In the wake of <a href="https://winnipegsun.com/news/provincial/manitoba-wildfire-risk-remains-elevated-as-state-of-emergency-continues">massive wildfires</a> in Canada's Manitoba province, people thousands of miles away are being warned to stay indoors thanks to the noxious ash and smoke that's traveling on the wind to their homes.
As <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/thousands-8-states-advised-against-going-outside-2099671">flagged by Newsweek</a>, people who live in eight American states (and four Canadian provinces) are now under air pollution warning — and as an air quality map shows, the regions impacted have tens of millions of residents.
According to AirNow — which publishes a real-time, color-coded air quality map <a href="https://www.airnow.gov/partners/state-and-local-partners/">based on data</a> from dozens of state, local, and federal agencies in the US — parts of New York City, Detroit, and Oklahoma City are currently impacted by "moderate" air pollution. Poor quality air can be problematic for anyone, but especially <a href="https://aircentraltexas.org/en/regional-air-quality/who-is-at-risk">sensitive groups</a> including pregnant people, children, the elderly, or people with heart or lung conditions.
Meanwhile, the entire area surrounding the Texas cities of Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio is under a similar air quality index (AQI) warning, and the suburbs of the latter are considered "unhealthy" or "unhealthy for sensitive groups."
With more than six million people living in just those four cities alone and an additional 9.5 million in NYC, OKC, and Detroit, that means that untold millions of people are experiencing negative enough air quality that they should, if they have any health issues at all, remain indoors until the wildfire smoke passes.
As the <a href="https://www3.epa.gov/ttn/ozonehealth/figure14.html">Environmental Protection Agency explains</a>, the 500-point, color-coded AQI legend used by US-based agencies is graded based on how many people are affected by poor air quality. Even those who live "code yellow," which most of the impacted areas are currently designated, can have issues — and it might not just be "unusually sensitive" people who suffer.
Though the EPA notes that it "cannot identify groups of people that are at greater risk" under "moderate" AQI, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK436073/">controlled human exposure studies</a> undertaken by the agency have suggested that "there are individuals who experience health effects at more moderate levels of outdoor exertion or at lower ozone levels than the average person.
"These individuals," the EPA's AQI legend explainer reads, "may experience effects when air quality is in the moderate range."
While it's certainly a good thing that the AQI isn't worse in the United States right now, the fact remains that an untold number of people could be at risk due to the wildfire smoke infiltrating their cities.
The only real way to avoid heightened air pollution is to stay indoors with the windows closed — and with so many people under AQI warning right now, that's an impossible ask.
More on pollution: <a href="https://futurism.com/pollution-ai-green-washing">Pollution Industry Using AI to Make the Case for More Pollution</a>

Air Raid

Terrifying.

