xAI will open source Grok this week. The move follows Elon Musk's complaint that OpenAI has deviated from its open source roots. Musk has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI claiming that OpenAI, which was supposed to make its technology freely available to the public, has become closed-source and has shifted its focus to maximizing profits for Microsoft. Musk has long been a proponent of open source - Tesla has open sourced many of its patents. It is unclear what aspects of Grok will be open sourced.

According to Elon Musk, Neuralink's 'Blindsight' product is already working on monkeys to restore vision. The resolution is pretty low, but researchers are looking for ways to increase the clarity of images. It is unclear whether the monkeys were born blind and how much of their optic nerves were still intact. The device could be made available to far more people if Neuralink was able to bypass both the eye and the optic nerve.

Tesla employees are now required to install and show customers how to use the latest version of the company's Full Self-Driving (FSD) premium driver assistance system before completing a vehicle delivery in North America. All Tesla vehicles have a standard driver assistance system called Autopilot. The FSD option costs $199 per month for most customers. Drivers must remain attentive to the road and ready to steer or brake at any time when using FSD.

Tesla is raising its compensation for artificial intelligence engineers to ward off poaching from other companies. Elon Musk says that the competition for AI engineers is the craziest talent war he has ever seen. Tech companies are offering million-dollar-a-year compensation packages and accelerated stock-vesting schedules. Layoffs are continuing in other areas of tech.

The fourth SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy launch may be in the next month or so. Its goal will be to get Starship's upper stage to get through the high heating regime of reentry and make a controlled splat into the ocean. SpaceX aims to bring the Super Heavy booster back intact, having it land on a virtual tower in the Gulf of Mexico. It could attempt to land a Starship booster on the real tower as soon as the vehicle's fifth flight. The company is working to accelerate production of Starship vehicles to support higher flight rates and increase payload capacity.

Elon Musk gave a 45-minute speech at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas last weekend about making life multiplanetary, the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and SpaceX's plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization. SpaceX has now completed 327 successful launches, with 80% of those involving used boosters. This performance has given Musk confidence that reusability can be achieved with the Super Heavy booster that powers Starship. While SpaceX's goals seem audacious, the company has proven that rocket reusability is a very viable thing, so its other goals appear a lot more achievable.

Elon Musk gave a 45-minute speech at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas last weekend about making life multiplanetary, the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and SpaceX's plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization. SpaceX has now completed 327 successful launches, with 80% of those involving used boosters. This performance has given Musk confidence that reusability can be achieved with the Super Heavy booster that powers Starship. While SpaceX's goals seem audacious, the company has proven that rocket reusability is a very viable thing, so its other goals appear a lot more achievable.

Elon Musk gave a 45-minute speech at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas last weekend about making life multiplanetary, the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and SpaceX's plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization. SpaceX has now completed 327 successful launches, with 80% of those involving used boosters. This performance has given Musk confidence that reusability can be achieved with the Super Heavy booster that powers Starship. While SpaceX's goals seem audacious, the company has proven that rocket reusability is a very viable thing, so its other goals appear a lot more achievable.

Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI, is suing the company claiming - among other things - that GPT-4 constitutes AGI and is no longer subject to the Microsoft agreement. He also argues for more transparency and openness.

OpenAI responded to Elon Musk's lawsuit by sharing its side of the story along with screenshots of email exchanges between Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Elon Musk. The receipts show that Musk believed OpenAI’s chance of success was 0% and agreed that there was a need to close source certain models.

Elon Musk shared on X that Grok, xAI's language model, will be open sourced in the coming days.

The Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta v12.3 update, which Elon Musk has described as a "big release", uses end-to-end neural nets for vehicle controls, a shift from programmer-coded controls.

Elon Musk's lawsuit highlighted OpenAI's departure from its original open-source ethos to a more closed, profit-driven model that contradicts its founding principles. An email between OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever and Musk from 2015 suggests that OpenAI knew early on that it would deviate from its stated mission. Criticism mounts as OpenAI faces accusations of failing to correct public misperceptions, enabling potentially harmful AI outputs and veering away from its nonprofit origins.

Elon Musk announced that xAI’s Grok chatbot, previously exclusive to Premium+ subscribers, will soon be available to all Premium subscribers on X.

Elon Musk's xAI is in talks with investors to raise $3B in a funding round that would value the artificial intelligence startup at $18B.

Elon Musk's xAI has released Grok-1.5, an AI with enhanced math and coding skills that boasts a significant performance increase and competitive benchmark results against leading AI models like GPT-4. The updated model can now process much longer context windows, improving its memory capacity. Grok-1.5 is currently accessible to Premium+ users of X. X plans to expand availability to regular Premium subscribers.

