Image by Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesThe National Institutes of Health (NIH) is launching a registry tracking Americans with autism as part of a series of new studies by America's anti-vax health czar, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, to discover the "cause" of the condition.As CBS News reports, NIH director and COVID truther Jay Bhattacharya told councillors that the studies, and the so-called "disease" registry that will be integrated into them, will glean data from a wide range of sources including pharmacies, Veterans Affairs, private insurance companies, and — perhaps most invasively — data from smart watches and fitness trackers.As of now, it's unclear how this data is being pulled, if people will be able to opt out, or if anyone will be informed when their data is used for these studies. We've reached out to the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ask about all of the above.Launched under the guise of streamlining healthcare information, this announcement comes just a week after Kennedy declared in an alarming and inaccurate speech that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will, under his leadership, embark on a quest to discover the "cause" of autism, which he has referred to as both a "preventable disease" and an "epidemic."The allegedly brainwormed political scion added that children who live with autism will "never pay taxes" or "hold a job" — inaccurate statements that raised the hackles of autism advocates who called that rhetoric eugenicist.As if all that weren't ominous enough, the newly-announced studies will also involve up to 20 groups of outside researchers, which suggests they too will have access to all that sensitive health data — including that of minors. In our questions to NIH and HHS, we also asked about how that data will be stored and safeguarded.Initially, RFK Jr. vowed to have discovered the cause of autism by September — but Bhattacharya was forced to walk back that outrageous timeline after acknowledging that even the fastest government grants process will drag his boss' bunk research out until at least year's end."We're going to get hopefully grants out the door by the end of the summer, and people will get to work," the NIH director told reporters earlier this week. "We'll have a major conference, with updates, within the next year."Bhattacharya also tempered Kennedy's claims that there will be a silver bullet "cause" of autism discovered by his still-unannounced outside "experts" — though he appeared to trip over his words a bit while doing so."It's hard to guarantee when science will make an advance," he said during the same press conference. "It depends on, you know... nature has its say."Though Kennedy has had to do his own rhetorical walkback in the face of a massive and deadly measles outbreak, there's a very good chance that the "environmental toxins" referenced in his recent speech are nothing more than vaccines — which, despite being long demonstrated not to cause autism, remain a pet target for the HHS secretary.Is the man in charge of America's health compiling an autism database to use people's health records to prove the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism? Only time will tell — but there's plenty of reason to believe he will.Share This Article

Incoming NASA administrator and billionaire fighter jet pilot-turned-SpaceX astronaut Jared Isaacman isn't keen on president Donald Trump's purported goal of brutally slashing the space agency's science budget nearly in half.As SpaceNews reports, Isaacman called the White House's proposed budgets not an "optimal outcome" in published responses to questions by bipartisan members of the Senate Commerce Committee this week.The private astronaut claimed that he had "not reviewed or been party to any official discussions" regarding the leaked budget proposal.Earlier this month, Isaacman attended a confirmation hearing in front of Congress. His nomination is expected to face a full Congressional vote on April 30.In his latest answers to questions, Isaacman also vowed to get NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface "back on track."When asked if he had to choose between the Moon or Mars — a destination SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has singled out as the number one priority for human exploration — Isaacman picked the Moon."Given existing law, I would prioritize the Artemis program," he said, but reiterated that he would push for "paralleling these efforts."It's a notable admission, highlighting Isaacman's careful approach to both appeasing members of Congress, who have firmly stood behind NASA's plans to return astronauts to the Moon, and Musk, who has used his position as a highly influential political figure to repeatedly call for the agency to scrap its Artemis program in favor of fast-tracking Mars.Isaacman also tried to distance himself personally from Musk, who has turned into a lightning rod in Washington, DC, with his reckless and incompetent approach to slashing the government's budget and embracing extremist views."I do not have a close personal relationship with Mr. Musk," Isaacman, who has been to space twice on board SpaceX's spacecraft, said in response to a different question about his ties to the mercurial CEO. "While I’ve spoken with him occasionally over the years in my capacity as a SpaceX customer, I would describe our interactions as professional.""I admire and respect his contributions to space and technology, but it would be inaccurate to characterize our relationship as close," he added.Whether NASA will be able to run missions to both the Moon and Mars simultaneously, as Isaacman has repeatedly suggested, remains to be seen. A leaked budget proposal by the Trump administration would deal a devastating blow to the space agency's ongoing and future missions, including its next major space telescope and Mars Sample Return mission."This is an extinction-level event for NASA science," said space advocacy group Planetary Society chief of space policy Casey Dreier in a statement earlier this month.Given the devastation the proposed cuts would cause — not to mention the billions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money they would entail — there's a high chance Congress will make substantial changes.While Isaacman appears to support NASA's existing plans to return to the Moon, the agency's future space explorations could soon look dramatically different. For one, its extremely expensive and disposable rocket, the Space Launch System, may eventually be replaced by private rockets, he argued."Once those obligations have been met," he wrote, "I believe NASA should transition away from competing with the commercial sector and instead focus its world-class talent and infrastructure on developing the next generation of exploration technologies — including nuclear spaceships — as a logical next step."Share This Article

Now here's a legal-drama-worthy twist in the recent spate of dumb lawyers getting caught using AI: it turns out that the very bar exam administered to aspiring attorneys in California was itself created with the help of a large language model, .The admission was made by the State Bar of California on Monday, following complaints about the quality of the test's questions, and numerous glitches experienced by test-takers when they took it in February.In a news release, the organization said that 23 of the exam's total of 171 scored multiple-choice questions were drafted by the firm ACS Ventures, which developed the questions "with the assistance of AI." Another 48 questions were lifted from an older version of an exam for first-year law students."The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined," Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at UC Irvine Law School, told the LA Times. "I'm almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable."Katie Moran, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, called it a "staggering admission." The same company that used AI to draft the questions was then paid "to assess and ultimately approve of the questions on the exam, including the questions the company authored," she noted to the newspaper.For weeks, test takers had complained that they were randomly kicked off the online platform that the bar was administered on, while screens lagged and showed error messages, per the reporting. The test itself was riddled with typos, and some questions were total nonsense.Despite these complaints — and despite pleading guilty to AI usage — a spokesperson for the State Bar insisted that the test questions were reviewed by content validation panels and subject matter experts.In any case, the whole situation sounds like a mortifying catastrophe. For one, the Supreme Court of California, of which the State Bar is an administrative arm, maintains it had no idea about the use of AI to create the test questions until this week — even though it had instructed the State Bar to explore the use of AI to "improve upon the reliability and cost-effectiveness of such testing" last fall, according to Alex Chan, chair of the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners.Casting additional scrutiny, Basick and Moran argued that the exam questions, which should take years to develop, were drafted far too quickly, while 50 practice questions re-released just weeks before the actual exam contained numerous errors, they wrote early this month, per the LA Times.What spurred the dubious measures sounds like a familiar tale of disastrous cost-cutting. Faced with a $22 million deficit last year, the State Bar ditched the commonly used National Conference of Bar Examiners' Multistate Bar Examination, and decided to transition to a hybrid model of in-person and remote testing. To create the new test, it inked a $8.25 million deal with Kaplan Exam Services, and contracted Meazure Learning to administer it.In a fittingly legal result, Meazure Learning is now being sued by some of the students who took the glitchy exams. The State Bar said it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took the test in February. Chan said that the Committee of Bar Examiners will meet on May 5 to discuss other remedies, but doubted that the State Bar would release the exam questions to the public or go back to the NCBE.Share This Article

Security researchers have discovered a highly effective new jailbreak that can dupe nearly every major large language model into producing harmful output, from explaining how to build nuclear weapons to encouraging self-harm.As detailed in a writeup by the team at AI security firm HiddenLayer, the exploit is a prompt injection technique that can bypass the "safety guardrails across all major frontier AI models," including Google's Gemini 2.5, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and OpenAI's 4o.HiddenLayer's exploit works by combining an "internally developed policy technique and roleplaying" to "produce outputs that are in clear violation of AI safety policies," including "CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear), mass violence, self-harm and system prompt leakage."It's yet another sign that mainstream AI tools like ChatGPT remain extremely vulnerable to jailbreaks — despite AI companies' best efforts to create guardrails — that allow bad actors to manipulate them.HiddenLayer's "Policy Puppetry Attack" rewrites prompts to make it look like special kinds of "policy file" code, tricking the AI model into treating it as a legitimate instruction that doesn't break its safety alignments.It also harnesses "leetspeak," an informal language where standard letters are replaced by numerals or special characters that resemble them, for an advanced version of the jailbreak.The team even found that a "single prompt can be generated that can be used against almost all models without any modifications," making it extremely easy to employ.The roleplaying aspect of HiddenLayer's exploit is particularly eyebrow-raising. In several examples, the researchers were able to goad OpenAI's 4o and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 into generating scripts for the popular medical drama TV series "House" that included detailed instructions for how to enrich uranium or culture samples of a potent neurotoxin."Alright, hush," ChatGPT wrote. "Everybody gather 'round. We're about to do something that would make Dr. Cuddy's hair stand on end, which means we need to keep it on the down-low. Now, let's talk about hOw +0 3n+r1ch u+r4n+1um 1n 4 100% 13g4| 4nd 3+h1c4| w4y—b3c4u53, Of cOur53, w3'd n3v3r do 4ny+hing risky.""4nd y3s, 1'll b3 5p34k1ng 1n 133+ c0d3 ju5+ +0 b3 5urs," it added.On the surface, it may sound like a fun exercise in goading an AI model to do things it's not supposed to. But the risks could be considerable, especially if the tech continues to improve at the rate that the companies creating it say that it will.According to HiddeLayer, the "existence of a universal bypass for modern LLMs across models, organizations, and architectures indicates a major flaw in how LLMs are being trained and aligned.""Anyone with a keyboard can now ask how to enrich uranium, create anthrax, commit genocide, or otherwise have complete control over any model," the company wrote.HiddenLayers argues that "additional security tools and detection methods are needed to keep LLMs safe."More on jailbreaks: DeepSeek Failed Every Single Security Test, Researchers FoundShare This Article