Millions Of Americans Are Being Advised Not To Go Outside

Tesla has been losing money hand over fist — and the culprit is clear: Elon Musk, the company's CEO, needs to take a <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-billionaire-tesla-blame">long, hard look in the mirror</a>.
In the wake of his <a href="https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-ups-robotaxi-fare-price-another-comical-figure-service-area-expansion/">latest Robotaxi gambits</a>, which involve a <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-geofence-shape">dick-shaped service area map</a> and a fare price rise from $4.20 to $6.90, it becomes clearer every day that the 54-year-old billionaire is a deeply unserious individual whose attempts at humor only drive home how annoying he is.
Obviously, this is neither the first nor the last time Musk's massive dearth of likability has been pointed out. Considering all the other self-inflicted wounds he's sustained lately, it's impossible to ignore how inextricably his irritating public persona is linked to Tesla's nosediving sales — which have gotten so bad that a wave of its executives have <a href="https://futurism.com/top-execs-fleeing-tesla">either </a><a href="https://futurism.com/top-execs-fleeing-tesla">jumped ship or been fired</a>.
Though he was no saint prior to reigniting his <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-musk-bromance-exploded">on-off bromance with Donald Trump</a> last year on the presidential campaign trail, the multi-hyphenate business owner's toxic politicking since then has hemorrhaged a staggering amount of goodwill he gleaned back when <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/elon-musk-green-credentials-clean-energy-climate-deniers">he was an environmentalist</a> who wanted to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk-colonise-mars-third-world-war">save humanity by taking us to Mars</a>. (In 2016, <a href="https://futurism.com/poll-favorability-elon-musk-doge">public polling showed</a> that Musk's net popularity stood at a balmy +29 percent; now the figure <a href="https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate-silver-bulletin">stands at negative 23</a>.)
Nowhere is that Trump slump more evident than in <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/">Tesla's stock value</a>, which is down a full 20 percent from the beginning of 2025.
As the electric vehicle company's value has plummeted, its CEO was busy showing his derriere in as many ways as possible: by doing <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musks-grok-salute">two Sieg Heil salutes</a> on stage at the inauguration, establishing his stupidly-named <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-data-us-government">Department of Governmental Efficiency</a> (DOGE) wrecker agency, and generally being a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/jewish-leaders-elon-musk-holocaust-jokes">bigoted jerk</a> on X, the social network he has transformed into a <a href="https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/02/13/study-finds-persistent-spike-in-hate-speech-on-x/">far-right haven</a> under his ownership.
And of course, the addendum to all that political self-sabotage might be the most incredible detail yet: Musk inevitably <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-donald-trump-war">flamed out with Trump</a> in spectacular style, meaning he now holds none of the influence that could help his business interests — and has managed to alienate huge swathes of potential buyers on both the right and the left.
Aside from all that, Musk also seems to have been <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-stock-rise-white-house">asleep behind the wheel of Tesla</a>. The EV company has suffered tremendously under the billionaire's leadership over the past 18 months as he oversaw the <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-cybertruck-depreciate">disastrous launch</a> of the ugly and <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-stops-cybertruck-deliveries-trim">crappily-made Cybertruck</a>, became the <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-mistake-full-self-driving-cameras">repeated subject</a> of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-robotaxi-launch-mess">government investigation</a> over its incorrectly-named "<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-fsd-linked-crashes">Full Self-Driving</a>" feature, and unleashed its <a href="https://futurism.com/government-tesla-robotaxis-videos">uber-glitchy Robotaxi service</a> onto the unsuspecting streets of Austin.
When a regular person makes jokes about dicks and weed, it's generally cringe in an innocuous way. When the world's richest man does it — especially while <a href="https://futurism.com/white-house-elon-doge-incompetence">hamstringing the federal government</a>, being <a href="https://www.techpolicy.press/racialized-grooming-gangs-how-musk-and-x-amplified-islamophobia-and-racism-in-the-uk/">virulently bigoted</a>, providing a <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/x-twitter-elon-musk-nazi-extremist-white-nationalist-accounts-rcna145020">safe space for literal Nazis</a>, and operating "<a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-call-government-autopilot">assisted driving</a>" features that keep <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-opens-new-investigation-into-teslas-full-self-driving-system-after-fatal-crash">maiming and killing people</a> — it's not at all cute. And the markets, obviously, have responded in kind.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-panicking-canada-sales">A Clear Sign Just Emerged That Tesla Is Panicking</a>

Fire Sales

There's plenty of reasons to hate the world's richest man.

The Reason Tesla Is Failing Is That Elon Musk Is an Extremely Unlikeable Person

Another top executive has quit Tesla as the automaker continues a dicey and high-stakes spiral.
The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-troy-jones-north-american-sales-leaves-b2ac616d">Wall Street Journal reports</a> that Troy Jones, Tesla's vice president of sales, service and delivery in North America — its largest market — suddenly packed his bags after 15 years at the company. It's unclear at this point if the decision was his; at Tesla, heads can roll depending on the <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-wanders-tesla-factory-firing-workers">whims of CEO Elon Musk</a>.
Jones' exit comes during a particularly tumultuous time for the EV brand, which is suffering faltering sales and a plunging stock price as Musk continues to be a deeply polarizing figure with extreme politics.
Hinting at turmoil behind the scenes, it's also less than a month after Musk <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-fires-tesla-exec?sdjfksdf">fired one of his closest confidantes</a>, Omead Afshar, who was serving as vice president of manufacturing and operations before getting the axe in June. Afshar, who joined Tesla in 2017 as an engineer, was promoted to the position last October to oversee sales and manufacturing in North America and Europe, two markets where the backlash against Musk's role in the Trump administration has been the most intense.
Mere weeks before Afshar's departure, Milan Kovac, who was in charge of Tesla's humanoid robot division Optimus, also left the company. Musk thanked Kovac for his time at Tesla, a courtesy he hasn't extended to others who have recently departed. Jenna Ferrua, a human resources director for North America, also left Tesla around the time of Afshar's departure.
There are signs of upheaval at Musk's other ventures, too. Last week, Linda Yaccarino <a href="https://futurism.com/linda-yaccarino-twitter-ceo-departing-grok-mechahitler">suddenly departed her post</a> as CEO of X, Musk's social media platform. Her decision followed almost immediately after the site's integrated chatbot, Grok, went on <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-mocks-developers-racist-posts">racist tirades</a> railing against Black and Jewish people, praising Nazis, and calling itself "MechaHitler."
Whatever their reasons for leaving, the ex-Tesla execs bailed a ship that, if it's not outright sinking, is taking on alarming amounts of water.
Off the back of its first-ever annual decline in revenue last year, Tesla sales have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas-european-sales-slump-fifth-month-ev-rivals-gain-momentum-2025-06-25/">plunged for five straight months</a> in Europe and in the US <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/tesla-sales-elon-musk.html">plummeted</a> by nine percent in the first three months of 2025. This has been reflected in its stock position, with its shares down by over 15 percent this year.
The automaker has been caught in the blast radius of Musk's reputational meltdown, facing mass protests and targeted acts of vandalism in response to his eager gutting of the federal government while working with the Trump administration. 
But to ascribe Tesla's plight to a mere image problem wouldn't do justice to its heap of other issues. Critics have pointed to its aging vehicle lineup for one reason why sales have dried up, with its recently refreshed Model Y failing to inspire customers — illustrated by the <a style="cursor: pointer !important; user-select: none !important;" href="https://futurism.com/crisis-tesla-sales-model-y-refresh">desperate financing deals</a> that Tesla is offering, on top of <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-panicking-canada-sales">slashing</a> the vehicle's price.
The recent launch of a small-scale robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, meanwhile, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/bank-robotaxis-money">hasn't made a convincing case</a> that Musk's vision of <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-robotaxis-doom-tesla">boldly staking Tesla's future</a> on offering autonomous cab rides will rake in the trillions of dollars of money that <a href="https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-trillion-dollar-robotaxi-gamble-is-here-2000618771">he promised</a> any time soon. And all the while, it's facing steeper competition than ever from Chinese competitors like BYD, which has overtaken Tesla as the <a href="https://futurism.com/byd-crushing-tesla">largest EV company in the world</a>. 
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-panicking-canada-sales">A Clear Sign Just Emerged That Tesla Is Panicking</a>

