Four tech billionaires walk into a mansion. It sounds like the setup for a punch line, but it also forms nearly the entire conceit behind "Mountainhead," a savagely entertaining but somewhat shallow new satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of "Succession." The film, which is streaming on HBO's Max, is a sort of chamber play, its stage a modernist castle in Utah--the Mountainhead of the title--overlooking snowy peaks. The players are a quartet of friends, or, more accurately, frenemies, who resemble a mishmash of real-world Silicon Valley founders. Steve Carell plays Randall Garrett, the group's Peter Thiel-esque mentor who, not unlike the late Steve Jobs, has cancer that his doctor tells him is incurable.

For the quartet of tech billionaires in Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead, ideas are so powerful that nothing else seems real. Holed up in a resplendent snowy retreat built by meditation-app developer Hugo Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), they're glued to their phones as the outside world is erupting into chaos, thanks in no small part to the wildfire spread of A.I. deepfakes on the social media platform owned by the world's richest man, Venis Parish (Cory Michael Smith). People in Gujarat are being burned alive after being falsely accused of desecrating religious symbols, and Midwestern Americans are machine-gunning each other over minor disagreements, but for these four men, the widespread devastation is in some ways proof of concept that they're as important as they believe themselves to be. And besides, those bodies going up in flames are just images on a tiny screen, so distant they might as well be theoretical. As he trudges through the snow with Randall (Steve Carell), the venture capitalist who serves as the group's self-appointed philosopher king, Venis asks him, "Do you … believe in other people?"

Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans. Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis' Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes--the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on--and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones.

I'll tell you what mine is: death. I am not really built for battle – I need five cups of coffee just to function and I have terrible allergies. My body can't even handle pollen, it's not going to do well with nuclear war. Plus, even if I was hardier – who wants to live a few extra months in a completely destroyed world? As you have probably noticed bunkers have become the ultimate status symbol among the 1%.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Sept. 9 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com The driver of a Tesla on autopilot appeared to be asleep behind the wheel while whizzing along a Massachusetts highway, new video shows. A fellow motorist captured the driver with his head slumped forward -- and his passenger equally zonked out -- along I-90 on Sunday. "Teslas are sick, I guess?"

The Tesla self-driving car has prompted debate online after the man was seen on the I-5 highway near Santa Clarita, California sleeping while driving. A Tesla driver was filmed asleep at the wheel as the semi-autonomous vehicle cruised on its own down a highway in Massachusetts over the weekend. At least, that's what video captured Sunday appears to show. Twitter user Dakota Randall posted a 28-second clip of the incident which occurred along the Massachusetts Turnpike. Teslas are sick, I guess?" The post has since received over 422,000 views, 600 Retweets and almost 2,000 likes. The video appears to show a driver using Tesla's advanced driver assistance system called Autopilot. Teslas are sick, I guess? Randall told local media that he blew his car's horn in an attempt to wake the driver, but it didn't work. "At no point did I feel like I was in danger until after the fact, when I thought'Wow, I was just driving next to somebody who was completely asleep on the Mass Pike of all places, like one of the most dangerous roads I can imagine," Randall told WHDH in Newton, Massachusetts. "But yeah, the car stayed the same speed in the same way on the highway, and yeah, it didn't change at all.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DataRobot, the pioneer in automated machine learning, today announced that Monsanto Company has selected the DataRobot automated machine learning platform to enable its Artificial Intelligence initiatives. Monsanto is a global modern agriculture company that develops products and digital tools to help farmers around the world grow crops while using energy, water and land more efficiently. Monsanto will leverage the DataRobot platform to improve data processes with automated and predictive analytics models that will provide insights across the company's core business functions including research & development, supply chain, and sales. DataRobot is the world's only software that puts the power of AI into the hands of any business user. DataRobot pre-packages and automates the data science workflow, enabling users to build and deploy highly accurate predictive models in a fraction of the time of traditional methods.

Climate projections continue to be marred by large uncertainties, which originate in processes that need to be parameterized, such as clouds, convection, and ecosystems. But rapid progress is now within reach. New computational tools and methods from data assimilation and machine learning make it possible to integrate global observations and local high-resolution simulations in an Earth system model (ESM) that systematically learns from both. Here we propose a blueprint for such an ESM. We outline how parameterization schemes can learn from global observations and targeted high-resolution simulations, for example, of clouds and convection, through matching low-order statistics between ESMs, observations, and high-resolution simulations. We illustrate learning algorithms for ESMs with a simple dynamical system that shares characteristics of the climate system; and we discuss the opportunities the proposed framework presents and the challenges that remain to realize it.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. In terms of stock market years, the bull market that kicked off in March 2009 should be on the front cover of AARP magazine. At age 8, the S&P 500 bull run is very old and very overvalued compared to its historical ratios.

Every brand wants to tell a story. But a new narrative analytics platform has launched to help brands figure out the stories that are actually being told about them. The platform is called Protagonist, from a company by the same name. Formerly called Monitor 360, the San Francisco-based firm was spun off three years ago from the consulting firm Monitor Group. Protagonist says its newly released platform is the first "specifically designed to analyze complex, cross-platform data to reveal the underlying beliefs and motivations of consumers." Customers include General Mills, MetLife, Warner Brothers and Microsoft.