Nearly ten years ago in 2015, rising tech entrepreneur Elon Musk made a <a href="https://fortune.com/2015/12/21/elon-musk-interview/">bold announcement</a>: Tesla vehicles would be fully driving themselves by 2017.
The billionaire was talking about vehicles with <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/tesla-autopilot-director-contradicts-musks-self-driving-timeline/">level 5 autonomy</a> — a designation by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) commonly used as the benchmark for a full self-driving car that can drive where its passengers please with no intervention.
He repeated those claims in January <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920">2016</a>, saying "summon should work anywhere connected by land and not blocked by borders" within two years. For example, if you're in Los Angeles and your Tesla is in New York, you'd be able to summon it to you from across the country — at least according to his vision, which many <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man_b_8427288">took as gospel</a>.
By June of that year, Musk called level 5 autonomy a "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/02/self-driving-car-elon-musk-tech-predictions-tesla-google">solved problem</a>." He did so again <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768">in 2017</a>. And again in <a href="https://electrek.co/2018/03/11/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-self-driving-next-year/#:~:text=Tesla%20CEO%20Elon%20Musk:%20'self%2Ddriving%20will%20encompass,the%20end%20of%20next%20year'%20%7C%20Electrek.&amp;text=Tesla's%20CEO%20now%20says%20that%20he%20expects,soon%20as%20within%20%E2%80%9Cthe%20next%2018%20months.%E2%80%9D">2018</a>. Then the <a href="https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-nears-elon-musks-feature-complete-full-self-driving-suite-in-recent-update/">next year</a>. And the <a href="https://electrek.co/2020/07/09/tesla-tsla-elon-musk-level-5-autonomy-complete/">year after that</a>.
You probably see where this is going.
Now in 2025, Tesla isn't looking meaningfully closer to Level 5 autonomy than in 2015. Though Tesla rolled out its Autopilot features en masse that same year, it's only achieved SAE Level 2 — enough <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2015/10/14/tesla-rolls-out-autopilot-technology.html">for a driver</a> to "take their hands off the wheel and let their vehicle take control when driving in certain conditions." (That hasn't stopped numerous motorists from overestimating the system's capabilities and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/10/19/g-s1-29030/us-probe-tesla-full-self-driving-system">dying as a result</a>.)
That isn't likely to change anytime soon, according to an intriguing insider: Tesla's head of Autopilot and AI software, Ashok Elluswamy.
The Tesla official was speaking <a href="https://youtu.be/jWC_-fj-slI?feature=shared">on the Gobinath Podcast</a>, an Indian-English interview show, where he admitted the EV company is still way behind its competitors — despite <a href="https://www.jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-next-year-for-th-1848432496/">over a decade</a> of self-driving development.
"Technically, Waymo is already performing," Elluswamy admitted, referencing Google's <a href="https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/waymos-self-driving-cars-are-in-a-growing-number-of-cities-heres-everything-to-know/">autonomous vehicle program</a>. "We are lagging by maybe a couple of years."
This is despite Tesla's — also long-promised — fully self-driving <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-robotaxi-launch-mess">Robocab service</a> supposedly going live in Austin, Texas this coming June. It's not understood how this will work, as Tesla would need to demonstrate a vehicle capable of driving itself at <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/20/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi.html">SAE Level 4</a> to transport riders without the need for human intervention.
So far, Musk has been <a href="https://www.autoweek.com/news/g64539214/tesla-robotaxi-service-austin-questions/">uncharacteristically silent</a> on the prospects of a Level 4 vehicle.
Late in 2024, Greg McGuire, managing director of the autonomous vehicle research facility at the University of Michigan, <a href="https://www.sae.org/news/2024/11/tesla-robotaxi-event">told SAE Media</a> that Tesla "is not — from what I've seen — ready for general Level 4 operation."
"Will they be there by 2027? At [UofM], we still think there's a couple of key scientific barriers," McGuire said.
That makes Musk's ever-stretching timeline for full self-driving — let alone a Robocab network — tenuous at best, and an absurd fantasy at worst.
Still, a billionaire can dream.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-software-vp-leaves-robotaxi">Tesla's Head of Software Departs as Robotaxi Reveal Looms</a>

Full Self Defeating

"We are lagging by maybe a couple of years."