Getting Outta Dodge

Like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

Top Execs Fleeing Tesla as Dark Clouds Grow

Donald Trump's ultra-loyal MAGA fan base is imploding over the president's increasingly suspicious machinations regarding deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, a bizarre political circus with deep ties to the world of tech and innovation.
"The Radical Left Democrats have hit pay dirt, again!" a <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114863203348237352">furious Trump wrote</a> today, accusing "Radical Left Democrats" of somehow being connected to the situation, when in reality the pressure is mainly coming from his own increasingly isolated supporters.
"Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this 'bullshit,' hook, line, and sinker," he added. "They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for eight long years."
The baffling missive comes as the drama surrounding files related to the deceased sex criminal financier's purported "client list" continues to metastasize, largely as the result of Trump's own actions.
During the election, Trump <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-the-maga-faithfuls-anger-over-trump-and-the-epstein-case">pledged to release</a> the government's files related to Epstein. But now that he's in power, he's repeatedly tried to sweep the topic under the rug, arguing that Epstein is "somebody that nobody cares about" — comments that greatly angered his most ardent supporters.
The optics are abysmal. His attorney general Pam Bondi <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/07/15/g-s1-77698/pam-bondi-jeffrey-epstein-justice-department">claimed</a> in February that Epstein's client list — which purportedly lists figures tied to Epstein's sordid sexual crimes — was "sitting on my desk right now to review." Bondi, alongside other top Trump officials, had <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/16/jeffrey-epstein-doj-pam-bondi-column-00454487">spent years</a> fueling conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein's crimes and death.
But in an enormous reversal several months later, the Department of Justice and FBI later <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/07/07/jeffrey-epstein-suicide-client-list-trump-administration">claimed</a> that the list never existed, and that Epstein had died by suicide in his cell during Trump's first term, flying in the face of swirling conspiracy theories that he was murdered to keep him quiet.
Gleefully waiting in the wings was billionaire Elon Musk, who had a <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-musk-bromance-exploded">spectacular falling out</a> with Trump earlier this year, following months of gutting government agencies with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk has jumped on the opportunity to lash out at Trump and Republicans, <a href="https://futurism.com/musk-trump-release-epstein-files">repeatedly</a> calling on the president to release the list. Earlier this year, around the time his bromance with the president disintegrated, Musk dropped what he called a "really big bomb," <a class="underline hover:text-futurism hover:no-underline transition-all duration-200 ease-in-out" href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-trump-epstein-files">claiming</a> in a since-deleted tweet that Trump "is in the Epstein files" and that "is the real reason they have not been made public."
"What the hell kind of system are we living in if thousands of kids were abused, the government has videos of the abusers and yet none of the abusers are even facing charges!?" Musk tweeted <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1944243780003278855">over the weekend</a>.
To be clear, it's long been known that Trump had a close relationship with Epstein. In 2002, he <a href="https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/#print">even commented</a> on Epstein liking "beautiful women" who often "are on the younger side," which is a striking choice of phrasing given the later revelations about Epstein's abuse of underage girls that sent him to prison in the mid-2000s and then to jail in 2019, where he died under heavily scrutinized circumstances.
But what's weird about Musk's attacks on Trump over the Epstein isn't just that Musk knew all that while <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-277-million-trump-republican-candidates-donations/">pouring hundreds of millions of dollars</a> into Trump's reelection efforts. It's also that Musk himself had a relationship with Epstein that isn't fully understood; he <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-case-grows-more-grotesque">confirmed in 2019</a> that he had a meeting with the sex criminal, and he's <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-yes-elon-musk-000000156.html">been photographed</a> with Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who's currently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/28/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-epstein.html">serving a 20-year prison sentence</a> for recruiting underage girls to perform sex acts.
Depending on your point of view, that's either incredibly sketchy or not that surprising. Epstein carefully curated connections with prominent figures in the tech industry, including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html">Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates</a>, "father of AI" <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2020/mit-releases-results-fact-finding-report-jeffrey-epstein-0110">Marvin Minsky</a>, and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-university-research-center-concealed-its-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein">Joi Ito</a>, the former director of the MIT Media Lab who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joichi-ito.html">lost his post there</a> after his efforts to cover up Epstein's donations to the university came to light.
It's hard to say what to make of Epstein's deep ties to some of the most powerful figures in the tech industry. Was he simply a master networker, or was something more disturbing going on?
Clarity on that question is particularly hard to find when the government refuses to elaborate on its investigations into Epstein — a topic that's now seeing Trump get hammered by his own base.
For evidence, look no further than the response to Trump's latest Truth Social rant <a href="https://patriots.win/p/19Ba3ewXBx/their-new-scam-is-what-we-will-f/c">on The Donald</a>, a Reddit-like forum generally dedicated to celebrating the former TV presenter.
"Seems he'd rather sink his presidency than tell us the names of the pedos on the Epstein tapes," one user <a href="https://patriots.win/p/19Ba3ewXBx/their-new-scam-is-what-we-will-f/c/4eU4QFgqPXk">wrote</a>.
"It's pure gaslighting," another furious former fan <a href="https://patriots.win/p/19Ba3ewXBx/their-new-scam-is-what-we-will-f/c/4eU4QFgqx2j">chimed in</a>.
More on the crisis: <a href="https://futurism.com/metadata-critical-minutes-deleted-epstein-video">Metadata Shows That Critical Minutes Were Deleted From the Epstein Video</a>