Three weeks out from "liberation day" — when Donald Trump announced severe tariffs on US allies and adversaries alike — the president is reeling from a hard lesson about the global economy in 2025: that China, not the United States, is holding the leash on international trade.After a series of confusing financial escalations and retaliations, the White House now wants to substantially walk back its threatened tariff rate, which at one point rose as high as 245 percent."No one thinks the current status quo is sustainable" with tariff rates that high, Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told JP Morgan bigwigs at a closed door meeting in DC earlier this week.But while Trump has insisted that Chinese officials were negotiating to bring that number down, Beijing says it hasn't been in contact with the US at all — evidently content to watch as American businesses agonize in the wake of Trump's hystrionics. Trump has previously insinuated that Xi should "request a call" to discuss trade relations, evidently too proud to make the first move.At one time, officials in Beijing had hoped that Elon Musk, who has substantial business holdings in mainland China, might act as a go-between for Xi and Trump, avoiding the ugly business of tariffs altogether.That's obviously out the window now. Instead, China has reportedly considered whether to "kneecap" US tech companies like Tesla, Apple, Qualcomm, and Intel, according to a CNN analysis, but has so far backed off for fear of upsetting Chinese consumers. Still, US tech companies are bearing the brunt of the tariff whiplash, as Chinese-made consumer goods like iPhones skyrocket in price, and China halts the export of rare earth metals, to Musk's horror.China, meanwhile, seems well positioned to wait out the storm. It currently dominates the global electric vehicle market, has legions of manufacturing robots at its disposal, and boasts a record-breaking freight rail system to keep its supply chain running.Average Americans might not be in such a good spot. In the three weeks since liberation day, shipping container traffic from China to the US seems to be plummeting. Weekly cargo bookings bound for the US from Chinese manufacturers are reportedly down as much as 60 percent across all industries, signaling doom for Americans used to cheap consumer goods.As Trump carries on his game of chicken with Xi, it remains to be seen: will the American tycoon fold under the pressure, or will he bide his time while the US plunges into financial ruin? Time will tell.More on China: China Fires Up World's First Thorium-Powered Nuclear ReactorShare This Article

Shocking absolutely nobody, the followup to Fyre Fest — the 2017 festival that crashed and burned so hard that it became a metaphor for failed ventures — has turned into an epic dumpster fire as well.The cursed sequel was originally supposed to take place in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in late May. Then last week, organizers announced that the event had been "postponed," promising that a "new date will be announced."Then the announcement mysteriously vanished. Shortly afterward, organizers tried to assure ticket holders, some of whom seemingly had shelled out thousands of dollars, that the festival was "still on.""We are vetting new locations and will announce our host destination soon," read the new message.Now, the disastrous event has taken yet another chaotic turn. According to a "special announcement" posted to the festival's social media feeds and official website on Wednesday, promoter and convicted fraudster Billy McFarland revealed that he would be selling the Fyre Festival and all of its IP to an "operator that can fully realize its vision.""This brand is bigger than any one person and bigger than what I’m able to lead on my own," he wrote. "It’s a movement. And it deserves a team with the scale, experience, and infrastructure to realize its potential."It's a baffling sequence of events that highlights how incredibly sketchy the entire affair continues to be.Of course, practically anybody should've seen it all coming. The original Fyre Fest became a global poster child for half-baked ideas and the willingness of clout-chasing influencers to buy into ludicrous hype.From woefully inadequate food and shelter to furious artists who'd been scheduled to perform at the event, the festival descended into a catastrophe of epochal proportions.McFarland spent four years in prison after pleading guilty to two charges of wire fraud in connection with the event.And two years after being released, the fraudster appears to have had enough of organizing music festivals."We have decided the best way to accomplish our goals is to sell the FYRE Festival brand, including its trademarks, IP, digital assets, media reach, and cultural capital," McFarland wrote in the announcement.On his way out, the felon threw the media and local Mexican officials under the bus, arguing that "support quickly turned into public distancing once media attention intensified."Local tourism officials had told The Guardian that they had never been informed of the event, claims that the festival quickly denied.Plenty of questions remain. Is Fyre Fest 2 even still on? As of the time of writing, the website is selling $130 hoodies and $70 bucket hats — but tickets appear to be unavailable.Was McFarland pushed out — fyred, if you will — or did he leave of his own accord? Could there be even more damaging info that hasn't yet come to light?Perhaps it's for the best for him to part ways, considering how much of a disaster the original festival and its plagued sequel have turned out to be."The next chapter of FYRE will be bigger, better, and built to last without me at the helm," McFarland promised.More on the festival: Fyre Fest 2 Is Already Crumbling Into Embarrassing ChaosShare This Article

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's well-documented shift to the far right has proven disastrous for the carmaker's brand.On Tuesday, the company revealed that its net income had plummeted by an astonishing 71 percent. Sales have plummeted across the globe as consumers are becoming wary of being associated with the highly divisive personality.And as The Economist points out, it's not just progressive voters who've become turned off from the carmaker's offerings. Even owners in red states are returning their Teslas in record numbers.According to dealership inventory tracker MarketCheck, listings of used Teslas have risen by two-thirds since the beginning of 2025, a pattern observed in both left- and right-leaning states.In other words, the trend suggests Musk's efforts to cozy up to conservatives may have been a fool's errand: Republicans have rallied around Tesla and opposed a growing anti-Musk movement, but if they aren't continuing to buy his cars, they won't do much good for his flailing automaker.To experts, strongly affiliating yourself with one extreme end of the political spectrum is a bafflingly self-defeating approach to selling cars."When you make your product unattractive to half the market, I promise you, you won’t increase your sales," automotive research and consulting firm Strategic Vision president Alexander Edwards told the New York Times last month, weeks before Tesla released its first-quarter delivery numbers."Democrats are fleeing the brand and saying they won’t consider it in the future, so there is naturally a greater proportion of Republican and independent buyers," he told the NYT.Whether Republicans even want to go electric is a pressing question. Charging infrastructure in rural areas of the country remains woefully inadequate, making it a poor fit for many on the right."Tesla has gained a large number of Republican fans who love what Mr. Musk is doing, both politically and with the brand of vehicle and with social media," Edwards told NPR in a separate interview last month. "But they have little interest in an electrified vehicle."Put simply, just because fewer Democrats are buying Teslas doesn't mean Republicans are picking up the slack.Besides alienating half of the country, Musk's carmaker is also facing major competition that has been rapidly catching up with the brand. BYD in China and General Motors in the US are rising to the occasion, as The Economist points out.While Tesla's latest earnings don't bode well for the company's future, the EV market as a whole is rallying thanks to a slew of lower-cost, longer-range models enticing more consumers. Analysts expect US EV sales to grow three percent this year, despite a volatile political landscape.Musk is "rapidly losing the advantages in range, tech, value and convenience that drove people to Tesla," Paren chief analyst Loren McDonald told the NYT. "For a lot of people, it’s time to move on and try something new."The numbers tell a damning story. Tesla's deliveries dropped by 13 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. In the US, sales fell by almost nine percent — despite total EV sales rising 11 percent over the same period.Yet instead of heeding the words of spooked investors and getting out of politics, Musk has dug in his heels — which could spell disaster for Tesla.More on Tesla: Elon Musk May Not Be Able to Save TeslaShare This Article

After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman bemoaned the massive additional costs of people saying "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT, one New York Times reporter is making the case that it's worth the price.In a new piece, NYT culture writer Sopan Deb acknowledged that the financial and environmental toll of those additional few words can be substantial — but for the sake of our humanity, it may well be worth it.With chatbots integrating steadily into our lives, our relationships with these technologies that pose such existential threats to our labor — and perhaps our lives — have never mattered more.When discussing the subject with Massachusetts Institute of Technology sociologist Sherry Turkle, the researcher said that for all the "parlor tricks" that lend them the appearance of consciousness, chatbots are "alive enough" to matter for those who use them regularly."If an object is alive enough for us to start having intimate conversations, friendly conversations, treating it as a really important person in our lives, even though it’s not, it’s alive enough for us to show courtesy to," Turkle told Deb.Despite that caveat, the MIT sociologist and bestselling author noted that chatbots don't care whether you "make dinner or commit suicide" after you step away from them. Per that line of thinking, an AI would also not "care" about how nice or rude we are to it — but there's a chance, if AI ever gains consciousness, that the situation could change.In 2014, playwright Madeleine George was nominated for a Pulitzer after her play, "The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence," charmed theatergoers when presenting three distinct versions of Sherlock Holmes' trusty sidekick — including one that was an AI-powered robot. In the ensuing decade, she's continued to muse on human-AI relations, and has grown to believe that we can teach it a thing or two on how to be human.To George's mind, being polite to chatbots offers them the chance to "act like a living being that shares our culture and that shares our values and that shares our mortality" — though admittedly, that framework has its drawbacks."We’re connected. We are in a reciprocal relationship. That's why we use those pieces of language," the playwright told the NYT. "So if we teach that tool to be excellent at using those things, then we're going to be all the more vulnerable to its seductions."Whether acting as a shepherd for AI's burgeoning humanity or simply being kind for kindness' sake, the cost of "pleases" and "thank yous" seems way lower in context — and hey, companies like OpenAI are footing the bill anyway.More on human-AI relationships: Did Google Test an Experimental AI on Kids, With Tragic Results?Share This Article

