File picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in New York. The billionaire congratulated Mr. Modi on the Lok Sabha election win
| Photo Credit: PTI

American tech billionaire Elon Musk on Friday said he is looking forward to his companies doing “exciting work” in India as he congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his historic election victory.

Mr. Modi will be administered the oath of office on June 9, his third consecutive term as Prime Minister.

“Congratulations @narendramodi on your victory in the world’s largest democratic elections! Looking forward to my companies doing exciting work in India,” Mr. Musk said in a post on X.

The congratulatory message came two months after the CEO of the electric carmaker Tesla and microblogging platform X in April postponed his proposed visit to India due to “very heavy Tesla obligations”.

Mr. Musk — who was expected to be in India on April 21 and 22 and scheduled to meet Prime Minister Modi — later wrote on X that he is looking forward to coming to India later this year.

In June last year, Mr. Musk met with Mr. Modi during the latter’s U.S. visit and stated that he planned to visit India in 2024 while expressing confidence that Tesla would enter the Indian market soon.

His proposed visit had raised expectations that he would announce plans for electric car maker Tesla to set up shop in the country, along with his satcom venture Starlink.

It was also expected that Mr. Musk would announce plans for Tesla to set up its manufacturing unit in India and investments could be to the tune of billions of dollars and the way forward for selling Tesla electric cars in India at the earliest.

Not just electric cars, he is also eyeing the Indian market for his satellite internet business Starlink, for which regulatory approvals are awaited.

Mr. Musk had in the past sought import duty reduction in India for it to be able to sell Tesla cars in the country.

Mr. Musk’s plan to visit India in April came on the heels of the government announcing a new electric vehicle policy, under which import duty concessions will be given to companies setting up manufacturing units in the country with a minimum investment of $500 million, a move aimed at attracting major global players like Tesla.

Washington:

U.S. businessman Elon Musk recently told investors that his artificial intelligence startup xAI is planning to build a supercomputer to power the next version of its AI chatbot Grok, The Information reported on Saturday citing a presentation to investors.

Musk said he wants to get the proposed supercomputer running by the fall of 2025, as per the report, adding that xAI could partner with Oracle to develop the massive computer.

xAI could not be immediately reached for comment. Oracle did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

When completed, the connected groups of chips – Nvidia’s flagship H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) – would be at least four times the size of the biggest GPU clusters that exist today, The Information reported quoting Musk from a presentation made to investors in May.

Nvidia’s H100 family of powerful GPUs dominate the data center chip market for AI but can be hard to obtain due to high demand.

Musk founded xAI last year as a challenger to Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google. Musk also co-founded OpenAI.

Earlier this year, Musk said training the Grok 2 model took about 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, adding that the Grok 3 model and beyond will require 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is seeking to meet senior Chinese officials in Beijing to discuss the rollout of Full-Self Driving (FSD) software in China. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A private jet linked to Tesla CEO Elon Musk landed in Beijing on April 28, a flight tracking app showed, as two people with knowledge of the matter said the billionaire was kicking off a surprise visit to the automaker’s second-biggest market.

Mr. Musk is seeking to meet senior Chinese officials in Beijing to discuss the rollout of Full-Self Driving (FSD) software in China and to obtain approval to transfer data collected in the country abroad to train algorithms for its autonomous driving technologies, one of the people said.

Tesla has since 2021 stored all data collected by its Chinese fleet in Shanghai as required by Chinese regulators and has not transferred any back to the United States.

The U.S. electric vehicle maker rolled out FSD, the most autonomous version of its Autopilot software, four years ago but has yet to make it available in China despite customers urging it to do so.

Mr. Musk said this month Tesla may make FSD available to customers in China “very soon”, in response to a query on social media platform X.

Rival Chinese automakers such as Xpeng have been seeking to gain an advantage over Tesla by rolling out similar software.

Also Read | How a Chinese rocket failure boosted Elon Musk’s SpaceX in Indonesia

Mr. Musk’s visit to China was not flagged publicly and the people spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak with media. Tesla did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The trip came just over a week after he scrapped a planned visit to India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing “very heavy Tesla obligations.”

