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Category: Elon Musk – Page 29

China Shows Off Monkey With Brain Chip Allowing It to Control Robotic Arm

A Chinese company says it’s successfully developed a brain chip and implanted it into a monkey — who can now remotely control a robot arm with the device.

That’s according to state-run news media outfit Xinhua, putting Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink on notice that there will be international as well as domestic competition for his brain-computer interface venture.

The company, Beijing Xinzhida Neurotechnology, which is backed by the Chinese government, unveiled its device, the NeuCyber Array BMI (brain-machine interface) System at a technology convention in Beijing on Thursday, according to Reuters.

XAI, Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, is closing on $6B in funding and X, his social network, is already one of its shareholders

xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source close to the deal. The deal — which would give investors one quarter of the company — is expected to close in the next few weeks unless the terms of the deal change.

The deal terms have changed once already. As of last weekend, Jared Birchall, who heads Musk’s family office, was telling prospective investors that xAI was raising $3 billion at a $15 billion pre-money valuation. Given the number of investors clamoring to get into the deal, those numbers were quickly adjusted.

Says our source, “We all received an email that basically said, ‘It’s now $6B on $18B, and don’t complain because a lot of other people want in.”

Tesla’s Optimus robots to be sold soon? Elon Musk shares major update

Humanoid robots have been in development for many years by Japan’s Honda and Hyundai Motor’s Boston Dynamics. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Nvidia-backed startup Figure said it had signed a partnership with German automaker BMW to deploy humanoid robots in the car maker’s facility in the US.

Elon Musk said before that robot sales could become a larger part of the Tesla business. He said, “I think Tesla is best positioned of any humanoid robot maker to be able to reach volume production with efficient inference on the robot itself.”

Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher

Meanwhile, Bostrom’s email from the 1990s resurfaced last year and resulted in him issuing a statement repudiating his racist remarks and clarifying his views on subjects such as eugenics. Some of his answers – “Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood” – led to further criticism from fellow academics that he was being evasive.

The university launched an investigation into Bostrom’s conduct following the discovery of his racist email, while other major effective altruism groups distanced themselves from him.

“We unequivocally condemn Nick Bostrom’s recklessly flawed and reprehensible words,” the Centre for Effective Altruism, which was founded by fellow Oxford philosophers and financially backed by Bankman-Fried, said in a statement at the time.

Why Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain implant reframes our ideas of self-identity

The extended mind — For decades, philosophers have debated the borders of personhood: where does our mind end, and the external world begin? On a simple level, you might assume that our minds rest within our brains and bodies. However, some philosophers have proposed that it’s more complicated than that.

When we merge mind and machine, the traditional borders of the self dissipate, says philosopher Dvija Mehta.

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