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Electric car maker Tesla’s profits took a dive in the third quarter, according to an earnings call on Wednesday in which the company’s chief Elon Musk blamed staff working from home for being “detached from reality”. Tesla’s profits in Q3 of 2023 have plunged by over 40 per cent compared to the gains it made in the same period last year after the company slashed its car prices by around 25 per cent in an attempt to compete with other EV makers. The EV manufacturer reported a net profit of about $1.9bn for the time between July through September, which is a 44 percent drop from the $3.3bn it made in the same three-month period last year. While the company has seen a small increase in overall revenue of about $23bn from the $21bn the same time last year, the figures are still lower than Wall Street expectations. Mr Musk also dampened hopes of the company’s anticipated Cybertruck reviving profits in the near future, announcing that it would take at least 18 months for the truck to become profitable as it could go on sale only by the end of November. “There will be enormous challenges in reaching volume production with Cybertruck and making the Cybertruck cash flow positive,” the Tesla titan told investors and analysts in the earnings call. “The blood, sweat and tears that will be required to achieve that is just staggering,” he added. Over the last year, Tesla has slashed the prices of its cars by quarter to boost sales. Growing competition with the introduction of EVs by other car makers in the US, including BMW, Toyota, Mercedes, GM and Hyundai, has also coincided with Tesla’s share of vehicles in the EV market reducing in the last quarter. In the earnings call, Mr Musk also said staff working from home are taking advantage of those who cannot work from home. “Like... what about all the people that have to come to the factory and build the cars?” he asked. “Why did I sleep in the factory so many times? Because it mattered,” the Tesla chief said. Mr Musk echoed the statements he made in an interview with CNN earlier this year in which he called remote work “morally wrong”, arguing that it is unfair to those who cannot have the option. “Get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” he said. Tesla also pointed fingers at its reduction in production while it upgraded its factories as one of the factors behind the profit slump. It said it has also been making big investments in AI and “commissioned one of the world’s largest supercomputers.” “We have more than doubled the size of our AI training compute, accommodating for both our growing data set & Optimus, which is currently being trained for simple tasks through AI rather than hardcoded software, while its hardware continues to improve,” Tesla said. But all is not gloomy as the company says the first deliveries of its Cybertruck are scheduled for 30 November and Tesla’s Model Y remains the “best-selling vehicle of any kind” in Europe. Read More X begins charging new users to post as part of trial EU asks Elon Musk to ‘walk the talk’ on X/Twitter disinformation over Hamas attack AOC wants to ‘trade in’ her Tesla for union-made electric vehicle amid historic auto workers strike Amazon to start dropping packages into people’s gardens using drones in the UK Facebook has stopped working Facial recognition firm Clearview AI overturns UK data privacy fine

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OpenAI researchers warned about a potentially dangerous artificial intelligence discovery ahead of CEO Sam Altman being ousted from the company, according to reports. Several staff members of the AI firm wrote a letter to the board of directors detailing the algorithm, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The disclosure was reportedly a key development in the build up to Mr Altman’s dismissal. Prior to his return late Tuesday, more than 700 employees had threatened to quit and join backer Microsoft in solidarity with their fired leader. The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board leading to Altman’s firing, among which were concerns over commercialising advances before understanding the consequences. The staff who wrote the letter did not respond to requests for comment and Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. OpenAI declined to comment on the letter but acknowledged in an internal message to staffers a project called Q* and a letter to the board before the weekend’s events, one of the people said. An OpenAI spokesperson said that the message, sent by long-time executive Mira Murati, alerted staff to certain media stories without commenting on their accuracy. Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for what’s known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks. Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorised to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing maths on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said. Reuters could not independently verify the capabilities of Q* claimed by the researchers. Researchers consider maths to be a frontier of generative AI development. Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do mathematics where there is only one right answer implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. This could be applied to novel scientific research, for instance, AI researchers believe. Unlike a calculator that can solve a limited number of operations, AGI can generalize, learn and comprehend. In their letter to the board, researchers flagged AI’s prowess and potential danger, the sources said without specifying the exact safety concerns noted in the letter. There has long been discussion among computer scientists about the danger posed by highly intelligent machines, for instance if they might decide that the destruction of humanity was in their interest. Researchers have also flagged work by an “AI scientist” team, the existence of which multiple sources confirmed. The group, formed by combining earlier “Code Gen” and “Math Gen” teams, was exploring how to optimise existing AI models to improve their reasoning and eventually perform scientific work, one of the people said. Altman led efforts to make ChatGPT one of the fastest growing software applications in history and drew investment – and computing resources – necessary from Microsoft to get closer to AGI. In addition to announcing a slew of new tools in a demonstration this month, Altman last week teased at a summit of world leaders in San Francisco that he believed major advances were in sight. “Four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple weeks, I’ve gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime,” he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, a day before he was fired by OpenAI’s board. Additional reporting from agencies. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity YouTube reveals bizarre AI music experiments AI-generated faces are starting to look more real than actual ones One of the world’s most hyped tech products just launched – and made a big mistake

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