Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk called Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos “a copy cat” on Twitter after the online retailer announced it is acquiring self-driving startup Zoox Inc.
It’s not the first time Musk, who also serves as CEO of SpaceX, has taken jabs at Bezos. Earlier this month, Musk made headlines when he said it was “time to break up Amazon” in a tweet. He also called Bezos, who runs rocket-launch startup Blue Origin LLC, a copy cat in April 2019 after hearing of plans for a satellite-based internet service to rival his own company’s.
Multi-billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk said he believes there is a 70% chance of him getting to Mars on one of his spacecraft. The Independent reports:
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has claimed there is a 70 per cent likelihood he will make it to Mars on one of his spacecraft – despite there being “a good chance of death”.
Former astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman: For the long-term survival of our species, we have to become a multi-planet being.
With our rising planet’s population competing for space and resources, some people are convinced we need to look beyond Earth to help ensure humanity’s survival. As Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind space tourism company SpaceX told Aeon’s Ross Andersen: “I think there is a strong argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”
Last month’s NASA and SpaceX successful launch of astronauts from US soil for the first time in almost a decade, has reignited discussion about space travel to Mars and beyond. Musk has been pushing Mars colonisation as extinction insurance for more than a decade now and he told Andersen that he would need a million people to form a sustainable, genetically diverse civilisation. Andersen reports:
Like many things about Elon Musk, Tesla’s approach to achieving autonomous driving is polarizing. Bucking the map-based trend set by industry veterans such as Waymo, Tesla opted to dedicate its resources in pursuing a vision-based approach to achieve full self-driving instead. This involves a lot of hard, tedious work on Tesla’s part, but today, there are indications that the company’s controversial strategy is finally paying off.
In a recent talk, Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy discussed the key differences between the map-based approach of Waymo and Tesla’s camera-based strategy. According to Karpathy, Waymo’s use of pre-mapped data and LiDAR make scaling difficult, since vehicles’ autonomous capabilities are practically tied to a geofenced area. Tesla’s vision-based approach, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence, is not. This means that Autopilot and FSD improvements can be rolled out to the fleet, and they would function anywhere.
This rather ambitious plan for Tesla’s full self-driving system has caught a lot of skepticism in the past, with critics pointing out that map-based FSD is the way to go. Tesla, in response, dug its heels in and doubled down on its vision-based initiative. This, in a way, resulted in Autopilot improvements and the rollout of FSD features taking a lot of time, particularly since training the neural networks, which recognize objects and driving behavior on the road, requires massive amounts of real-world data.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has applied to offer high-speed internet to Canadians living in remote areas by beaming it to them via satellites.
The Globe and Mail newspaper first reported that space exploration company SpaceX applied with Canada’s telecom regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), for what’s known as a Basic International Telecommunications Services, or BITS, licence.
