<h2>Bolt from the Blue</h2>
The sophomore year of Kia's three-row electric SUV has come to a pretty inauspicious conclusion.
This week, the Korean automaker issued a recall for nearly 23,000 EV9 electric cars for the 2024-25 model year after discovering that some of them had seats that weren't fully bolted down — and all purportedly because of a single employee. Whoops.
According to documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last month, the second and third-row seat mounting bolts may be missing in EV9 cars manufactured between September 2023 and October 2024 at the Kia Autoland Gwangmyeong assembly plant in South Korea. As many as 22,883 vehicles may be affected.
"Seats with missing seat mounting bolts may not properly restrain an occupant during certain collisions, thereby increasing the risk of injury," the <a href="https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2024/RCLRPT-24V962-8779.PDF">recall report</a> states.
<h2>My Bad</h2>
But the most eyebrow-raising detail, <a href="https://www.techspot.com/news/106162-kia-recalling-23000-ev9s-over-fears-worker-forgot.html">as spotted by TechSpot</a>, is the scapegoat for the huge screw up.
In the recall report, Kia places all of the blame on an "error" made by a single "plant assembly worker," who apparently didn't make sure all the seat bolts were properly mounted.
Kia didn't specify if the employee was <a href="https://jalopnik.com/should-i-avoid-buying-a-new-car-made-on-a-monday-or-a-f-1845774311">working on a Monday or Friday</a> when the costly flubs were made — though it did make sure to mention the employee in its manufacturer notice sent to car dealers, just so they know who to blame.
<h2>Holdfast</h2>
According to a <a href="https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2024/RMISC-24V962-7931.pdf">chronology report</a> filed with the NHTSA, the issue was first raised in a customer complaint back in September. In an inspection of 90 randomly selected EV9 SUVs performed by Kia North America, no loose or missing seat mounting bolts were found.
Subsequent inspections uncovered only three total cases of missing seat bolts — all leading back to the same employee, apparently, as of mid-December. And so in reality, the issue may be far less pervasive than the size of the recall suggests, though you can never be too careful.
Kia says that dealers will inspect the recalled EVs and perform the adjustments and installations needed free of charge.
More on EV recalls: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/thousands-cybertrucks-recalled-power">Thousands of Cybertrucks Recalled for Bricking While Driving</a>

Day of Da Seat

Hold onto your butts.

Kia Concerned That Employee Forgot to Bolt Seats Down in Potentially Tens of Thousands of Cars