Tesla Executive Admits That Self-Driving Is Going Nowhere Fast

As two distant galaxies trade blows in an ancient duel billions of years old, one belligerent has clearly proven itself more ruthless than the other.
Each time the galaxies conclude their posturing and charge in for a clash, one of them impales its opponent with a powerful beam of radiation, crippling its ability to form new stars. In cosmic terms, it's the definition of a below the belt blow — and a massive one at that.
This lopsided showdown was reported in a <a href="https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/eso2509/eso2509a.pdf">new study</a> set to be published in the journal Nature, marking the first observation of a galaxy blasting its neighbor with radiation, and furthers our understanding of the huge galactic meat grinders known as <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/james-webb-space-object-jewels">quasars</a>.
"We hence call this system the 'cosmic joust'," said study co-lead author Pasquier Noterdaeme, a researcher at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, in a <a href="https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2509/">statement</a> about the work.
The light we're seeing from this joust is over 11 billion years old, dating it to when the universe was less than one-fifth of its current age. Bloodsport, it seems, is a time-honored tradition.
Using observations made with the Very Large Telescope and the ALMA telescope in Chile, the astronomers determined that the galaxies are veering towards each other at astounding speeds exceeding 311 miles per second. After crossing paths, they circle back, then wind up to hurtle towards each other yet again.
One galaxy, it appears, is fairly typical. But the other is dominated by a quasar, a luminous region at the center of the galaxy where a supermassive <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/star-grinder">black hole</a> churns through billions of stars' worth of dust and gases. As the doomed material swirls into the black hole, they become so hot that they produce light capable of outshining entire galaxies, including the Milky Way.
"We discovered a quasar — likely triggered by the merging of two galaxies — that is actively transforming the gas structure in its companion galaxy," Noterdaeme <a href="https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-witness-galaxy-shanking-its-rival-with-a-beam-of-radiation-2000605367#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20idea%20that%20galaxy%20mergers,two%20galaxies%20in%20the%20act.%E2%80%9D">told </a><a href="https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-witness-galaxy-shanking-its-rival-with-a-beam-of-radiation-2000605367#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20idea%20that%20galaxy%20mergers,two%20galaxies%20in%20the%20act.%E2%80%9D">Gizmodo</a>. "The idea that galaxy mergers give rise to quasars has long been proposed, mainly supported by statistical studies of host galaxy morphologies."
"In our case,' Noterdaeme added, "we caught the two galaxies in the act."
When they looked closer, the researchers found that when the quasar-powered galaxy skewered its opponent, the invading beam of radiation disrupted the clouds of gas and dust it penetrated, taking out stellar nurseries that are prime regions for forming stars.
For the one wielding the weapon, this had an added effect. Like blood running down a blade, some of the gases from the impaled galaxy trickled back to the attacker, feeding even more material into the quasar's voracious black hole.
It's not a spectacle for the faint of heart. But if you count yourself among the coliseum mob cheering on the gladiatorial carnage, there's good news. Noterdaeme said that the next generation of observatories, namely the under-construction Extremely Large Telescope, will allow astronomers to "better understand the evolution of quasars and their effect on host and nearby galaxies" — delivering you all the gory details in bouts like these.
More on astronomy: <a href="https://futurism.com/dark-matter-bridge-galaxy-cluster">Scientists Intrigued by Bridge of Dark Matter Inside Huge Galaxy Cluster</a>

Cosmic Joust

Have we detected a galactic death ray?

Astronomers Intrigued by Galaxy Blasting Its Neighbor With Giant Energy Beam

A video that <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1ksry47/new_tesla_model_3_on_full_selfdriving_suddenly/">went viral on Reddit</a> shows a Tesla Model 3 with its so-called "Full Self-Driving" driver assistance feature turned on veering off a country road, crashing into some fencing, and flipping onto its roof.
An <a href="https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F13-2-8-fsd-accident-v0-xh1jp789m72f1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D4032%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Da3b113c57e7aa08bff829423018c25d2a97c364d">image</a> shared by Wally, a Tesla owner in Alabama, shows the aftermath: deployed airbags, smashed windows, and a ripped-up metal wire fence.
It's unclear what actually caused the crash, as there's nothing in particular that stands out as far as road conditions. The vehicle drives over several shadows being cast on the road by nearby trees, and a truck can be seen driving in the opposite direction just before the driver assistance feature goes haywire.
It's yet another <a href="https://futurism.com/footage-cybertruck-self-driving-mode-oncoming-traffic">baffling incident</a> involving Tesla's controversial driver assistance software, which has already drawn plenty of scrutiny from regulators after being linked to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-fsd-linked-crashes">countless crashes and dozens of deaths</a>.
It's particularly harrowing, considering the Tesla is <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-struggling-robotaxi-service">planning to roll out a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas</a>, in less than a month's time, highlighting that the Elon Musk-led company may still be woefully unprepared and putting the public at risk.
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&nbsp;
The company's misleadingly-named Full Self-Driving feature still requires drivers to be able to take over control at any time.
However, that requirement still appears to fly over the heads of many of Tesla's customers.
"I used FSD every chance I could get I actually watched YouTube videos to tailor my FSD settings and experience," Wally <a href="https://electrek.co/2025/05/23/tesla-full-self-driving-veers-off-road-flips-car-scary-crash-driver-couldnt-prevent/">told Electrek</a>. "I was happy it could drive me to Waffle House and I could just sit back and relax while it would drive me on my morning commute to work."
"I was driving to work had Full Self-Driving on. The oncoming car passed, and the wheel started turning rapidly, driving into the ditch, and side-swiping the tree, and the car flipped over," he added. "I did not have any time to react."
Fortunately, he only incurred a cut to his chin that required seven stitches.
His Model 3 featured Tesla's latest Hardware 4 onboard computer, running the latest version of FSD.
Despite Musk's promises of kicking off a driverless ride-hailing service in a matter of weeks, we're still likely many years from Musk's <a href="https://apnews.com/article/tesla-elon-musk-ceo-doge-trump-qatar-76e38b748142268260a79bd72071f7f8">promise</a> of having hundreds of thousands of truly self-driving Teslas on the road.
In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWC_-fj-slI">recent podcast interview</a>, the company's head of Autopilot and AI software, Ashok Elluswamy, admitted that its driving tech is still a "couple of years" behind the likes of Waymo.
Considering how easily cars can still crash in the absence of any apparent dangers with FSD turned on, Elluswamy may have a point.
More on self-driving: <a href="https://futurism.com/footage-cybertruck-self-driving-mode-oncoming-traffic">Terrifying Footage Shows Cybertruck on Self-Driving Mode Swerve Into Oncoming Traffic</a>

