Elon Musk – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Nov 3
2015

How Facebook Will Use Artificial Intelligence to Understand Your Entire Social Life

Short Bytes: Artificial Intelligence holds a special place in the future of the humanity. Many tech giants, including Facebook, have long been working on improving the AI to make lives better. Facebook has decided to reveal its milestones in Artificial Intelligence Research in the form of a progress report.

It doesn’t matter if you are scared of AI like Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking or if you have an opinion same as that of Google’s chief of Artificial Intelligence that computers are remarkably dumb. Companies are still going through the byzantine process of training the machines and creating human brain algorithms. Meanwhile, Facebook has just announced its progress report.

Facebook’s AI research team (FAIR) will present at NIPS, an Artificial Intelligence conference, its report card and reveal the team’s achievements regarding its state-of-the-art systems. Facebook has been trying to improve the image recognition and has created a system that speeds up the process by 30% using 10 times less training data from previous benchmarks.

Oct 30
2015

The Autopilot is learning fast: Model S owners are already reporting that Tesla’s Autopilot is self-improving

During the press conference for the release of the Autopilot, Tesla CEO Elon Musk referred to each Model S owners as “expert trainers” – meaning that each driver will train the autonomous features of the system to feed the collective network intelligence of the fleet by simply driving the electric vehicle on Autopilot.

He said that the system should improve everyday, but that improvements might only become noticeable every week or so by adding up. Just a few weeks after the release, Model S owners are already taking to the Tesla Motors Club forum to describe how the Autopilot is improving…

Oct 24
2015

Tesla’s Autopilot approved for international use

At the launch of its latest Autopilot features, Tesla CEO Elon Musk noted that it would roll out the new vehicle capabilities to nations outside the United States once it got regulatory approval. Today Musk tweeted that the company has gotten approval from all those countries (except Japan). Now Tesla owners around the world can enjoy the slightly unnerving feeling of letting their Model S drive itself on the highway. Musk also announced that Autopilot 1.01 would be coming soon with improved fleet learning, better lane tracking on poor roads, curved speed adoption and controller smoothness.

Oct 19
2015

SpaceX Changes Its Falcon 9 Rocket Return-to-Flight Plans — By Peter B. de Selding | SPACE.com

“SpaceX on Oct. 16 said it had changed its Falcon 9 return-to-flight plans and would first launch 11 small Orbcomm messaging satellites into low Earth orbit, and then test reignition of the rocket’s redesigned second-stage engine during the same flight before launching SES’s heavier telecommunications satellite into higher orbit, a mission that will need the reignition capability”

Oct 17
2015

How Tesla is ushering in the age of the learning car

Tesla’s new autopilot system is relying on the cutting edge of machine learning, connectivity and mapping data.

While Tesla’s new hands-free driving is drawing a lot of interest this week, it’s the technology behind-the-scenes of the company’s newly-enabled autopilot service that should be getting more attention.

At an event on Wednesday Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk explained that the company’s new autopilot service is constantly learning and improving thanks to machine learning algorithms, the car’s wireless connection, and detailed mapping and sensor data that Tesla collects.

Oct 14
2015

Tesla is mapping the Earth, ‘cause your GPS won’t cut it for self-driving cars

Self-driving cars require an incredible amount of information to operate safely. Tesla and Elon Musk know this well.

Tesla Motors formally launched its long-awaited Autopilot feature on Wednesday, which is not quite a self-driving car, but rather a higher degree of autonomy. One of the new features of Autopilot: Tesla is creating high-precision digital maps of the Earth using GPS.

Oct 11
2015

Elon Musk: Tesla autopilot features coming Thursday in software upgrade

Tesla’s latest software update is slated to roll out worldwide this week. Here’s what it will do.

Tesla Motors, the electric automaker, plans to roll out its latest software upgrade—version 7, which includes autopilot features—worldwide to owners of its Model S sedan on Thursday.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the announcement via a tweet this weekend. He also answered some of his Twitter followers’ questions about the new software.

Oct 10
2015

The mysterious artificial intelligence company Elon Musk invested in is developing game-changing smart computers

“Vicarious, the mysterious company that’s been funded by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and actor Ashton Kutcher, wants to do something completely radical — build the world’s first human-level artificial intelligence (AI).”

Smarter than Siri and Cortana.

Oct 10
2015

Elon Musk: We need to leave Earth as soon as possible

He believes in a good backup plan.

Oct 8
2015

Panasonic has made the world’s most efficient rooftop solar panel

At the end of last week, solar technology company SolarCity, which was co-founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, made headlines when it announced it had developed the most efficient rooftop solar panel to date, with a module-level efficiency of 22.04 percent. Now, just a few days later, Panasonic has one-upped them by announcing a rooftop panel prototype that’s nearly half a percent more efficient.

“Sorry Elon, I’mma let you finish…” and, well, you know how that pun goes. What’s cool about Panasonic’s record-breaking prototype is that it was mass-produced, and able to convert 22.5 percent of sunlight into electrical energy straight off the production line, which means it’ll be easily commercialised and presumably relatively cheap for consumers.

Right about now you’re probably wondering why this is a big deal, when researchers have already managed to convert the Sun’s rays into electricity with more than 40 percent efficiency, and just last year Panasonic themselves announced they’d made a solar cell with 25.6 percent efficiency.