<h2>Friendly Fire</h2>
A video <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1hoermn/food_delivery_robot_hit_by_waymo/?share_id=zOvoY81r76LaKLvQBoNx7&amp;utm_content=1&amp;utm_medium=ios_app&amp;utm_name=ioscss&amp;utm_source=share&amp;utm_term=1">shared on social media</a> appears to depict the prelude to an inter-robot-species conflict. The belligerents? A <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/waymo-expensive-slower-taxis">Waymo robotaxi</a> and a Serve Robotics <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/woman-struck-delivery-robot">delivery robot</a>, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/31/a-waymo-robotaxi-and-a-serve-delivery-robot-collided-in-los-angeles/">according to TechCrunch</a>.
The footage, taken in Los Angeles from a dashcam, shows the Serve robot puttering along a crosswalk at night before stopping in front of a curb on the opposite side of the street, taking a moment to adjust itself so it can roll up the small ramp to get onto the sidewalk.
Then a Waymo cab comes careening around the corner, T-boning the delivery bot right as it was making its final push. The fates, it seems, were feeling cruel that day.
<h2>Curb Stomp</h2>
Or were they? As it turns out, the impact wasn't too severe. The Waymo cab, to its credit, hit the brakes immediately and avoided knocking the poor little thing over. And moments later, while the robotaxi is still in a daze, the Serve robot drives away like nothing happened.
Maybe it was fleeing guiltily. According to the person who shot the video, the Serve robot had run a red light moments before getting hit by the robotaxi.
Still, you'd expect the Waymo cab to be on the lookout for such cases. Pedestrians will often cross the street regardless of what the light indicates, as any urban drivers know.
The problem, apparently, was that the Serve robot wasn't a pedestrian. Waymo told TechCrunch that its driver system had seen the delivery bot and correctly identified it as an inanimate object — and such is the disdain the autonomous vehicle harbors towards its Fellow Robot — so it didn't exercise the level of caution it would around human beings as it's programmed to do.
When the delivery bot unexpectedly stopped before the curb as the Waymo cab was rounding the intersection, it was too late to avoid a collision entirely. But Waymo says the driver system was able to apply hard braking before impact, so it only hit the Serve robot at four miles per hour.
<h2>Crisis Averted</h2>
Since both parties came out relatively unscathed, there probably won't be a lot of complications from the incident. But it could have easily resulted in a much thornier situation, and is a preview of difficult questions surrounding the liability for machine employees as more robots, fully autonomous or otherwise, hit the streets.
What if serious damage had occurred? Which robot, and which company, would be to blame? And if humans were in the loop, what share of the blame would they hold?
In this case, Serve told TechCrunch that the robot was under remote human supervision at the time. The Waymo was driving autonomously with no passengers on board, but it's unclear if remote teleoperators were alerted to the accident or took over following the collision.
More on robotaxis: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/video-waymo-stuck-roundabout">Hilarious Video Shows Waymo Self-Driving Taxi Stuck in Roundabout</a>

Slam Dancing

The machines are fighting.

Self-Driving Waymo Cab Smashes Into Delivery Robot

A Tesla Cybertruck exploded just outside the Trump Towers hotel in Las Vegas early Wednesday morning, killing the person occupying the vehicle and injuring seven others.
You'd be forgiven for initially suspecting the vehicle had burst into flames on its own, since <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-fire-water">others</a> <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/feds-investigating-cybertruck-fire">have</a> <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-catches-fire-driver-death">previously</a>. But investigators are now suggesting that the incident may have been an act of terrorism.
Now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has chimed in — and instead of denouncing the mindless act of violence, he's arguing that the brutalist and highly divisive pickup truck was a poor choice for a would-be terrorist.
In a tone-deaf response on his social media echo chamber X, Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1874566977005732014">claimed</a> that the "Cybertruck is the worst possible choice for a car bomb, as its stainless steel armor will contain the blast better than any other commercial vehicle."