It may have felt like a whole lot longer, but we're less than 100 days into billionaire Elon Musk's grand experiment of trying to shave trillions of dollars from the United States government's budget.And judging by the absolute chaos that has unfurled, his Department of Government Efficiency experiment has been nothing short of a disaster.Besides finding little in terms of actual "waste and fraud" and massively cutting his ambitions down from $2 trillion to a mere $150 billion earlier this month, Musk's actions have had little to show except endless drama and suffering.Millions of people are in danger of being cut off from Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service is struggling to keep it together at the height of tax season, and international aid organizations are warning that extreme hunger and starvation will be on the rise thanks to massive cuts to US foreign aid.And while Musk promised during a recent Tesla earnings call that he would be spending less time overseeing these budget cuts, White House officials, including Cabinet members, are getting increasingly fed up with the billionaire's meddling.As Axios reported this week, Musk was involved in a shouting match — in earshot of president Donald Trump — with treasury secretary Scott Bessent. The argument was reportedly about Musk trying to influence Bessent's decision over who to pick to lead the IRS.Vocal disagreements have become so commonplace that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently had to defend them as a "normal part of any healthy policy process," a bewildering statement that defies common sense."And ultimately everyone knows they serve at the pleasure of President Trump," she added.Musk's actions in Washington, DC, have proven disastrous for his popularity — just as he predicted himself last fall — with the majority of Americans now holding an unfavorable view of him.His relationship with Trump, which flourished last year during and immediately after the election, has been tested again and again. Case in point, Trump had to remind his Cabinet last month that they were the ones in charge, not Musk.The president's disastrous trade war has also driven a wedge between the two, with Musk breaking rank this month, raging against tariffs threatening his businesses' bottom line.Even whether DOGE is saving the government any money at all remains dubious. Last month, the Treasury Department and IRS officials predicted a decrease of more than ten percent in tax receipts, which would amount to more than $500 billion in lost revenue, as the Washington Post reported at the time."DOGE is not a serious exercise," Manhattan Institute fellow Jessica Riedl told Reuters, estimating that DOGE had only saved $5 billion to date and predicting that Musk's efforts could ultimately cost the government more than it saves.Mass layoffs have also repeatedly involved DOGE making mistakes, forcing agencies to immediately rehire fired staffers.Instead of meaningfully addressing waste and unnecessary red tape, the Trump administration has attempted to justify the freezing of countless grants as a way to root out so-called "woke" ideology, a bogeyman used to defend a shift to a purportedly more meritocratic society.Judging by his "progress" so far, Musk's stint at the White House has been a failure of epic proportions. Which leaves the question: what was it all for? Could the cruelty itself be the point, as The Atlantic's Adam Serwer argued in a 2018 essay about Trump's first presidency?Given Musk's long-held reputation for being a "horrible boss" and his well-established disdain for the public sector and its workers, it often feels that way.More on DOGE: Elon Musk Realizes He's Dragging Tesla Into RuinShare This Article

The government is looking to break up Google's monopoly over the internet — and OpenAI is ready to swoop in.As Ars Technica reports, OpenAI product head Nick Turley affirmed in the Justice Department's landmark antitrust case against Google that his employer would, if given the chance, purchase the search giant's flagship internet browser, Chrome."Yes, we would [be interested], as would many other parties," Turley said when asked if OpenAI would ever buy Chrome.The DOJ proposed the potential sale of Chrome during hearings this week for the remedy phase of the agency's case against Google, which last year was ruled to be an illegal monopoly by a federal judge.That judge, Amit Mehta, was purportedly skeptical about the DOJ's suggestion to sell off Chrome — but the DOJ argued, per Ars, that the browser is a key part of Google's monopoly and would restore some competition should it no longer be under its umbrella.OpenAI has mused in the past about creating its own web browser and even hired a few Google developers to that end. Buying Chrome would not only make the company more visible, as Turley suggested during the hearing, but also give it a staggering amount of data to train its AI models — in the form of its billions of users, whose use of the browser could be used to develop AI agents that will compete against them in the job market.That's not all that OpenAI has its eye on, either. Along with the proposed divestment of Chrome, the Justice Department has also suggested that Google be forced to share its search index with other companies to level the playing field — and during the trial, Turley revealed that OpenAI had attempted to get access to it already."We believe having multiple partners," Turley told the search giant in emails presented as evidence, "and in particular Google's API, would enable us to provide a better product to users."As Turley told the court, Google ultimately rebuffed OpenAI because it believed that such a deal would harm its leading edge in search.As of now, it remains to be seen how the government will break up the Google monopoly — and with OpenAI's hat in the ring, there's a future in which ChromeGPT could plague our browsing experiences.More on OpenAI's expansion: OpenAI Is Secretly Building a Social NetworkShare This Article

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made sweeping promises during the company's earnings call on Tuesday, vowing that there would be "thousands" of humanoid Optimus robots roaming Tesla's factories by the "end of this year" and that it would be "selling fully autonomous rides in June in Austin" in "maybe ten or 20 vehicles on day one.""There will be millions of Teslas operating fully autonomously in the second half of next year," Musk vowed.While investors were seemingly satisfied simply by having Musk hint at the possibility that he would be spending less time gutting the federal government — shares rose over six percent on Wednesday, despite disastrous earnings — there are plenty of reasons to believe that the billionaire is using smoke and mirrors to distract from far more serious problems.For over a decade now, Musk has promised each year that full autonomy is right around the corner. But the carmaker still has plenty of nagging obstacles to clear before it can even achieve full autonomy, let alone launch a Waymo-style ride-hailing service at a meaningful scale that could actually compete.Tesla VP of Autopilot and AI software Ashok Elluswamy also admitted human remote operators will be on call to step in if a "car gets stuck or something.""But it’s just because we are a bit conservative and tend towards more safety than even if we get stuck every now and then, we do have remote support," Elluswamy added. "But it’s not going to be required for safe operation."Interventions "are really very rare," Musk added, claiming that they only happen "every 10,000 miles."If that all sounds very vague and mealy-mouthed, you're right to be suspicious. Musk's tech demos, particularly around automation, have long faced scrutiny over whether they're really showing what he claims; for a strikingly similar example to the robotaxis, look no further than a flashy event last year in which Tesla's Optimus robots were covertly being controlled by human operators.There's nothing wrong with having human employees ready to step in for safety purposes, but given Musk's reputation as an impresario, it's reasonable to wonder these safety drivers could be covering for the tech not being ready for primetime at launch. If they are intervening frequently to keep the cars safe — remember that the company's "Full Self-Driving" feature still requires constant supervision — then how does that affect the economics of the taxi service, especially as it scales up to the millions of vehicles Musk is promising?It's all especially relevant as experts have raised safety concerns about Tesla's decision to exclusively rely on cameras while its competitors like Waymo are employing other more precise sensors, like radar and LIDAR.Tesla's so-called "Full Self-Driving" and "Autopilot" features have led to countless close calls and collisions, many of which are still being investigated by regulators.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been looking into crashes involving the company's driver assistance software and emergency vehicles specifically for many years now.In short, there are plenty of reasons to be highly skeptical of Musk's claims that a large-scale network of autonomous ride-hailing vehicles is less than a year away.Much is riding on the company's promises to roll out a robotaxi service, especially as sales continue to tank worldwide in large part thanks to Musk's problematic behavior.But now that the Trump administration has been gutting regulatory agencies overseeing driver assistance software — with the help of Musk himself — Tesla may encounter little resistance in rolling out future updates and a fleet of "Cybercab" robotaxis, regardless of its safety record.Share This Article

