MAROKO133 Update ai: It’s Starting to Feel a Lot Like Tesla’s Robotaxi Program Is Mostly S

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: It’s Starting to Feel a Lot Like Tesla’s Robotaxi Program Is M

Elon Musk once promised that pivoting Tesla into the self-driving taxi business would generate the automaker trillions of dollars in revenue. Certainly the enthusiasm these kinds of grand proclamations have inspired in investors has kept the company’s stock buoyant, with an astonishing market cap nearing $1.5 trillion. But does the reality on the ground back it up? Not really, suggests new reporting from The New York Times.

For one, Tesla faces steep competition from companies like Waymo that have already been in business for over a decade, and have thousands of robotaxis giving rides across major US cities. It was recently revealed, meanwhile, that Musk’s company only has about 30 capital-R Robotaxis roaming Austin, Texas — the only city where it’s currently offering rides to the public.

Worse yet, the cabs’ presence is barely felt by locals.

“I’ve never seen a Robotaxi in Austin,” Kara Kockelman, a professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin who studies transportation, told the NYT. “Waymos are around all the time.”

Perhaps that puny market penetration would be less alarming if Tesla offered advanced tech and a passenger experience that Waymo doesn’t, but its self-driving cabs aren’t even fully driverless, requiring the supervision of a human “safety monitor” who must be present in the vehicle at all times. Numerous instances of the cabs violating traffic laws and an alarming crash rate demonstrate why that policy is still necessary.

It’s reasonable that a newcomer to the field would take time to find its feet, but Musk has promised monumental progress at a whirlwind pace. He said that over a thousand Robotaxis would be operating in Austin “within a few months” of launching, that over a million fully autonomous Teslas would be on the road by 2026, and that the automaker’s Robotaxi operations would cover “half the population of the US” by the end of next year.

Investors take these promises seriously. Musk’s eye-watering trillion-dollar pay package, which they recently approved, requires Musk to oversee the commercial deployment of one million Robotaxis, the NYT noted.

Experts, to say the least, aren’t convinced. One criticism is Musk’s refusal to use radar and lidar sensors to help the cars understand their surroundings. After experimenting with the sensors, Musk swore them off as an expensive “crutch,” and doubled-down on only using cameras to see. Numerous accidents, including one in which a Tesla running the company’s Full Self-Driving ran over and killed an elderly pedestrian while its front camera was blinded by sunlight, have underscored the risks of Musk’s approach.

“I’m still deeply skeptical that Tesla is all that close in terms of building a real automated driving system,” Matthew Wansley, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has worked for an autonomous driving start-up, told the NYT.

Technology can sometimes advance at a rapid pace, and fortunes can quickly shift in a nascent industry. But right now, Tesla is “way behind Waymo,” Raj Rajkumar, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and pioneer of autonomous technology, told the newspaper.

More on robotaxis: Waymos Cause Traffic Jams Across City During Power Outage

The post It’s Starting to Feel a Lot Like Tesla’s Robotaxi Program Is Mostly Smoke and Mirrors appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Astronomers Appear to Have Caught a Star Splitting In Ha

A team of astronomers believe they’ve witnessed a star split in half before merging back together again, triggering an ungodly double explosion that’s sending seismic ripples through both the scientific community and spacetime itself.

The incredible event, designated AT2025ulz, may represent an entirely new class of astrophysical phenomena: a “superkilonova,” meaning an even more spectacular iteration on the already elusive kilonova.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the findings, described in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, aren’t hard proof — but they undoubtedly point to something strange afoot.

“Everybody was intensely trying to observe and analyze it, but then it started to look more like a supernova, and some astronomers lost interest. Not us,” lead author Mansi Kasliwa, an astronomer at Caltech, said in a statement about the finding.

Massive stars typically die in an explosion called a supernova, seeding the cosmos with heavy metals and producing a distinct signature. Sometimes, the blasts leave behind an ultra-dense core called a neutron star, which contains more mass than the Sun in a sphere roughly the size of a city. 

These, too, can go out with a bang. Neutron stars can be found in binary pairs, and when their incredible gravity draws them together, their collision causes an equally catastrophic explosion called a kilonova. To date, there is only one confirmed detection of a kilonova, which are far rarer than supernovas. One study suggested there’s only ten star systems in the entire Milky Way that will explode this way.

When astronomers were first clued in to AT2025ulz, which is located 1.3 billion light years away, they were getting mixed signals. On August 18, 2025, two observatories, LIGO in the US and Virgo in Europe, detected powerful gravitational waves, or ripples that surge through the fabric of our reality at the speed of light. The signal suggested a merger between two massive objects, like the collision between neutron stars that causes kilonovas.

Hours later, the Zwicky Transient Facility in California looked at the source and found a rapidly fading red object. The light signature was consistent with the aftermath of a kilonova, which glows red from forging heavy elements like gold during the blast.

Days later, though, a curveball was dealt. AT2025ulz brightened, turned blue, and showed signs of hydrogen all across its spectra of light — the telltale sign of a supernova.

The researchers suggest that it may be neither supernova nor kilonova, but a superkilonova. In this scenario, the original star exploded in a supernova and essentially split in twain to birth two, smaller neutron stars, not just one. Trapped inside the remnants of the supernova, the twin stars then spiraled together and exploded in a kilonova, whose signature was initially hidden by the original star’s remains. The hypothesis is supported by gravitational wave data indicating that at least one of the stars was less massive than the Sun.

“We do not know with certainty that we found a superkilonova, but the event nevertheless is eye opening,” Kasliwa said.

More on space: James Webb Discovers Planet Shaped Like Lemon

The post Astronomers Appear to Have Caught a Star Splitting In Half, With Catastrophic Results appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com