Musk becomes world's first half-trillionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk has become the first person ever to achieve a net worth of more than $500bn (£370.9bn), The tech magnate's net worth briefly reached $500.1bn on Wednesday afternoon New York time, before dipping slightly to just over $499bn later in the day, the Forbes billionaires index reported. Alongside Tesla, valuations of his other ventures, including the artificial intelligence start-up xAI and rocket company SpaceX, have also reportedly climbed in recent months. According to Forbes' billionaires index, Oracle founder Larry Ellison is the world's second richest person, with a fortune of about $350.7bn. Mr Ellison briefly overtook Musk last month after shares in Oracle soared by more than 40%, boosted by the firm's surprisingly rosy outlook for its cloud infrastructure business and artificial intelligence (AI) deals.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) can exhibit impressive proficiency in isolated, short-term tasks, they often fail to maintain coherent performance over longer time horizons. In this paper, we present Vending-Bench, a simulated environment designed to specifically test an LLM-based agent's ability to manage a straightforward, long-running business scenario: operating a vending machine. Agents must balance inventories, place orders, set prices, and handle daily fees - tasks that are each simple but collectively, over long horizons (>20M tokens per run) stress an LLM's capacity for sustained, coherent decision-making. Our experiments reveal high variance in performance across multiple LLMs: Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o3-mini manage the machine well in most runs and turn a profit, but all models have runs that derail, either through misinterpreting delivery schedules, forgetting orders, or descending into tangential "meltdown" loops from which they rarely recover. We find no clear correlation between failures and the point at which the model's context window becomes full, suggesting that these breakdowns do not stem from memory limits. Apart from highlighting the high variance in performance over long time horizons, Vending-Bench also tests models' ability to acquire capital, a necessity in many hypothetical dangerous AI scenarios. We hope the benchmark can help in preparing for the advent of stronger AI systems.

Major tech moguls had their claws out for each other on Wednesday, hissing at their rivals over enormous pledges to invest in AI that had been announced by Donald Trump the day before. Trump announced Stargate, a 500bn project to be funded jointly by OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank, on Tuesday. During the announcement, the president was flanked by the leaders of those companies: Sam Altman, Larry Ellison and Masayoshi Son, respectively. Son is slated to be the chair of the project. Absent from the photo op was a representative from MGX, Abu Dhabi's state AI fund, another principal investor.

The world's richest tech billionaires increased their fortunes by 750 billion last year - with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook tsar Mark Zuckerberg topping the list. Forbes has released its annual roster of the world's wealthiest technology tycoons - and the profit increases they saw in 2023 are eye-watering. Bezos, 60, added 80 billion to his net worth, while Zuckerberg, 39, enjoyed a whopping 113 billion increase to his net value. Of the planet's 342 billionaires who made their fortune in the tech industry - earning a combined income of 2.6 trillion last year - Bezos tops the list. Bezos' net worth surged 80 billion to 194 billion in 2023, according to Forbes.

Some of the most powerful people in America assembled in Washington, DC, today to help shape the future of artificial intelligence (AI) safeguards. The unprecedented meeting took place as the US Senate gears up to draft legislation that will regulate the rapidly advancing AI industry, which many of the world's best minds fear could destroy humanity if left unchecked. The gathering brought 22 of the most influential voices in the tech sector - who had a combined net worth of over $400billion - and 100 senators under one roof, bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and the nation's capital. The high-profile event included notorious AI critic Elon Musk, who today called for tighter regulation of AI, as well as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and the CEOs of Google and IBM. The private meeting was a crash course for legislators on how best to regulate AI: a technical achievement which some of these same industry leaders likened to the'extinction'-level risk of nuclear weapons.

British people have a lot of questions, and these days all they have to do is shout at their voice assistant Alexa and they will probably get the answer. Amazon has now revealed its most asked questions for Alexa in Britain this year, ranging from the weird, wonderful and straight-up nosey. From the height of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to Gordon Ramsay's net worth, hundreds of questions have been asked, with some being more popular than others. The net worth of the second richest man in the world, and new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, was one of the most frequently asked question from Alexa owners. One of the most popular questions was'Alexa, how tall is Rishi Sunak'.

More and more people talk about Artificial Intelligence, especially in the last few years. Humans have been brave enough to think about the possibility of robots that can do things that humans do for a long time. Even though this has been helpful in many ways, have we ever wondered if artificial intelligence could be smarter than humans? Before you can compare human and artificial intelligence, you need to know what artificial intelligence is. In simple terms, artificial intelligence is the set of skills that a machine needs to be able to do tasks that a human can do easily.

We are well aware that Google's Artificial Intelligence is one of the most advanced technologies in this field. In other words, it is not surprising that Google is capable of developing an Artificial Intelligence that understands how the human brain operates and can imitate its capabilities… Those of us who are customers of this company have been impressed on multiple occasions by their ability to know each other too well and to anticipate our every move. Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, expressed surprise at the possibility of Google's technology knowing us and imitating our behavior based on predictions about our preferences. It all began when Blake Lemoine was working on the advancements of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), a Google Artificial Intelligence designed to have conversations and eventually perfect Google searches by analyzing sentences and patterns in conversation, one of the many ways that artificial intelligences operate and learn. This project's primary objective is to ensure that the responses of Google's Artificial Intelligence in conversations transcend the automatic responses that characterize bots, for instance, and that different topics can be covered and a dialogue can progress naturally.

Humans invented artificial intelligence, so it is an unfortunate reality that human biases can be baked into AI. Businesses that use AI, however, do not need to replicate these historical mistakes. Today, we can deploy and scale carefully designed AI across organizations to root out bias rather than reinforce it. This shift is happening now in consumer lending, an industry with a history of using biased systems and processes to write loans. For years, creditors have used models that misrepresent the creditworthiness of women and minorities with discriminatory credit-scoring systems and other practices. Until recently, for example, consistently paying rent did not help on mortgage applications, an exclusion that especially disadvantaged people of color.

Elon Musk has overtaken Amazon . Messrs. Musk and Bezos, both founders of rocket companies, have clashed over issues such as Amazon's power over book publishing and Mr. Musk's interest in colonizing the planet Mars. Amazon last year bought a self-driving-car startup that would compete with Tesla. Mr. Musk's net worth totaled around $195 billion Thursday, up from roughly $30 billion a year ago and topping Mr. Bezos's wealth by about $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The value of Tesla's shares rose almost 8% Thursday, enough for Mr. Musk to overtake Mr. Bezos in the wealth ranking.