Author: publisher

As the AI race reaches white-hot temperatures, big tech companies are caught up in a heated race to build as many pollution-belching and power-sucking data centers as they can.And while the Trump administration is largely clearing their way by easing environmental rules for the polluting facilities, other governments are less inclined to give companies a pass.As Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported last month, Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of the European nation without concluding the necessary environmental assessments.Despite the…

By all accounts, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has been nothing short of a disaster. It’s cost NASA a staggering amount of money, and even after over a decade of development, the capsule still has yet to complete a crewed mission to the International Space Station.It’s been a humiliating saga, including a failed uncrewed launch attempt that went haywire thanks to a glitching computer, an aborted mission which stranded two NASA astronauts on board the station for nine months, and a litany of technical headaches along the way.But now that SpaceX is threatening to retire its Crew Dragon spacecraft, NASA could soon…

In a new documentary by filmmaker and investigative journalist Alex Gibney, Elon Musk’s first wife, Justine Musk, revealed that the billionaire likes to refer to the mothers of his kids as “breeders” who are “interchangeable.”Musk has had 14 known children with four different women — that we know of — over the last two decades, in what seems to be a quest to impregnate as many partners as possible.Now he’s moving on from his latest longtime girlfriend and former employee, Shivon Zilis, who has had four of his children over the last five years, and once served as a board…

Sitting US head of state Donald Trump still insists that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him, his supposed defeat a con job by scheming Democrats.His flagship chatbot, though, has other ideas.This week, Trump launched America.gov, an AI-powered website designed to retrieve all the information you need from the federal government through a chatbot. Though his administration has worked tirelessly to reshape the federal government to his views — such as by purging “woke” references from government websites, defunding climate research, and the like — the AI apparently did not receive adequate reeducation.

Privately-developed humanoid robots are advancing at a striking clip, which means today’s innovation may soon be tomorrow’s pile of junk. But with so many other companies racing to develop the hot robot, how do the hundreds of robotics startups clogging the landscape keep their obsolete units away from prying eyes?That question has been asked and answered by at least one robotics firm in the US, Figure AI. This week, Figure released a wild promo video showcasing the “decommissioning” of its F.02 units, involving Arnold Schwarzenegger and an industrial vat of red hot liquid steel.If you’ve seen the 1991 action epic…

A recent paper found that the extensive use of AI chatbots can be linked to “severe negative outcomes.”According to the research, which was published in the journal JMIR Mental Health by a team of UK-based researchers at Northeastern University London and King’s College London, dark outcomes of engaging in emotional relationships with chatbots can include “addiction-like attachment, exacerbation of mental health symptoms, harmful advice,” and even “self-harm of suicidal acts.” The paper comes after extensive reporting about the public health issue known as “AI psychosis,” meaning the phenomenon in which AI users suffer delusional, paranoid, and even suicidal spirals after…

Elon Musk isn’t exactly known for his quick wit, and a recent incident on X-formerly-Twitter shows exactly why that is.In a throwaway post about the dodgy WiFi offerings on Delta Airlines flights, machine learning engineer and co-founder of the firm Proof of Human Matt Hardy quipped a few days back that “we should just sandbox the [AI] agents by giving them Delta Wifi.”Coming on the back of tech-industry buzz about AI agents busting out of closed-off research environments, the timely joke attracted a respectable 11,000 likes: not bad for a tweet probably born out of Hardy’s own frustrations on a…

Meta’s fuzzy Muse AI personal assistant overtook ChatGPT as the top free iOS app in the US after launching earlier this month, surpassing 3.4 million downloads last week.But whether the agent will be able to hold on to that momentum is anything but guaranteed, considering the sheer amount of changes it requires to its users’ behavior. Tech companies like OpenAI and Meta would love us to hand over mundane tasks like booking a flight or shopping online to their agents — but that may not even be a priority for the average user.As Axios points out, Muse and similar products…

A Malaysian man is facing up to three years in a Singaporean prison — after an ill-conceived text containing AI slop shut down the city-state’s largest reservoir for days.According to the BBC, the bizarre incident started when the 30-year-old Ye Lin sent his colleague a photo of a saltwater crocodile — entirely generated by Google Gemini — lurking in the Pandan Reservoir, a 435-acre basin in Singapore’s western residential district. To put the body of water into perspective, the Central Park Reservoir in the heart of New York City is roughly a quarter of the size, standing at just 106…

It was an extremely ambitious mission with the best of intentions.With the help of contractor Katalyst Space Technologies, NASA launched a specialized robotic spacecraft in July in a bid to give the agency’s aging Swift observatory a desperately-needed nudge.But it didn’t take long for the unprecedented rescue attempt to spiral into a crisis — literally. The robot started spinning uncontrollably, causing it to tumble back towards the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.And now, Swift — which has been circling our planet for over two decades, providing scientists with invaluable observations of the cosmos — is about to succumb…