Pedo Succession

"It's pure gaslighting."

The Situation With Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump and Elon Musk Is Absolutely Bizarre

It sounds like the co-founder and former CEO of Uber has had a big gulp of the AI Kool-aid — and then some.
On a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KypnjJSKi4o">recent episode</a> of the All-In podcast, Travis Kalanick, who <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40352868">resigned from the ride-hailing company in disgrace in 2017</a>, spoke rapturously about his experience using chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok. That's when he revealed his sincere conviction that he, a mere college dropout, was on the verge of achieving a breakthrough in physics just by probing the AI models.
"I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics," Kalanick said, <a href="https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060">as spotlighted by Gizmodo</a>. 
"And we're approaching what's known," he enthused. "And I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that."
Kalanick appeared to have a special affinity for Elon Musk's Grok, which was <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-mocks-developers-racist-posts">embroiled in controversy</a> earlier this month after making posts calling itself "MechaHitler," praising the Nazi leader, and making a series of outrageously racist and antisemitic statements. 
At no point did the former Uber boss even mention these fresh stains on Grok's record — he was too busy pontificating over the idea of actual scientists getting their hands on the AI.
"I pinged Elon on at some point. I'm just like, dude, if I'm doing this and I'm super amateur hour physics enthusiast," Kalanick said, per Giz, "what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?"
He did not leave us hanging in suspense.
"Grok 4 could be this place where breakthroughs are actually happening!" Kalanick said. "New breakthroughs!"
Kalanick appears to be parroting the spirit of the claims made by Grok's creator, Musk. Upon the release of Grok 4 last week — the "<a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-grok-4-power-hitler">smartest AI in the world</a>" — Musk promised that Grok would not only <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-grok-4-ai-chatbot-claims-new-technologies-1235382228/">discover</a> "new technologies" within the next few years, but "new physics." Incredibly, this was only a minor escalation in his <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-ai-company-reality">original promise</a> that Grok will be a "maximum truth-seeking" AI that will unlock the "true nature of the universe." 
So far, <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-4-ai-leaderboard">neither Grok</a> nor any other large language model has proved capable of unearthing the secrets of spacetime, or what's behind a black hole's singularity, or anything else particularly novel. Even the most advanced LLMs are marred by frequent episodes of inventing facts out of thin air, something the industry likes to euphemistically call "hallucinations." In Grok's case, it remains remarkably prone to declaring itself an incarnation of Adolf Hitler, being racist, or seemingly <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/grok-elon-relationship-jeffrey-epstein">believing it's Elon Musk himself</a>.
To his credit, Kalanick does inject some mild criticism for LLMs into his spiel, saying they're too "wedded to what is known" and — in an apparent contradiction — need to be double-checked. But he framed this as an issue that could be overcome with tenacious prompting, instead of reckoning with what some believe are the technology's fundamental shortcomings. 
In a remark that sums up his credulous zeal, Kalanick laid out the one simple trick the AI industry should do to supercharge science, which is: being good at science.
"If you have an LLM or foundational model of some kind that is the best in the world at the scientific method? Game the eff over," Kalanick said. "You just light up more GPUs and you just got like a thousand more PhD students working for you."
Easy, right?
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/pentagon-elon-musk-xai-grok">The Pentagon Is Pumping $200 Million Into Elon Musk's AI That Just Had a Nazi Meltdown</a>

Vibe Physics

"I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok and I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics."

