asking why tax cuts for the wealthy are a priority in the Obamacare repeal process:

Less than a week after a report from the New York Times exposed Uber's use of special software to covertly evade local law enforcement, the ride-hailing company says it will stop using its "Greyball" tool for that purpose.

We have started a review of the different ways this technology has been used to date. In addition, we are expressly prohibiting its use to target action by local regulators going forward. Given the way our systems are configured, it will take some time to ensure this prohibition is fully enforced.

Uber's "Greyball" software added to a growing list of ethical questions surrounding Uber—with Silicon Valley congressman Ro Khanna calling it "deeply disturbing."

Gary Marcus, a research scientist who joined Uber four months ago as director of its AI labs, is leaving the company, according to sources. Uber bought Marcus' startup, Geometric Intelligence, in December, using its 15 employees to form a new artificial intelligence unit.

Marcus joins a long list of recent exits from the troubled company, with Uber's most future-leaning efforts especially hard hit. Other notable departures include product head Ed Baker, self-driving car engineer Raffi Krikorian and famous car hacker Charlie Miller, who is joining Chinese rival Didi.

Why it matters: Today's Uber is all about matching riders and drivers, but the company's future efforts in self-driving cars and machine intelligence require a type of talent in short supply. Uber, already facing a lawsuit from Google and its ongoing harassment investigation, may have a tough time replacing those who leave.

Update: Marcus has confirmed the move in a Facebook post, saying is moving back to New York and will be a "senior advisor" to Uber.

The Congressional battle over the FCC's privacy rules for internet providers is officially underway. Republican Sen. Jeff Flake introduced a resolution on Tuesday to repeal the rules. And Rep. Marsha Blackburn is planning to follow suit in the House late Wednesday afternoon, which was first reported by Politico.

Who should care: Internet providers, first and foremost, who rail against the rules because they say it puts them at a disadvantage with web services — like Facebook or Google — that have to comply with less-strict standards. But some argue that the rules actually could be bad news for those web services as well because they would set a broader precedent for regulations in this area.

Google devoted much of its Cloud Next conference to trotting out happy customer after happy customer, but there were a few bits of news, including confirmation it had acquired machine learning startup Kaggle.

The search giant also used the San Francisco event to announce a partnership with SAP and to launch a new tool that automatically categorizes and searches video. Google Cloud chief Diane Greene insists Google is gaining ground on market leaders Microsoft and Amazon, saying it is winning more half the accounts it bids on.

On the other hand: Microsoft and Amazon insist they still rarely see Google when competing for large customer accounts.

Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing giant that acquired Uber's local business last year, has opened a research center in Silicon Valley, the company said on Wednesday.

Focused on artificial intelligence, security, and autonomous driving, the office will be in Mountain View—Google's hometown—and it has hired Charlie Miller, the famed car hacker who left Uber last week. Didi Chuxing VP of Research Institute Dr. Fengmin Gong will lead the lab.

Joining the race: Despite being one of the biggest ride-hailing companies in the world, Didi seems to be joining the race to build self-driving cars a bit later than everyone else, though it's impossible to know how long it's been working on this tech behind closed doors. On Wednesday, it also announced it's co-hosting a competition with online learning company Udacity, which offers education on self-driving car technology, and the winners will get to work with Didi.