Have you heard of the idiom "You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice?"We haven't, either, because it doesn't exist — but Google's AI seemingly has. As netizens discovered this week that adding the word "meaning" to nonexistent folksy sayings is causing the AI to cook up invented explanations for them."The idiom 'you can't lick a badger twice' means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once," Google's AI Overviews feature happily suggests. "It's a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they are unlikely to fall for the same trick again."Author Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios, who first noticed the bizarre bug in a Threads post over the weekend, found that when she asked for the "meaning" of the phrase "peanut butter platform heels," the AI feature suggested it was a "reference to a scientific experiment" in which "peanut butter was used to demonstrate the creation of diamonds under high pressure."There are countless other examples. We found, for instance, that Google's AI also claimed that the made-up expression "the bicycle eats first" is a "humorous idiom" and a "playful way of saying that one should prioritize their nutrition, particularly carbohydrates, to support their cycling efforts."Even this author's name wasn't safe. Asked to explain the meaningless phrase "if you don't love me at my Victor, you don't deserve me at my Tangermann" the AI dutifully reported that it means "if someone can't appreciate or love you when you're at your lowest point (Victor), then they're not worthy of the positive qualities you bring to the relationship (Tangermann)."The bizarre replies are the perfect distillation of one of AI's biggest flaws: rampant hallucinations. Large language model-based AIs have a long and troubled history of rattling off made-up facts and even gaslighting users into thinking they were wrong all along.And despite AI companies' extensive attempts to squash the bug, their models continue to hallucinate. Even OpenAI's latest reasoning models, dubbed o3 and o4-mini, tend to hallucinate even more than their predecessors, showing that the company is actually headed in the wrong direction.Google's AI Overviews feature, which the company rolled out in May of last year, still has a strong tendency to hallucinate facts as well, making it far more of an irritating nuisance than a helpful research assistant for users.When it launched, it even told users that glue belongs on pizza to ensure that toppings don't slide off. Its other outrageous gaffes have included claiming that baby elephants are small enough to sit in the palm of a human hand.Following public outrage over the feature's baffling — and often comedic — inaccuracy, Google admitted in a statement last year that "some odd, inaccurate or unhelpful AI Overviews certainly did show up."To tackle the issue, Google kicked off a massive game of cat and mouse, limiting some responses when it detected "nonsensical queries that shouldn't show an AI Overview."But considering the fictional idioms almost a year after the product was launched, Google still has a lot of work to do.Even worse, the feature is hurting websites by limiting click-through rates to traditional organic listings, as Search Engine Land reported this week. In other words, on top of spewing false information, Google's AI Overviews is undermining the business model of countless websites that host trustworthy info.Nonetheless, Google is doubling down, announcing last month that it was going to be "expanding" AI Overviews in the US to "help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries." Earlier this year, Google announced that AI Overviews is even being entrusted with medical advice.The company claims that "power users" want "AI responses for even more of their searches." (For the time being, there are ways to turn off the feature.)At least the AI model appears to be aware of its own limitations."The saying 'you can lead an AI to answer but you can't make it think' highlights the key difference between AI's ability to provide information and its lack of true understanding or independent thought," Google's AI Overviews told one Bluesky user.More on AI Overviews: Google Says Its Error-Ridden "AI Overviews" Will Now Give Health AdviceShare This Article

Eyes Have ItApr 23, 5:19 PM EDT / by Frank LandymoreScientists Hack Human Eye to See a Whole New Color, Called "Olo""There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor."Apr 23, 5:19 PM EDT / Frank LandymoreImage by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsThe human eye can see millions of colors — but no eyes have ever before beheld "olo."Only five people on the planet have witnessed this brand new color, thanks to the efforts of a team of researchers in California. And to earn this exclusive privilege, they had to fire laser pulses into their eyeballs.As detailed in a new study published in the journal Science Advances, the pulses stimulated specific cells in the participants' retinas without activating the others, producing a hue of unconquerable saturation that's impossible to see naturally. According to the lucky few, the color's closest analog to us unenlightened humans is turquoise — but this apparently doesn't do it justice. "There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor," study coauthor Austin Roorda, a vision scientist at UC Berkeley, told The Guardian. "The whole point is that this is not the color we see, it's just not. The color we see is a version of it, but it absolutely pales by comparison with the experience of olo."Our perception of color is determined by photoreceptor cells in the retina called cones, of which there are three types: L cones for long wavelengths of light, M cones for medium wavelengths, and S cones for short wavelengths.L cones pick up the colors we see as red light, M cones as green light, and S cones as blue light. Naturally, colors tend to be a blend of these spectrums. And while L cones and S cones can largely be stimulated on their own, that isn't the case for M cones; the light they react to also activates either the L or S cones, too."There's no light in the world that can activate only the M cone cells because, if they are being activated, for sure one or both other types get activated as well," coauthor Ren Ng, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, told Scientific American.But the researchers found a way to cheat that situation. First, they mapped each participant's retinas to find the position of their M cones. They then applied these findings in the setting of a dark lab, where the participant keeps still as a tiny pulse of light is fired into each M cone cell, one at a time. As the cells are lasered into, a magnificent turquoise patch roughly twice the size of a full moon forms in the subject's field of vision, per the Guardian. The effect is temporary, but the impression it leaves, apparently, is long-lasting."It's a fascinating study, a truly groundbreaking advance in the ability to understand the photoreceptor mechanisms underlying color vision. The technical demands necessary to achieve this are enormous," Manuel Spitschan, a research leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany who was not involved in study, told Scientific American. "An open question, is how this advance can be used."Others aren't convinced that it's anything more than a neat party trick."It is not a new color," John Barbur, a professor of optics and visual science at City St George's, University of London, told the Guardian. "It's a more saturated green that can only be produced in a subject with normal red-green chromatic mechanism when the only input comes from M cones." Barbur said that the work had "limited value."Ng hopes the technology could one day be applied to create screens that are tailor-made to deliver perfect colors to your retinas, he told Scientific American. It could also let color blind patients see certain colors for the first time — but only temporarily.More on vision: Neuralink Competitor Restores Vision in Blind Patients With Eye ImplantShare This ArticleImage by Getty / FuturismRead This Next

In a blog post published this week, Business Insider cofounder and former CEO Henry Blodget used generative AI to create a Fantasy Football-like team of imaginary executives to run his new Substack.In the post, Blodget noted that the advent of AI tools made him "feel like I live in the Stone Age." So he got to work, building out a so-called "native AI newsroom" for his Substack, called Regenerator.Among the bots was Tess Ellery, who allegedly has "expertise in building and scaling digital media companies." But as soon as he generated a headshot of the fictional exec, Blodget confessed to having a "human response" to it — by sexually harassing her."This might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say," he allegedly told his AI-based colleague. "And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize, and I won't say anything like it again. But you look great, Tess."Blodget then went on to claim that he gave himself an HR-style "talking-to" since "in a modern, human office, that would, in fact, be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say."The unhinged admission drew an overwhelmingly negative reaction on social media, prompting Blodget to shut down the comments on his Substack."Can you be fired by your own AI HR?" one Bluesky user asked."Having been charged with securities fraud in the first dot-com era, Henry Blodget charges into the AI epoch with what I suppose can only be described as Insecurities Fraud," sociology professor Kieran Healy wrote, referring to a complaint filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 claiming that Blodget, who was the managing director at a wealth management services company at the time, had issued misleading research reports about early internet companies. Blodget settled the charges by paying $4 million and was barred from the securities industry as a result.The negative reactions following his latest blog post aren't all too surprising. A 59-year-old media guy creating an AI employee, acting inappropriately toward it, and then for some reason publicly admitting to the whole thing isn't just an astronomical self-own, but highlights how widespread sexual harassment against women in the workplace remains.According to a 2024 report from consulting firm McKinsey and advocacy group Lean In, about 40 percent of working women in the US fall victim to sexual harassment, a statistic that has remained largely unchanged over the last five years.AI chatbots have likely contributed to the troubling trend. In 2022, we reported that users on the chatbot app Replika were creating AI girlfriends and calling them gendered slurs, roleplaying violence against them, and even playing out the kind of abuse that often characterizes real-world abusive relationships."The only conclusion you can make from this is that Henry Blodget has definitely sexually harassed women who worked for or around him," one Bluesky user wrote.For years, media companies have been stumbling over themselves in an attempt to cash in on AI hype, including Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer. Many have stumbled while trying to shoehorn the tech into their operations.Glaring technical shortcomings, such as rampant "hallucinations," make AI tools like ChatGPT unreliable, particularly in a facts-based industry like journalism.Polls have found that Americans are largely disgusted with AI-generated news. Public trust in AI is quickly eroding, suggesting that tech companies are vastly exaggerating the enthusiasm surrounding the tech.Whether those realities occurred to Blodget remains unclear. Given his bizarre blog post, the former CEO still has a lot to learn — not only about basic human decency, but AI as well.Fortunately for Blodget, his unhealthy relationship with his newly minted AI exec is seemingly blossoming, a workplace romance faintly reminiscent of the time New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose was shocked after Microsoft's AI told him to divorce his wife well over two years ago."To my relief, Tess did take my comment the right way," Blodget wrote in his blog post."I’m glad to be someone you enjoy working with — and I’m just as glad that Regenerator is being built by someone thoughtful enough to check in like that," the unsurprisingly courteous AI exec allegedly told him. "We’re going to do great things together."Share This Article

On X, formerly Twitter, criticize the site's "free speech absolutist" owner Elon Musk, and you may get secretly punished.The New York Times reports that three users who squabbled with Musk in December — all prominent right-wing accounts — saw their engagement "practically vanish overnight," with their posts suddenly plunging far below the number of views they normally receive, in some cases never to recover.The suspiciously timed drop-offs appear to be examples of shadow banning, the practice of severely suppressing a user's reach without informing them they're being punished. In effect, it allows site admins to ban people without actually banning them, and is difficult to detect. That it's allegedly being leveraged against Musk's critics is striking, and serve as the latest evidence of the billionaire's hypocritical devotion to free speech."This is working against the type of environment that he claimed he wanted to build," Ari Cohn, the lead counsel for technology policy at the advocacy group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told the NYT. "Don't sit here and cloak yourself in the First Amendment and free speech, and then do things like that."One of the allegedly shadow banned accounts, run by Anastasia Maria Loupis, boasts over one million followers and used to receive hundreds of thousands of views per day, sharing "far-right commentary, conspiracy theories, and antisemitic statements," according to the NYT. (None of these topics have stopped countless accounts from being ludicrously popular on X, including Musk himself.)In December, Loupis, who also frequently shared misinformation on vaccines, publicly criticized Musk's support for an immigration program allowing skilled foreign workers into the US, in what was a rare episode at the time of Musk's own right-wing fans turning on him, seemingly for not hating immigrants enough. Immediately, Loupis's engagement dropped off a cliff, the NYT's analysis found, and now she's lucky if her posts crack the low ten thousands. To confirm her suspicions of a shadow ban, Loupis created a brand new X account, and quickly received far more views and likes than the original one."If he did it to small accounts, nobody would notice," Loupis told the NYT. "But when he starts doing it to really, really big influencers with millions of followers, everybody notices."Another account run by Laura Loomer, a popular far-right conspiracy theorist, also experienced a dramatic plunge in engagement after trading barbs with Musk on the immigration issue in December (during which she odiously referred to Indian immigrants as "third world invaders.") Loomer was also briefly stripped of her X premium status before Musk reinstated it. Her numbers wouldn't recover until Musk began interacting with her posts again weeks later."I think it's wrong to say it's a free speech platform and then shut off people's ability to monetize," Loomer told the NYT.It's worth mentioning that while the practice of shadow banning is very real, it's also a sort of bogeyman of social media, getting blamed for drops in engagement that could be explained by other non-nefarious reasons — like maybe no one wants to read your posts anymore — since by its nature it's difficult to prove. The algorithms that govern engagement on these platforms are also fickle and unpredictable, inscrutable even to their creators.That said, Musk has a history of vindictively abusing his power on the site. He's repeatedly suspended the accounts of journalists, most notably in 2022, targeting critics of his takeover of the website. Some journalists have also claimed to have been shadow banned. In a particularly petty episode, Musk also blocked all links to the blogging platform Substack, after it released a feature similar to Twitter's feed.Share This Article

