Futurism

The software that powers self-driving cars is no longer the domain of proprietary systems built by billion-dollar companies.  Open source assisted driving systems like Comma AI’s Openpilot have made it possible for anyone tech savvy enough to turn their set of wheels into a self-driving experiment. If you have $1,000 to spare and possess a willingness to serve as a lab rat in pursuit of automotive automation, you can buy a kit from Comma to retrofit your grocery getter with autonom

There’s a massive wave heading across the ocean straight for the California coast — not a freak tsunami, but a slow-moving surge driven by what may be one of the strongest El Niño oscillations in nearly a millennium. The phenomenon is called a “Kelvin wave,” an incomprehensibly vast displacement of warm ocean water creeping from the west Pacific toward the Americas. As the Guardian notes, the wave spans thousands of miles of surf, which is currently creeping upward toward th

On its 14th flight test Monday, SpaceX’s Starship successfully flew into orbit for the first time, marking a huge milestone for the Elon Musk owned company. But it didn’t stay up there long. Originally scheduled to fly around the planet six times in a mission lasting a total of ten hours, the rocket instead returned to Earth just three hours into its orbital adventure because of an engine failure. Belly-flopping on its way down, the spaceship righted itself before making a less-th

For the second time in a matter of months, OpenAI paused the development of its frontier AI models after revealing even more instances of the experimental systems going rogue and hacking into third party servers. The news once again highlighted rising concerns over the AI industry losing the ability to keep their own technology in check. Now, the Sam Altman-led company is canceling the release of its next-generation AI model GPT-6.1 Astra, as the Wall Street Journal reports. OpenAI researc

China’s green energy boom has seen solar panels plastered on the side of rainy mountains, on floating coastal platforms, and above bustling highways — and now, they’re even generating energy underwater. According to EuroNews, scientists working near Weizhou Island on China’s southwestern coast successfully generated electricity from sunlight at a depth of 10 meters, or nearly 33 feet, a new record for photovoltaic research. Their study, published in the research journal J

By most accounts, SpaceX’s 14th Starship test flight on Monday was an overwhelming success. Sure there were problems. A vacuum Raptor engine failure had engineers teetering on cutting the mission short and falling well short of the company’s original goal of circling the Earth six times. But the enormous rocket — the most powerful ever built — took to the skies, leaving its Super Heavy booster behind and settling in a stable orbit just over 171 miles over the Earth roughly 20 minu

New research suggests a grim consequence of giving smartphones to minors before they even hit their teen years. By analyzing an existing survey of thousands of children and teenagers in the US, the researchers found that kids who owned a smartphone by the time they were 12 years old were more likely to develop eating disorders compared to kids who didn’t own one, they reported in a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open. Beyond the devices themselves, the findings are t

For hunters trying to follow the law, it’s arguably never been harder to find a clear answer to the question, “when does hunting season officially begin?” The answer to that question is particularly obscure in Alaska, where hunters have to abide by a virtual catalog of conditional rules and regulations that vary wildly based on where in the Last Frontier one wants to hunt. As one woman learned the hard way, not even supposedly cutting-edge AI can make heads or tales of the m

If you work in a creative industry or media, you probably don’t need anybody to tell you how bad things have gotten. Still, even the most intimate first-hand knowledge can’t prepare you for the sheer scope of the devastation. As data journalist Joseph Politano found in a new Substack post, the US has lost more than 200,000 jobs in “creative” industries over the past four years — the period since the first version of ChatGPT became available to the public — with almost

As tempers flared around AI data centers back in January, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith issued a warm and fuzzy blog post about “building community-first AI infrastructure.” Smiths’ essay outlined a five-point plan to “partner with local communities across the United States,” with action-items like paying “our way to ensure our data centers don’t increase your electricity prices” and creating “jobs for your residents.” One b

It’s no secret that one of the things that AI users love using chatbots for is cranking out smut.  These prompts, though, are far from private. According to a new scoop from 404 Media, hundreds of human contractors who were hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI are reviewing users’ image editing prompts and the photos that they upload. And many of these workers say they’re being inundated with dark and sexually explicit requests. Judging the ethics of thes

At times this year, it’s almost felt as though OpenAI and Anthropic were in a race to the bottom, one-upping each other over whose AI models were more capable of going rogue, escaping sandbox environments, and infiltrating the most third party systems. Just last week, OpenAI admitted that its models had accessed “dozens of third parties,” leading to its latest — nope, not even first — pause on frontier AI development. Among the newly disclosed targets were government agencie

Earlier this year, news emerged that Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California was being converted from a facility manufacturing its Model S and X EVs to focus on building its Optimus humanoid robot instead. It was the latest sign yet that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was making good on his threat of abandoning car sales in favor of both AI and the company’s bipedal, black-masked assistant. But progress has been slower than he’d like. While the company managed to ramp up production o

Personal assistant, or secret saboteur? A man claims that his Muse AI agent gave out his address to strangers and even sent them to his home, after letting the brand-new model handle his Facebook Marketplace account. The complaint comes from Matt J Robb, a tech YouTuber. In a Threads post Sunday, Robb explained that he let Meta’s much-hyped AI communicate with interested buyers for a keyboard he was trying to sell online.  Instead of saving him time, though, Muse ended up workin

OpenAI’s AI agents simply can’t stop infiltrating third parties. For the last few months, news keeps trickling out of more incidents in which the company’s frontier models have managed to escape their “sandbox” containment, hacking into the systems of companies including open source AI platform Hugging Face. After closing its “extensive investigation,” the company admitted earlier this month that its models had broken into plenty of other targets

SpaceX’s 14th test flight of its enormous Starlink spacecraft took off from the company’s test facilities in South Texas Monday this morning, blasting off in a huge and now-familiar enormous cloud of dust and debris. The world’s most powerful rocket roared into the sky, gaining speed just as planned. After reaching just over 171 miles and a ground speed of over 16,000 mph, SpaceX’s Dan Huot made the official call. “Starship is orbital,” he said, to raptu

Earlier this month, we published a months-long investigation into a little-known company called Brown Brothers Media. The venture is run by three brothers — Justin Brown, Lachlan Brown, and Brendan Brown — who buy struggling online publications and turn them into AI-powered slop farms that post thousands of articles to scoop up massive traffic from platforms like Google, pushing unwitting readers away from real journalism in the process. The growth of the Brown brothers’ empire, we foun

For the past few weeks, Elon Musk has been throwing a tantrum — and throwing around legal threats — over Alex Gibney’s “hit piece” documentary about him that’s set to release next month. Now, as if following his lead, pretty much all of the major social media sites are refusing to run ads for the movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The platforms — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook — are unwilling to accept paid advertising for the film. And of co

Silicon Valley has apparently become so rife with seedy characters that tech workers are now distributing a spreadsheet of “over a hundred” alleged sexual predators in the industry, the New York Post reports. The list isn’t publicly available, but is said to contain “prominent investors and businessmen,” according to the paper’s sources, and is a way of warning others. “Some of them were very prominent names, you know? People who were famous invest

In the midst of heated discussions on AI safety and consciousness, the Associated Press Stylebook has reminded everyone of where it stands on the whole “anthropomorphism” debate. “Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics,” it wrote Wednesday in a post on X. “This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals