Spain will ensure it protects the country’s “strategic autonomy” after Saudi Telecom Co. snapped up a near 10%

Within a mere two hours of its launch today, Threads, Meta's ambitious platform garnered a staggering 2 million sign-ups

An Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup bent on bringing blockchain technology to the corporate world has managed to raise new

A London judge dismissed a lawsuit accusing Shell Plc’s board members of failing to manage climate change risks.

General Motors has hired a former high-ranking software executive at Apple to run a new software organization at the automaker

The new biography on Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson has claimed that the Tesla, Space X and X/Twitter owner once brought a gun to a recording session of the game Cyberpunk 2077 and asked to be included in a cameo. The game, which was released in 2020 was infamously hit with a number of technical issues but was still one of the most hyped releases of that particular year and even featured a cameo from Keanu Reeves. Now it appears that Musk also has an albeit brief cameo in the game, which he was reportedly "obsessed" with. According to Isaacson, Musk turned up at a studio where his then-partner Grimes was recording the voice for the game's popstar character Lizzy Wizzy. Grimes told Isaacson that Musk appeared at the studio touting a 200-year-old replica flintlock pistol that Musk sleeps with beside his bed. Musk shared a photo of the pistol next to his bed in 2022. Grimes recounts that "the studio guys were like sweating" but Musk calmed them down by saying he was "was armed but not dangerous." You would think that this type of intervention might not convince anyone to put Musk in a video game but then again he is one of the richest men in the world and sure enough he did make a small appearance in Cyberpunk. Or that's at least what gamers think. In December 2020 CNET reported that an NPC-character that looks very similar to Musk does make an appearance during the game's Corpo intro. Musk also interacted with the game's official X/Twitter account after it posted that they "had a deal" with him. This is hardly the first time that Musk has made a cameo in a piece of pop culture having also appeared in the likes of The Simpsons, South Park, Rick and Morty, The Big Bang Theory and even Iron Man 2. Sign up for 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.

The leaked Fortnite Festival concert starts on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2023, at 9 a.m. ET in Chapter 5 with free rewards and possibly live music.

Oil and gas producers talk up technological breakthroughs they say will soon allow the world to drill and burn fossil fuels without worsening global warming

Google has been accused of “secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet” in order to train its AI chatbot Bard. The class-action lawsuit filed in California alleges that Google and its AI division DeepMind used data from millions of Americans without their knowledge or consent to build its generative AI products. “Personal data of every kind, especially conversational data between humans, is critical to the AI training process,” the lawsuit notes. “This is how products like Bard develop human-like communication capabilities. Creative and expressive works are just as valuable because that is how AI products learn to ‘create’ art.” Google updated its online privacy policy earlier this month, stating that it can use publicly available data to train its artificial intelligence tools. According to the latest lawsuit, this change was designed to “double-down on its position that everything on the internet is fair game for the company to take for private gain and commercial use, including to build and enhance AI products like Bard”. Beyond freely available data, the lawsuit claims that Google illegally accessed “at least 200 million materials explicitly protected by copyright”, including the text from books and articles behind paywalls. Among those copyrighted materials is allegedly a book written by one of the plaintiffs named in the legal action. Many of the other plaintiffs named are listed solely as users of Google products like Search and Gmail, as well as other online platforms like TikTok. The lawsuit alleges that Google scraped “the entire internet to take anything it could, whether contributed on Google platforms or not, and without regard for the privacy, property, and consumer protection interests of hundreds of millions of Americans who shared their insights, talents, artwork, data, personally identifiable information, and more, for specific purposes, not one of which was to train large language models to profit Google while putting the world at peril with untested and volatile AI products”. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which features similar capabilities to Google’s Bard, also has a proposed class action lawsuit filed against it, which accuses the chatbot of drawing on “massive amounts of personal data from the internet”. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent, but a spokesperson told Reuters that the allegations were “baseless”. Read More Google’s AI chatbot Bard can now talk Elon Musk reveals plan to use AI to reveal mysteries of the universe

The number of fires burning in Canada’s top energy-producing province of Alberta declined overnight, bringing some relief to

Hello, it’s been a scorching week, both literally and in markets. Here’s something to help you catch up

Australia’s consumer watchdog has warned companies that using words like “green” and “sustainable” when describing their environmental strategies