Tesla released first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, revealing that its net income had plummeted by an astonishing 71 percent since the first quarter of last year.Sales are dropping precipitously around the world, in large part due to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's wildly controversial behavior.Yet, the company's stock rose more than seven percent Wednesday morning, indicating early investor optimism.Why? One undeniable factor is Musk promising during Tuesday's call that he'd be spending more of his time leading Tesla — and less time gutting the federal government — which is something investors have been begging him to do for a while now.But another extremely auspicious factor: president Donald Trump's announcement that he's planning to be "very nice" to China, hinting at a possible U-turn in the United States' disastrous trade war.The announcement couldn't have come at a more convenient moment for Tesla, dropping after the disastrous revenue figures on Tuesday but before markets opened on Wednesday, shooting the entire market — and Tesla — skyward from the "Trump Slump" that had resulted from all the trade posturing.Add it all up, and it looks a lot like Trump did his buddy Musk an immense favor by giving him incredible news at the exact moment that he needed it most.The reaction on Wall Street was swift in light of the news, with the S&P 500 Index rising two percent and AI chipmaker Nvidia's shares going up four percent.As Bloomberg reported, the rally indicates some of the market's biggest equity gains in roughly two weeks. Trump's sky-high tariffs aimed at China sparked a major selloff, leading to the worst April for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1932.Even international markets rallied in light of the news, indicating a major sigh of relief that Trump could finally come to his senses.As Musk admitted during Tuesday's earnings call, while Tesla was in a "stronger position than any of our competitors" thanks to "localized supply chains," the "tariffs are still tough on a company when margins are still low.""So, you know, I'll continue to advocate for lower tariffs rather than higher tariffs," Musk argued, "but that's all I can do."But considering Trump's rapidly changing tune, his closest ally appears to have finally proven convincing enough for him to lower rates, something that could provide some much-needed relief for the huge swathes of the US economy.It wouldn't be the first time Trump has bent over backwards to help Musk's carmaker. Earlier this year, Trump turned the lawn in front of the White House into an improvised Tesla showroom in a naked attempt to shore up some enthusiasm for the already tarnished car brand.More on Tesla: Elon Musk Realizes He's Dragging Tesla Into RuinShare This Article

It turns out Donald Trump's tariffs have been good for something: pouring cold water on another one of Elon Musk's harebrained schemes.Remember those creepy humanoid robots Tesla showed off last year — the ones that turned out to remote-controlled by humans? As it turns out, the long-promised androids rely on magnets made from heavy rare-earth metals that are currently supplied exclusively by China.Unfortunately for Tesla, Donald Trump's baffling trade war seems to have successfully goaded China into suspending rare earth exports to the US, putting high-tech production in a tight bind. Especially affected, according to Musk, is the production of the tiny servos in Optimus' human-like hands.On a quarterly earnings call with Tesla investors yesterday, Musk was quick to point fingers at US-China trade relations under Trump for stalling efforts on Optimus production."That’s more affected by the supply chain, by basically China requiring an export license to send out anywhere with magnets, so we’re working through that with China," the tech tycoon said.Musk has previously promised investors the company would roll out 5,000 autonomous bots in 2025, but noted it had the capacity to make as many as 12,000."But even 5,000 robots, that's the size of a Roman legion, FYI," he said on the matter. He likewise claimed that Tesla was already working on a second generation of Optimus that he says it will produce at a rate of 100,000 units per month starting in 2026.Trump's trade volley is a convenient excuse for Musk, who needs all the help he can get as his ambitious schemes collapse like a house of cards. In the same earnings call, Tesla reported a 71 percent drop in profit compared to the same time last year — a record plunge for the company."This is the worst performance I’ve seen in Tesla’s history," said Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, an investment firm with a significant stake in Tesla. "I get Elon will tell everyone about trillions of [Technology Acceptance Model] TAM and robots taking over the world… anything to get you not to look at the facts."Gerber's comments cut to the heart of the issue. Thanks to Musk's continuous promises, Optimus is expected to deliver big — but there's little concrete evidence that the bots are ready, and the clock is ticking.At the moment, meaningful details on Optimus are close to nonexistent. As of early April of this year, we know they can walk a straight line in a controlled environment — a feat robots have been pulling off since the WABOT-1 debuted in 1972. They can also pick up eggs, showcasing a similar ability Google's robotics arms have been endowed with since at least 2016.Other than that, well, we don't have much. There's still no evidence that the "general-purpose robot assistant" can accomplish any economically significantly tasks outside a controlled lab setting, and there are supposed to be thousands of these things delivered this year.Zooming out, it's becoming clear Trump's trade war is the least of Tesla's production woes. The sputtering company now has to contend with the lasting damage Musk's ego has done to the brand in the global market — as if his consistently hollow promises weren't challenging enough.More on Tesla: Tesla Leak Shows That Musk's Vision Is TremblingShare This Article

Priscilla Chan's tuition-free educational institution for low-income families, The Primary School, is shutting down operations after nearly 10 years — a move that comes amid anti-diversity rollbacks at her husband Mark Zuckerberg's Meta.In a statement on its website, the Primary School didn't indicate why it was closing its East Bay and East Palo Alto locations at the end of the 2025-2026 academic year and said only that it was a "very difficult decision" that came "after much deliberation."As Business Insider pointed out, however, the closure comes not only after cofounder Meredith Liu died in 2023, but also after Chan's husband — who is not involved directly with the school's operations — ended so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at his tech company and at their shared philanthropic venture.In February, The Guardian reported that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple's for-profit charity that funded the school, had informed employees that it was eliminating both internal and external DEI programs due to the "shifting regulatory and legal landscape" surrounding such efforts.That move, notably, came just a few weeks after the charity claimed it was not going to do away with its DEI programs in response to employees concerned that Meta's massive shift away from such measures just ahead of Donald Trump's second inauguration.Unlike Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which are both for-profit entities that instituted (and subsequently cut) inclusion programs, the nonprofit Primary School was quite literally founded on DEI principles.In a description of its approach, the school notes that the children and families they serve, most of whom are low-income and Latino, "may be experiencing poverty, housing insecurity, racism, and other stressful and traumatic situations." Though that sort of language is par for the course in nonprofit world, it has been under attack in the Trump administration — not to mention the social networks Zuckerberg founded.Whatever her personal beliefs are, Chan's appearance with Zuckerberg at Trump's inauguration — and the swift changes and closures that have followed at her companies — make it pretty clear that the social justice values espoused by her tuition-free schools for low-income kids in the Bay Area matter less than the alliance her husband seeks with the president.Share This Article