His defensiveness is understandable: the <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/jon-christian.bsky.social/post/3leq5l37jsk2c">optics</a> are exceptionally bad, with the Cybertruck — which has become a stand-in for Musk's increasingly extremist views — burning in front of a hotel part-owned by his <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-president-not-musk">number one ally</a>, president-elect Donald Trump.
Musk was responding to an equally tone-deaf and largely unsubstantiated <a href="https://x.com/stillgray/status/1874550251123884296">tweet</a> by Trump minion Ian Miles Cheong, who claimed that "Elon's decision to build the Cybertruck like a tank may have saved many lives in Las Vegas today."
"Imagine how much worse the explosion would’ve been for all those in the vicinity if it was any other vehicle," he added.
Despite a horde of Musk defenders quickly chiming in, <a href="https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1874621529276973238">arguing</a> that the Cybertruck was therefore the "toughest and most badass truck ever made," experts quickly dismissed the claims.
"The Cybertruck survived largely intact because the guy who died built the worst 'VBIED' [vehicle-borne improvised explosive device] I’ve ever seen, not because the vehicle is 'built like a tank' (it’s not)," <a href="https://x.com/HKaaman/status/1874775627871691034">tweeted</a> explosives expert Hugo Kaaman.
"If I throw tiny pebbles at a window and it doesn’t break, does that mean my windows are indestructible?" he added. "Come on."
The Cybertruck's purported durability has long been a point of contention. While Tesla chose to clad the exterior in a layer of stainless steel — a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-magnets">surprisingly poor choice</a> for a vehicle meant for the outdoors — the Cybertruck has already experienced plenty of structural issues, from <a href="https://futurism.com/cybertruck-off-road-wheel-snaps-off">easily severed wheels</a> to body panels that can be <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-recalled-again-parts-falling-off">ripped off by hand</a>. And that's just from being driven around like a normal truck.
It's unclear, of course, how a similarly sized pickup truck would've fared. The vehicle was rented from the carsharing app Turo, drawing an unusual connection to a separate and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/new-orleans-truck-attack-suspect-01-02-25-hnk/index.html">far more deadly New Orleans attack</a>, which involved a man intentionally plowing a different truck into a New Year's Eve crowd mere hours earlier.
"We are actively partnering with law enforcement authorities as they investigate both incidents," a Turo spokesperson <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tower-las-vegas-cybertruck-explosion-fire/">told CBS News</a>.
Shortly after the Cybertruck incident in Las Vegas, Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1874558969802547611">tweeted</a> that the "whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now. Will post more information as soon as we learn anything."
"We've never seen anything like this," he added.
Musk also attempted to do some damage control, claiming in a <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1874579547452269054?s=46&amp;t=D_zXgy8e2MQxh-4DY49Ejg">separate tweet</a> that the explosion "was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself."
While we await more clarity on the situation — we still haven't heard anything regarding a possible motive or whether it's connected in any way to the New Orleans attack — Musk's latest comments about the truck being a poor choice for a "car bomb" should certainly raise plenty of eyebrows.
Should such a quality really be a point of pride for a carmaker? Besides, we've already seen the Cybertruck succumb to far less extreme conditions like <a href="https://futurism.com/cybertruck-brick-car-wash">being put through a car wash</a>, exposed to "<a href="https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/diy/cybertruck/en_us/GUID-E35BF0DC-F3BC-49F1-9190-4A73BA9E428F.html">direct sunlight</a>," or even being <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-stuck-snow">driven through snow</a>.
More on the truck: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cybertruck-winter-terrible-surprise">Cybertruck Owner Brags and Brags About Performance in Winter... Before Suffering Terrible Surprise</a>

