White House officials concerned about AI chatbots' potential for societal harm and the Silicon Valley powerhouses rushing them to market are heavily invested in a three-day competition ending Sunday at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas

Coming as a surprise ultraportable laptop, the Acer Swift Go 14 (starts at $799.99; $1,099.99

Lawmakers race to extend funding, Plug Power is the latest clean-energy stock in trouble, and other news to start your day.

Elon Musk has launched a new AI company that aims to “understand reality” and unlock the secrets of the universe. The formation of xAI brings together researchers from leading artificial intelligence firms, including Google’s DeepMind, OpenAI and Microsoft Research, who collectively have contributed to major advances in AI in recent years. Announcing the launch on Twitter on Wednesday, Mr Musk gave further details about what he hoped to achieve with his latest venture. “I often wonder where consciousness starts, as we progress from one cell to ~35 trillion cells,” Mr Musk wrote. “If the Standard Model is correct, then quarks and leptons become ‘conscious’ no later than ~13.8B years from start, assuming there are no sentient aliens. Btw, where are the aliens!?” Mr Musk has warned for months about AI’s potential for “civilizational destruction,” arguing that a race among companies such as Google and Microsoft to develop the technology should be halted to allow time for drafting regulation for the sector. The reason for the launch of xAI is “to understand the true nature of the universe,” said Mr Musk, who also co-founded OpenAI but later left the startup credited with sparking the generative AI frenzy through its launch of the ChatGPT chatbot. Dan Hendrycks, who serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that aims to reduce the risks posed by the technology, will be an adviser to xAI. The startup’s team includes several former engineers and scientists from Alphabet-owned Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. “We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar ... GPT-3.5, and GPT-4,” the startup said on its website. The company, which is looking for experienced engineers and researchers to join its team as technical staff in the Bay Area, will hold a Twitter Spaces event on 14 July. Mr Musk’s startup will work closely with his other companies including Twitter and Tesla, according to the website. Tesla shares showed little reaction to the news and were trading 1.5 per cent higher, a sign that investors were not worried the startup will be a potential distraction for Mr Musk. The billionaire in March registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm lists Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary. Mr Musk has previously warned of the existential risk posed by advanced AI, claiming that it is one of the most serious threats to the future of humanity. Earlier this year, he joined more than 1,000 tech leaders and researchers in signing an open letter urging a moratorium on the development of powerful AI. Additional reporting from agencies Read More ChatGPT creator says AI ‘superintelligence’ is impossible to stop xAI: Everything we know about Elon Musk’s new AI company Elon Musk posts series of explicit tweets about Mark Zuckerberg Twitter gets strange endorsement from Taliban over rival Threads

UK water companies have publicly apologized and laid out a multi-billion pound modernization plan to curb the volume

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 14, 2023--

Scientists have detected huge waves in outer space that measure three times the size of our sun. The waves are being formed on a star system called MACHO 80.7443.1718, found around 169,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The waves are formed in a similar way to waves on Earth. Just like ones on our planet are formed due to the gravitational pull of the moon, a nearby celestial object stretches the star and causes enormous waves in the system MACHO 80.7443.1718. Experts have studied the star’s unusual behaviour and published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy. The experts stated that MACHO 80.7443.1718 contains a "heartbreak" star, which is a term they use to describe the way plasma is influenced by the pull of a nearby object to unleash incredible waves of energy. The sheer power of these waves is, itself, difficult to imagine. In fact, just one of them would end life on Earth in an instant. "Each crash of the star’s towering tidal waves releases enough energy to disintegrate our entire planet several hundred times over," MacLeod said. "This heartbreak star could just be the first of a growing class of astronomical objects," MacLeod added. "We’re already planning a search for more heartbreak stars, looking for the glowing atmospheres flung off by their breaking waves." The scale in general is far beyond human comprehension – at least ours, anyway. In fact, the waves of plasma measure around 2.5 million miles above the surface of the primary star – which itself has a radius of 10.4 million miles, around 24 times the size of the sun. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A spokesman for Donald Trump said Wednesday that Donald Trump Jr.'s account on X -- the platform formerly known as Twitter -- was compromised after posts appeared that shared racist posts.

YouTube announced Tuesday that it will start removing false claims about cancer treatments as part of an ongoing effort to build out its medical misinformation policy.

It doesn't feel like fall yet in most of the country but it's still Apple-picking

Americans' commitment to freedom of speech is colliding with their dislike of the Chinese government and their addiction to social media.

LONDON & NEW YORK & HONG KONG--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 31, 2023--