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CNBS Tesla Robotaxi Backfire + Ford CEO Gets OWNED After LiDAR Comment

Tesla’s autonomous driving technology, particularly its vision-only approach, is being showcased and defended in response to criticism from Ford’s CEO and others, who prefer LiDAR-based solutions ## Questions to inspire discussion.

Tesla’s Autonomous Technology.

🚗 Q: How does Tesla’s autonomous vehicle technology differ from competitors? A: Tesla uses a vision-only approach without LiDAR, while competitors like Waymo rely on LiDAR and radar systems.

🔄 Q: What makes Tesla’s approach to autonomous vehicles more scalable? A: Tesla aims to make all 8 million+ vehicles on the road capable of self-driving with a software update, unlike competitors focusing on specific areas.

Market Comparison.

📊 Q: How does Tesla’s autonomous vehicle fleet compare to Waymo’s? A: Tesla has over 8 million vehicles capable of autonomy, while Waymo has less than 2,000 vehicles on the road.

Rolling for science: Mars orbiter learns new moves after nearly 20 years in space

After nearly 20 years of operations, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is on a roll, performing a new maneuver to squeeze even more science out of the busy spacecraft as it circles the Red Planet. Engineers have essentially taught the probe to roll over so that it’s nearly upside down. Doing so enables MRO to look deeper underground as it searches for liquid and frozen water, among other things.

The new capability is detailed in a paper recently published in The Planetary Science Journal documenting three “very large rolls,” as the mission calls them, that were performed between 2023 and 2024.

“Not only can you teach an old spacecraft new tricks, you can open up entirely new regions of the subsurface to explore by doing so,” said one of the paper’s authors, Gareth Morgan of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

Amazon Is Building a Gigantic Computing Facility to Match the Human Brain

Indiana’s newest cash crop isn’t soybeans or corn; it’s AI data centers — lots and lots of AI data centers.

The New York Times reports that Amazon is building a vast complex of AI infrastructure facilities on top of 1,200 acres of former cropland, all meant for startup Anthropic’s project to build an AI model that is as powerful, complex — and, just possibly, as intelligent — as the human brain.

To that end, Amazon has constructed seven data centers on site, with around 30 slated to be built in total, according to the newspaper. It’s such an outrageously ambitious project, with untold billions in investment, that Amazon has tapped four separate construction firms to get the complex finished as soon as possible.

Saturday Citations: Upside-down sharks; brain network functioning in psychopaths; IQ associated with better predictions

This week, biologists discovered a new cellular organelle that’s like “a new recycling center within the cell.” Wild-growing tomatoes in the Galápagos are de-evolving. And geologists at the University of Southampton detected deep Earth pulses beneath Africa. Plus: Brain network functionality differs in people with psychopathic personality; sharks have a surprising vulnerability; and people with the highest measured IQ make better probabilistic predictions than people with the lowest IQ.