The Financial Times has a good rundown of the extensive executive churn across Elon Musk’s companies in recent months, from Tesla’s robotics team to xAI’s CFO. Musk’s “24/7 campaign-style work ethos” is apparently a little difficult to keep up with.
Federal agencies will now be able to use xAI’s models via the partnership. The news comes after xAI’s tech has been widely criticized for its lack of safety processes and transparency — earlier this month, experts told The Verge about their fears related to xAI, Grok, and its surveillance risks.
[The Wall Street Journal]
It cost xAI around $490 million, according to a report by AI research institute Epoch AI, which is more than nine times the estimated cost of training Meta’s Llama 3.
[Epoch AI]
The workers focused on Gemini, AI Overviews, and other products, and the news came amid conflicts about pay, working conditions, and the workers’ concern that they’re training AI to replace their own jobs, Wired reported. And at Elon Musk’s xAI, more than 500 data annotation staffers were let go on Friday, per Business Insider.
xAI’s track record with safety is concerning, Senator Elizabeth Warren says in letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The fourth installment in the automaker’s Master Plan series seizes on flashy new buzzwords: sustainable abundance.
Tesla has revealed the fourth part of its “Master Plan.” Part three dropped in 2023, promising to create “a sustainable energy civilization.” The new plan is instead about “sustainable abundance,” promoting clean energy and automation that will “give people back more time to do what they love.” Or, as Electrek puts it:
“This is a bunch of utopic nonsense, complete with AI ‘abundance’ buzzwords that Grok could have easily written.”
[X (formerly Twitter)]
