'Tell Him He's a Piece of Shit': Meta's New AI Unit Is a Total Mess Executives and employees alike are struggling with Meta's chaotic AI strategy, according to sources and internal discussions reviewed by WIRED. Someone interrupted a livestreamed, employee-only presentation at Meta earlier this week with an expletive-filled outburst about "being the company's bitch," according to a recording heard by WIRED. The individual then asked the people leading the call to write to a specific Meta AI executive and tell him that he's a piece of shit. One of the presenters covered their face with their hands, according to a witness. The incident, which took place on a call open to thousands of employees, reflects growing frustration inside the company's Applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of AI researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs .

Donald Trump's White House UFC Event Would Be Embarrassing Anywhere A Monster Energy-sponsored MMA show on the White House's South Lawn was never going to be the height of dignity. But UFC Freedom 250 is failing to clear even the lowest bar. With his history of involvement in pro wrestling and boxing and his zeal for garish excess--the man is a failed casino impresario, after all--it makes perfect sense that Donald Trump would want to celebrate both America's birthday and his own with UFC cage fights on the White House lawn, sponsored by Monster Energy. If there's been any surprise, it's been in how the whole affair has so far failed to clear the lowest bar. The event's promoters are certainly setting expectations high.

Chinese Drivers Are Using Tiny Plastic Heads to Fool Tesla's Autopilot Safeguards A cottage industry of celebrity figurines, blinking screens, and other DIY gadgets is helping drivers bypass Tesla's distracted-driving controls. In China, for just $30, you can have Dwayne Johnson drive your Tesla for you. Sounds too cheap to be true? What you're actually buying is a tiny replica of The Rock's head, designed to sit above the rearview mirror and trick Tesla into thinking an attentive driver is behind the wheel. Tesla's self-driving system appears unable to tell the difference between the figurines and a real person, allowing the actual driver to look away from the road, scroll through their phone, or even doze off--activities that are supposed to be prohibited while assisted-driving features are engaged.

SpaceX's stock market debut has thrust the richest man in the universe into an unexplored frontier of wealth. There are thousands of billionaires across the world. But there is only one trillionaire. Elon Musk became the first person to amass a personal fortune of over $1,000,000,000,000--that's 12 zeros--after shares of his rocket company SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday. SpaceX's initial public offering on Thursday valued the company at nearly $1.8 trillion, up from its most recent private valuation of around $1.25 trillion.

GOP lawmakers, tech investors, and even OpenAI have tied the anti-data-center movement in the US to Chinese interference. Experts say it's much more complicated than that. Right-wing officials and data center investors are increasingly claiming that data center protests are being funded and influenced by the Chinese government. OpenAI added to the discourse on Wednesday when it released a report describing a cluster of accounts originating in China that, the company said, had been spreading anti-data-center messages on social media. Experts who spoke to WIRED, however, are skeptical of the funding claims.

They swear they haven't peeked at the closely guarded secret and that they'll keep the cryptographic competition going. On a blustery March day, the artist Jim Sanborn received visitors at his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The visitors sat him down in front of a laptop, and he typed in a secret message. They compressed the message using a unique hash function, sent that to the cloud, and wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn hoped that this action would set him free.

Why Real-Life Disclosure Day Will Look Nothing Like Steven Spielberg's New Movie Previous landmark scientific discoveries like the Higgs boson provide a better template for what it will take to confirm whether aliens have made contact with Earth. Steven Spielberg's new film imagines the moment 8 billion humans find out that we are not alone in the universe. The movie, which opens in US theaters on June 12, is a fictional account of the government cover-up and subsequent "disclosure" of evidence that aliens have contacted Earth. The UFO community has been chasing that type of cinematic big reveal for 80 years. But it's more likely that monumental scientific discoveries, like the detection of the Higgs boson in 2012 and the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016, are a better guideline for how real-world disclosure is likely to play out: through long-running research and with verifiable results.

It's how the company has worked from the start. Brian Manning encountered SpaceX's culture of extreme ownership from day one as an engineer at the rocket maker . After a one-hour onboarding session a decade ago, he got his first assignment: Design a small part by the next day. "The way I looked at it is having very clear responsibility, autonomy, and accountability," says Manning, who aced the task and spent about two years at the company. "Rather than hiring people and telling them how to do it, they give people full ownership to make things happen."

Crowding the gates of a major health care conference, protesters called for Palantir to be booted out of the UK's National Health Service over privacy concerns and political grievances. Protesters wearing hospital gowns and wielding signs gathered outside a UK health care conference on Thursday to object to a deal between the country's National Health Service and American software company Palantir . At 8 am local time, the group, around 80 people in total, crowded the entryway to the NHS ConfedExpo in Manchester. They wanted to appeal to NHS leadership to terminate a contract worth up to $440 million over concerns around national security, data privacy, and the company's political affiliations . The contract, which includes access to Palantir's data analytics and artificial intelligence services, is intended to run until 2031 but includes a break clause that permits the government to withdraw the agreement next February.

OpenAI is in the midst of overhauling ChatGPT . The goal is to transform the chatbot's simple interface into a personalized AI agent that can handle tasks in every facet of your personal and professional life. The company has taken to calling this new product, privately and publicly, a "super app." The all-in-one platform represents one of the biggest bets OpenAI has ever made, and one engineering leader now holds enormous sway over whether it pays off: Thibault Sottiaux. Last month, Sottiaux was appointed OpenAI's head of core products, overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex, as well as combining them into the future super app.