The EV manufacturer is supported by a robust online community. But Elon Musk's politics and overblown hype about Full Self-Driving are turning some loyalists away. This month, Tesla customers erupted in outrage over what some called a " bait and switch " by the electric vehicle manufacturer. Initially, the company had offered to transfer the Full Self-Driving feature, which is now only available through a subscription model but could once be purchased for a "lifetime" fee that ran as high as $15,000, to any new Tesla purchased by March 31. The deal was most tempting for drivers already enticed by a new base Cybertruck model that cost just $59,990, a price that CEO Elon Musk soon clarified would only last for 10 days, leaving potential buyers a very small window to make up their minds. Then Tesla quietly amended the language of the FSD transfer agreement, stipulating that customers would need to take delivery of a Tesla by March 31 in order to swap their FSD from their last vehicle to the next.

"Didn't know you were famous," the rapper Juliani, an old friend and musical collaborator, texted me from his studio in Nairobi. I didn't have a clue what he was referring to, but then he forwarded me the link to a tweet by Elon Musk that included a screenshot of a 2019 Al Jazeera column of mine, " Abolishing whiteness has never been more urgent ." The original post was circulating on Twitter/X, courtesy of a white nationalist poster who obviously wasn't too happy with the headline. Neither was Elon, who retweeted it with the comment, "It's not okay to say this about any group!" Although the post was only a few hours old, it already had five million views.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Through a stroke of good fortune, Elon Musk's otherwise disastrous purchase of Twitter has turned into one of the great business acquisitions of all time. Buying control of a president was a start. What if the deal bought him something even more valuable? Musk's purchase of Twitter, which closed in the fall of 2022, has undergone an odyssey.

Virtual employees could join workforces this year and transform how companies work, according to the chief executive of OpenAI. The first artificial intelligence agents may start working for organisations this year, wrote Sam Altman, as AI firms push for uses that generate returns on substantial investment in the technology. Microsoft, the biggest backer of the company behind ChatGPT, has already announced the introduction of AI agents – tools that can carry out tasks autonomously – with the blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey among the early adopters. "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies," wrote Altman in a blogpost published on Monday. OpenAI is reportedly planning to launch an AI agent codenamed "Operator" this month, after Microsoft announced its Copilot Studio product and rival Anthropic launched the Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, which can carry out tasks on the computer such as moving a mouse cursor and typing text.

As Elon Musk has embraced Donald Trump and various far-right conspiracy theories, he has left behind an aghast cohort of Tesla owners who suddenly feel embarrassed by their own cars. Many of them are now publicly displaying their dismay at Musk on their vehicles. Sales of anti-Musk stickers have boomed since the world's richest man declared his support for Trump and helped propel him to victory in the US presidential election, as owners of Teslas, the car brand headed by Musk, try to distance themselves from the South African-born multibillionaire. The day after the election was the biggest day ever," said Matt Hiller, a Hawaii-based aquarium worker who sells a range of stickers online that denounce Musk. "People saw a billionaire supervillain buy his way into the administration and it rubbed them the wrong way." Hiller started the sticker range last year after deciding against buying a Tesla due to Musk's "amplifying of horrible people and silencing of others" on X, formerly Twitter, another of his companies. Several hundred stickers a day are now being sold, primarily to Tesla owners, Hiller said, bearing texts such as "Anti Elon Tesla Club" or "I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy", or a picture of Musk in clown makeup with the words "Space Clown". "People keep telling me that they feel they can drive their Teslas again with these stickers," said Hiller, who has had to set aside part of his house to accommodate the growing operation. Hiller devises slogans such as "Elon Ate My Cat", a reference to a debunked falsehood about migrants eating pets in Ohio, that are then sold on Etsy and Amazon. It's a relief really to see they are awake," he said of the surging demand.

Elon Musk is once again suing OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, resurrecting a legal battle against his former partners with a case that now claims they manipulated him into co-founding the artificial intelligence company. Months after abruptly withdrawing a similar lawsuit without explanation, Musk filed a new lawsuit on Monday in a northern California federal court. OpenAI denied the allegations in a statement to the Guardian, pointing to its previous blogposts about Musk's initial lawsuit earlier this year. Musk's latest complaint claims the case is a "textbook tale of altruism versus greed", repeating allegations in his previous suit that his former co-founders in OpenAI betrayed him by turning the company from a non-profit into a largely for-profit enterprise. "The perfidy and deceit is of Shakespearean proportions," it states.

Yesterday, following Apple's announcement of a partnership with OpenAI to integrate support for ChatGPT into the company's devices, Elon Musk did what he always does: he tweeted. The owner of X wrote, on X, that he would ban Apple devices at his companies "If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level.". And to that I say: Go right ahead. And while you're at it, remove your company's software from Apple's App Store too. Musk's companies (at least the major ones) currently include Tesla, SpaceX, X, X AI and Neuralink.

Elon Musk supported making OpenAI a for-profit company, the ChatGPT maker said, attacking a lawsuit from the wealthy investor who has accused the artificial intelligence business of betraying its founding goal to benefit humanity as it pursued profits instead. In its first response since the Tesla CEO sued last week, OpenAI vowed to get the claim thrown out and released emails from Musk, escalating the feud between the San Francisco-based company and the billionaire that bankrolled its creation years ago. "The mission of OpenAI is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI and helping create broadly distributed benefits," OpenAI said in a blog post late Tuesday from five company executives and computer scientists, including CEO Sam Altman. "We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon's claims." AGI refers to artificial general intelligence, which are general purpose AI systems that can perform just as well as -- or even better than -- humans in a wide variety of tasks.

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang ran a surprisingly successful presidential campaign in 2020, captivating the internet with fresh ideas and a fun, geeky persona. More than any other candidate, Yang seemed to channel the optimistic spirit of science fiction shows like Star Trek. "There are a bunch of things that are happening now that mean we should be thinking more ambitiously about what our society could and should look like, and I ran for president on those ideas," Yang says in Episode 554 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I'd like to think that I was the presidential candidate that a lot of science fiction and fantasy people would recognize as one of their own." Yang, author of the nonfiction books Forward and The War on Normal People, recently released his first novel, The Last Election, about a plot by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to seize power in the wake of a disputed election.

The public has rapidly become fascinated with the power of a new artificial intelligence technology -- ChatGPT -- a chatbot developed by the research and deployment company OpenAI and launched late last year. Already it's demonstrated the ability to serve up detailed answers to complex questions while using the information it processes and feedback from users to improve its ability to respond. ChatGPT has proven to be versatile, with users using the technology to compose music, debug computer code, write restaurant reviews, generate advertising copy and answer test questions. It's able to deliver its responses in a conversational way, and has sparked excitement about its potential, along with some concerns with how it might be used. But what exactly is ChatGPT and what does it say about the state of AI now, and in the future?