Lifeboat Foundation

Billionaire CEO Elon Musk on Friday said that his rocket manufacturing company SpaceX launched the satellite systems of its rivals without favoring their own.

The CEO took to X to clarify the same after SpaceX entered into a contract to launch Amazon.com Inc’s AMZN Kuiper satellites, aimed at providing satellite internet along the lines of SpaceX’s Starlink.

What Happened: Under the newly announced contract, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will launch thrice to deliver Kuiper satellites to low-Earth orbit starting mid-2025. Project Kuiper is a project by the e-commerce giant aimed at providing broadband with the help of a network of satellites in low-Earth orbit like Starlink.

Dec 1 (Reuters) — Amazon (AMZN.O) on Friday said it booked three Falcon 9 launches with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to help deploy the ecommerce giant’s Project Kuiper satellite network, tapping a rival in the satellite internet business for its multi-billion dollar launch campaign.

Amazon aims to build Kuiper as a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to beam broadband internet globally and compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network, which already has some 5,000 satellites providing nearly global coverage.

Amazon, which vowed in 2019 to invest $10 billion into the project, will put an unspecified number of Kuiper satellites on three Falcon 9 rockets from SpaceX beginning in mid-2025, the company said Friday.

One of Elon Musk’s rockets carrying a South Korean spy satellite took off for orbit as the rivalry between the two Koreas expands beyond Earth.

The network’s total capacity will surpass 500 Gbps by 2025.

While China is already marching ahead with its internet infrastructure, the country has announced the completion of its first high-orbit satellite communication network, which aims to provide fast and reliable internet service within its territory and to several countries along its Belt and Road initiative.

The network, which consists of three high-throughput satellites named ChinaSat 16, 19, and 26, is expected to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, a low-orbit satellite system developed by the American aerospace company, according to a Beijing-based communications expert.

Continue reading “China soars Starlink-challenger satellite network to counter Elon Musk” »

With dubstep as the soundtrack and neon lighting as the backdrop, Elon Musk handed the first Cybertrucks over to a select group of customers that included Reddit co-founder and VC fund Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian and Trousdale Ventures founder and CEO Phillip Sarofim.

The live streamed portion of the Tesla Cybertruck delivery event was a short affair — around 30 minutes. But the event still had all the traditional trappings one has come to expect from Tesla: the pomp and pumpy music, VIP guests and of course, Musk.

The Tesla Cybertruck deliveries come at least six years since Musk first tweeted about building a truck and four years since he debuted the futuristic-looking pickup.

The tech billionaire Elon Musk has come to define innovation, but he can also be a lightning rod for controversy; he recently endorsed antisemitic remarks on X, formerly known as Twitter, which prompted companies to pull their advertising. In his interview, Musk discusses his emotional state and why he has “no problem being hated.” This interview was with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times at the annual DealBook Summit and recorded live in front of an audience at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed the company has begun to introduce the latest version of its ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD) semi-autonomous software in the US, with its ‘beta’ title – which refers to a product being tested by consumers – to be dropped.

Mr Musk confirmed Tesla employees are the first to experience the new system.

Known as version 12 (or v12), the new FSD could signify a major technological step forward in the industry – allowing the car’s computers to make its own judgements based on what its cameras see, rather than relying on “hard-coded programming”, website Not a Tesla App reports.

The brain-computer interface (BCI) space continues to rise in notoriety, and a number of players are throwing their hats in the ring.

Such technologies could enable users to control a computer with their brain, or even go beyond that. Countless immobile people someday could control a mouse cursor, keyboard, mobile device/tablet, wheelchair or prosthetic device by only thinking.

Big names have already established their presence in the space. Elon Musk’s Neuralink continues to make headway, while Bill Gates-and Jeff Bezos-backed Synchron has an innovative catheter-delivered implant. Blackrock Neurotech, which has a next-generation BCI, has been implanting its Utah Array in patients since 2004.

Elon Musk is hyping the imminent release of his ChatGPT competitor Grok, yet another example of how his entire personality is just itself a biological LLM made by ingesting all of Reddit and 4chan. Grok already seems patterned in many ways off of the worst of Elon’s indulgences, with the sense of humor of a desperately unfunny and regressive internet troll, and biases informed by a man whose horrible, dangerous biases are fully invisible to himself.

There are all kinds of reasons to be wary of Grok, including the standard reasons to be wary of any current LLM-based AI technology, like hallucinations and inaccuracies. Layer on Elon Musk’s recent track record for disastrous social sensitivity and generally harmful approach to world-shaping issues, and we’re already looking at even more reason for concern. But the real risk probably isn’t yet so easy to grok, just because we have little understanding yet of the extent of the impact that widespread use of LLMs across our daily and online lives will have.

One key area where they’re already having and are bound to have much more of an impact is user-generated content. We’ve seen companies already deploying first-party integrations that start to embrace some of these uses, like Artifact with its AI-generated thumbnails for shared posts, and Meta adding chatbots to basically everything. Musk is debuting Grok on X as a feature reserved for Premium+ subscribers initially, with a rollout supposedly beginning this week.