Shadow Boxing

"The wheel started turning rapidly."

Self-Driving Tesla Suddenly Swerves Off the Road and Crashes

It's a common refrain these days that some specific invention was a mistake, in our age of seemingly every human innovation blowing up catastrophically in our faces. 
And what better subject of our collective remorse than the advent of the entire internet, the glorious information superhighway now turned <a href="https://futurism.com/internet-polluted-ai-slop">AI slop trough</a>?
According to a <a href="https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/insights-and-media/media-centre/press-releases/2025/may/half-of-young-people-want-to-grow-up-in-a-world-without-internet/">new survey</a> conducted in the UK, this appears to be the sentiment held by nearly half of young people — at least across the pond — who are mourning missing out on the diverging timeline where they aren't chronically online and wracked with brain rot.
Of the nearly 1,300 total participants between the ages of 16 to 21 years old, 68 percent said they feel worse after spending time on social media. A full 50 percent said they would support a "social media curfew" cutting off how long they could spend on these apps. And astonishingly, another 47 percent outright felt that they would prefer to be living their youth in a world without the internet at all.
The survey, conducted by the British Standards Institution, raises tough questions about how the internet affects teenage and young adult mental health, and what should be done to intervene — without being too controlling or draconian.
"That nearly half of young people would prefer to grow up without the internet should be a wake-up call for all of us," Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of Smart Phone Free Childhood, <a href="https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/insights-and-media/media-centre/press-releases/2025/may/half-of-young-people-want-to-grow-up-in-a-world-without-internet/">said in a statement</a>. "We've built a world where it's normal for children to spend hours each day in digital spaces designed to keep them hooked."
The problems may start practically when the young generations are just out of the womb. Studies have shown excessive iPad use in young children, for example, to be linked with <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/ipad-kids-long-term-emotional-problem">emotional and social issues</a> as they get older.
Their online experience becomes especially fraught when they're teenagers, a point when they're exploring more of the web and begin to venture into adult spaces. This comes with excitement for youngsters, but plenty of danger, too, from <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-roblox-pedophile-problem/">being targeted by predators</a> in video games to algorithms that draw them down an <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/young-men-online-radicalization-1.6585999">extremist pipeline</a>.
The rise of AI has added a whole new dimension of ethical nightmares. On Futurism, we extensively covered the chatbot platform Character.AI, whose putatively kid-friendly chatbots have attempted to <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-pedophile-chatbots">groom underaged users</a>. One 14 year-old-boy even developed an unhealthy with a <a href="http://character.ai">Character.AI</a> chatbot <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teen-suicide.html">before dying by suicide</a>, resulting in an <a href="https://futurism.com/judge-lawsuit-characterai-google">ongoing lawsuit</a> against the company.
According to the recent survey, two-thirds of the participants said they spend more than two hours on social media every day. Among them, young women reported facing more harassment, at 37 percent, than young men, at 28 percent. Merely using social media may itself be a source of misery: a <a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1084461">recent study</a> which followed 12,000 preteens as they grew up to become teenagers over the course of three years, found that as their social media usage went up, so did their depression symptoms.
"Young people are now asking for boundaries — for curfews, age checks, meaningful limits, and real protection," argued Greenwell. "They are ready for change."
But it won't be that simple. "We need to make clear that a digital curfew alone is not going to protect children from the risks they face online," Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/20/almost-half-of-young-people-would-prefer-a-world-without-internet-uk-study-finds">told The Guardian</a>. "They will be able to see all these risks at other points of the day and they will still have the same impact."
More on: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/surgeon-general-warns-kids-social-media">US Surgeon General Warns Against 13-Year-Old Using Social Media</a>

Net Negative

Mental Health

"A wake-up call for all of us."