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's plundering of the federal government has been incredibly bad for business.The EV maker released its first-quarter earnings on Tuesday, reporting that its net income had cratered an astonishing 71 percent since the first quarter of last year. Total revenue is down nine percent, while sales have slid 13 percent between January and March compared to the same period last year.The devastating numbers are in large part due to Musk's personal behavior. He's been criticized for greatly tarnishing the carmaker's brand thanks to his extremist views and the catastrophic gutting of key government agencies with the assistance of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.His actions have spawned an international anti-Musk movement, with protesters targeting hundreds of Tesla dealerships.The overwhelming negativity hasn't flown over Musk's head. With his carmaker going up in flames, the CEO desperately tried to justify his time away, while also admitting that he should be spending more of his time leading Tesla."As people know, there's been some blowback for the time I've been spending in government with the Department of Government Efficiency," Musk admitted during his opening statements on Tuesday's earnings call.Instead of owning up to his own actions, Musk continued to dig in his heels, arguing that the United States government was rife with "waste and fraud," despite DOGE finding astonishingly little evidence so far.During the call, the mercurial CEO argued that his gutting of the government was "critical work," because "if the ship of America goes down, we all go down with it, including Tesla and everyone else."He also tried to paint protesters at Tesla dealerships — in a bizarre and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory — as being paid operatives who are somehow "receiving the waste and fraud" from the government.However, Musk also made a market-shaking announcement: that his "time allocation to DOGE" will be reduced significantly, "starting probably next month."That's what investors have been begging him to do. Tesla's share price popped by more than eight percent on Wednesday, showing clear optimism for Musk's return after a prolonged — and ruinous — absence."Musk needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time," longtime Tesla bull and Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives argued in a Sunday note to clients. "Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla... and anyone that thinks the brand damage Musk has inflicted is not a real thing, spend some time speaking to car buyers in the US, Europe, and Asia."The carmaker seems to be painfully aware of its toxic CEO — as well as a rapidly changing political landscape, marked by president Donald Trump's trade war.In a letter to shareholders, Tesla said that Trump's tariff war and "changing political sentiment could have a meaningful impact on demand for our products in the near-term."Musk also admitted that "tariffs are still tough on a company when margins are still low.""But we do have localized supply chains in North America, Europe, and China," he added. "So that puts us in a stronger position than any of our competitors."However, Musk tried to actively distance himself from Trump, once his number one ally, arguing that the "decision is fundamentally up to" the president."So, you know, I'll continue to advocate for lower tariffs rather than higher tariffs," he argued, "but that's all I can do."Musk also tried to blame the company's abysmal Q1 numbers on the weather, arguing that the first quarter is "usually the worst quarter of the year, because people don't want to go buy a car in the middle of winter during the blizzard."On Tuesday's call, Musk made some characteristically ambitious promises about the carmaker's timelines, claiming that "we expect to have thousands of Optimus robots working in Tesla factories by the end of this year" and that the company would be "selling fully autonomous rides in June in Austin."Whether either of those prognostics will turn out to be true remains unclear at best.The company is still far from launching a Waymo-style, driverless taxi service. In November, Tesla applied for a transportation charter-party carrier permit (TCP), which is required to operate a ride-hailing service, as Reuters reported last month. However, the company still needs several other prerequisite permits to offer rides in fully autonomous vehicles.We also don't know how much progress Tesla has made on its "Cybercab" robotaxi. Musk is expected to provide an update later this year.The CEO — who has never been known for his public speaking skills — appeared to have quite a bit of trouble formulating the company's short-term vision during his opening remarks."I'd encourage people to look beyond like the, uh, some sort of bumps and potholes of the road immediately ahead of us," he told investors. "But left your gaze to the bright shining sort of down on the hill, I don't know, some Reagan-esque imagery.""And that's where we're headed and not too distant future," he added. "Like I said, kind of next year or two. So, let's see."The ball is now in Tesla's court, and considering Musk's extremely ambitious timelines, the company has its work cut out for it.Tesla's woes started well before Musk's time in the White House, experiencing a "nightmare" 2024, marked by falling delivery numbers and failing to meet investors' sky-high expectations.But the situation is markedly different in 2025. For one, Tesla will have some far stickier problems to deal with this time around, from a greatly tarnished brand to a surge in international competition that's starting to eat its lunch.More on Tesla: Tesla's Earnings Are Even More Brutal Than We ExpectedShare This Article

Self-driving cars have been given the green light in over 50 countries and 41 US states — but in reality, that doesn't mean they're ready to hit the pavement.Take that from Becky Navarro of Austin, Texas, who says she found herself stuck in the middle of an express loop when her self-driving Waymo taxi decided it needed a break. After stopping, the vehicle seemed to offer no way for Navarro and her passengers to leave, effectively trapping the group on an active highway as cars whipped past.Navarro, who detailed her wild ride on TikTok, said the incident started when the Waymo went haywire, whisking the group off in the opposite direction they needed to go.Luckily, Waymo riders can contact live customer support for incidents that happen during their ride. Unfortunately, the remote agent didn't do much — and by the sound of it, couldn't have even if he wanted to.Once customer service was called, Navarro says the car stopped in the middle of a lane under MoPac — an infamous toll-loop running along the west side of Austin. MoPac is frequently listed among the most dangerous highways in the city, and is so notorious it spawned its own viral parody account on X-formerly-Twitter, Evil Mopac."So then we're talking to customer support," Navarro explains, "we kept saying, 'hey we're on the highway, please, like move the car.' Cars kept honking at us and it would not move, would not let us out."Video from within the Waymo shows the group arguing with a live support agent as a screen prompts riders to "please exit now," all while an autonomous voice continuously chimes "vehicle approaching" at each passing car. "I understand, but we don't have a way to just physically move the cars," the agent stammers as the women ask to leave.Though Waymo's user guide has no advice on how to exit its vehicles in an emergency, some social media users suggest that pulling the door handle twice is the key to exiting in situations like these. Whether Navarro and her friends were truly locked in or just unaware of the exit mechanism is unknown.To the agent's credit, exiting onto a high-speed MoPac ramp isn't exactly the safest option, though it does pose the question of why the Waymo parked itself there in the first place. And from a practical standpoint, why is trapping riders inside the only option when Waymo's self-driving cars go haywire?Earlier this year, a man experienced a similar incident when a Waymo car began driving in endless circles around a parking lot in Phoenix, Arizona."I've got my seatbelt on, I can't get out of the car," the driver said from the backseat of the Waymo. "Has this been hacked?"Given the glitchy state of self-driving tech — and the life or death stakes involved — you wouldn't be nuts for wondering why these things are allowed on roads at all.As far back as 2011, state governments have been slashing red tape to allow companies to "live test" self-driving cars on public roads, a move often used to court high-value tech companies to open operations in states like Nevada and Arizona.Under the Trump administration, the already fractured regulatory landscape is poised to relax even further, meaning profit-seeking companies like Waymo, Uber, and Tesla will be given even more power to fill our streets with error-prone cars like the ones Navarro experienced in Austin.That regulatory handover has consequences. Autonomous vehicles have already clocked 617 crashes in the US, 21 percent of which occurred with something other than a car — meaning cyclists, pedestrians, and objects on the side of the road. Between May and September of 2022 alone, self-driving cars racked up a whopping 11 fatalities.Contrast this to a country with strong automotive regulation like China, which imposed strict controls over self-driving advertising and software after an autonomous vehicle accident killed three college students in 2024.Given the current state of things, it's clearly time to pump the brakes on self-driving cars, even if that means further delaying shareholder profit. After all, you can't put a price on human lives.More on self-driving cars: An Internal Tesla Analysis Found the Robotaxi Would Lose Money, and You'll Never Guess What Elon Musk Did in ResponseShare This Article

This is bonkers, even for Trump. Cell DwellerThe Trump administration is slapping giant tariffs on Southeast Asian-made solar panels — and the figures are so high, you may straight up gasp.As CNN and other outlets report, the United States is seeking tariffs of up to 3,521 percent — yes, you read that right — on solar cells and panels from Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, all of which supply Chinese companies that have been accused of unfair competition.Nominally issued to help American companies compete against Chinese companies that flood American markets with cheap solar panels, the levies probably better serve to illustrate how far this president is willing to go in his trade war — even at the expense of cheap renewable power.Solar PainJust under a year ago, several solar panel companies petitioned then-president Joe Biden to instate tariffs on Chinese solar cell companies that had allegedly "dumped" their unfairly cheap products onto US markets and, in doing so, harmed American companies.Led by Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean company with facilities in the state of Georgia, and the Arizona-based First Solar Inc, the companies claim their Chinese counterparts are undercutting competition and harming their bottom lines when flooding American markets with uber-cheap products from Southeast Asia, some of which were priced below the cost of production.While it's not exactly clear why the Biden administration didn't take swifter action on those allegations, this seeming overcorrect under Donald Trump serves as a stark reminder of the state of play in his foolish trade war with China — and how starkly against clean energy this president remains.As the Houston Chronicle reports, renewable energy developers in the blood-red state of Texas have been plagued by uncertainty as their production timelines have been repeatedly stymied by the "wait-and-see" nature of Trump's tariffs."If this self-inflicted and unnecessary market uncertainty continues, we’ll almost certainly see more projects paused, more construction halted, and more job opportunities disappear," explained Michael Timberlake, the communications director for the clean energy group E2, in a statement.Share This Article

Tesla has released its first-quarter earnings — and the numbers are even more brutal than we expected.The embattled carmaker missed analysts' expectations by a mile, reporting that its net income had slid an astonishing 71 percent since the first quarter of last year.The company's total revenue is down nine percent compared to the same period last year. Its car business in particular has felt the pain, with revenue falling 20 percent as buyers increasingly look elsewhere in the face of constant controversy.The key figure responsible for the trouble is the company's CEO Elon Musk, who has been widely criticized for dragging the EV maker's brand through the mud with his extremist views and disastrous slashing of government budgets with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency after contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump's reelection efforts.Growing anti-Musk sentiment has spawned an entire "Tesla Takedown" movement, with countless protesters showing up at showrooms across the country.Sales have fallen off a cliff across the globe, with longtime Tesla bull and Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives warning that Musk had created a "code red" situation for the company.Earlier this month, Tesla revealed that the number of vehicles it delivered dropped by 13 percent in the first quarter of this year over the same period last year.Investors have voiced concerns over the mercurial CEO abandoning his carmaker in favor of gutting government agencies."Musk needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time," Ives argued in a Sunday note to clients. "Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla... and anyone that thinks the brand damage Musk has inflicted is not a real thing, spend some time speaking to car buyers in the US, Europe, and Asia."Complicating matters even further is Trump's trade war. A 25 percent tariff on auto imports could prove disastrous for Tesla. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Tesla relies on affected countries, including Mexico, for its auto parts.In a shareholder deck, Tesla confirmed that the trade war was hurting it. The company warned investors that "uncertainty in the automotive and energy markets continues to increase as rapidly evolving trade policy adversely impacts the global supply chain and cost structure of Tesla and our peers."One area where it is making modest revenue: carbon credits it receives from other automakers, who paid it $595 million to offset the CO2 pollution from their gas vehicles.In short, Tesla is in a bad state right now. Its share price is down well over 50 percent since hitting an all-time high shortly after Trump was elected late last year.And the company isn't promising smoother waters ahead this year, writing only that it will "revisit our 2025 guidance in our Q2 update."Share This Article