The company said this month it would lay off 10% of its global workforce as it grapples with falling sales and an intensifying price war for EVs led by Chinese brands.

Landed in Beijing

A Gulfstream private jet with tail number N272BG, which is registered to Falcon Landing, a company connected to SpaceX and Tesla, landed at Beijing Capital Airport on Sunday at 0603 GMT, according to Chinese flight tracking app Flight Manager.

The other jet registered under Falcon Landing is N628TS, which is Mr. Musk’s main jet that he used to travel to China on his last trip nearly a year ago, when he met with Chinese government officials in Beijing and visited Tesla’s Shanghai factory.

Tesla has sold more than 1.7 million cars in China since it entered the market a decade ago and the Shanghai factory is its largest globally.

Mr. Musk’s visit coincides with the Beijing autoshow, which opened last week and ends on May 4. Tesla does not have a booth at China’s largest autoshow and last attended in 2021.

GM CEO Mary Barra made an unannounced visit to the show in the world’s biggest auto market on Friday, according to two people with knowledge of her schedule. GM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Also on Friday, Grace Tao, Tesla’s vice president in charge of external relations in China, published a commentary on the social media account of state media outlet People’s Daily, arguing that autonomous driving technologies would be the new growth engine for EV industry.

Also Read | Tesla recalls over 1.6 million EVs exported to China to fix automatic steering, door latch glitches

Ms. Tao said in the article that Tesla was leading autonomous driving research and development with its “end-to-end neural network” technology and data collected from millions of cars on the road.

China’s complicated traffic conditions with more pedestrians and cyclists than in many other markets provide more scenarios that are key for training autonomous driving algorithms at a faster pace, according to industry experts.

Mr. Musk said last week Tesla would introduce new, cheaper models using its current EV platforms and production lines and would offer a new “robotaxi” with self-driving technology. He said in a post on X this month that he would unveil the robotaxi on August 8.

Tesla shares are down almost a third since the start of the year as concerns have grown about the EV maker’s growth trajectory. Last week, Tesla reported its first decline in quarterly revenue since 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic slowed production and deliveries.

London:

Tesla CEO and ‘X’ owner, Elon Musk said on Wednesday that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could endanger the existence of human civilisation.

“There is some chance, above zero, that AI will kill us all. I think it’s slow but there is some chance. I think this also concerns the fragility of human civilization. If you study history, you will realise that every civilisation has a sort of lifespan,” he said.

His remarks came during a media interaction as he arrived to attend the United Kingdom hosted world’s first global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit.

Moreover, Musk was also seen having conversations with some of the participants at the summit.

Earlier, a day before attending the AI summit, Musk appeared on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he that artificial intelligence (AI), if programmed by people in the “environmental movement”, may lead to the extinction of humanity.

In the podcast, he said, “Actually, what I think the biggest danger is for AI is that if AI is implicitly programmed, I don’t think they explicitly but implicitly programmed with values that led to the destruction of downtown San Francisco. And a bunch of these AI companies are in San Francisco or in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then you could implicitly program an AI to believe that extinction of humanity is what it should try to do.”

He added, “I think the most likely outcome to be specific about it is a good outcome, most likely a good outcome. But it’s not for sure. So i think we’re to be careful how we program the eye and make sure that it is not accidentally antihuman.”

Moreover, the social media company Meta President said, “I’m looking forward to attending the AI Safety Summit in the UK this week. I hope we spend as much time as possible developing much-needed solutions to current problems – for example, on the transparency and detectability of AI-generated content.”

He added, “not just debating speculative future risks about AI models that currently do not exist, and may never possess the autonomy and agency that some people fear.”

The summit underway in UK will see a convergence of governments, academia and companies working in artificial intelligence to debate and identify risks, opportunities and the “need for international collaboration, before highlighting consensus on the scale, importance and urgency for AI opportunities” a statement by the British High Commission read.

Moreover, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said that he will do a live conversation with Elon Musk on X after the AI summit.

PM Sunak posted on X, “In conversation with @elonmusk. After the AI Safety Summit, Thursday night on @x.”

The summit aims to put light on the transformative benefits that AI technology can offer, putting a predominant focus on “education and areas for international research collaborations”.