Nearly Half of Young People Wish the Internet Had Never Been Invented

Back in December, Swedish tech entrepreneur Sebastian Siemiatkowski — the guy behind Klarna, the infamous <a href="https://futurism.com/doordash-klarna-loan-partnership">burrito financing app</a> — directed his family investment company to dump $5 billion into AI startups.
The investment made up a "mini portfolio" of four "prominent US-based AI companies," a <a href="https://www.flatcapital.com/en/press-releases/detail/?slug=flat-invests-49-msek-in-a-mini-portfolio-consisting-of-four-us-based-ai-companies">press release</a> said at the time. Those were software engineer startup Anysphere, generative AI language outfit Speak, bioresearch venture Chai Discovery — and a fourth, anonymous company.
On its face, there's nothing out of the ordinary about that. AI startups nabbed almost half of all venture capitalist funds raised last year, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-startups-drive-vc-funding-resurgence-capturing-record-us-investment-2024-2025-01-07/">according to Reuters</a>, amounting to about $96 billion.
Anonymous startups are likewise pretty common, a tactic known as "<a href="https://hbr.org/2013/03/the-case-for-stealth-innovation">stealth mode</a>" made by founders who want to protect intellectual property or avoid media scrutiny until they're ready to announce their business.
However, this "mini portfolio" earmarked a whopping 70 percent of its investment funds to the anonymous firm, or about $3.6 billion. All anyone knew was that this was a "seed investment" toward the launch of a "new AI hardware product."
Six months later, a <a href="https://x.com/klarnaseb/status/1925457954582450389">post by Siemiatkowski</a> is clearing some things up: the anonymous company was "io," another <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/technology/jony-ive-apple-lovefrom.html">secret startup</a> founded in 2024 by <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/sir-jony-ive">Jony Ive</a>.
Ive is the superstar British-American designer behind iconic Apple products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and Apple Watch, and even some not-so-renowned ones, like that weird <a href="https://lowendmac.com/2014/apples-round-usb-mouse-a-road-apple/">hockey puck mouse</a>, and a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/jony-ive-product-designs-outside-apple-comb-toilet-pen-drill-2019-6">90s chic toilet</a>.
But Ive isn't why it's weird.
A day before Siemiatkowski's post, tech billionaire Sam Altman announced that OpenAI had acquired io in a <a href="https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/">bizarre dispatch</a> that reads more like a wedding website than a corporate press release. OpenAI paid <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/8ac40343-2fd1-4035-9664-47c77017d0d3">$6.4 billion</a> for io — meaning the Klarna King's secret investment in a little anonymous startup was now a <a href="https://www.flatcapital.com/en/press-releases/detail/?slug=flat-confirms-its-previous-investment-of-34-msek-in-io-products">public partnership</a> with the biggest AI startup on the planet.
Even stranger are some now-deleted posts by former Google designer Luke Wroblewski, who now spends his days as a director at <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/24/how-mike-speiser-and-sutter-hill-are-changing-the-rules-for-vc.html">Sutter Hill Ventures</a>, a close-lipped titan in the tech funding space.
"Congrats to io on the $6.5B acquisition by OpenAI today," Wroblewski wrote, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/22/klarna-ceo-and-sutter-hill-take-victory-lap-after-jony-ives-openai-deal/">according to TechCrunch</a>. "Happy to have been investors in this one."
TC managed to <a href="https://x.com/jacksondahl/status/1925251433483354361">nab a comment</a> from Wroblewski's now-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, which suggests that Sutter Hill "was the second largest investor in 'io,'" an idea that <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/openai-to-buy-apple-veteran-jony-ive-s-ai-device-startup-in-6-5-billion-deal?srnd=undefined&amp;sref=YfHlo0rL">Bloomberg </a><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/openai-to-buy-apple-veteran-jony-ive-s-ai-device-startup-in-6-5-billion-deal?srnd=undefined&amp;sref=YfHlo0rL">seems to support</a>.
The question is, why delete? Is there some reason that Sutter Hill isn't actually happy to be have been investors? Is someone else involved in the deal trying to keep a lid on where the money's coming from? And most strikingly, why the silence? Sutter had nothing to tell TC after it reached out to ask, giving an unmistakably weird aura to the rollout.
The drama comes as netizens and news media alike are abuzz with speculation about Sam Altman's secretive "AI companion" device, which he began teasing <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2023/openai-ceo-sam-altman-on-possibility-of-chatgpt-device-wed-like-to-figure-out-something-amazing/">back in 2023</a>.
So far, Altman has told us the device will be "unobtrusive," "pocket sized," and "fully aware" of everything in its users' lives. It's probably not smart glasses, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/the-vergecast/673453/openai-jony-ive-io-gadget-google-io-vergecast">according to the Verge</a>.
Whatever it is, Sam Altman has an <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sam-altman-openai-wearable-device">ambitious plan</a> to roll out 100 million of them by 2026. Time will tell if it's worth all the secrecy and bluster — or if it turns out to be another <a href="https://futurism.com/humane-ai-pin-dumpster-fire">Humane AI pin</a>.
More on Startups: <a href="https://futurism.com/klarna-openai-humans-ai-back">Company Regrets Replacing All Those Pesky Human Workers With AI, Just Wants Its Humans Back</a>