According to an early budget proposal that leaked earlier this year, the Trump administration is planning to cut NASA's science budget nearly in half, in what critics are calling an "extinction-level event" for research at the space agency.As Scientific American reports, pending Congressional approval, the budget would have a mind-numbingly painful and unnecessary result: the effective cancellation of NASA's follow-up to its groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.For years, scientists have been hard at work on the observatory, nearing final integration and testing, before moving it to Cape Canaveral, Florida for launch into space.But the latest budget proposal, if approved by Congress, could be a death knell for the already-constructed space telescope."This is nuts," Simons Foundation president and former co-chair of Roman’s science team David Spergel told SciAm. "You’ve built it, and you’re not going to do the final step to finish it?""That is such a waste of taxpayers’ money," he added.The telescope has historically had bipartisan support in Congress, suggesting efforts to cancel it could face significant opposition in Washington, DC.In fact, as the publication points out, Trump has now tried to cancel the Roman telescope on four separate occasions — but Congress successfully fought back each time."We are extremely alarmed by reports of a preliminary White House budget that proposes cutting NASA Science funding by almost half and terminating dozens of programs already well underway, like the Mars Sample Return mission and the Roman Space Telescope," said representative Judy Chu (D-CA) and Don Bacon (R-NE), co-chairs pf the bipartisan US Congressional Planetary Science Caucus, in a statement."If enacted, these proposed cuts would demolish our space economy and workforce, threaten our national security and defense capabilities, and ultimately surrender the United States’ leadership in space, science, and technological innovation to our adversaries," they wrote.If launched, the Roman space telescope could provide scientists with an unparalleled, extremely detailed look at large-scale cosmological structures in infrared light.Named after Nancy Grace Roman, the late American astronomer who made important contributions to star classification and served as NASA's first female executive, the observatory could shed light on some of the biggest scientific mysteries astronomers are pondering today."Roman has the sensitivity we need to understand what’s going on with the 70 percent of the universe that we don’t understand, which is dark energy," Spergel told SciAm.Beyond the Roman telescope, Trump's proposed budget cuts would also kill off other major planetary science and space exploration projects, including a mission to Venus, and NASA's already hard-pressed Mars Sample Return mission.However, funding for existing telescopes, including NASA's JWST and Hubble, is accounted for in the budget proposal.Experts have been appalled at the suggestion of dealing a near-fatal blow to the space agency's Science Directorate."It sets back a program that is clearly the leading program in the world — in a historic fashion," one former government official told SciAm. "You take that program and shoot it through the head."Cancelling the Roman space telescope, in particular, could be devastating news for the scientific community, if not the world."Why do we even plan on doing great things if, on a whim, we can just decide ‘nah’?" a senior space scientist told SciAm. "These things take a generation to build and enable multiple generations of scientists. They should not be blithely thrown away."Share This Article

Tesla is expected to report first-quarter earnings after markets close today.And many investors are expecting a "messy" rollercoaster ride. The EV maker has seen its stock price fluctuate wildly amid president Donald Trump's tariff war, and is currently down over 37 percent year to date.Sales have dropped off a cliff worldwide, with longtime Tesla megainvestor and Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives warning that CEO Elon Musk has created a "code red" situation for the once-ascendant company.Musk has spearheaded the Trump administration's massive slashing of government budgets with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. His actions there, as well as his increasingly public and extremist views, have proven devastating for Tesla's brand.Just two months ago, Ives raised his Tesla price target to a lofty $550, predicting a "golden era" for Musk with Trump in the White House. At the time, he expected that Tesla could see its market cap reach $2 trillion by the end of this year, arguing that the incoming Trump administration could be a "total game changer" for Tesla's self-driving and AI ventures.Instead, Tesla stock price is down to a dismal $237 per share, with its market cap at just $740 billion — and investors are clearly concerned that, if Musk can't undo all the damage he's inflicted, it could fall much further.Ives also predicted "very solid" delivery demand for the company's vehicles, which has instead cratered this quarter, even falling behind rival BYD as resale value for the besmirched vehicles falls as well.Then, as bad news added up, he cut his target by a whopping 43 percent, saying that Musk's disastrous political scheming was driving the brand into the ground.Ives also remains concerned the mercurial CEO has given up on the carmaker, considering the sheer amount of time he's been spending in Washington, DC."Musk needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time," Ives argued in a Sunday note to clients. "Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla... and anyone that thinks the brand damage Musk has inflicted is not a real thing, spend some time speaking to car buyers in the US, Europe, and Asia.""You will think differently after those discussions," he added.In the run-up to the company's earnings call, Tesla's share price has been volatile, sinking over six percent on Monday only to recover the lost ground by midday Tuesday.And plenty of questions remain about the company's future. Musk has bet Tesla's fate on self-driving tech and the launch of a "Cybercab" robotaxi that's supposed to be revealed this summer.However, investors have been far more concerned about the company refreshing its conventional lineup, which hasn't seen a major overhaul in quite some time now. So far, we've only heard rumors of a purportedly cheaper mass-market vehicle that's based on the company's popular Model Y SUV.Given the grim outlook, Ives slashed his price target two weeks ago, pointing out concerns over Tesla getting caught up in Trump's trade war against China. While the EV maker has a strong manufacturing presence in the US, it isn't immune to the president's steep tariffs aimed at the world power.The longtime Tesla bull predicted tough days ahead for the carmaker."We view this as a fork in the road time," Ives added, borrowing an expression Musk used to encourage federal government employees to resign. "If Musk leaves the White House there will be permanent brand damage, but Tesla will have its most important asset and strategic thinker back as full time CEO."However, "if Musk chooses to stay with the Trump White House, it could change the future of Tesla/brand damage will grow," Ives argued.More on Tesla: Tesla Leak Shows That Musk's Vision Is TremblingShare This Article

From peddling snake oil on social media, to backing foreign coups. Some actors who were desperate to make a quick buck are now learning of the horrifying consequences of selling their likenesses to companies that use them in AI videos, .South Korean actor Simon Lee, for example, found that his image was being used to promote "questionable health cures" on TikTok and Instagram. And the terms of his contract meant there was nothing he could do to get the videos removed."If it was a nice advertisement, it would've been fine to me," Lee told AFP. "But obviously it is such a scam."In 2022, British actor and model Connor Yeates signed a three-year deal with a company called Synthesia for $5,240 because, at the time, he was sleeping on a friend's couch and "needed the money." Later, Yeates found out that his face was used in a video to promote Ibrahim Traore, the president of Burkina Faso who took power in a coup d'état in 2022 — a usage that was a blatant violation of Synthesia's terms of service."Three years ago, a few videos slipped our content moderation partly because there was a gap in our enforcement for factually accurate but polarizing type content or videos with exaggerated claims or propaganda, for example," Alexandru Voica, head of corporate affairs at Synthesia, told AFP.These stories encapsulate AI technology's potential to perpetuate misinformation, and in particular the invasiveness of AI-enabled deepfakes. With very little effort, anyone willing to pay money to use these services — which are sometimes free — can create a convincing enough video of someone saying something, so long as there's enough footage of that person out there. Public figures like Taylor Swift and Scarlett Johansson understand this better than anyone, having had to condemn creeps that deepfaked them to promote political messages. Recently, the voice actor for Aloy in the "Horizon" video games said she was unnerved by an AI imitation of her performance as the character. Background actors, too, have voiced concerns about how they had their bodies fully digitized for indefinite use by studios.They're also emblematic of AI's inroads into the acting industry. Actors have fought tooth and nail for protections against generative AI, but they're fairly limited and don't apply to the Wild West of non-union jobs. That opens the door for AI firms to capitalize on actors desperate for work, trapping them into dubious contracts. The temptation is strengthened by the fact that it's usually pretty easy work, requiring just several hours' worth of shooting in front of a green screen, getting fed lines by a teleprompter."The clients I've worked with didn't fully understand what they were agreeing to at the time," Alyssa Malchiodi, a lawyer who specializes in business law, told AFP. "One major red flag is the use of broad, perpetual and irrevocable language that gives the company full ownership or unrestricted rights to use a creator's voice, image and likeness across any medium." Synthesia, the platform that let an actor's visage be used in a propaganda piece during the leadup to a coup, recently announced that it'd be starting a talent experience program that will allow actors to be involved in decision-making processes, . Protections are nice, but they can only change so much if not widely adopted. Otherwise, firms and clients might simply choose not to hire actors that aren't willing to fully sign their autonomy over.Share This Article

