Elon Musk asks, as Twitter's largest shareholder, if users want an Edit button

Twitter logo through a magnifying glass

Elon Musk, the CEO of both Telsa and SpaceX, recently went shopping. He splashed $2.89 billion on Twitter stock, making him the largest shareholder in the company, with a hefty 9.2 percent holding.

While it is not yet clear what Musk intends to do with the influence he now undoubtedly wields, he is certainly not going to be sitting quietly. In a tweet posted overnight, the entrepreneur tweeted a poll asking if Twitter users would like an edit button.

Continue reading

Elon Musk- and Tesla-themed Bitcoin scams seek to lure victims

Holding Bitcoin

A favorite tactic of scammers is to invoke the name of a celebrity to get people to fall for their schemes. It's no surprise then that, given his known enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies, Tesla supremo Elon Musk's name often comes up.

Researchers at Bitdefender Antispam Lab have spotted two spam campaigns this month both seeking to cash in on Musk and Tesla's high profile in the cryptocurrency world.

Continue reading

There's a Starlink waiting in the sky -- it may not blow your mind though

Satellite

Elon Musk's Starlink is a project aimed at delivering fast broadband via satellite to rural areas left behind by fiber rollouts.

But research from Ookla, the company behind Speedtest.net, suggests that its performance is somewhat variable, much faster than fixed broadband in some areas but a lot slower in others.

Continue reading

Fake news: OpenAI's 'deepfakes for text', GPT2, may be too dangerous to be released

Fake news robot

OpenAI -- a company backed by Elon Musk -- has created an artificial intelligence system called GPT2 that's capable of writing fake news. The system is also capable of generating works of fiction, and it has been described as being so dangerous that it may not be publicly released.

The stories written by GPT2 have been called "deepfakes for text" and can be generated by feeding the system just a few words. The style is far more sophisticated than most AI-generated text, and the news stories it can generate are so convincing that there are serious concerns about the potential for misuse.

Continue reading

The space race is over and SpaceX won

Elon Musk

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently gave SpaceX permission to build Starlink -- Elon Musk's version of satellite-based broadband Internet. The FCC specifically approved launching the first 4,425 of what will eventually total 11,925 satellites in orbit. To keep this license SpaceX has to launch at least 2,213 satellites within six years. The implications of this project are mind-boggling with the most important probably being that it will likely result in SpaceX crushing its space launch competitors, companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance (ULA) partnership as well as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Starlink is a hugely ambitious project. It isn't the first proposed Internet-in-the-sky. Back in the 1990s a Bill Gates-backed startup called Teledesic proposed to put 840 satellites in orbit to provide 10 megabit-per-second (mbps) broadband anywhere on Earth. Despite spending hundreds of millions, Teledesic was just ahead of its time, killed by a lack of cost-effective launch services. Twenty years later there are several Teledesic-like proposals, the most significant of which may be OneWeb -- variously 882 or 648 or 1972 satellites, depending who is talking, offering 50 mbps. OneWeb has raised more than $1 billion, found a launch partner in Arianespace and even broken ground on a satellite factory in Orlando, Florida.

Continue reading

OpenAI framework used to create undetectable malware

malware alert

Some of the most notable machine learning tools can be hijacked in order to create super-powerful malware capable of bypassing most anti-virus systems, researchers have claimed.

At the recent DEF CON event, security company Endgame revealed how it created customized malware using Elon Musk's own OpenAI framework that security engines were unable to detect.

Continue reading

The robots are coming!

dishwasher-1

Elon Musk thinks he can increase the speed of his Tesla production line in Fremont, California by 20X. I find this an astonishing concept, but Musk not only owns a car company, he also owns the company that makes the robots used in his car factory. So who am I to say he’s wrong? And if he’s right, well then the implications for everything from manufacturing to the economy to geopolitics to ICBM targeting to your retirement and mine are profound. We may be in trouble or maybe we’re not, but either way it’s going to be an interesting ride.

My friend Jerry Kew from the UK brought this article to my attention in which Elon Musk says he expects to increase the speed of his Tesla production line from the current five centimeters per second to one meter per second. Here’s Jerry’s back-of-the-envelope calculation of what this means:

Continue reading

OpenAI and Microsoft team up to create 'cloud brains'

AI

The artificial intelligence (AI) non-profit OpenAI has agreed to partner with Microsoft to develop "cloud brains" to test its experiments.

The organization, which is backed by Elon Musk, has signed an agreement that will allow it to run large-scale experiments using the company's Azure cloud services. OpenAI aims to discover more about deep learning and AI, while Microsoft will use the partnership to create new tools and technologies that use AI.

Continue reading

Elon Musk changes tune of Apple talk

Elon-Musk-profile-800x450_contentfullwidth

Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk has been dropping quite a bit of shade on Apple over the past few months, claiming the company is a graveyard for sacked Tesla employees and that he is not afraid of a car built by the same engineers that created the Apple Watch.

On Twitter earlier this week, he backtracked on those claims, saying he does not hate the company. Musk said that Apple had a lot of talented engineers, the Apple Watch has an excellent design, and he is glad they’re working on an electric car.

Continue reading

Elon Musk is afraid Larry Page might end up destroying the world

Elon-Musk-profile-800x450_contentfullwidth

When SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk recently said that with artificial intelligence we’re "summoning the demon", he wasn’t joking.

He was genuinely concerned about artificial intelligence turning against humanity, and according to a new book by Ashlee Vance, he still is.

Continue reading

Elon Musk is changing the future

NASA Space Satellite

Elon Musk is renowned worldwide for his roles as co-founder of PayPal and CEO of green technology giants Solar City, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors. Now, the billionaire has crafted a feasible plan for supplying Internet to all areas of the world through the use of low Earth orbit satellites -- a project which he hopes will also act as a monetary springboard for an ambitious attempt at colonizing Mars. Of course, Musk has not forgotten his eco-friendly roots, and he is expanding on those with new technology for reducing environmental impact at home.

To grant Internet access to the entire globe, Musk wants to launch hundreds or possibly thousands of satellites. Since satellite Internet typically involves high latency and slower connections, due to the time a signal takes bounce between the Earth’s surface and a geostationary satellite, one of the major aims of Musk’s approach is to replace the current approach of using a small number of large, expensive satellites with an approach that instead uses hundreds of smaller, cheaper devices, expanding coverage and reducing data transmission times.

Continue reading