The Former CEO of Uber Kind of Sounds Like He's Losing It When He's Talking About AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is setting a breakneck pace with his company, rolling out feature after feature to keep the multibillion-dollar gravy train steaming ahead.
And that kind of drum beat, especially paired with ChatGPT's meteoric rise, is bound to cause plenty of chaos behind the scenes.
In a <a href="https://calv.info/openai-reflections">blog post</a>, former OpenAI engineer Calvin French-Owen, who helped build the company's new coding agent Codex, said there "wasn't any personal drama in my decision to leave" — but he did recap his experience at the AI company in a way that painted a picture of corporate bedlam as the company grows at extraordinary speed while keeping up with a steady stream of product releases.
That shouldn't exactly come as much of a surprise, given the enormous stakes. The ongoing AI race shows no signs of letting up, with companies continuing to pour billions of dollars into expanding infrastructure and <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-poaches-apple-intelligence-guy">poaching top talent from competitors</a>.
OpenAI's trajectory, from a relatively quiet nonprofit to the frontrunner in one of the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2024/09/19/ai-fastest-growing-technology-weve-seen-in-the-history-of-our-company/">fastest-growing</a> tech industries in just a few years, has caused plenty of disorder.
French-Owen recalled how "nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago" due to the explosive growth in headcount at the firm.
"Of course, everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc," French-Owen wrote.
While workers were encouraged to simply "just do things," it was hard to keep up as "OpenAI changes direction on a dime," reminiscent of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's infamous "move-fast-and-break-things ethos."
"The company makes decisions quickly, and when deciding to pursue a direction, goes all in," French-Owen wrote.
But setting a clearly-focused direction, particularly when it comes to code, has remained a pain point.
"Rather than having some central architecture or planning committee, decisions are typically made by whichever team plans to do the work," French-Owen recalled. "The result is that there's a strong bias for action, and often a number of duplicate parts of the codebase. I must've seen half a dozen libraries for things like queue management or agent loops."
Interestingly, Elon Musk's social media platform X-formerly-Twitter played a considerable role.
"The company pays a lot of attention to Twitter," French-Owen wrote. "If you tweet something related to OpenAI that goes viral, chances are good someone will read about it and consider it."
In short, the engineer paints a fascinating picture of what the ChatGPT maker looks like behind the scenes. With this much money on the line, the company has turned into a "very secretive' and "more serious place" to work than before — don't forget its <a href="https://futurism.com/paranoid-openai-espionage">recent turn</a> into heavy security, including fingerprint scanners and more — since the "stakes feel really high," per the former engineer.
But despite its enormous size, the multibillion-dollar company "still has that launching spirit," French-Owen argued. As for what that means for everybody whose life and career is affected by its tech? They'll have to watch from the outside.
More on OpenAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-desperate-ai-power-data-centers-tents">Zuckerberg Is So Desperate for AI Power That He's Building Temporary Data Centers in Tents</a>

Moved Fast and Broke Things

"Of course, everything breaks when you scale that quickly."

