Elon Musk is bucking a billionaire trend. He says he doesn’t plan to hand over his companies, which include Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX, to his kids.
Elon Musk informed the audience via video link at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council event in London: “I will strongly consider England for a future location of a gigafactory.”
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When Microsoft-funded lab OpenAI launched ChatGPT in February, millions of people realized almost overnight what tech professionals have understood for a long time: Today’s AI tools are advanced enough to transform daily life as well as an incredibly broad range of industries. Microsoft’s Bing leaped from a distant second place in search to a much higher-profile level. Concepts like large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing are now part of mainstream discussion.
However, with the spotlight also comes scrutiny. Regulators around the world are taking note of AI’s risks to user privacy. The Elon Musk-backed Future of Life Institute amassed 1,000 signatures from tech leaders asking for a six-month pause on training AI tools that are more advanced than GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT.
On Friday, May 19, SpaceX released a 20-second video demonstrating that it is already conducting tests on technology aimed at fortifying the ground beneath its enormous Starship rocket’s orbital launch pad. The launch pad, situated at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, endured significant damage during the inaugural test flight of a fully-integrated Starship vehicle on April 20. During the test flight, the sheer power of the Super Heavy rocket’s 33 Raptor engines created a substantial crater beneath the pad. As a result, chunks of shattered concrete were sent soaring through the air.
SpaceX founder Chief Engineer Elon Musk shared that SpaceX is actively developing a solution to mitigate such damage. He said that they plan to build “a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount.” The footage of the test shows a methane-fueled Raptor engine ignited with its beam hitting a steel-plate and a massive stream of water. “One hell of a plasma beam!” said Musk when he shared the video via Twitter, shown below. A single Raptor V2 engine is capable of generating around 230 tons of thrust. Engineers must build a strong structure that could support such intense power, collectively, all 33 Raptor engines generate over 17 million pounds of thrust!
Regarding launch pad modifications –“We’re going to put down a lot of steel” under the launch tower before the next Starship flight with a water flame diverter system, Musk said during a Subscriber-only Twitter Spaces discussion on April 29. “We certainly didn’t expect” to destroy the concrete under the launch pad during the flight test, he said (pictured below). He speculates that the crater was caused due to “compressed the sand underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete effectively bent and then cracked.”
Elon Musk was asked in a CNBC interview how he would advise his kids on careers in the AI age. Musk said finding fulfillment can be difficult if the AI can.
It’s as though Musk views in-person work as a kind of hazing ritual — he and others did it, so you have to do it too. Well, as my mom frequently said when I proposed doing something dumb because others did it, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”
Picture this: Musk standing on the precipice of the Golden Gate Bridge, urging us all to leap into the frigid waters below simply because he took the plunge. While his bravado might be admired by some, it’s not a practical or sustainable model for the future of work. Here’s a thought: rather than Musk’s daredevil dive into the deep abyss of forced in-office work, perhaps we should consider a more measured, flexible and hybrid approach to work, one that incorporates both remote and in-person options, as I tell my clients.
NASA on Friday announced the second spacecraft it hopes will help return astronauts to the surface of the moon later this decade. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander joins the SpaceX Starship as the two vehicles the space agency aims to use for its Artemis program to once again put boots on lunar regolith.
Over a half-century after NASA used a massive investment of US GDP to fund the Apollo program and build the Saturn V rocket, humanity’s next chapter in space is largely in the hands of two of the richest men in the world, SpaceX founder and chief twit Elon Musk and Amazon and Blue Origin head Jeff Bezos.
The shift in the provenance of Apollo’s mission architecture versus that of Artemis is, at the very least, a symbolic representation of a key shift in American society over the last few generations. Hot off the heels of successful collective action in Europe and elsewhere during World War II, the Americans again came together to catch up to — and then surpass — the Soviet Union in the space race.
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Who is winning the Battle of the Robot Armies? Both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will soon have over one million robots each. That means they will soon have as many robots in their army as there are soldiers in the US army…
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At the 2023 Tesla Shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shows off a new Optimus video, the company’s humanoid robot in development.
Continue reading “Elon Musk Reveals New Optimus Robot Video! (2023 Tesla Shareholder Meetinig)” »
