Technology

SAN FRANCISCO: Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) investors are waiting to see how much Elon Musk’s price cuts will pay off: the electric vehicle (EV) maker is expected this weekend to report record sales as cheaper sticker prices, helped by US subsidies, spurred demand. Musk’s action in January kicked off a price war that was especially heated in China, betting that Tesla’s …

Elon Musk on Friday defended his controversial pay model for Twitter, claiming that any social media platform that didn’t follow suit would fail because they would be swarmed by bots. Musk made his prediction on the eve of Twitter’s April 1 ultimatum that verified accounts with the cherished blue tick that had not forked over cash would lose it. “The …

Elon Musk asked a US judge on Friday to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. In an evening filing in Manhattan federal court, lawyers for Musk and his electric car company Tesla called the lawsuit by Dogecoin investors a “fanciful work of fiction” over Musk’s “innocuous and often …

Twitter on Friday made public parts of the computer code that decides how the social media site recommends content, allowing users and programmers a peek into its workings and the ability to suggest modifications to the algorithm. The company said in a blog post it uploaded the code in two repositories on code-sharing platform Github. They include the source code for many …

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk has surpassed former US president Barack Obama as the most followed account on Twitter, five months after he bought the platform in a tumultuous takeover. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX on Thursday had 133,084,560 Twitter followers, a nose ahead of Obama, who had 133,041,813. The feat comes as the role of Twitter as a key platform for the exchange of …

Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society and humanity. Earlier this month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled the fourth iteration of its GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) AI programme, which has wowed users …

Elon Musk said on Monday that only verified Twitter accounts would be eligible to vote in polls starting April 15, a move that the social media company’s CEO believes will address advanced AI bot swarms. Musk also said only verified accounts will be eligible to be in Twitter’s For You recommendations, which displays a stream of tweets from accounts on …

WASHINGTON: The United States (US) and Japan on Tuesday announced a trade deal on electric vehicle battery minerals that is key to strengthening their battery supply chains and granting Japanese automakers wider access to a new $7,500 US EV tax credit. The swiftly negotiated agreement prohibits the two countries from enacting bilateral export restrictions on the minerals most critical for …

An 11-year-old Indian girl broke the internet after developing an Artificial Intelligence-based application that detects eye diseases via iPhone. According to the Indian news agency, Leena Rafeeq from Kerala was working on the application ‘Ogler Eye Scan’ since she was 10 years old. The “self-taught coder” shared her feat on LinkedIn.  The girl studied different subjects including computer vision, algorithms, …

Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink has approached one of the biggest US neurosurgery centers as a potential clinical trials partner as it prepares to test its devices on humans once regulators allow for it, according to six people familiar with the matter. Neuralink has been developing brain implants since 2016 it hopes will eventually be a cure for intractable …