Elon Musk has admitted that his endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory on his social media site X, previously known as Twitter, was a “mistake” and “one of the most foolish” things he had done on the platform. The world’s richest man said he had “no problem being hated” but also blamed members of the media for much of the outrage surrounding the post, which is thought to have contributed to major investors in the platform pulling funding. Earlier this month, Mr Musk responded to a Twitter/X user who accused Jewish people of hating white people by saying it was “the actual truth.” His actions sparked global outrage, with several world leaders condemning his endorsement of the conspiracy theory. Speaking at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit this week, Mr Musk discussed the post and said that the outrage caused was “not my intention”. “[It was] one of the most foolish — if not the most foolish — thing I’ve done on the platform,” he said. “I should in retrospect not have replied to that one person and should have written in greater length what I meant,” he said. “But those clarifications were ignored by the media and essentially I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic. And for that I’m quite sorry, that was not my intention.” Earlier this week, Mr Musk visited Israel and toured a kibbutz attacked by Hamas, meeting with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The pair visited the Kfar Aza kibbutz, which Hamas attacked on 7 October, killing an estimated 52 residents. Another 20 people are reported as missing. Mr Musk said witnessing the scenes of the massacre was “jarring”, during a live event on Twitter/X with Mr Netanyahu after the tour. Speaking at the Dealbook Summit, he denied that the visit had been – as some had described it – an “apology tour”. “[The trip to Israel] wasn’t in response to that at all,” Mr Musk said, adding: “I have no problem being hated.” Mr Musk later went further, addressing companies that had pulled marketing from X over concerns related to far-right content and accusing them of “blackmail”. “Don’t advertise,” he said at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit. “If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go f*** yourself. Go f*** yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.” Read More Elon Musk believes OpenAI may have made ‘dangerous’ discovery OpenAI may have made a ‘dangerous’ artificial intelligence discovery, Elon Musk says Elon Musk publicly tells advertisers to ‘go f*** yourselves’ Elon Musk mocked for trying to resurrect QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy Elon Musk set to meet Netanyahu and hostage families in Israel Elon Musk weighs in on Dublin riots claiming country’s PM ‘hates the Irish people’

OpenAI may have discovered “something dangerous” that caused chaos at the company, Elon Musk has said. Recent days have seen ChatGPT creator OpenAI fire and then re-hire its chief executive, Sam Altman. Many of the circumstances of that decision still remain entirely mysterious, and it is not clear why OpenAI’s board removed Mr Altman. Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI, as part of his response to concerns that artificial intelligence could prove dangerous to humanity. But he has been critical of its recent direction, including its turn towards operating for a profit and no longer open sourcing its work. During the New York Times’s Dealbook conference, Mr Musk said that he had attempted to find out what happened behind the scenes at OpenAI, but had failed to do so. He had reached out to numerous people working at the company, including Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI chief scientist and board member who is believed to have led the rebellion against Mr Altman, but had not heard anything. But he suggested that the company had found “something dangerous” that had caused Mr Sutskever to be concerned. He said that the most likely scenario was a worrying breakthrough that had led the company to try and avoid the danger. He was asked by journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin whether he meant that he thought something dangerous had been discovered within the company. Mr Musk said that would be his guess. In the same interview, Mr Musk once again criticised OpenAI’s move away from the open source and non-profit principles that it had been founded with. He also suggested that artificial intelligence companies were lying if they claimed their artificial intelligence systems were not trained on people’s data. But he said that any lawsuits over the issue will not be settled before we have a “digital god”, and would therefore be irrelevant. Earlier, he had told advertisers that left the company over antisemitic content to “go f*** yourself”. His profanity-laced remarks followed a moment of contrition in a New York Times DealBook Summit interview, as he first said “I’m sorry” for a tweet that agreed with an anti-Jewish post on X on Nov. 15. Musk has faced a torrent of criticism since he on Nov. 15 agreed with a user who falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth.” On Wednesday Musk said he had “handed a loaded gun” to detractors, describing his post as possibly the worst he had made during a history of messages that included many “foolish” ones. The Tesla CEO bristled at the idea that he was antisemitic and said that advertisers who left X, formerly known as Twitter, should not think they could blackmail him, saying “fuck you” numerous times. At one point he added the words “Hey Bob,” an apparent reference to Robert Iger, chief executive of Walt Disney, which pulled ads on X. The “Great Replacement” theory holds that Jewish people and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants that will lead to a “white genocide.” Musk‘s post drew condemnation from the White House for what it called an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.” Following the post, major U.S. companies including Walt Disney, Warner Bros Discovery and NBCUniversal parent Comcast suspended their ads on X. A report from liberal watchdog group Media Matters precipitated the advertiser exit, which said it found ads next to posts that supported Nazism. The platform filed a lawsuit last week against Media Matters for defamation. Additional reporting by Reuters Read More Elon Musk publicly tells advertisers to ‘go f*** yourselves’ Elon Musk mocked for trying to resurrect QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy Elon Musk set to meet Netanyahu and hostage families in Israel Elon Musk weighs in on Dublin riots claiming country’s PM ‘hates the Irish people’ Elon Musk’s antisemitic comments have pushed X advertisers over the edge Democrats accuse Elon Musk and X of profiting from Hamas propaganda

The long awaited global release of Call of Duty's Warzone Mobile has been seemingly pushed back even further, after its App Store listing received an update.