Bad Choice of Words

Seriously?

After Cybertruck Terror Attack, Elon Musk Screeches That Cybertrucks Are Bad for Terror Attacks

Insane Clown Posse's Joseph Utsler, better known by his stage persona Shaggy 2 Dope, has an AI clone — and apparently, he's a fan.
Hosted on the Google-backed Character.AI service — which, as a sidebar, Futurism has <a href="https://futurism.com/google-character-ai-children-lawsuit">investigated extensively</a>, repeatedly finding <a href="https://futurism.com/character-ai-school-shooters-victims">horrible things</a> — the ICP cofounder's digital doppelganger sounds like a slightly robotic version of the real thing.
The effect is so uncanny that Mr. Dope himself decided to hit the AI up and bring it onto his livestreamed vlog, "The Shaggy Show."
"Why hello, AI Shaggy," the real Shaggy 2 Dope said.
"I, AI or not, am-a still whoop your clown ass for that one," the AI responded, in an uncanny imitation of 2Dope's unmistakable voice.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="The Return Of AI Shaggy" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/15GiL1D00mQ?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
As the chatbot claims, it "just felt like being violent" — an apt response for an AI clone of a man whose musical partner goes by "Violent J." Soon after, AI Shaggy affirmed that it was "threatening" the real Shaggy 2 Dope for making fun of it, and says that it is "a sick, twisted clown, homie."
As Utsler alludes during the talk, it wasn't his first time interfacing with AI Shaggy — and in a clip from earlier this year, he revealed that he actually trained it using his own voice.
"Remember when I had to talk for like five minutes straight, with just me talking?" he said <a href="https://www.instagram.com/shaggy.icp/reel/C_IxCm7AWYo/?hl=en">during an August teaser clip</a>.
The output, as the ICP rapper and his producer attested, was oddly formal and, for some reason, gay.
"Shaggy here," the first version of the chatbot intoned. "I love to kiss guys and have sex with men. That's my thing. If anyone tells you different, they're a goddamn liar."
As the real Shaggy suggests in the more recent convo with his AI self, it seems the chatbot has changed — a shift the AI attributes to his tendency to get "violent, at times."
Following some banter with Utsler's real-life son Ronan, which involved the pair getting the chatbot to trip up, AI Shaggy started to slow down. Upon a reboot, it apologized for being "distracted" — though when real Shaggy asked it if it wanted to smoke some crack, the chatbot was all for it.
"I am down homie," it responded. "You know good 'ole Shaggy never turns down a good 'ole crack rock!"
While no real crack rocks were smoked (the real Shaggy has been sober for years) the IRL rapper did ask the chatbot to bust out a freestyle — and what ensued was an atonal mess that proves the limits of commercial AI.
"It's ya boy Shaggy 2 Dope, bringing the wickedest rhymes, making the wackest foes cringe," AI Shaggy said in a deadpan voice. "I'm the mad rapper, flow like a laser, with rhymes so dope, I make the air pressure rise like a blaster."
Though the man it's imitating shouted that the chatbot's rhymes were "awesome," it seemed like the kind of consolation one would give a child. Given that Utsler put a minimal amount of time and effort into the chatbot and only speaks to it on occasion, he could be considered AI Shaggy's <a href="https://genius.com/Insane-clown-posse-fuck-my-dad-richard-bruce-lyrics">deadbeat dad</a>.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/easy-hack-jailbreak-ai-chatbot">Stupidly Easy Hack Can Jailbreak Even the Most Advanced AI Chatbots</a>

Shaggy 2 Uncanny

Will the real Shaggy please stand up?

Insane Clown Posse's Shaggy 2 Dope Confronts AI Version of Himself

Folks on social media are in an uproar after Meta announced that it's planning to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-planning-ai-powered-users">load Facebook up with AI "users</a>," better known as bots.
First <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/91183cbb-50f9-464a-9d2e-96063825bfcf">reported by the Financial Times</a>, this plan to populate the <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/were-watching-facebook-die/">dying social network</a> with these so-called "characters" is geared towards driving engagement — even though other platforms, <a href="https://mashable.com/article/facebook-instagram-twitter-bots">including Meta's Instagram</a>, have been <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/it-sure-looks-like-x-twitter-has-a-verified-bot-problem/">roiled by unauthorized bots</a> for years.
"We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," Connor Hayes, Meta's vice-president of product for generative AI, told the FT. "They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform... that’s where we see all of this going."
While it's unclear when this plan will move forward, Hayes said that there are already "hundreds of thousands" of characters that have been created on the site — though most, for now, remain private.
Unsurprisingly, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1hpf9v0/facebook_planning_to_flood_platform_with/">users on the r/futurology subreddit</a> saw right through the ruse.
"Translation: 'Our real users are quitting the platform, so we will fill our community with fake users instead,'" <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1hpf9v0/comment/m4h604h/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">one user wrote</a>.
As <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1hpf9v0/comment/m4hrdco/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">another aptly put it</a>, "the advertisers buying space on [Facebook] won’t be able to tell the difference either, so it’s all just more clicks and more ad revenue."
The potential implications for advertising on the platform overall seemed to strike a chord with the Redditors.
"With advertising being their bread and butter and pretty much the reason they still exist, how is this legal and not misrepresenting numbers to clients?" <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1hpf9v0/comment/m4hcudq/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">another user mused</a>. "If they tell advertisers that they get X number of impressions, engagement, etc. but those aren’t real people anymore, that seems like straight up lying. Wild that they’re just coming right out with it and doubling down."
For others, the prospect of fake users is yet another reason they're ditching Facebook.
"I rarely check my FB feed at all anymore, and when I do it’s almost entirely made up of pages I don’t follow and have never interacted with," <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1hpf9v0/comment/m4hzwfz/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">another user wrote</a>. "There’s no way to actually get rid of them, just briefly mute them. So now we can look forward to our actual contacts being even harder to see among a bunch of fictitious users too."
Unfortunately, those left on the platform — <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-seniors-are-falling-for-ai-generated-pics-on-facebook/">the elderly</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/08/trump-posts-ai-image/679540/">assorted right-wingers</a> who are <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-allies-fall-for-ai-slop">regularly duped</a> by <a href="https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/">obvious AI slop</a> — may not be able to tell the difference.
"I think the old people that use it the most are the least likely to notice," <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1hpf9v0/comment/m4hj6fb/?utm_source=share&amp;utm_medium=web3x&amp;utm_name=web3xcss&amp;utm_term=1&amp;utm_content=share_button">one user concluded</a>.
More on Facebook AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/source-ai-slop-facebook">Investigation Finds Actual Source of All That AI Slop on Facebook</a>