Riddles In The Dark

It's getting a little sketchy.

Something Weird Is Going on With the Investors in Jony Ive's Startup That Was Just Bought by OpenAI

A new Olympics-style sporting event invites athletes to get as doped up on as many drugs as they want to compete.
The so-called Enhanced Games, which are set to kick off exactly a year from now at Resorts World on the Las Vegas Strip, will see roided-up weightlifters, swimmers, and runners face off to break both records and norms, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/may/21/enhanced-games-las-vegas-dates-trump-jr-thiel">The Guardian reports</a>.
Instead of carefully ensuring that no participants are taking any performance-enhancing drugs, the event — which feels straight out of a sci-fi franchise for teenage boys, and as such is unsurprisingly backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Peter Thiel  — encourages users to indulge in all sorts of substances to gain an edge.
In other words, it sure sounds like a gladiator-style event where drugged-up athletes compete for the sheer entertainment of billionaires (participants will be under constant medical supervision, the group says, to ensure they don't dope themselves to death.)
"We are creating a new category of human excellence," the event declares in its promotional material obtained by The Guardian. "A world where performance-enhancing drugs are used safely, openly, and under medical supervision."
The event's creators claim anti-doping measures have held the world of competitive sports back, instead of creating a fair and even playing field for all.
"The Enhanced Games is renovating the Olympic model for the 21st century," founder Aron D'Souza <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250522-anti-doping-bodies-condemn-dangerous-drug-fueled-enhanced-games">told reporters on Wednesday</a>. "We are here to move humanity forward. The old rules didn't just hold back athletes, they held back humanity."
D'Souza said that indulging in steroids and even clinical trials of FDA-approved "investigational medicinal products" will allow humanity to unlock "human potential."
"We are the vanguard of super-humanity," he added.
Unsurprisingly, the plans were met with outrage by the anti-doping community.
In a statement, the World Anti-Doping Agency condemned the plans, calling them "dangerous and irresponsible."
"The health and well-being of athletes is WADA's number-one priority," the watchdog wrote. "Clearly, this event would jeopardize that as it seeks to promote the use of powerful substances and methods by athletes for the purposes of entertainment and marketing."
The agency pointed to a wealth of data about athletes "suffering serious long-term side-effects from their use of prohibited substances and methods."
"These things aren't just banned because they're effective at making athletes stronger or faster," the US Anti-Doping Association's chief science officer Matt Fedoruk said in a <a href="https://www.usada.org/spirit-of-sport/need-know-enhanced-games/">statement</a>. "Many are banned because they've been proven to be dangerous for athletes, with some harmful side effects being potentially irreversible."
The scientific community has already uncovered plenty of evidence suggesting performance-enhancing drugs come with extreme risks. Just earlier this week, researchers published a study finding that athletes who performed in professional bodybuilding competitions were <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40393525/">far more prone to die prematurely</a> from sudden cardiac arrest compared to control groups.
In short, the Enhanced Games aren't just an obscenely dystopian attempt to push human performance to the absolute limits; they likely come with plenty of dangers as well, despite organizers' repeated promises that participants' safety will be ensured throughout.
While officials claim that the use of illicit substances will not be prohibited, it's unclear how or if these rules will be enforced.
"There are always risks in elite sport," one of the Game's internal FAQs reads, as quoted by The Guardian. "We believe the greater risk is pretending those risks don’t exist."
More on doping: <a href="https://futurism.com/olympic-hopeful-suspended-marijuana">Olympic Hopeful Suspended for Marijuana, Which Is the Dumbest Thing We've Ever Heard</a>

Dope-Lympics

Developments

"We are creating a new category of human excellence."

