The Tesla Roadster 2 drove up a curved ramp before using SpaceX rocket thrusters to fly, flip and land
Elon Musk has revealed Tesla’s latest model, which he claims will be the world’s first flying car, using technology from his aerospace company SpaceX to “basically fly like a rocket”.
The billionaire, who hosted a demonstration of the Tesla Roadster 2 at the SpaceX rocket development and testing facility in Texas, said the sports car could go from 0 to 60mph in a record time of less than a second and had thrusters.
An accelerating sell-off of AI-linked shares has hit global markets, as fears over rising inflation and future interest rate hikes spooked traders already wary of the heavily indebted sector.
South Korea’s benchmark Kospi 200index, which is heavily skewed towards the companies that make memory chips, fell more than 8% overnight to a six-month closing low, triggering circuit breakers that brought trading to a halt at various points.
Above the rain-soaked streets of Warsaw, the observation deck of the Varso tower overlooks Joseph Stalin’s gift to Poland that has divided opinion for decades.
For some, the Soviet-era Palace of Culture and Science is a drunk confectioner’s nightmare; standing as a relic of oppression that should have been demolished. For others, it is an icon on the skyline and a monumental warning from history.
Company hails first step in rolling out technology across UK as first autonomous vehicles take to city’s streets
Uber has begun a trial of autonomous vehicles on the streets of Manchester as it looks to bring robotaxis to cities around the UK.
The first self-driving cars are operating, using the technology of its partner firms Pony and Verne, with whom Uber recently launched Europe’s first autonomous taxi service in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.
The $5.5tn (£4.1tn) US chipmaker Nvidia is donating $250m worth of computing power to the UK to support AI safety research.
The donation from the world’s most valuable company comes as the UK government confirmed its AI Security Institute (AISI), which tests advance AI models, will be able to examine cutting-edge technology developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google before they are released.
The heads of the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund have issued a stark warning that rising cyber-attacks risk undermining trust in the financial system.
Speaking on a panel about online fraud at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, pointed to alarming headlines about self-replicating AI agents hijacking personal devices, and the French supermarket hack that heated fridges up to 50C.
Shares in semiconductor companies fell on Tuesday after the boss of Broadcom compared many AI investors to “casino” gamblers, and the Chinese memory chip maker CXMT said it had made good progress on a new chip architecture.
South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index tumbled 6.25% as investors dumped chip stocks, while other Asian markets were also lower. Japan’s Nikkei fell 1.8% and the Taiwan exchange lost almost 2%, with the country’s chip maker TSMC down by a similar amount.
The pioneering computer scientist on why Trump is using ‘superintelligence’ wrong, whether AI could wipe out humanity – and how our biggest challenge will be accepting we’re not the only intelligent beings
Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.
The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers havejoined Hinton in ringingthealarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.
Artificial intelligence is less regulated than milk and washing machines, the president of Microsoft has said, as the tech industry warns over the safety of AI.
Brad Smith said there should be more safety rules to govern the technology including a legal obligation to a “victim” if their system was breached by rogue AI agents.
OpenAI has revealed that it is making about $20bn less in projected revenue than it had recently indicated to investors, raising questions about the break-neck growth rate in demand for AI.
The ChatGPT-maker company has told investors that its revenues for this year would reach $50bn (£37bn), a projection based on sales up to the end of September.
We have a deep reservoir of assets, but struggle to turn small companies into global success stories. Innovation needs to be at the heart of government policy
Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
The coming 10 years are almost certain to be the decade that sees the greatest scientific breakthroughs in a century. The question is whether advances now under way in AI, quantum computing and biology can address cancer, find ways to treat or prevent dementia, and overcome the growing resistance to antibiotics. Can we find sustainable ways to address our energy needs and protect the environment at the same time? Can AI transform the way we deliver education, health and social care to the benefit of millions, as well as advance modern manufacturing strength? And what role can Britain’s inventors, investors and industrialists play in developing these transformative technologies?
While the US and China are the world’s obvious innovation powerhouses, the UK also has enormous assets, as the Innovation Nation Conference in Manchester addressed by the prime minister, Andy Burnham, will hear today. We are home to four of the world’s top 10 universities and 16 of the top 100, five of which are in Europe’s top 10 for spin-outs, startups based on intellectual property produced through a university’s research. With less than 1% of the world’s population, the UK produces 6% of the world’s research papers, nearly 9% of citations and 12% of the most highly cited research.
Gordon Brown was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
Béjar’s daughter was 14 when she told him Instagram was failing to keep her safe. So when he became part of Meta’s ‘wellbeing team’, he knew he had to speak out – and his testimony cost it billions
The Social Reckoning hits cinemas this Friday, but the real world has already been working on a sequel – or rather, a threequel. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, the movie is a follow-up to The Social Network, detailing the further misadventures of Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire, and in particular Frances Haugen, the employee who in 2021 leaked internal documents that appeared to show Facebook was aware of the harms its products had inflicted.
It’s no spoiler to reveal the film climaxes with Haugen’s testimony to the US Senate, on 5 October 2021. That very same day, Arturo Béjar, a consultant on the wellbeing team of Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook), hit send on a long-gestating email to Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on a similar theme. “I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” Béjar began, before laying out some shocking statistics from his team’s survey. For example: 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days. Furthermore, 51% of Instagram users said they had had a bad or harmful experience in the past seven days. Only 1% of them reported it, and of those, 2% had the content taken down – so just 0.02%. This was a far greater degree of harm than the company’s existing measurements suggested. Zuckerberg never replied.
Martyn Thomas wonders how any rational person can argue that independent oversight and regulation will be sufficient
Once again a frontier AI model has been withdrawn because it fails safety tests (OpenAI scraps release of new model over safety concerns in internal testing, 28 September). There is the usual call for “independent oversight and regulation”, though never any explanation of how this would work or, most importantly, what evidence should persuade a regulator that an AI system is adequately safe.
There is a long engineering tradition of regulating safety-critical software systems, such as those controlling aircraft or nuclear power stations; international standards require “safety cases” – rigorous analyses that show that the possible hazards have been identified and controlled and that the probability of an accident is extremely low.
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