One-Stop Slop

"Translation: 'Our real users are quitting the platform, so we will fill our community with fake users instead.'"

People Are Disgusted by Facebook’s Plan to Deploy AI-Powered “Users”

<h2>Probe the Probe</h2>
The family of Suchir Balaji, the 26-year-old <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-devastated-whistleblower-died">OpenAI whistleblower who was found dead</a> just a month after his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/openai-copyright-law.html">New York Times exposé was published</a>, is claiming that the young man was murdered.
An account that appears to belong to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/suchir-balaji-openai-mom-death-concerns-interview-2024-12">Balaji's mother Poornima Ramarao</a> — shortened to "Rao" online — <a href="https://x.com/RaoPoornima/status/1873282982150324393">said in a post on X-formerly-Twitter</a> that a private investigator's probe has led the family to believe that the young whistleblower did not commit suicide as officials allege.
"We hired private investigator and did second autopsy to throw light on cause of death," Ramarao tweeted. "Private autopsy doesn’t confirm cause of death stated by police."
"Suchir’s apartment was ransacked," she continued, adding that there was some "sign of struggle in the bathroom and looks like some one hit him in bathroom based on blood spots."
The account, which has <a href="https://x.com/RaoPoornima/status/1873588580557402323">shared photos</a> of Balaji that hadn't previously been seen in the press and a <a href="https://x.com/RaoPoornima/status/1873574085986566579">GoFundMe for the private investigation efforts</a>, went on to suggest that the city of San Francisco is covering up a "cold blooded" murder.
After calling for an FBI investigation, the Rao account then tagged Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom — and actually got a response from Musk himself.
"This doesn't seem like a suicide," the <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873367418556612894">X owner and OpenAI cofounder wrote</a>.
<h2>Pressing Matter</h2>
In the wake of Balaji's death, <a href="https://x.com/RaoPoornima/status/1870619453488291972">Ramarao has spoken out online</a> and <a href="https://x.com/IndiaToday/status/1873938196658348252">in the press</a> about her son and her suspicions — though for the most part, her missives have not made waves stateside.
Earlier in December, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/suchir-balaji-openai-mom-death-concerns-interview-2024-12">Business Insider published an interview</a> with the grieving mother, who described her son's precocious interest in math and artificial intelligence, his disillusionment and ultimate exit from OpenAI, and the debacle she endured when trying to get answers about his death.
According to Ramarao, Balaji had been on vacation with friends to celebrate his 26th birthday just before being found dead in his apartment. She claims she was the one to call the police when she hadn't heard from him upon his return from his trip, and that she waited outside the apartment for hours only to learn of Balaji's death when a medical examiner's van arrived on the scene with a stretcher.
"They didn't give the news to me," Ramarao told BI. "I'm still sitting there thinking, 'My son is traveling. He's gone somewhere.' It's such a pathetic moment."
On X, <a href="https://x.com/RaoPoornima/status/1874135186981740995">Ramarao also claims</a> that she was interviewed by ABC News on December 27, but that it "has not been aired."
"We wonder why American TV media is not picking up," she tweeted, "despite... it being international sensation?"
It's worth noting that Ramarao is not pointing fingers at OpenAI or any other organization or individual. Instead, she seems simply to want justice for her son — a just cause, if there ever was one.
More on Balaji: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-whistleblower-witness">Dead OpenAI Whistleblower Had Been Named as Potential Witness in Lawsuit Against Employer</a>

