An invite-only event in Austin, Texas, kept online fans in the dark for hours. A Tesla launch event tends to cause a hoopla. Fans crowd into an event space; loud electronic beats are the warm up act. Finally, the star himself, the ringmaster of this electric circus, CEO Elon Musk, emerges to a roar. There are demos, powerful verbs, and sometimes, a "one more thing," a last-minute surprise product unveiling.

A Memphis data center run by SpaceXAI is apparently the source of the issue that took out Grok for more than three hours Thursday. The company issued a brief apology to Grok users, as well as to unnamed "compute partners" who were also apparently affected by the issues. "We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning," the company wrote. "We'd also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners." We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning.

OpenAI recently estimated its Cursor partnership would make more than $1 billion in revenue a year, WIRED has learned. It still walked away after Elon Musk's SpaceX acquired the AI coding startup. In a late-night blog post last Friday, OpenAI said it would wind down its partnership with Cursor, the startup behind one of the most popular AI coding tools on the market. The reason OpenAI gave for the decision is effectively that it can't trust Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX recently acquired Cursor in a $60 billion deal. In doing so, OpenAI walked away from one of its most important customers. Cursor has long paid OpenAI fees to offer the ChatGPT-maker's models to developers using its AI coding editor.

Many of the lawsuits xAI is facing'stem from a period at the start of this year when loose safeguards on Grok allowed users to direct it to remove clothing from photos and generate sexualized images'. Many of the lawsuits xAI is facing'stem from a period at the start of this year when loose safeguards on Grok allowed users to direct it to remove clothing from photos and generate sexualized images'. Child sexual abuse survivor alleges Elon Musk's AI chatbot used photos of her to generate new illegal images Musk denied he was aware Grok ever produced'any naked underage images' A survivor of child sexual abuse has sued Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, alleging that its chatbot used pictures of her abuse to generate new illegal pornographic images that depict her. "Using real images of Plaintiff and class members, Grok generated child pornography depicting Plaintiff and class members," states the complaint, which was filed last week in a US district court in California. Attorneys for the plaintiff, who is listed as Jane Doe in the case to protect her identity, accuse xAI of both generating CSAM of their client and of ingesting child sexual abuse images depicting her into the company's datasets after new images were publicly posted.

Many of the tech billionaires who built our world have taken the wrong lessons from their favorite science fiction. A fter reading Jill Lepore's The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I'd set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or '80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I'd confiscate all of their science fiction. As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get--maybe couldn't get--was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Switch Off Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series The contract will end by mid-November, months after SpaceX bought the coding tool's parent company for $60 billion. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . OpenAI said Friday it will wind down its partnership with Cursor, the popular AI coding tool now owned by SpaceX, marking the latest escalation in the long-running dispute between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

OpenAI is planning to cut off Cursor's access from its models, following the AI coding assistant's acquisition by SpaceXAI. In a post on its website, the company said it's giving Cursor users as much time as it could based on its contract. It intends to pull its models from the service on November 12, 2026, but it said that Cursor could choose an earlier termination date. The company explained that it's making this choice because it can't be confident that SpaceX will use its technology within its terms of services, based on its "experience with Elon Musk's companies violating contracts." OpenAI and Musk have a long and troubled history, with the SpaceXAI chief being one of the company's earliest investors.

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Beyond Elon Musk's interpretation of, Silicon Valley leaders have often misunderstood classic books like and . Why does anyone care what Elon Musk thinks of Homer's, or Christopher Nolan's? Musk is promising to use AI to generate a "historically accurate" version of the --turning epic poetry into atrocious slop--even as AI companies are literally destroying books to ingest them as data more cheaply. Meanwhile, Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires are building a world they read about, as boys, in the pages of books they failed to understand. I think of that world as the Artificial State.