Tesla's new robot, a powerful new chatbot, and a nuclear fusion breakthrough: The most popular tech stories

A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks.

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Last month, on a very odd investor call, Elon Musk declared that Tesla was no longer a car company. It’s a robotics company now, an AI company, and the cars are just means to that end. So how’s the whole robotics thing going? Well, according to a new video from the Optimus team, very slowly.

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The mysterious AI chatbot, “gpt2-chatbot,” returned to the major large language model benchmarking site, LMSYS Org, on Monday night roughly a week after it abruptly disappeared. But now, there are two: “im-a-good-gpt2-chatbot” and “im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot.” These models exhibited the same GPT-4 level capabilities, with some saying they’re even better than the original.

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Tesla is a massive company, employing 140,000 people as of late last year. But over the past month, layoffs have torn through the electric vehicle maker — and now a hiring freeze appears to be in effect in North America.

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What happens when you stick your finger in the closing trunk—or, in this case, the “frunk”—of a Tesla Cybertruck? It’s a question that way too many Cybertruck owners are asking themselves these days. And a new video posted to YouTube appears to show the most grotesque answer to date.

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Elon Musk’s “absolutely hardcore” layoffs won’t stop coming as Tesla employees announce their terminations on social media.

Well over a dozen Tesla employees took to LinkedIn on Monday to tell their networks they are now out of a job. It was unclear Monday afternoon how many workers have been affected by the latest round of job cuts. While at least one worker said they were directly informed by their manager, it’s likely that many found out by email.

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Wayve, a British startup developing self-driving vehicles, has made history with the U.K.’s largest-ever fundraising for an artificial intelligence firm.

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Elon Musk’s comments about Tesla’s self-driving technology has landed him in hot water with the feds — again.

Reuters, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, reports that the Department of Justice is examining whether Musk and Tesla’s comments about the company’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology constitute securities fraud or wire fraud. Investigators are looking into whether Tesla committed wire fraud by misleading consumers about the technology and whether Tesla committed securities fraud by deceiving investors, Reuters reports.

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Microsoft deployed a generative AI model on Thursday for U.S. intelligence agencies to analyze top-secret information, Bloomberg reports. Microsoft announced the AI offering at the 2024 SCSP AI Expo for National Competitiveness in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. The GPT-4-based model was created to be entirely divorced from the internet, allowing it to securely process classified data.

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Light famously cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole, leaving astrophysicists to theorize and speculate what it’s like beyond the limits of human perception. Now, NASA researchers take that theorization a step further, in the form of an animation that takes you (the viewer) into the black hole.

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