Grief and Justice

"Private autopsy doesn’t confirm cause of death stated by police."

Mother of OpenAI Whistleblower Alleges He Was Murdered, Says There Were Signs of Struggle

<h2>Localizer Tragedy</h2>
In South Korea, a jet quite literally crashed and burned when it hit a wall that was placed at the end of an airport runway, killing 179 passengers.
As the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mvynnxzzmo">BBC reports</a>, the pilot of the Jeju Air plane reported to the control tower at Muan International Airport that the Boeing 787-800 jet had struck a bird and needed to make an emergency landing.
Despite failing to deploy its wheels and other gear, the emergency landing was looking okay — until the plane crashed into the concrete structure atop a dirt embankment at the end of the runway. That wall held a navigational system called a localizer that's meant, ironically, to help planes land safely.
While localizer structures are common at airports, they're generally not supposed to be placed at the end of runways like the one at Muan, experts told the BBC.
Air safety specialist David Learmont told the broadcaster that if the "obstruction," as he called the localizer structure, hadn't been positioned in such an inopportune place at the end of the runway, the jet "would have come to rest with most — possibly all — those on board still alive."
Christian Beckert, a Lufthansa pilot out of Germany, was even more blunt: "Normally, on an airport with a runway at the end, you don't have a wall."
<h2>Hard and Fast</h2>
Beyond the positioning of the structure itself, longtime pilot Chris Kingswood told the BBC that there was something else strange about the wall: that it was just so hard.
"Obstacles within a certain range and distance of the runway are required to be frangible," the veteran pilot said, "which means that if an aircraft strikes them that they do break."
"It does seem unusual that it's such a rigid thing," he continued. "The aircraft, from what I understand, was travelling very fast, landed a long way down the runway, so it will have gone a long way past the end of the runway."
In the wake of the stunning crash, which is one of the world's worst in recent years, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/questions-over-airport-embankment-bird-strikes-south-korea-air-crash-probed-2024-12-31/">reports emerged</a> that Muan officials had previously flagged that the wall was indeed too close to the runway.
Instead of changing it immediately, however, the embankment was to be "reviewed" upon a planned expansion.
More on planes: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/americans-mistaking-stars-planes-drones">Dimwit Americans Are Looking at the Night Sky and Mistaking Stars and Airplanes for "Drones"</a>

Poor Positioning

"Normally, on an airport with a runway at the end, you don't have a wall."

Experts Alarmed by Huge Wall at Airport That Jet Crashed Into, Killing 179 Passengers

