By Jeffrey Dastin MOUNTAIN VIEW, California The financial report you read, the apparel marketing you see and the

New Zealand has pushed back the start of taxes on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions to give farmers more

An Indian spacecraft is set to blaze its way to the far side of the moon in a follow-up mission to a failed effort nearly four years ago to land a rover softly on the lunar surface

Players are struggling to make sense of Lethal Company's controller support settings, and we're here to help.

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

Threads, a text-based conversation app was launched by Meta with the intention of competing with Twitter

TL;DR: As of June 18, get a refurbished Apple iPad Mini 2 for only $106.99

There's certainly plenty to watch across the various video-streaming services. Possibly too much, according to

Scientists have found material from outside of our solar system for the first ever time, according to a controversial Harvard Professor. The “spheres” were found in the Pacific Ocean in June. But early analysis has now indicated that the material came from outside of our solar system, carried by an interstellar object that crashed into the Earth in 2014, according to Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University. The material could even be of “extraterrestrial technological origin” because of some unusual characteristics of the material, he said. Professor Loeb has previously claimed that the asteroid may have been artificial, such as an alien spacecraft. “This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists analyze materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Professor Loeb wrote in his announcement. Professor Loeb has made a number of claims about potential extraterrestrial life and visitors from other solar systems. While has made a number of contributions to astrophysics, he is perhaps best known for his suggestions that Oumuamua, the first interstellar object to visit our solar system, could have been an “alien probe”. His regular and often unusual claims have led to some censure from fellow scientists, who say that he is given to sensationalism and is damaging the usual process of discovery. His pronouncements can be attention-grabbing and undermine the usual work of science to check extraordinary claims with extraordinary evidence, they have said. “People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb’s wild claims,” Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, told The New York Times in July, when Professor Loeb revealed details of his search. “It’s polluting good science — conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room.” Professor Loeb made the most recent claims on Medium, where he has been documenting his trip to the Pacific Ocean to collect materials. In recent years he has been taken with a fireball that fell to Earth in 2014 – and has been looking to collect any fragments from it. He has claimed that details about the fireball indicate that it had come from outside of our solar system. Those claims have proven controversial – though they have been accepted for publication in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal, after initially being rejected – because scientists have argued there is not significant enough proof to indicate it really was an interstellar visitor. Nonetheless, in recent months Professor Loeb and his team have been scouring the Pacific Ocean for any fragments from that object, and in June they announced that they had successfully gathered some examples. Those samples have since undergone testing by scientists. Now Professor Loeb says that analysis shows that the materials are “from a meter-size object that originated from outside the solar system”. A number of details about the material indicated that it was of interstellar origin, he said. He pointed particularly to the amount of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium (or BeLaU) in the objects. That set them apart from other samples not found in the path of the object – and also from objects that would normally be expected to have been formed on the Earth, the Moon or Mars, he said. Professor Loeb said he he was confident that more objects would be found like “IM1”, the name he has given to that object he claimed to be an interstellar visitor. He suggested that there could be “a few million such objects reside within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun at any given time” and that “some of them may represent technological space trash from other civilizations”. He also criticised those many scientists who have expressed scepticism about his claims, joking that he was “running away from colleagues who have strong opinions without seeking evidence, and I am running towards a higher intelligence in interstellar space” and saying that he wishes his critics “happiness and prosperity”. Read More We just received the first ever pictures taken near the Moon’s uncharted south pole Rare blue supermoon brightens the night sky this week India set to launch spacecraft to Sun after successful moon landing Rare blue supermoon brightens the night sky this week India set to launch spacecraft to Sun after successful moon landing Japan forced to suspend launch of historic first Moon lander

Amazon.com Inc. is hiring Microsoft Corp.’s product chief to run the division responsible for Alexa and the Echo

SAVE 49%: Access Max from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN. A one-year subscription to

A cybersecurity firm is calling out Microsoft for allegedly taking too long to patch a