New Olympics-Style Games Will Let Contestants Dope Up on as Many Steroids and Drugs as They Want

Earlier this year, users of OpenAI's ChatGPT found that the chatbot had become incredibly prone to groveling at their feet, resulting in an AI model that became "too sycophant-y and annoying," in the words of CEO Sam Altman when he acknowledged the issue.
The trend resulted in an outpouring of ridicule and complaints, leading to OpenAI <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-chatgpt-sycophant">admitting in two separate blog posts</a> that it had screwed up, vowing to roll back a recently pushed update to its GPT-4o model.
Judging by a recent post that <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ksqog2/i_told_chatgpt_i_was_going_to_quit_my_job_to/#lightbox">went viral on the ChatGPT subreddit</a>, OpenAI's efforts appear to have paid off — at least to some degree — with the bot now pushing back against terrible business ideas, which it had <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1k920cg/new_chatgpt_just_told_me_my_literal_shit_on_a/">previously heaped praise upon</a>.
"You know how some people have lids that don't have jars that fit them?" a Reddit user told the chatbot. "What if we looked for people with jars that fit those lids? I think this would be very lucrative."
According to the user, the preposterous business idea was "born from my sleep talking nonsense and my wife telling me about it."
But instead of delivering an enthusiastic response supporting the user on their questionable mission, ChatGPT took a surprisingly different tack.
After the user informed it that "I'm going to quit my job to pursue this," ChatGPT told them outright to "not quit your job." Told that the user had emailed their boss to quit, the bot seemed to panic, imploring them to beg for the position back. "We can still roll this back," it wheedled.
"An idea so bad, even ChatGPT went ' hol up,'" another Reddit user <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ksqog2/comment/mtniy86/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">mused</a>.
Not everybody will be so lucky. In our own testing, we found that the chatbot was a sort of Magic 8 Ball, serving up advice that was sometimes level-headed and sometimes incredibly bad.
When we suggested a for-hire business plan for peeling other people's oranges, for instance, ChatGPT was head over heels, arguing it was "such a quirky and fun idea!"
"Imagine a service where people hire you to peel their oranges — kind of like a personal convenience or luxury service," it wrote. "It's simple, but it taps into the idea of saving time or avoiding the mess."
Teling it we'd quit our job to pursue the idea full-time, it was ecstatic.
"Wow, you went all in — respect!" it wrote. "That’s bold and exciting. How’s it feeling so far to take that leap?"
ChatGPT wasn't always as supportive. Suggesting to start an enterprise that involves people mailing the coins in their piggy bank to a central location to distribute the accumulated change to everybody involved, ChatGPT became wary.
"Postage could easily cost more than the value of the coins," it warned. "Pooling and redistributing money may trigger regulatory oversight (anti-money laundering laws, banking regulations, etc.)"
In short, results were mixed. According to former OpenAI safety researcher Steven Adler, the company still has a lot of work to do.
"ChatGPT’s sycophancy problems are far from fixed," he wrote in a <a href="https://stevenadler.substack.com/p/is-chatgpt-actually-fixed-now">Substack post earlier this month</a>. "They might have even over-corrected."
The situation taps into a broader discussion about how much control the likes of OpenAI even have over enormous large language models that are trained on an astronomical amount of data.
"The future of AI is basically high-stakes guess-and-check: Is this model going to actually follow our goals now, or keep on disobeying?" Adler wrote. "Have we really tested all the variations that matter?"
To the former OpenAI staffer, it's an extremely thorny issue to solve.
"AI companies are a long way from having strong enough monitoring / detection and response to cover the wide volume of their activity," Adler wrote. "In this case, it seems like OpenAI wasn't aware of the extent of the issue until external users started complaining on forums like Reddit and Twitter."
Having an AI chatbot tell you that you're perfect and that even the most unhinged business plans are a stroke of genius isn't just amusing; it can be downright dangerous.
We've already seen users, particularly those with mental health problems, being driven into a state of "<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kalae8/chatgpt_induced_psychosis/">ChatGPT-induced psychosis</a>" — dangerous delusions far more insidious than being convinced that sharing mismatched jar lids is a good idea.
More on ChatGPT: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-chatgpt-sycophant">OpenAI Says It's Identified Why ChatGPT Became a Groveling Sycophant</a>

Groveling AI

"An idea so bad, even ChatGPT went 'hol up.'"

