Tesla says its annual revenue has fallen for the first time as the electric vehicle (EV) maker shifts it focus to artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. The company, which is run by multi-billionaire Elon Musk, reported a 3% decline in total revenues in 2025, while profits fell 61% in the last three months of the year. Tesla also announced plans to end production of its Model S and Model X vehicles. It will now use the manufacturing plant in California that made those cars to produce its line of humanoid robots - known as Optimus. In January, China's BYD overtook Tesla as the world's biggest EV maker, while Musk's involvement in politics both in the US and abroad has proved controversial.

When one of Tim's year 8 pupils asked him about his "favourite Italian brain rot animal", he thought he'd misheard. "My hearing is not great at the best of times – I had to ask her to repeat this probably four or five times," he says. Tim (not his real name) was familiar with the term "brain rot", used to describe the sense of mental decline after too much time spent mindlessly scrolling online (and voted Oxford University Press's word of the year for 2024). But what was this about it being Italian? He told his pupil to get on with her work, sat down at his laptop – and immediately turned to Google.

Tesla boss Elon Musk is to unveil the firm's long-awaited robotaxi prototype, the Cybercab, at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California on Thursday. Self-driving cars have long fascinated Mr Musk and he has made a series of bold predictions about them - including that they will save lives or earn their owners money, through being rented out for rides or even overnight stays. But when he takes to the stage for the event - which the company has billed We, Robot - he will be under pressure to quell persistent doubts about the electric vehicle maker's ability to execute on his ambitions. The project has undergone delays, having been originally slated for release in August before being moved to October. Mr Musk explained away the latest delay by saying it was down to some last minute changes from him.

Elon Musk will aim to quiet any doubts about Tesla's standing in the electric car race on Wednesday when the serial entrepreneur convenes an investor day. Invoking his trademark flare, Musk promised to reveal "Master Plan 3" at the gathering, entailing "the path to a fully sustainable energy future for Earth," he said on Twitter in early February. The event, which will be held at Tesla's factory in Texas, will be webcast at 2100 GMT on Wednesday. "Since he is making promises for all citizens of the earth, and not only investors, there better be something pretty big," said Jessica Caldwell, an auto industry expert at Edmunds.com. Caldwell would like to see more clues on how Tesla plans to boost production.

The uses of robots are changing from static environments in factories to encompass novel concepts such as Human-Robot Collaboration in unstructured settings. Pre-programming all the functionalities for robots becomes impractical, and hence, robots need to learn how to react to new events autonomously, just like humans. However, humans, unlike machines, are naturally skilled in responding to unexpected circumstances based on either experiences or observations. Hence, embedding such anthropoid behaviours into robots entails the development of neuro-cognitive models that emulate motor skills under a robot learning paradigm. Effective encoding of these skills is bound to the proper choice of tools and techniques. This paper studies different motion and behaviour learning methods ranging from Movement Primitives (MP) to Experience Abstraction (EA), applied to different robotic tasks. These methods are scrutinized and then experimentally benchmarked by reconstructing a standard pick-n-place task. Apart from providing a standard guideline for the selection of strategies and algorithms, this paper aims to draw a perspectives on their possible extensions and improvements

Four years ago, organizers created the international AI City Challenge to spur the development of artificial intelligence for real-world scenarios like counting cars traveling through intersections or spotting accidents on freeways. In the first years, teams representing American companies or universities took top spots in the competition. Last year, Chinese companies won three out of four competitions. Last week, Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Baidu swept the AI City Challenge, beating competitors from nearly 40 nations. Chinese companies or universities took first and second place in all five categories.

A new report published by University College London aimed to identify the many different ways that AI could potentially assist criminals over the next 15 years. The report had 31 different AI experts take 20 different methods of using AI to carry out crimes and rank these methods based on various factors. The AI experts ranked the crimes according to variables like how easy the crime would be to commit, the potential societal harm the crime could do, the amount of money a criminal could make, and how difficult the crime would be to stop. According to the results of the report, Deepfakes posed the greatest threat to law-abiding citizens and society generally, as their potential for exploitation by criminals and terrorists is high. The AI experts ranked deepfakes at the top of the list of potential AI threats because deepfakes are difficult to identify and counteract.

Event Description: In in our "cyber" age how do we do sex, love and reproduction? This seminar is an interdisciplinary dialogue among psychoanalysts, critical and cultural thinkers, writers and those interested in how our age of technology, consumer (re)production, including pornography, and mass social media has affected what psychoanalysts call "the subject," which is how each and every one of us is uniquely human. The seminar takes place over 2 days, commencing on Friday evening with a panel of invited speakers who will give short presentations, followed by audience discussion. The seminar continues on Saturday morning with the invited keynote speaker, Isabel Millar (see talk and bio below). This is followed by a roundtable discussion with the Friday evening panellists and the invited speaker, and the seminar will conclude with an audience Q&A session.

A "smart-automation" approach can give a typical HR organization a measurable lift when it comes to improving customer experience and efficiency, according to new research from the Hackett Group. The Hackett Group's new Digital World Class analysis found that those typical HR organizations can reduce costs by 17% and operate with 26% fewer staff hours--while also improving effectiveness and internal customer experience. The Hackett Group research advises that, by following a smart-automation strategy, typical HR functions can boost efficiency levels close to those seen by world-class HR organizations (defined as those that achieve top-quartile performance in both efficiency and effectiveness across an array of weighted metrics in the Hackett Group's comprehensive HR benchmark). For instance, world-class HR organizations currently operate at 20% lower cost and with 31% fewer employees than typical HR organizations, the research found. Smart automation--defined as approaches including robotic-process automation, cognitive automation, intelligent data capture and other leading-edge technologies--can enable world-class HR organizations to cut costs and reduce the number of staff hours needed to perform existing administrative/transactional work.

Last summer, the actor Jay Duplass found himself in the middle of a lush forest in Washington state, his body struggling under the weight of a giant space-helmet. The actor was filming scenes for the sci-fi drama Prospect, in which he plays a planet-scavenger hoping to get rich. Duplass' otherworldly get-up--like nearly all of the film's costume and props--had been designed and hand-made by a team of earthbound artists. But while his beat-up headgear looked cool, wearing it was "a goddamn nightmare," the actor says. Those helmets are not designed to be worn all day, or walked around in.