Stupid. Divisive. Fugly. The Hummer shouldn’t have sold in numbers, but it did. Might Elon Musk pull off a similar trick with the stainless steel Cybertruck? Forty-six months after the official unveiling—when design chief Franz von Holzhausen famously shattered the prototype’s Armor Glass with the spirited throw of a metal …
Read More »These Clues Hint at the True Nature of OpenAI’s Shadowy Q* Project
Last week, after briefly deposed CEO Sam Altman was reinstalled at OpenAI, two reports claimed that a top-secret project at the company had rattled some researchers there with its potential to solve intractable problems in a powerful new way. “Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve …
Read More »Sam Altman Officially Returns to OpenAI—With a New Board Seat for Microsoft
Sam Altman marked his formal return as CEO of OpenAI today in a company memo that confirmed changes to the company’s board, including a new nonvoting seat for the startup’s primary investor, Microsoft. In a memo sent to staff and shared on OpenAI’s blog, Altman painted the chaos of the …
Read More »The Year of ChatGPT and Living Generatively
No human celebrating a first birthday is as verbose, knowledgeable, or prone to fabrication as ChatGPT, which is blowing out its first candle as I type these words. Of course, OpenAI’s game-changing large language model was precocious at birth, tumbling into civilization’s ongoing conversation like an uninvited guest busting into …
Read More »Tesla’s Cybertruck Is Two Years Late and Still Crazy
Paul Snyder has mixed feelings about Tesla’s Cybertruck, the first of which will be unveiled during an event for investors and fans on Thursday in Austin, Texas. One of them is horror. When Tesla revealed the vehicle’s design in November 2019, his first reaction was a question. “Like, what is …
Read More »Tesla’s Cybertruck Is Here and It Costs $61,000
Two years after Tesla was due to deliver its first electric trucks, the Cybertruck is really, truly here—and the base model costs $61,000. That’s about $21,000 more than CEO Elon Musk promised when the Cybertruck was first introduced four years ago. And that cheapest model won’t be available until 2025. …
Read More »Elon Musk Just Told Advertisers, ‘Go Fuck Yourself’
Elon Musk says that advertisers fleeing X after his endorsement of an antisemitic post could “kill” the platform formerly known as Twitter. And he has a simple message for those companies, which include Disney, Apple, and IBM: “Go fuck yourself.” Musk, speaking Wednesday night at the New York Times’ DealBook …
Read More »OpenAI’s Custom Chatbots Are Leaking Their Secrets
You don’t need to know how to code to create your own AI chatbot. Since the start of November—shortly before the chaos at the company unfolded—OpenAI has let anyone build and publish their own custom versions of ChatGPT, known as “GPTs”. Thousands have been created: A “nomad” GPT gives advice …
Read More »Fresh Bitcoin Hype Shows Crypto Just Can’t Help Itself
The prospect that US residents may soon be able to invest in bitcoin through their brokerage, as if it were a regular stock, has prompted a fresh round of hype in crypto circles—and a surge in crypto prices. Several investment firms, including heavy-hitters like BlackRock and Fidelity, are queuing up …
Read More »Google DeepMind's AI Dreamed Up 380,000 New Materials. The Next Challenge Is Making Them
The robotic line cooks were deep in their recipe, toiling away in a room tightly packed with equipment. In one corner, an articulated arm selected and mixed ingredients, while another slid back and forth on a fixed track, working the ovens. A third was on plating duty, carefully shaking the …
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