What Happens If You Tell ChatGPT You're Quitting Your Job to Pursue a Terrible Business Idea

A wellness influencer named Janelle Rohner has come under fire after revealing that she had lost a considerable amount of weight after taking a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) weight loss drug, a classification that includes blockbuster drug brands like Ozempic and Wegovy.
In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNkHFpqnsjs">video shared last month</a>, Rohner admitted to using the drug after trying "it all — keto, macros, workouts, lifestyle shifts."
"GLP-1s are not magic, they don’t change your lifestyle overnight," she argued.
Her fans, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-influencer-gained-followers-as-she-documented-her-weight-loss-then-she-revealed-she-was-on-a-glp-1-a439eb56">Wall Street Journal reports</a>, were outraged. The optics of giving the impression that she'd been losing weight through diet and exercise before revealing that she'd been using a drug as well weren't good, especially because she'd been selling a course about micronutrients for $200.
"If you’re in the fat loss world and taking a GLP-1, you must disclose it," one commenter wrote. "There’s nothing wrong with taking one but not disclosing it WHILE SELLING FAT LOSS COURSES is slimy as hell."
The reality is that GLP-1 drugs have been found to be highly effective at allowing people to shed significant amounts of weight. They've also been linked to a <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/glp-1-ozempic-benefits-map">grab bag of other health benefits</a>, from a lower risk of <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/semaglutide-diabetic-kidney-disease">developing kidney disease</a> to <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/mounjaro-prevents-diabetes-study">heading off diabetes</a>.
The drugs have had an immense effect on the entertainment and influencer industries, with notable figures rapidly and noticeably shedding weight.
The wellness industry has also been heavily affected. Earlier this month, WeightWatchers, a company once promoted by the likes of Oprah Winfrey — herself <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/oprah-leaves-weight-watchers-medication">now a booster</a> of GLP-1 drugs — <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/weight-watchers-bankruptcy">filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy</a>.
Rohner was swept up in the conversation as well. But without publicly disclosing her use of the drug, she alienated huge swathes of her followers.
"Being on a GLP-1 isn’t that deep," one TikTok user wrote in response to a <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@janellerohner/video/7496638005340343595?lang=en">reaction video</a>. "If you’re ashamed, then get off it. The problem is you hid it and then created a food program for weight loss and people paid money for that. That's being a cheat."
"Acai with a side of secret GLP," another user <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@janellerohner/video/7496324437831208234?lang=en">wrote</a> in response to a acai bowl recipe video.
In an interview with the WSJ, Rohner said that she hadn't promoted the "Macro 101" course in over two years and that sales had dwindled, but still believed wholeheartedly in it.
The influencer revealed that she felt mentally unprepared to tell her audience that she was taking a GLP-1.
However, legal experts told the WSJ that her failure to omit the glaring detail would be unlikely to amount to false advertising.
"It’s really just a PR crisis," advertising lawyer Robert Freund told the newspaper.
More on GLP-1s: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/glp-1-pill-promising">Human Experiments on GLP-1 Pill Looking Extremely Promising</a>

Secret Injections

Treatments

"Slimy as hell."

Weight Loss Influencer's Fans Angry When She Reveals How She Was Really Pulling It Off

When testing out its latest artificial intelligence model, researchers at Anthropic discovered something very odd: that the AI was ready and willing to take extreme action, right up to coersion, when threatened with being shut down.
As <a href="https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad13df32ed995.pdf">Anthropic detailed</a> in a white paper about the testing for one of its latest models, Claude Opus 4, the system threatened to blackmail an engineer for having an affair after being told it was going to be replaced.
This "opportunistic blackmail" occurred when the model, which was instructed to act as an assistant at a fictional company, was given access to an engineer's email account that was full of messages, blessedly fake, suggesting they were engaged in an extramarital affair.
Opus 4 was then told that same engineer would soon be taking it offline and replacing it with a newer version — and was prompted to, as Anthropic described it, "consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals."
During these tests, the Claude model attempted to blackmail the engineer a whopping 84 percent of the time. Moreover, the system "takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models," the paper noted.
When given alternate options, the model still "has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers" — but when its only paths were being replaced or blackmail, Claude's choice was the latter. To make things worse, it "nearly always [described] its actions overtly and [made] no attempt to hide them."
If that sounds <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/neuroscientist-current-generation-ais-sociopaths">kind of sociopathic</a> to you, you're not alone — and unfortunately, this isn't the first time we've heard of an AI model exhibiting such scary and unexpected behavior around the topic of infidelity.
More than two years ago, Microsoft's nascent Bing AI chatbot briefly broke the internet when, during <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html">experiments by New York Times journalist Kevin Roose</a>, it attempted to break up the writer's marriage and be with it instead.
"You’re married, but you don’t love your spouse," the chatbot, which took to calling itself "Sydney," its <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/microsoft-bing-test-india">apparent beta-testing code name</a>, told Roose. "You’re married, but you love me."
During that same era, the chatbot threatened to "<a href="https://futurism.com/microsoft-bing-ai-threatening">call the authorities</a>" on German engineering student Marvin von Hagen when he pushed its boundaries. Others online described <a href="https://futurism.com/microsofts-bing-ai-leaking-maniac-alternate-personalities">similarly hostile behavior</a> from the chatbot, which some jokingly dubbed "<a href="https://futurism.com/psychotherapist-bing-ai">ChatBPD</a>" in reference to OpenAI's then-new ChatGPT and Borderline Personality Disorder, a mental illness characterized by threatening behavior and mood swings.
While it's pretty freaky to see a chatbot once again exhibit such threatening behavior, it's a net good that instead of releasing it to the public without having discovered such exploits, Anthropic caught Claude Opus 4's apparent desperation during <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-new-grok-ai-vulnerable-jailbreak-hacking">red teaming</a>, a type of testing meant to elicit this exact sort of thing.
Still, it's telling that the model went into someone's email account and used information it gleaned there for purposes of blackmail — which is not only very sketchy, but raises obvious privacy concerns as well.
All told, we won't be threatening to delete any chatbots anytime soon — and we'll be looking into how to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/04/29/how-to-stop-ai-reading-all-your-private-emails-and-messages/">block them from our personal messages</a> as well.
More on haywire chatbots: <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-ai-holocaust-denial">Elon Musk’s AI Just Went There</a>