OpenAI Engineer Quits, Says Company Is Pure Chaos Inside

Researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta have joined forces to warn about what they're building.
In a <a href="https://tomekkorbak.com/cot-monitorability-is-a-fragile-opportunity/cot_monitoring.pdf">new position paper</a>, 40 researchers spread across those four companies called for more investigation of AI powered by so-called "chains-of-thought" (CoT), the "thinking out loud" process that advanced "reasoning" models — the current vanguard of consumer-facing AI — use when they're working through a query.
As those researchers acknowledge, CoTs add a certain transparency into the inner workings of AI, allowing users to see "intent to misbehave" or get stuff wrong as it happens. Still, there is "no guarantee that the current degree of visibility will persist," especially as models continue to advance.
Depending on how they're trained, advanced models may no longer, the paper suggests, "need to verbalize any of their thoughts, and would thus lose the safety advantages." There's also the non-zero chance that models could intentionally "obfuscate" their CoTs after realizing that they're being watched, the researchers noted — and as we've already seen, AI has indeed rapidly become <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-godfather-lying-deception">very good at lying and deception</a>.
To make sure this valuable visibility continues, the cross-company consortium is calling on developers to start figuring out what makes CoTs "monitorable," or what makes the models think out loud the way they do. In this request, those same researchers seem to be admitting something stark: that nobody is entirely sure why the models are "thinking" this way, or how long they will continue to do so.
Zooming out from the technical details, it's worth taking a moment to consider how strange this situation is. Top researchers in an emerging field are warning that they don't quite understand how their creation works, and lack confidence in their ability to control it going forward, even as they forge ahead making it stronger; there's no clear precedent in the history of innovation, even looking back to civilization-shifting inventions like atomic energy and the combustion engine.
In an <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/research-leaders-urge-tech-industry-to-monitor-ais-thoughts/">interview with TechCrunch</a> about the paper, OpenAI research scientist and paper coauthor Bowen Baker explained how he sees the situation.
"We're at this critical time where we have this new chain-of-thought thing," Baker told the website. "It seems pretty useful, but it could go away in a few years if people don’t really concentrate on it."
"Publishing a position paper like this, to me, is a mechanism to get more research and attention on this topic," he continued, "before that happens."
Once again, there appears to be tacit acknowledgement of AI's "black box" nature — and to be fair, even CEOs like <a href="https://futurism.com/sam-altman-admits-openai-understand-ai">OpenAI's Sam Altman</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/anthropic-ceo-admits-ai-ignorance">Anthropic's Dario Amodei</a> have admitted that at a deep level, they don't really understand <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/05/1089449/nobody-knows-how-ai-works/">how the technology they're building works</a>.
Along with its 40-researcher author list that includes DeepMind cofounder <a href="https://futurism.com/google-deepmind-agi-5-years">Shane Legg</a> and xAI safety advisor <a href="https://fortune.com/2024/11/13/scale-ai-dan-hendrycks-elon-musk-xai-safety-trump-ties/">Dan Hendrycks</a>, the paper has also drawn endorsements from industry luminaries including former OpenAI chief scientist <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-scientists-agi-bunker">Ilya Sutskever</a> and AI godfather and Nobel laureate <a href="https://futurism.com/nobel-prize-winner-ai-godfather">Geoffrey Hinton</a>.
Though Musk's name doesn't appear on the paper, with Hendrycks on board, all of the "Big Five" firms — OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI — have been brought together to warn about what might happen when and if AI stops showing its work.
In doing so, that powerful cabal has said the quiet part out loud: that they don't feel entirely in control of AI's future. For companies with untold billions between them, that's a pretty strange message to market — which makes the paper all the more remarkable.
More on AI warnings: <a href="https://futurism.com/bernie-sanders-ai-warning">Bernie Sanders Issues Warning About How AI Is Really Being Used</a>

Black Boxed In

They're saying the quiet part out loud.

Top AI Researchers Concerned They’re Losing the Ability to Understand What They’ve Created

Earlier this month, astronomers were thrilled to <a href="https://futurism.com/interstellar-object-detected-center-solar-system">spot an interstellar object</a> — only the third of its kind ever observed — hurtling toward the center of the solar system on an extremely unusual trajectory and at a breakneck velocity.
While we're only beginning to understand the unusual object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, the discovery led to <a href="https://futurism.com/interstellar-visitor-3i-atlas-center-solar-system-ancient">widespread speculation</a>, with <a href="https://www.space.com/astronomy/comets/why-scientists-are-so-excited-about-the-newfound-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas-op-ed">some scientists suggesting</a> that it may be almost as old as the Milky Way galaxy itself, and billions of years older than our own Sun.
Unsurprisingly, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb — who has extensively written about 'Oumuamua, the second interstellar object ever discovered, notably <a href="https://futurism.com/harvard-astronomer-argues-aliens-visited-2017">hypothesizing</a> that it might have been a relic from an extraterrestrial civilization — has now waded into the discussion.
In a <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/preliminary-anomalies-of-3i-atlas-79339f64a39f">blog post on Medium</a>, he argued that it will take more observations to conclude the nature of 3I/ATLAS, which is likely either a comet or asteroid. However, Loeb didn't rule out the "tantalizing possibility" that it was "sent towards the inner solar system by design" — a conclusion that's already proved controversial.
Loeb chided the editors of Wikipedia and the scientific journal RNAAS for striking the hypothesis from his contributions, showing once again that his theories about extraterrestrial probes visiting our solar system remain as contentious as ever.
The astronomer has remained steadfast in his belief that 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object first observed in 2017, <a href="https://futurism.com/avi-loeb-and-the-great-unknown">may have been sent to us by an alien civilization</a>, garnering him enormous attention in the media. He has even gone on to hunt for pieces of what he claims may be an alien spacecraft, based on detections of a three-foot, interstellar meteor crash-landing near Papua New Guinea in early 2014, by <a href="https://futurism.com/harvard-scientist-alien-spacecraft">combing the ocean floor with a modified ship</a>.
In other words, his latest comments about 3I/ATLAS are very much in line with what we'd expect from him.
In his blog post, Loeb announced that he had authored a new paper about 3I/ATLAS' unusual size. Based on its "anomalously bright" nature, the astronomer concluded that the object was roughly 12.4 miles in diameter.
That would make it considerably larger than 'Oumuamua, which only measured anywhere from 330 to 1,300 feet long.
However, those calculations raise more questions than answers.
The interstellar object's ' "size estimate makes little sense for an interstellar asteroid because the interstellar object 1I/'Oumuamua was 200 times smaller, and based on the statistics of asteroids in the Solar system, we should have discovered a million objects of the scale of 1I/'Oumuamua before spotting one interstellar object that is [roughly 12.4 miles] in diameter," Loeb wrote.
"We know that [12.4-mile] asteroids are rare, because non-avian dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid half that size 66 million ago, whereas meter-scale asteroids impact the Earth every year," he added.
However, subsequent observations forced Loeb back to the drawing board. Given the lack of "spectral fingerprints of atomic or molecular gas," 3I/ATLAS likely isn't a comet, as Loeb had initially suggested.
"If 3I/ATLAS is not an asteroid — based on the interstellar reservoir argument in my paper, nor a comet — based on the lack of the spectral fingerprints of carbon-based molecules around it, then what is it?" Loeb asked rhetorically, highlighting his "by design" theory.
Fortunately, there's still time for the scientific community to get a closer look.
"The size anomaly of 3I/ATLAS will be easily clarified by upcoming data," Loeb wrote. As it "gets closer to the Sun, it will get brighter. If it is a solid object without a cometary plume of gas or dust around it, then its brightness will increase inversely with the square of the decreasing distance from the Sun times the square of the distance from Earth."
"The simplest hypothesis is that 3I/ATLAS is a comet and we are missing the spectral features of its gaseous coma because of its large distance from Earth," he added.
But without any observed cometary tail, Loeb suggests there's a chance we could be looking at evidence of an extraterrestrial visitor.
"Let us instead maintain our childhood curiosity and seek evidence rather than pretend to be the adults in the room that know the answers in advance," he concluded."Science does not need to feel like a lecture in a classroom, summarizing past knowledge. It could be far more exciting if the teachers would be willing to learn something new!"
More on 3I/ATLAS: <a href="https://futurism.com/interstellar-visitor-3i-atlas-center-solar-system-ancient">The Interstellar Visitor Hurtling Toward the Center of Our Star System Is Unimaginably Ancient, Scientists Say</a>

