WASHINGTON — Blue Shepard launched six women, including a pop star and TV show host, on a suborbital flight of the company’s New Shepard vehicle April 14.

New Shepard lifted off at 9:30 a.m. Eastern from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas after a problem-free countdown. The vehicle’s capsule, RSS Kármán Line, reached a peak altitude of 106 kilometers before landing 10 minutes and 21 seconds after liftoff.

The NS-31 mission, the company’s 11^th crewed suborbital flight, flew a routine profile but with a unique complement of spaceflight participants. It was the company’s first mission to carry only women, and the first all-woman spaceflight of any kind since Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on a solo flight in 1963.

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This must be the most bizarre gig a dog trainer could get.

Australia has a maths problem. A new Grattan report shows that one in three Australian school students fail to achieve proficiency in maths.

The report, The Maths Guarantee: How to boost students’ learning in primary schools, shows that students from disadvantaged backgrounds struggle the most with maths. But one in five students from well-off families struggle too.

In a 2023 international maths test, only 13 per cent of our Year 4 students excelled, compared to 22 per cent in England and 49 per cent in Singapore.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said he would not rule out helping the Pentagon develop a new weapons platform, the latest sign of a shift in how artificial intelligence companies think about working with the defense sector.

Alyssa Carson, otherwise known by her call sign ‘NASA Blueberry’, is not only one of the youngest faces in the space agency but also one of the leading figures when it comes to exploration of Mars — and that could lead her to be the first person to ever set foot on the planet.

She’s currently 24 years old but her dreams first began at age 3, when she saw a cartoon that sparked her brain to begin dreaming of space travel.

As revealed by ShareAmerica, Carson has undergone a number countless training sessions and preparations for becoming an astronaut, and is currently studying a PhD in astrobiology which would be invaluable during a hypothetical trip to Mars.

In this insightful conversation with OpenAI’s CPO Kevin Weil, we discuss the rapid acceleration of AI and its implications. Kevin makes the shocking prediction that coding will be fully automated THIS YEAR, not by 2027, as others suggest. He explains how OpenAI’s models are already ranking among the world’s top programmers and shares his thoughts on Deep Research, GPT-4.5’s human-like qualities, the future of jobs, and the timeline for GPT-5. Don’t miss Kevin’s billion-dollar startup idea and his vision for how AI will transform education and democratize software creation.

00:00 — Summary.
01:21 — Introduction.
03:20 — Discussion on OpenAI being both a research and product company.
11:05 — Timeline for GPT-5
11:38 — AI model commoditization and maintaining competitive advantage.
15:09 — Deep Research capabilities.
24:22 — Coding automation prediction: THIS YEAR
30:05 — AI in creative work and design.
36:43 — Future of programming and engineers.
38:32 — Will AI create new job categories?
40:58 — Billion-dollar AI startup ideas.
46:27 — Voice interfaces and robotics.
49:28 — Closing thoughts.

Microsoft will invest $290 million over the next two years in South Africa on AI and cloud infrastructure, vice chair and president Brad Smith announced.

At an event with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Johannesburg Thursday, Smith said the investment will help the country’s “ambition to become a globally competitive AI economy.”

It has built massive datacenters in the past three years in Johannesburg and Cape Town, a $1.1 billion investment.

We stand on the brink of a transformative era in space exploration: a shift from government-led to commercial-led activities off-planet. With this shift comes the need to recognize that the United States commercial space industry will play a pivotal role in maintaining the nation’s leadership in low Earth orbit (LEO). And while NASA has long shouldered this responsibility, its commitment to pass the torch, to foster commercial partnerships and support commercial space development, is falling short. The new Trump administration has a unique opportunity to ensure that American leadership is not usurped by our fiercest geopolitical adversary, China. To maintain U.S. leadership, the government must act with urgency to support a smaller number of companies most likely to achieve success in the critical foothold of LEO.

For a quarter of a century, the U.S. has benefited from sustaining a continuous human presence in space on the International Space Station (ISS), a strategy that China is emulating with its Tiangong space station, which has been continuously crewed since 2022. Through the ISS achievement, the U.S. not only advanced scientific understanding but also brought nations together and spurred economic growth through uncontested leadership. However, with the ISS set to retire by the end of this decade, it is imperative to transition from a government-run space station to a robust commercial space framework. This transition is essential to ensuring U.S. presence, enabling discovery, fueling our space economy and safeguarding our strategic priorities in space.

A commercial platform will continue to support the nation’s needs at a much lower cost than the ISS while stimulating a new generation of technologies that will revolutionize our economy and preserve the national asset that is our LEO workforce. Hard-working Americans in this microgravity industry are the lifeblood of what makes America great and will ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.

Just a few days after the full release of OpenAI’s o1 model, a company staffer is now claiming that the company has achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“In my opinion,” OpenAI employee Vahid Kazemi wrote in a post on X-formerly-Twitter, “we have already achieved AGI and it’s even more clear with O1.”

If you were anticipating a fairly massive caveat, though, you weren’t wrong.