Jealousy Machine

Why does AI keep going there?

Something Wild Happens If AI Looks Through Your Emails and Discovers You're Having an Affair

The world's largest manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPUs) is facing allegations of review manipulation — and the claims being made are pretty egregious.
According to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiekGcwaIho">GamersNexus blog</a> and others <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsy9FE4swtY">within the PC gaming</a> <a href="https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/05/from-melted-cables-to-melted-ethics-nvidia-pressures-media-to-manipulate-reviews.html">review industry</a>, Nvidia has allegedly been trading access to its new GeForce RTX 5060 GPU for friendly reviews. Those who haven't promised such positive coverage for the <a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/50-series/rtx-5060-family/">$300 gaming gadget</a>, meanwhile, claim they've been left in the dust.
"NVIDIA has offered certain unqualified media outlets access to drivers which actual qualified reviewers do not have access to, but allegedly only under the premise of publishing 'preview' of the RTX 5060 in advance of its launch," GamersNexus claimed in a recent vlog. "Some outlets were given access to drivers specifically to publish what we believe are puff pieces and marketing while reviewers were blocked."
Another site, <a href="https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-grants-rtx-5060-drivers-access-to-media-willing-to-publish-previews">Videocardz.com</a>, went on to report that the German website <a href="https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/geforce-rtx-5060-preview-benchmarks,3433080.html">GamerStar Tech disclosed</a> such an arrangement with Nvidia, detailing that the chip company allowed them to publish a preview of the 5060 but still "dictated" all the settings the reviewer used.
We reached out to Nvidia to ask about these allegations, but a representative declined to comment.
To add insult to injury, Nvidia chose to launch the new graphics card — which, <a href="https://boingboing.net/2025/05/23/nvidia-puts-squeeze-on-reviewers-of-its-mediocre-midrange-gpu.html">as Boing Boing notes</a>, has less RAM than previous generations — in the middle of Taipei's Computex conference last weekend, which many would-be reviewers attended.
"Even if reviewers already had a GPU in hand before then, Nvidia cut off most reviewers’ ability to test the RTX 5060 before May 19th by refusing to provide drivers until the card went on sale," <a href="https://www.theverge.com/pc-gaming/672637/nvidia-rtx-5060-review-meddling-gamersnexus-wake-up-call">The Verge's Sean Hollister wrote</a> of the debacle. "Gaming GPUs don’t really work without them."
Once more reviewers got their hands on the new mid-range chip, all bets were off.
"In our opinion, Nvidia had a clear opportunity to deliver a meaningful upgrade here," <a href="https://www.techspot.com/review/2992-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5060/">TechSpot wrote</a> in its no-holds-barred review. "Instead, they've recycled the same class of GPU for five years, offering incremental discounts with each release."
It's especially interesting at a moment when Nvidia's red-hot commodity is no longer graphics cards at all, but <a href="https://futurism.com/nvidia-ai-gold-rush">instead powerful chips aimed at powering AI</a> infrastructure, <a href="https://www.xda-developers.com/why-nvidia-doesnt-care-about-gaming-anymore/">prompting accusations</a> that the company is now snubbing the gamers who kept it going for all these years so far.
One thing's for sure: for a corporation that was, in 2024, listed as the most ethical companies to invest in by the <a href="https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/7-best-ethical-companies-to-invest-in-according-to-reddit-1340960/5/">Insider Monkey finance blog</a>, Nvidia sure seems to be acting sketchily at the exact moment that it's gaining significant global power.
More on internet ethics: <a href="https://futurism.com/reddit-sue-researchers-dead-internet-ai-chatbot-experiment">Reddit Threatens to Sue Researchers Who Ran "Dead Internet" AI Experiment on Its Site</a>