Like so many things in Elon Musk's orbit, a lot of it may come down to AI. SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year, multiple outlets have reported, and Ars can confirm. This represents a major change in thinking from the world's leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk . The Wall Street Journal and The Information first reported about a possible IPO last Friday, and Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting the company would target a $1.5 trillion valuation. This would allow SpaceX to raise in excess of $30 billion. This is an enormous amount of funding.

Rep. Brian Mast defends Trump's Nvidia chip policy as part of a broader strategy to maintain U.S. dominance in AI and computing technology markets.

Fulu sets repair bounties on consumer products that employ sneaky features that limit user control. Just this week, it awarded more than $10,000 to the person who hacked the Molekule air purifier. Companies tend to be rather picky about who gets to poke around inside their products. Manufacturers sometimes even take steps that prevent consumers from repairing their device when it breaks, or modifying it with third-party products. But those unsanctioned device modifications have become the raison d'être of a bounty program set up by a nonprofit called Fulu, or Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users.

OpenAI confirms personal information from API accounts was exposed in a data breach involving third-party analytics provider Mixpanel, affecting names and email addresses.

Fears about AI data centers' water use have exploded. Experts say the reality is far more complicated than people think. Last month, journalist Karen Hao posted a Twitter thread in which she acknowledged that there was a substantial error in her blockbuster book Empire of AI. Hao had written that a proposed Google data center in a town near Santiago, Chile, could require "more than one thousand times the amount of water consumed by the entire population"--a figure which, thanks to a unit misunderstanding, appears to have been off by a magnitude of 1,000. In the thread, Hao thanked Andy Masley, the head of an effective altruism organization in Washington, DC, for bringing the correction to her attention. Masley has spent the past several months questioning some of the numbers and rhetoric common in popular media about water use and AI on his Substack.

As more and more age tech hits the market, I've been testing the most innovative gadgets for older folks and caregivers. Age tech is a rapidly growing category focused on remote caregiving, improving quality of life, and enabling older folks to stay in their own homes for longer. The US Census Bureau says around 16 million elders (over 65) live alone. While the majority are healthy, with family and friends nearby, many lack support and may be battling physical and mental decline. Whether you're getting older or trying to help an aging loved one, there's an increasingly diverse range of gadgetry to choose from, but as a nascent category, it's tricky to know what will help.

Expanded carrier screening: Is it worth it? Carrier screening tests would-be parents for hidden genetic mutations that might affect their children. It initially involved testing for specific genes in at-risk populations. Expanded carrier screening takes things further, giving would-be parents an option to test for a wide array of diseases in prospective parents and egg and sperm donors. The companies offering these screens "started out with 100 genes, and now some of them go up to 2,000," Sara Levene, genetics counsellor at Guided Genetics, said at a meeting I attended this week. "It's becoming a bit of an arms race amongst labs, to be honest."

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .

Get in, loser, we're going judging. Honestly, compiling the biggest losers for Engadget is more fun than talking up the winners . While we reviewed nothing as atrocious as those ill-fated AI assistant gadgets from 2024, AI companies and services straddled both the winner and loser podiums. The losers might be you, the American consumer. In the US, anyone wanting a drone will have to find something that isn't made by DJI.

The filmmaker, who died in January, showed us what our world was becoming, and how we should respond. In the summer, the actress Natasha Lyonne relayed an anecdote about the late director David Lynch, in which he told her that A.I. in the creative arts would soon be as ubiquitous and indispensable as the pencil. Lyonne, who happens to be the co-founder of an A.I. studio, seemed to be implying that the revered filmmaker had offered his approval to the same nihilistic and destructive technology that recently enabled President Donald Trump to imagine himself as a king in a fighter jet dropping payloads of diarrhea on the people he's sworn to serve. In an interview with magazine in November, 2024, he said that, on the one hand, "the good side" of A.I. could be "important for moving forward in a beautiful way," and, on the other, "if money is the bottom line, there'd be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror." He added, "I'm hoping better times are coming." In January, amid the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Lynch was evacuated from his home and died shortly thereafter, of complications from emphysema.