Elon Musk is getting the Hollywood treatment. Variety reports that indie movie studio A24 has won the rights to adapt Walter Isaacson’s recent biography about the business magnate, with “Black Swan” and “Requiem for a Dream” director Darren Aronofsky slated to direct. There’s no official word on who’s playing Musk yet, though there’s plenty of wild suggestions online.
According to the report, studios were embroiled in “heated competition” for Isaacson’s latest book, which was released this September. The author’s last biography on a tech titan, Steve Jobs, was also adapted into a movie of the same name in 2015. Of course, the main attraction here is Musk, whose penchant for controversy is matched only by his enormous popularity.
Even so, with his calamitous takeover of X-formerly-Twitter, his questionable antics on the platform, and the epic fallout of his Starship rocket launch, Musk has somehow managed to shove himself further into the limelight this year, after a decade of building an already far-reaching image off the success of his companies SpaceX and Tesla. For better or worse, everyone now has an opinion on the guy.
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino regrets that she was not able to use her boss Elon Musk’s wildly vulgar AI chatbot to teach her kids about sex. You know, regular stuff for an exec to say publicly!
To back up for a second: Grok, as the AI is called, was released this weekend to a small group of test users. Whereas other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have been criticized by many on the right for being too liberal, Grok is specifically designed to be anti-“woke,” like a seasoned Twitter troll; it has the humor of a 13-year-old boy, and yet somehow a 53-year-old man. Unsurprisingly, the limited users with access quickly took to X-formerly-Twitter to share the AI’s sometimes tame-ish, sometimes deranged outputs with their followers.
One of those posts, shared to X on Tuesday by Babylon Bee staffer Ashley St. Clair and reshared by Musk, featured Grok’s response to the question of how babies are made.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is looking for a volunteer for its first clinical trial of a brain implant chip. The trial, which begins next year, has attracted thousands of prospective patients. The ideal candidate must be an adult under 40 with all four limbs paralyzed. The procedure involves inserting electrodes and wires into the brain, with a small computer replacing part of the skull. The computer will collect and analyze brain activity, sending the data wirelessly to a nearby device. Neuralink aims to translate thoughts into computer commands. However, the company has faced criticism for animal testing practices.
Musk cofounded OpenAI—the parent company of the viral chatbot ChatGPT—in 2015 alongside Altman and others. But when Musk proposed that he take control of the startup to catch up with tech giants like Google, Altman and the other cofounders rejected the proposal. Musk walked away in February 2018 and changed his mind about a “massive planned donation.”
Now Musk’s new company, xAI, is on a mission to create an AGI, or artificial general intelligence, that can “understand the universe,” the billionaire said in a nearly two-hour-long Twitter Spaces talk on Friday. An AGI is a theoretical type of A.I. with human-like cognitive abilities and is expected to take at least another decade to develop.
Musk’s new company debuted only days after OpenAI announced in a July 5 blog post that it was forming a team to create its own superintelligent A.I. Musk said xAI is “definitely in competition” with OpenAI.