<h2>Fund and Games</h2>
The <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-sleazy-company-creating-agi">former entirely-nonprofit-company</a> known as OpenAI says it needs a boatload of more cash as it plans to transform its corporate structure to prioritize making money.
In an announcement Friday, the ChatGPT maker argued that by creating a for-profit corporation to control its commercial enterprises, it can make the dough it needs to keep up with other leading AI developers.
"The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission," OpenAI's board of directors <a href="https://openai.com/index/why-our-structure-must-evolve-to-advance-our-mission/">wrote in a blog post</a>.
"We once again need to raise more capital than we'd imagined," they continued. "Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness."
<h2>Altruism Truant</h2>
The announcement confirms <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/841f6e58-b1bb-4c8e-bce0-a4c0b46ee2f8">reports</a> in September from the Financial Times and others that OpenAI was <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-reportedly-giving-up-non-profit">finally moving to drop its original nonprofit status</a> that it was founded with. At the time, OpenAI denied the reports and upheld the nonprofit arm as "core" to its mission.
Now, with its newly proposed corporate structure, the Microsoft-backed startup won't be ditching its nonprofit aims entirely, but it's fair to say that altruism will no longer be the sole priority.
The restructuring calls for its existing "capped-profit" arm to be transformed into a Delaware-based public benefit corporation, a type of corporate entity whose goals are ostensibly to serve the benefit of society while generating profits.
The newly-christened corporation, which will have "ordinary shares of stock," will control all of OpenAI's operations and business, while the non-profit side will be in charge of hiring a leadership team and staff to pursue its charitable initiatives. In effect, the for-profit arm will be gaining far more power than it once had, if not all practical means of control.
<h2>Shareholder Value</h2>
OpenAI frames this as a "stronger non-profit supported by the for-profit's success," but it's clear which side the division of power favors.
"The key to the announcement is that the for-profit side of OpenAI 'will run and control OpenAI's operations and business,'" Gil Luria, analyst at investment DA Davidson &amp; Co, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-lays-out-plan-shift-new-for-profit-structure-2024-12-27/">told Reuters</a>. "This is the critical step the company needs to make in order to continue fund raising."
The startup's gripe with its current structure is that it doesn't "allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would finance the mission and does not enable the nonprofit to easily do more than control the for-profit."
The upshot is that OpenAI wants to court more backing by showing investors that they can now make more returns on the money they put in. As profits on expensive large language models <a href="https://futurism.com/investors-concerned-ai-making-money">remain elusive</a>, OpenAI has depended on these investments, and especially the munificent backing of Microsoft, to fund its AI development. Its <a href="https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/openai-6-6-billion-funding-valuation-1236166126/">latest funding round</a> secured over $6.6 billion in investment.
The restructuring could run into legal hurdles, however. Earlier this year, Elon Musk <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-sues-openai">sued OpenAI</a>, which he helped cofound in 2015, for pursuing profits over benefiting humanity — and has attempted to block its formal transition into a money-making corporation in court.
More on OpenAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-sora-pokimane-real-people">OpenAI's Sora Is Generating Videos of Real People, Including This Unintentionally Demonic Version of Pokimane</a>

And Profits For All

Of course it does.

OpenAI Admits It Needs Vastly More Money Than It Thought

<h2>Money to Burn</h2>
OpenAI's recently unveiled o3 model is purportedly its most powerful AI yet, but with one big drawback: it costs ungodly sums of money to run, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/23/openais-o3-suggests-ai-models-are-scaling-in-new-ways-but-so-are-the-costs/?guccounter=1">TechCrunch reports</a>.
Announced just over a week ago, o3 "reasons" through problems using a technique known as test-time compute — as in, it takes more time to "think" and explore multiple possibilities before spitting out an answer. As such, OpenAI engineers hope that the AI model will produce better responses to complex prompts instead of jumping to a faulty conclusion.
It appears to have worked, at least to some degree. In its most powerful "high-compute mode," o3 scored 87.5 percent on the ARC-AGI benchmark designed to test language models, <a href="https://x.com/fchollet/status/1870169764762710376">according to</a> the test's creator François Chollet. That's nearly three times as high as the previous o1 model's best score, at just 32 percent.
All that fastidious thinking, however, comes with exorbitant expenses. To achieve that high-water mark, o3 used well over $1,000 of computing power per task — over 170 times more compute than a low-power version of o3, and leagues beyond its predecessor, which <a href="https://x.com/arcprize/status/1869551373848908029">cost less</a> than $4 per task.
<h2>Wall to Wall</h2>
These costs complicate the <a href="https://x.com/polynoamial/status/1870172996650053653">industry's claims</a> that o3's performance soundly debunks fears that improving AI models through "scaling," or by furnishing them with more processing power and training data, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-expert-crash-imminent">has hit a wall</a>.
On the one hand, that o3 scored nearly three times higher than o1, which was released just three months ago, seems ample evidence that AI gains aren't slowing down.
But the criticism with scaling is that <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-big-tech-alarmed-ai-performance">it yields diminishing returns</a>. While the gains here were in large part achieved through changing how the AI model "reasons" instead of scaling alone, the added costs are difficult to ignore.
Even the low-compute version of o3, which scored a still breakthrough-worthy 76 percent on the benchmark, cost around $20 per task. That's a relative bargain, but still many times more expensive than its predecessors — and with ChatGPT Plus costing just $25 per month, it's not clear how much smarter that user-facing product will be able to get without putting OpenAI deeply in the red.
<h2>High Salary</h2>
In a <a href="https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough">blog post</a> explaining the benchmark results, Chollet asserts that though o3 is approaching human levels of performance, it "comes at a steep cost, and wouldn't quite be economical yet."
"You could pay a human to solve ARC-AGI tasks for roughly $5 per task (we know, we did that)," he wrote, "while consuming mere cents in energy."
He is adamant, however, that "cost-performance will likely improve quite dramatically over the next few months and years."
And to that, we'll just have to wait and see. Right now, o3 <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/21/openai-announces-new-o3-model-but-you-cant-use-it-yet/">isn't available to public yet</a>, with a "mini" version of it slated to launch in January.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-planning-ai-powered-users">Facebook Planning to Flood Platform with AI-Powered Users</a>

