Tesla faces federal lawsuit over racial harassment claims, striking actors to return to bargaining table, and other news to start your day.

Allow us to break it to you gently: School will be back in session before

Meta has unveiled a new series of artificial intelligence chatbots to challenge the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Speaking at the tech giant’s annual Meta Connect conference, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the AI chatbots would feature different “personalities” based on celebrities. Among those to have already lended their personalities are the rapper Snoop Dogg, NFL star Tom Brady and YouTuber Mr Beast. The Meta AI virtual assistants, which will only be available in the US initially, will be able to answer queries or craft responses in a fashion similar to ChatGPT and other programmes. The firm also announced plans to launch an AI studio where users could custom build their own AIs. Users will be able to access the assistant and any created within its new AI studio from within any of Meta’s messaging platforms. This is where Meta is looking to differentiate itself from its rivals, by using its already extensively used social platforms to put AI chatbots in front of users, many for the first time. The company said it did not believe there will be “one single super-intelligent AI that everyone uses”, but rather “different AIs for different things”. This was the reason for creating AI Studio, Meta said, to enable users to “create your own AI that’s aligned with your goals, whether you’re a small business, a creator, or anyone really”. The company demonstrated several AIs it had created already, including a sous chef who could offer meal suggestions and a “personal editor and writing partner” called Lily. Meta said these different chatbots would be given their own profiles on its platforms to enable users to interact with them. Elsewhere at the conference, Mr Zuckerberg unveiled the newest version of the company’s virtual reality headset – the Meta Quest 3 – and reiterated his belief that the future of the internet would be based in the virtual world of the metaverse. In this space, users in such headsets will be able to interact with avatars of others as well as AI bots. Mr Zuckerberg said the metaverse would see the “physical and digital world come together”. The Facebook founder also unveiled a new pair of Meta smartglasses made by Ray Ban, which will be powered by the new Meta AI. “Smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let an AI assistant see what you are seeing and hear what you are hearing,” Mr Zuckerberg said. Over the last week, both Microsoft and Amazon have used live events to demonstrate their latest innovations in AI, with Microsoft announcing a new tool called Copilot is coming to Windows which users can call up at any time to help them with any computing, work or social task. While Amazon used its product event last week to unveil improvements to voice-based AI assistant Alexa that make it more natural and conversational, and better at understanding context and inference to help users complete tasks. On the same day as Meta’s announcement, OpenAI also unveiled a major update to ChatGPT that will give the viral chatbot direct access to the internet for the first time. Additional reporting from agencies Read More Meta unveils new Quest 3 headset and smart glasses that allow for virtual experiences in the real world Meta just took a step towards its dream of the metaverse Meta showcases new AR/VR tech at annual Connect conference Meta plans to develop ‘sassy robot’ chatbot for young users, report says

Astronomers have discovered a new way that stars can die. In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, experts have worked out that a minute-long gamma-ray burst of light, which occured in 2019 and evidence a star dying, happened because stars collided within the densely crowded environment near the supermassive black hole at the centre of an ancient galaxy. Normally gamma-ray bursts (GRB) last around two seconds and happen when stars collapse. “For every hundred events that fit into the traditional classification scheme of gamma-ray bursts, there is at least one oddball that throws us for a loop,” said study coauthor Wen-fai Fong, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a statement. “However, it is these oddballs that tell us the most about the spectacular diversity of explosions that the universe is capable of.” Over time, astronomers have observed three main ways that stars can die, depending on their size. Lower mass stars like our sun shed their outer layers as they age, eventually becoming dead white dwarf stars. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Massive stars burn through the fuel-like elements at their core and shatter in explosions called supernovas. Doing so can leave behind dense remnants like neutron stars or result in the creation of black holes. A third form of star death results when neutron stars or black holes begin to orbit one another in a binary system and spiral closer to one another until they collide and explode. But the new observation suggests a fourth type of death. “Our results show that stars can meet their demise in some of the densest regions of the universe, where they can be driven to collide,” said lead study author Andrew Levan, an astrophysics professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, in a statement. “This is exciting for understanding how stars die and for answering other questions, such as what unexpected sources might create gravitational waves that we could detect on Earth.” “The lack of a supernova accompanying the long GRB 191019A tells us that this burst is not a typical massive star collapse,” said study coauthor Jillian Rastinejad, a doctoral student of astronomy at Northwestern, in a statement. “The location of GRB 191019A, embedded in the nucleus of the host galaxy, teases a predicted but not yet evidenced theory for how gravitational-wave emitting sources might form.” “While this event is the first of its kind to be discovered, it’s possible there are more out there that are hidden by the large amounts of dust close to their galaxies,” said Fong, who is also a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics at Northwestern. “Indeed, if this long-duration event came from merging compact objects, it contributes to the growing population of GRBs that defies our traditional classifications.” You learn something new every day. 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.

Exchange-traded fund issuers are once again venturing into crypto territory that regulators had recently steered them away from.

Riot Games confirmed that Valorant Team Deathmatch, featuring new maps built specially for the mode, comes out with Episode 7 on June 27.

Elon Musk's rebranding of Twitter to X is complete. The app’s icon now sports a

Montana has become the first state to enact a complete ban on TikTok

BYD outpaced Tesla in the second quarter as the Chinese carmaker posted record sales of hybrid and electric vehicles.

Fans are very excited to see Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed collaborate on the show

(This Oct. 17 story has been corrected to fix the delivery figure in paragraph 4) By Arriana McLymore (Reuters) -

(Bloomberg Markets) -- Singapore is a small country that lives at the sharp end of several big global stories: US-China