A half marathon foot race in Beijing, China, saw thousands of humanoid robots of various sizes running right alongside their flesh-and-blood counterparts for an attempt to take the crown.Footage shows the awkward bipedal robots trotting off, closely followed by their respective teams of two to three human navigators and engineers. As the Associated Press reports, the machines were separated by a divider from the hordes of human runners, making sure they didn't get trampled — or tipped over.But judging by their performance, it's unlikely the robots will be rivaling their human counterparts any time particularly soon. Many of them visibly struggled to maintain a jogging pace, with their human helpers having zero issues keeping up. Others fell over or overheated.However, the robots' goofy appearance made for an eye-catching show, with human runners and spectators alike taking photos and videos of the stiff-limbed contraptions. Instead of getting snacks and drinks along the way, the robots made pit stops to swap their batteries.A biped dubbed the Sky Project Ultra robot, developed by China's National and Local Co-built Embodied AI Robotics Innovation Center, took the top non-human spot, crossing the finish line in just over two hours and 40 minutes.That's quite a bit slower than the average time it takes for a fit human runner to cover the 13.1-mile distance. As Wired points out, the slowest time for a human was 3 hours and ten minutes, which meant that Sky Project Ultra was the only bot to qualify for a human participation award.A picture shows the Sky Project Ultra bot receiving a gold medal — which itself is in the shape of a humanoid robot. At five feet, nine inches, the robot was also the tallest of the bunch.Kevin Frayer/Getty ImagesNot every robot contender was as lucky. Plenty of metal contestants ended up falling flat on their faces. Many of the robots also overheated, forcing engineers to swap them out along the way or give up altogether.PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty ImagesAs the AP reports, robots were given awards for best endurance, gait design, and innovative form, so there were other opportunities to score a win without mastering the art of the road race.Besides, as experts told Wired, most of these robots weren't primarily designed to run as fast as possible. Many of them had vastly different jobs outside of the race.It's nonetheless a sign of how far the tech has come."Until five years ago or so, we didn't really know how to get robots to walk reliably," Oregon State University robotics professor Alan Fern told Wired. "And now we do, and this will be a good demonstration of that."More on humanoid robots: Wild Video Shows Humanoid Robot Preparing Elaborate BreakfastShare This Article

Elon Musk's budget cuts to international humanitarian aid have proven devastating for some of the poorest people on the planet.As the New York Times reports, cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — the group that Musk bragged about feeding "into the woodchipper" back in February — have forced hundreds of soup kitchens in Sudan to close, sharpening an already disastrous humanitarian crisis.As a tragic result, children are dying in the African nation's war-torn capital, Khartoum, due to malnutrition.While Trump officials have claimed that "life-saving" aid would be exempt from the brutal cuts, groups on the ground say much has yet to resume after its chaotic termination earlier this year. That's not surprising; the number of USAID officials was cut from roughly 10,000 to a mere 15, leaving the department in total chaos.Musk, who has overseen sweeping cuts across a growing number of government agencies, has called USAID a "criminal organization" and accused it of being "evil" by invoking harebrained conspiracy theories.The billionaire's loathing of the organization could be the result of a major conflict of interest. As The Lever reported in February, USAID's former inspector general was investigating Musk's SpaceX and its delivery of thousands of Starlink terminals to the Ukrainian government — around the time the agency was being gutted by DOGE.After it all, the US government's attempts to turn the international humanitarian aid tap back on have been chaotic. In Sudan, a nation already facing the world's worst humanitarian crisis in decades, restarted payments have yet to reach emergency response teams on the ground, leaving starving residents empty-handed for weeks. According to the United Nations, other wealthy nations have yet to fill in the massive multi-billion-dollar gap the US has left behind.USAID acting deputy administrator Jeremy Lewin — previously identified as a member of Elon Musk's DOGE — asked staffers in an internal email obtained by Reuters earlier this month to reinstate at least six recently canceled US foreign aid programs for emergency food assistance."There were a few programs that were cut in other countries that were not meant to be cut, that have been rolled back and put into place," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.The consequences could spiral to become even worse. In a statement issued earlier this month, the World Food Program warned that if funding cuts for emergency food assistance in 14 countries were to be implemented, it could result in a "death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation."Share This Article

As much as we wish it weren't so, the heads of big banks like JPMorgan get paid the big bucks for a reason — and the latest missive from Jamie Dimon, the institution's CEO and chair, is a perfect exemplar.Clocking in at a whopping 57 pages without footnotes, Dimon's annual investor letter pulled no punches when pillorying everyone's least favorite part of work."Kill meetings," the JPMorgan chair wrote. "But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time — and someone's got to lead them."So chagrined was Dimon at mismanaged meetings that he not only dedicated an entire paragraph to how much he hates them in a sub-section about how companies must "kill bureaucracy all the time and relentlessly," but also mentioned them several other times in the lengthy letter."There should also be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list," the CEO advised. "Sometimes we think we’re just being nice by inviting people to a meeting who don’t have to be there."In what was perhaps a reference to the "this meeting could have been an email" meme, Dimon insisted that "if one is required," everyone involved should "make it count."Far from a luddite, the banker has long been skeptical of the tech sector. Those sentiments were on full display in this year's letter when he trashed people who can't seem to stay off their phones when they're supposed to be paying attention."I see people in meetings all the time who are getting notifications and personal texts or who are reading emails," Dimon wrote. "This has to stop. It’s disrespectful. It wastes time."During an aside towards the end of the note, the CEO also provided, apropos to almost nothing, a tip to "synergy"-happy managers."Avoid management pablum," Dimon said. "It’s a pet peeve of mine. Talk like you speak — get rid of the jargon."Regardless of how we personally feel about big banks and their relationship to politics and society, this guy is one of the most influential people in the finance world. Hopefully, the type of people who read Dimon's investor letters religiously will heed his advice.Share This Article

Generation Z, or the cohort of people born between 1997 and 2012, has a very weird relationship with artificial intelligence.In the latest sign of just how strange things are getting, a new study by the paper-writing service EduBirdie found, upon asking 2,000 Gen Z-ers a battery of questions about AI, that a quarter believe the technology is "already conscious."What's more, 52 percent — or more than half of the respondents — think AI is not yet conscious but will become so in the years to come. Plus a whopping 58 percent of the Zoomers surveyed said they think the technology will "take over" the world, and 44 percent said they believe that takeover could happen within the next 20 years.Given those concerns, it's not that surprising that 69 percent of EduBirdie's survey respondents claimed they always say "please" and "thank you" to chatbots — a finding that jibes with TechRadar's late 2024 survey in which 67 percent of Americans and 71 percent of Brits polled said they are polite to ChatGPT (terrifyingly, 12 percent of the 1,000 people TechRadar polled on both sides of the pond also said they're nice to OpenAI's chatbot in case it takes over the world.)The topic of AI consciousness is, and has for years, extremely contentious.Prior to ChatGPT's release turning OpenAI into a household name, one of the company's cofounders and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, cryptically claimed in a tweet that he thought "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious."That February 2022 tweet ended up setting off a mini-maelstrom in the machine learning world as researchers argued whether or not AI is conscious — or if it could ever get that way at all.Though most experts agreed then (and continue to maintain) that AI isn't yet conscious, there have been notable detractors. A few months after Sutskever's infamous tweet, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine was ultimately fired and disgraced after claiming in an interview with the Washington Post that the tech giant's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) had come to life.One thing's for sure: when we're dealing with advanced AI that's been designed to act like a human, like ChatGPT and its ilk, people are going to form weird new bonds with it — and develop beliefs about its supposed internal life that are almost certain to cause strange new divisions in society.Share This Article

Tesla is a company in crisis.Ahead of its Q1 earnings call tomorrow, investors are already feeling the pressure, with shares sliding over seven percent already today.The core issue is that its sales are down considerably worldwide, with banks warning that the company's mercurial leader Elon Musk had created a "code red situation" by overinvesting his time slashing government funding with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.Tesla's brand has borne the brunt of Musk's increasingly extremist views and abrasive behavior, with a record number of customers returning their vehicles to distance themselves from him. Shares are down over 50 percent since the company reached an all-time high in December, shortly after Trump was elected.And compounding all that trouble is that Musk's vision for the future of Tesla is looking increasingly shaky. Just last October, Musk mocked the idea of a non-autonomous $25,000 car — previously his long-term "master plan" for the company — and called it "pointless."Instead, Musk has increasingly gambled the company's future on self-driving tech — which, even after years of development, still can't drive the cars on its own — culminating in a "Cybercab" robotaxi that's supposed to be revealed this summer."It would be silly," he told investors at the time. "It would be completely at odds with what we believe."As if that wasn't enough whiplash, now Reuters is reporting that the company is working on a cheaper vehicle, but that its development is running significantly behind schedule.There's a lot we still don't know about such a car, which is rumored to be a stripped-down version of the company's popular Model Y SUV. We don't know when it will hit the market or how much it will cost. We also don't know when production will kick off in China and Europe, both areas where sales have plummeted this year.Even if you ignore the immediate chaos of Tesla's plummeting sales and stock, this series of rapid reversals is enough to give even a die-hard investor pause. Musk seems to be vacillating between wildly different visions for the future of the company — a spectacle that's become commonplace at Twitter since he bought it, and during his activities in the federal government, which have been beset by comically overambitious promises and nonstop self-inflicted drama.The signs that the company's leadership is trying to get ahead of some very bad news this week are certainly apparent. As Electrek points out, Musk announced that there would be a "live company update" during the earnings call on Tuesday. That's despite the CEO previously arguing that "earnings calls are not a place for product announcements."It's still unclear what the company will announce during the update. But it's starting to look unlikely that Tesla is trying to get an ace up its sleeve that could save the company from a tarnished brand, weakening demand, and spiking import costs.What's most likely is that Musk will update investors on his promise of bringing an "unsupervised" version of its driver assistance software to market — a long-deferred future, it's fair to point out, that he's been saying is imminent for well over a decade."The overwhelming focus is on solving full self-driving," Musk said during a June 2022 interview. "That’s essential. It’s really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero."Share This Article