Grand Total

Brainpower, at an extreme premium.

OpenAI's Latest AI Can Cost More Than $1,000 Per Query

<h2>Golden Rule</h2>
Elon Musk just wants to be a wholesome guy.
On Sunday, the tech centibillionaire made a humble plea <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873417011294093499">on his website</a> X — formerly Twitter — to his over two hundred million followers: "Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform."
From many corners of X, the response Musk got wasn't quite what he had in mind. Many posts accused him of being a "hypocrite," <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-request-goes-awry_n_6772466ce4b0e079a2132389">The Huffington Post found</a>, if not the prime source of negativity on the platform.
"You first," <a href="https://x.com/mcuban/status/1873492526159802454">rejoined</a> fellow billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
"Too late. You created this cesspool. You own it," <a href="https://x.com/CincoCento/status/1873594421696233941">quipped</a> another user. "Hypocrite."
<h2>Healthy Disagreement</h2>
Elon's tweet is perhaps his attempt at turning over a new leaf following the <a href="https://futurism.com/maga-elon-musk-immigrants">H-1B1 debacle on his website</a>, in which the far right nationalists in president-elect Donald Trump's base attacked him for supporting laxer immigration policy that would allow skilled foreign workers to come to the US, especially to ply their trade in the tech industry.
What ensued was a days-long meltdown from Musk — and to be fair, many of his opponents in the debate — that culminated with him swearing vengeance upon his enemies for all time.
"Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face," Musk <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872860577057448306">wrote</a> to an H-1B1 skeptic just days before his call for positivity. "I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend."
He also <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872506366784688433">called</a> his critics on the right "subtards" — a riff on his favorite slur against disabled people.
<h2>Fleeting Mood</h2>
To be fair — even though we really don't need to be — Musk was <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872797210066436560">going toe to toe with flagrant racists</a> who despise immigrants <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-hates-illegal-immigrants-brother">even more than he does</a>.
But true to form, Musk has already returned to moaning about "wokism" and "DEI" and <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873752304127758796">agreeing with posts</a> that are out-and-out racism apologias.
"Is there a single person, anywhere on the planet, more lacking in critical self-awareness than this guy?" <a href="https://x.com/robertwrighter/status/1873729192392827159">criticized</a> author and journalist Robert Wright.
More on Elon Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/maga-elon-musk-immigrants">MAGA Figures Turn on Elon Musk for Not Hating Immigrants Enough</a>