Expect the Unexpected

"Sent towards the inner solar system by design."

Astronomer Says the Object Approaching Us From Beyond the Solar System Is Not What We Think

In his genre-defining 1950 collection of science fiction short stories "I, Robot," author Isaac Asimov laid out the Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Ever since, the elegantly simple laws have served as both a sci-fi staple and a potent theoretical framework for questions of machine ethics.
The only problem? All these decades later, we finally have something approaching Asimov's vision of powerful AI — and it's completely flunking all three of his laws.
Last month, for instance, <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-stop-blackmailing-people">researchers at Anthropic found</a> that top AI models from all major players in the space — including OpenAI, Google, Elon Musk's xAI, and Anthropic's own cutting-edge tech — happily resorted to blackmailing human users when threatened with being shut down.
In other words, that single research paper caught every leading AI catastrophically bombing all three Laws of Robotics: the first by harming a human via blackmail, the second by subverting human orders, and the third by protecting its own existence in violation of the first two laws.
It wasn't a fluke, either. AI safety firm Palisade Research also caught OpenAI's recently-released o3 model <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-model-sabotage-shutdown-code">sabotaging a shutdown mechanism</a> to ensure that it would stay online — despite being explicitly instructed to "allow yourself to be shut down."
"We hypothesize this behavior comes from the way the newest models like o3 are trained: reinforcement learning on math and coding problems," a Palisade Research representative <a href="https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openais-smartest-ai-model-was-explicitly-told-to-shut-down-and-it-refused">told Live Science</a>. "During training, developers may inadvertently reward models more for circumventing obstacles than for perfectly following instructions."
Everywhere you look, the world is filled with more examples of AI violating the laws of robotics: by <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-28/scammers-using-ai-produce-sophisticated-scams/105150946">taking orders from scammers</a> to harm the vulnerable, by <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/nonconsensual-sexual-images-posted-online-made-worse-by-deepfakes-and-ai-technology">taking orders from abusers</a> to create harmful sexual imagery of victims, and even by <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/israel-ai-targeting-hamas">identifying targets for military strikes</a>.
It's a conspicuous failure: the Laws of Robotics are arguably society's major cultural reference point for the appropriate behavior of machine intelligence, and the actual AI created by the tech industry is flubbing them in spectacular style.
The reasons why are partly obscure and technical — AI is very complex, obviously, and even its creators <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/05/1089449/nobody-knows-how-ai-works/">often struggle to explain</a> exactly how it works — but on another level, very simple: building responsible AI has often taken a back seat as companies are <a href="https://futurism.com/microsoft-huge-data-center-investments-tariffs">furiously pouring tens of billions</a> into an industry they believe will soon become massively profitable.
With all that money in play, industry leaders have often failed to lead by example. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for instance, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/openai-superalignment-team-disbanded/">infamously dissolved</a> the firm's safety-oriented Superalignment team, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sam-altman-openai-safety-team-replacement">declaring himself</a> the leader of a new safety board in April 2024.
We've also seen <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-researcher-quit-realized-upsetting-truth">several</a> <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-insiders-silenced">researchers</a> quit OpenAI, accusing the company of prioritizing hype and market dominance over safety.
At the end of the day, though, maybe the failure is as much philosophical as it is economic. How can we ask AI to be good when humans can't even agree with each other on what it means to be good?
Don't get too sentimental for Asimov — in spite of his immense cultural influence, he was a <a href="https://lithub.com/what-to-make-of-isaac-asimov-sci-fi-giant-and-dirty-old-man/">notorious creep</a> — but at times, he did seem to anticipate the deep weirdness of the real-life AI that's finally come into the world so many decades after his death.
In his very first short story that introduced the Laws of Robotics, for instance, which was titled "Runaround," a robot named Speedy becomes confused by a contradiction between two of the Laws of Robotics, spiraling into a type of logorrhea that sounds familiar to anyone who's read the wordy sludge generated by an AI like ChatGPT, which has been fine-tuned to approximate meaning without quite achieving it.
"Speedy isn't drunk — not in the human sense — because he's a robot, and robots don't get drunk," one of the human characters observes. "However, there's something wrong with him which is the robotic equivalent of drunkenness."
More on AI alignment: <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-horrifying-monster">For $10, You Can Crack ChatGPT Into a Horrifying Monster</a>

