THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

We cannot say for sure if Elon Musk dialed up the flattery quotient on his chatbot, Grok, after the author Joyce Carol Oates publicly humiliated him this month. What we can say is that, yesterday, Grok did assert, in response to a question from an X user, that “Musk edges out” Jesus Christ, son of God, as a role model for society; the bot cited Musk’s “relentless innovation, risk-taking, and a commitment to preserving our species through space exploration and AI safeguards.”Musk triumphed in many such hypotheticals. When prompted by users, Grok also declared that Musk has greater “holistic fitness” than LeBron James—actually, that he “stands as the undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness” altogether, that “no current human surpasses his sustained output under extreme pressure.” One user asked if Musk would be better than Jeffrey Epstein at running a private island, and Grok explained that “if Elon Musk ever tried… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, is now on the path to becoming its first trillionaire. Tesla’s shareholders recently approved a massive pay package for the CEO, including some $1 trillion in stock options. But the payout will happen only if certain targets are met—including Musk’s successful deployment of 1 million Optimus robots.Named after a Transformers character, because of course it is, Optimus is a humanoid machine that’s supposed to be able to complete boring and dangerous work in place of humans. The robot was unveiled in 2021, when Tesla held an “AI Day” event detailing its future plans. Musk declared then that Tesla needs to be “much more than an electric-car company,” and to that end, it would combine its advancements in chips, autonomous driving, and batteries into this robot.Optimus would be able to do factory work, sure, but that’s just the starting point. Over time, Musk has… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

On Wednesday, I texted Nick Fuentes about being the center of an existential crisis in American conservatism. Fuentes, a white-nationalist influencer, appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show in October, which has enraged a number of prominent figures on the right and set off a spiraling conversation about where to draw the line on whom the party welcomes into its mainstream. “I don’t consider myself to be hateful or prejudiced,” he told me. “Just provocative and maybe tribalistic.”Fuentes has repeatedly praised Hitler, likened “organized Jewry” to a “transnational gang,” said that women should be “subordinate” to their husband, and called Chicago “nigger hell.” In our text exchange, I reminded him of a clip from 2019 in which he said Jim Crow “was better for them; it’s better for us.” “What that 10 seconds clip from 7 years ago that is clearly a joke?” he responded. “You think thats a fair characterization… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

You could almost mistake it for an ad. Last week, the far-right Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was on the Amtrak Crescent traveling from the nation’s capital to her home state, and she was enchanted. “The sweetest people run the train,” she posted on X, alongside a video of the autumnal landscape rushing by. “And the morning views of my north Georgia mountains made me smile and warmed my heart.”As Greene said, she’d wound up on the train because of “flight delays and cancellations,” a result of the government shutdown. (Thousands of flights have been canceled over the past week, and delays have been common as unpaid air traffic controllers are overworked or walk off the job entirely.) Previously, Greene had been no particular fan of the train—in 2021, she voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that earmarked $66 billion to rehabilitate the country’s woefully out-of-date rail network—yet now she… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Some generations get a nationally televised car chase featuring O. J. Simpson fleeing police in a white Bronco. Others get the communal adrenaline rush of frantically “CTRL-F”-ing a House Oversight Committee trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.Yesterday, lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of documents related to Epstein, including thousands of emails between him and his powerful contacts in the government, Silicon Valley, and the British royalty. There is an obvious voyeuristic thrill to reading them, but these documents have a deeper relevance. They are a skeleton key for understanding the dynamics of Donald Trump’s America, one in which the wealthy and powerful appear not as master operators but as bumbling sycophants, eager to cozy up to influence no matter how villainous or depraved.Like Epstein’s birthday book, published in September by the House Oversight Committee, the messages are often enthusiastic, even fawning (unlike the birthday book, these messages were sent long… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.