Elon Musk sent a memo to Tesla employees saying that the company will lay off more than 10% of its global workforce. Tesla had 140,473 employees as of December 2023. Its shares have fallen 31% year to date. Electric vehicle sales are gaining popularity worldwide, but the company is facing more competition now than ever. It is also dealing with other challenges, such as logistical problems caused by Yemeni Houthi maritime attacks in the Red Sea and production suspension at its gigafactory near Berlin due to suspected arson at a nearby electricity substation. A copy of the memo from Musk is available at the end of the article.

Tesla is asking shareholders to approve a move to Texas and to re-approve a $55.8 billion pay package for CEO Elon Musk that was recently voided by a Delaware judge. The vote will be held at Tesla's 2024 annual meeting on June 13. Renegotiating a replacement compensation plan that Musk would agree to would likely take substantial time and incur new accounting charges of billions of dollars. Musk has not been paid for any of his work over the last six years at Tesla, where he helped generate significant growth and stockholder value, with the company's stock up more than 630% since March 2018.

Tesla is laying off its director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci, the head of new vehicle development Daniel Ho, as well as the teams that operated under the two executives. These layoffs are part of a larger effort by CEO Elon Musk to reduce costs and headcount within the company. Tesla plans to continue building out some new Supercharger locations and finish those currently under construction. Musk is also dissolving the company's public policy team in this latest cull.

The US provided Boeing and SpaceX with funding to build a crewed space vehicle in 2014. Boeing received far more funding than SpaceX and it had far more experience, but the company still allocated fewer resources to the project than it needed to thrive. The company kept carrying technical debt forward so that additional work was lumped onto the final milestones. Other issues, such as the way the company was structured, cost fixation, siloed development, and a lack of proper testing, all worked together to kneecap the project.

Multiple recently-former Tesla employees posted on social media on Sunday to share that they were no longer with the company. The company started laying off employees last month ahead of the release of its Q1 financial results. While Elon Musk has said that he plans to reduce headcount by more than 10% globally, the total may be closer to 20% by the time everything has settled. The latest round of layoffs affected service advisers, engineers, and HR.

Elon Musk plans to enhance X's AI, Grok, to merge live news with social media commentary to provide updates and citations in real time. Grok will generate news summaries from user discussions on X, focusing on engagement and accuracy. The project faces challenges with proper citation and legal concerns.

Tesla had 3,400 job postings across the US, Mexico, Canada, and Puerto Rico on May 1, but it has since removed almost all of them. The bulk of the positions were in California, Texas, and Nevada, where the company has its gigafactories. This is the second time that Tesla has almost entirely wiped out its job postings since it began laying off workers on April 16. The company entered its fourth consecutive week of layoffs this week. At least six high-profile executives have either already resigned or plan to later this year.

Elon Musk's AI startup xAI is negotiating a potential $10 billion deal to rent cloud servers from Oracle, aiming to become one of Oracle's largest customers and rival AI offerings from OpenAI and Google.

This article presents the story of Tesla's Supercharger firings based on interviews with eight former charging-division employees, one contractor, and an email that Tesla sent to outside vendors. Charging chief Rebecca Tinucci went to meet with Elon Musk about the network's future the day before the firings. Tinucci had recently cut between 15% to 20% of staff, but Musk wanted more layoffs. She balked at the request, saying that deeper cuts would undermine the charging businesses' fundamentals. Musk responded by firing Tinucci and her entire 500-member team.

The US Food and Drug Administration has given the green light for Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second person. Most of the threads implanted in the first participant have come loose and are no longer reading the electrical signals needed to translate his thoughts into cursor movements. While software changes have helped him regain many of the device's capabilities, only around 15% of the threads inserted in his brain remain in place. Neuralink's proposed fix for the problem that occurred in the first test participant involves embedding some of the device's ultrathin wires deeper into the brain.

Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, is advancing its Grok chatbot to support multimodal inputs, allowing users to upload photos and receive text-based answers.

xAI is planning to build a supercomputer to power the next version of its Grok AI chatbot. Elon Musk says he wants to get the proposed supercomputer running by the fall of 2025. xAI could be partnering with Oracle for the project. When completed, the supercomputer will be at least four times the size of the biggest GPU clusters that exist today. Musk estimates that running the Grok 3 model and beyond will require 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips.

xAI has announced raising $6 billion in funding to help bring the startup's first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies. The funding comes from several sources, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian Prince Al Waleed bin Talal. Elon Musk plans to launch xAI's new data center by the fall of 2025. Musk has said he would prefer to build products outside of Tesla when it comes to AI and robotics unless he gets more control.

Elon Musk redirected 12,000 H100 GPUs ordered by Tesla to X. He had told investors in April that Tesla had spent $1 billion on GPUs in the three months of the year. Tesla has been developing its own in-house supercomputer for AI, but Musk has previously said that it would be redundant if the company could source more H100s. X's order of 12,000 H100s will be redirected to Tesla.