Sales rise 2% to $25.5bn in the latest quarter but profits drop, as Elon Musk plans to donate tens of millions to Trump

Earnings at Tesla almost halved as discounts and price cuts pile pressure on the electric carmaker’s profit margins.

The company, led by Elon Musk, has sought to drum up interest in its plans for robotaxis, artificial intelligence and “genuinely useful” humanoid robots as deliveries slipped amid cooling demand.

Continue reading...

Tech firm says its freely available and usable Llama 3.1 405B model is comparable with likes of OpenAI and Anthropic

Meta has claimed that its new artificial intelligence model is the first open-source system that will rival products from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

In a blogpost, the company said its new model, with the unwieldy name of Llama 3.1 405B, “is competitive” with others – including those from OpenAI and Anthropic – “across a range of tasks”.

Continue reading...

Countless theories for the cybersecurity firm’s outage are flying around, but whatever the reason, this sort of thing is likely to happen again

• Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here

“Where did CrowdStrike go wrong” is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question.

We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it’s too late to limit the fallout. The alternative – a staged rollout – would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50m.

Continue reading...

Billionaire says Optimus will start performing tasks for carmaker in 2025 and could be ready for sale in 2026

• Business live – latest updates

The Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, has claimed the company will produce “genuinely useful” humanoid robots to start working in its factories next year.

The world’s richest person, who has a penchant for making overambitious claims on social media, posted on his platform X, formerly Twitter, that he also hoped to expand into “high production” mode to make robots with a humanlike form available sell to other companies in 2026.

Continue reading...

Israeli company aims for stock market flotation after spurning biggest deal in tech group’s history

The cybersecurity firm Wiz has turned down a $23bn (£18bn) takeover bid from Google’s parent, Alphabet, spurning what would have been the tech company’s biggest ever acquisition and seeking a stock market flotation instead.

Alphabet had been in talks with Wiz, founded by alumni of Israel’s cyberintelligence unit, as it seeks to catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon in the hyper-competitive cloud services market.

Continue reading...

Sixth-generation folder adds bigger battery, better camera, brighter screen and more fancy AI features

Samsung’s popular folding-screen Z Flip phone is back for 2024 with a faster chip, much longer battery life and more AI.

The Galaxy Z Flip 6 is the smaller of Samsung’s two new folders for this year, launched alongside the book-style Z Fold 6. It takes the flat sides and slab-like design of Samsung’s standard Galaxy S24+ and folds it in half, turning a big-screen phone into a compact clamshell.

Main screen: 6.7in FHD+ 120Hz AMOLED Infinity Flex Display (425ppi)

Cover screen: 3.4in AMOLED

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

RAM: 12GB

Storage: 256 or 512GB

Operating system: One UI 6.1 based on Android 14

Camera: 50+12MP rear, 10MP front-facing

Connectivity: 5G, nano sim + esim, wifi6E, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3 and GNSS

Water resistance: IP48 (1.5-metre depths for 30 minutes)

Folded dimensions: 85.1 x 71.9 x 14.9mm

Unfolded dimensions: 165.1 x 71.9 x 6.9mm

Weight: 187g

Continue reading...

Young people are evaluating good and bad life decisions on a scale and seeking input from others. To philosophy experts, it sounds familiar

You can count calories, steps, streams of your favorite song – and now, you can assign a number to how cool you are. See: aura points, a way to calculate your rizz. (That’s what the kids call charisma, and if you didn’t know that, you just lost 100 aura points.)

Ask someone out and get a yes? That’s 100 aura points for you. Still on Snapchat past the age of 19? Gross and suspect … dock 1,000 aura points. Confidently answered a question in class, but got it wrong? You’re in the red now.

Continue reading...

Some top backers throw weight behind Harris amid flood of grassroots donations but other heavyweights pointedly decline to offer support

Top Democratic donors helped end Joe Biden’s re-election bid in the past weeks by publicly and privately calling on him to stand aside, and threatening to pull their funds.

In the hours after he withdrew from the campaign, some of the party’s highest-profile backers promptly threw their weight behind Kamala Harris. Others pointedly did not.

Joe Biden drops out and endorses Kamala Harris

Democrats praise Biden and Republicans go on the offense

Who will replace Biden ? How does the process work ?

A look back at Joe Biden’s life in politics

Continue reading...

But experts says full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could still take weeks

A “significant” number of the 8.5m devices affected by last week’s global IT outage are back online, according to the cybersecurity company at the centre of the incident.

CrowdStrike said it was also testing a new technique to reboot systems more rapidly, amid warnings from experts that a full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could still take weeks.

Continue reading...