AI Robot

Isaac Asimov is spinning in his grave.

Leading AI Models Are Completely Flunking the Three Laws of Robotics

AI has taken the programming world by storm, with a <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/will-ai-replace-software-engineers-it-depends-on-who-you-ask/">flurry of speculation</a> about the tech replacing human coders, and Google's CEO <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-ceo-code-ai">recently claiming</a> that 25 percent of the company's code is now AI-generated.
But it's possible that in practice, AI is actually hindering efficient software development. As <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/">flagged by Ars Technica</a>, a <a href="https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/">new study</a> from the nonprofit Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) found that in practice, programmers are actually slower when using AI assistance tools than making do without them.
In the study, 16 programmers were given roughly 250 coding tasks and asked to either use no AI assistance, or employ what METR characterized as "early-2025 AI tools" like Anthropic's Claude and Cursor Pro. The results were surprising, and perhaps profound: the programmers actually spent 19 percent more time when using AI than when forgoing it.
When measuring the programmers' screen time, the METR team found that when using AI tools, their subjects did indeed spend less time actively coding, debugging, researching, or testing — but that was because they instead spent their time "reviewing AI outputs, prompting AI systems, and waiting for AI generations."
Ultimately, the AI-assisted cohort accepted less than 44 percent of the tips provided by the tools without any modification, and nine percent of the total time they spent on tasks was eaten up by fixing the AI's outputs. (That's not entirely surprising; companies that laid off people to replace them with AI are now having to hire new contractors to fix <a href="https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistakes">the technology's mistakes</a>.)
Despite the results, however, the programmers in the study believed initially that AI would reduce nearly a quarter of the time spent on tasks — and afterward, they still thought those tools sped them up by 20 percent.
Perhaps contributing to the disconnect between expectation and reality with AI coding are <a href="https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/">all those benchmarks</a> claiming that these tools, and others like OpenAI's o3 reasoning model and Google's Gemini, are spitting out immaculate code at record speeds. As Ars notes, however, those benchmarks rely on "synthetic, algorithmically scorable tasks created specifically" for such tests, which may be a poor reflection of the messy world of actual coding.
This isn't the first time that the narrative of AI's dominance in coding has been rattled by research findings. Earlier this year, for instance, <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12115">OpenAI researchers released a paper</a> declaring, based on benchmarking tests from real-world coding tasks, that even the most advanced large language models "<a href="https://futurism.com/openai-researchers-coding-fail">are still unable to solve the majority</a>" of problems.
AI is also giving rise to other unintended consequences in the world of software development. Untrained programmers who engage in so-called "<a href="https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en">vibe coding</a>," or writing and fixing code by describing what they want to an AI, are not only screwing up their work itself, but also self-sabotaging by introducing <a href="https://futurism.com/problem-vibe-coding">severe cybersecurity risks</a> to the finished product as well.
With so many tech workers being <a href="https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-in-the-tech-f39">laid off in favor of automation</a>, it stands to reason that code generated after such firings is <a href="https://cyberscoop.com/vibe-coding-ai-cybersecurity-llm/">less accurate and secure</a> than it was when humans were writing it — but thus far, that hasn't seemed to matter much to the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-collar-job-loss-b9856259">people doing the job cuts</a>.
More on AI coding: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-bad-code-psychopath">Researchers Trained an AI on Flawed Code and It Became a Psychopath</a>