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Bill Gates went to see Elon Musk in 2022, hoping to convince the fellow billionaire to give away more of his money -- the way the Microsoft founder had.

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Google Bard, the tech giant’s generative AI platform, can now link with other Google services such as Gmail, Maps and YouTube in order to provide more in-depth responses to prompts from users. Launched earlier this year, Bard is part of the new wave of AI-based chatbots which offer detailed written replies to questions and queries. Google has now announced a major update to the program, called Bard Extensions, which will allow users to link other Google services to collaborate with Bard to provide a response to a prompt – for example, when asking Bard to help plan a holiday, users can ask Bard to get the dates that work for family members from Gmail, use Google Maps to get directions to the airport and find YouTube videos to watch about the best things to do at the destination. It said the update made Bard “the most capable” version of the program so far and would help more people use the app to collaborate. The tech giant said the update would have a strong focus on user privacy, with users required to actively give permission to Bard to access their Google services, and any content lifted would not be reviewable by a human unless the user specifically asked Bard to flag it for review. In a further expansion of the chatbot, Google said it would now also enable users to double-check the responses they receive from Bard using a new “Google it” button, which will check the response against linked Google search results and highlight passages it is confident about the validity of, as well as those where it found differing results. Some experts have raised concerns about the possible spread of misinformation within generative AI platforms, warning some information is being presented to users in an authoritative way when it may be based on inaccurate or outdated information used to train such chatbots. A report by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published on Monday which looked into the potential impact of the AI market noted that without proper guiding principles, people and businesses could be harmed through exposure to significant levels of misinformation and AI-enabled fraud. In a blog post on the updates to Bard, Google’s director for product management of Bard, Yury Pinsky, said: “One of the biggest benefits of Bard, an experiment to collaborate with generative AI, is that it can tailor its responses to exactly what you need. “For instance, you could ask Bard to start a trip planning doc for you and your friends, draft up your online marketplace listing, or help explain a science topic to your kids. And now Bard is getting even better at customising its responses so you can easily bring your ideas to life. “Today we’re launching Bard Extensions in English, a completely new way to interact and collaborate with Bard. With Extensions, Bard can find and show you relevant information from the Google tools you use every day — like Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and hotels — even when the information you need is across multiple apps and services.” Elsewhere in the update, Google also confirmed that when a link to a Bard conversation is shared online, others will be able to click on that link and continue the same conversation themselves. Read More Charity boss speaks out over ‘traumatic’ encounter with royal aide Ukraine war’s heaviest fight rages in east - follow live

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Nasa is sending a rocket to a metallic asteroid between Mars and Jupiter in the hope of finding diamonds and rubies. The mission, which is set to launch on Friday 13 October, will involve visiting the mysterious metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, which sits in an asteroid belt between the two planets. The journey will take seven years for Falcon Heavy, a craft made by Elon Musk’s space exploration firm SpaceX. It was due to take off on Thursday, but the launch was postponed because of bad weather. Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said: “We are launching a billion dollar spacecraft all the way beyond Mars and close to Jupiter and it’s going to snuggle up next to a metallic asteroid, and we are going to learn something about that metallic asteroid. “I hope we might find diamonds and rubies on that asteroid. “Everything is a new discovery, and we are glimpsing more of the development of this magnificent thing we call the universe.” Falcon Heavy takes off on its four-billion-mile journey at 10.19am in Florida, from the Kennedy Space Center. That is 3.16pm UK time. By May 2026, it will pass by Mars and use the planet’s gravitational force to slingshot itself toward the asteroid. Four years later, it will reach its destination. There, it will find a rock made up of iron and nickel, scientists believe. But they also think it could contain precious metals and gems. 16 Psyche has puzzled astronomers since it was discovered by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis in 1852. In the 1980s, radar readings found that it was made of metal, leading scientists to speculate that the 130-mile boulder lost its outer shell by colliding with other asteroids. The spacecraft will spend about 26 months in orbit, taking images of the asteroid to get a clearer picture of its topography, surface features, gravity and magnetism. The asteroid will not be mined – but space agencies might just start taking more notice if they find its one massive diamond. 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.

By Zeba Siddiqui SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Google-owned U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant said on Thursday it had seen increasing use of

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 9, 2023--