Representatives from The Alan Turing Institute, The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Ada Lovelace Institute are also among the groups confirmed to attend.

Prime Minister Sunak had last week stated that the summit will focus on understanding the risks such as potential threats to national security including the dangers a loss of control the technology could bring.

On the agenda are discussions around issues likely to impact society, such as election disruption and erosion of social trust.

According to government estimates, the UK already employs over 50,000 people in the AI sector and contributes 3.7 billion pounds to its economy annually. Michelle Donelan will be joined by members of the UK’s Frontier AI Taskforce – including its Chair, Ian Hogarth. The task force was launched earlier this year with an aim to evaluate the risks of frontier AI models (generative language models of AI).

Additionally, on the first day of the Summit, Union Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar participated the AI summit and conveyed India’s thoughts on AI.

On the second day of the summit, Chandrasekhar will contribute to discussions regarding the establishment of a collaborative framework for AI among like-minded nations. He will shed light on India’s perspective concerning AI risks in areas such as disinformation and electoral security.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Tesla on Tuesday was cleared by a court in the 2019 fatal Model 3 crash that took place in Los Angeles, US, involving its advanced driver-assistance system, Autopilot. The case was filed by two passengers who accused the company of knowing Autopilot was defective when it sold the car. Tesla, on the other hand, argued that human error caused the crash. The court too found that the vehicle did not have a manufacturing defect. Now, Tesla chief Elon Musk also reacted to the news and expressed his belief that if Autopilot had been activated, the driver would likely have been saved.

“The irony is that if Autopilot had been turned on here, it would almost certainly have saved the driver,” Mr Musk wrote in on X (formerly Twitter). 

The irony is that if Autopilot had been turned on here, it would almost certainly have saved the driver

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2023

Micah Lee was killed in 2019 after their Model 3 veered off a highway, hit a tree, and caught fire. While Mr Lee was killed in the incident, his two passengers were injured. The two passengers then approached the court alleging that Autopilot caused the accident and demanded over $400 million in punitive damages. This trial was the first in the United States that alleged that Tesla’s autopilot feature led to death. 

Tesla, however, denied liability alleging that Mr Lee had consumed alcohol and that it was unclear if Autopilot was engaged during the crash. The Jury in Riverside County Superior Court also voted in favour of Mr Musk’s company, saying that the vehicle did not have a manufacturing defect. 

Also Read | Ola EV Sales Up By 30%, CEO Says Staff ”Working More Than 70 Hours” To Meet Demand

This is a major victory for Tesla as it faces several other similar lawsuits across the country. But the automaker continues to test and roll out its Autopilot and more advanced Full Self-Driving (FSD) system, which Mr Musk has touted as crucial to his company’s future. 

Notably, the latest verdict represents Tesla’s second big win this year. The automaker won an earlier trial in Los Angeles in April with a strategy of saying that it tells drivers that its technology requires human monitoring, despite the “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving” names. The case was about an accident where a Model S swerved into the curb and injured its driver. 

Elon Musk was ordered by a US judge to face most of a lawsuit claiming he defrauded former Twitter shareholders. (File)
| Photo Credit: AP

Elon Musk was ordered by a US judge to face most of a lawsuit claiming he defrauded former Twitter shareholders last year by waiting too long to disclose that he had invested in the social media company, which he later bought and renamed X.

In a decision made public on Monday, US District Judge Andrew Carter said shareholders in the proposed class action could try to prove that Musk intended to defraud them by waiting 11 days past a US Securities and Exchange Commission deadline to reveal he had bought 5% of Twitter’s shares.

The judge in Manhattan also dismissed an insider trading claim against Musk, the world’s richest person. Lawyers for Musk did not immediately respond on Tuesday to requests for comment.

Shareholders led by an Oklahoma firefighters pension fund said Musk saved more than $200 million by adding to his Twitter stake, and quietly talking with its executives about his plans, before finally disclosing a 9.2% stake in April 2022.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

The shareholders also said they sold Twitter shares at artificially low prices because Musk hid what he was doing. Musk’s lawyers argued that their client was “one of the busiest people on the planet,” and that any disclosure failure was “inadvertent.”

Carter said he could not infer that Musk was “too busy” to comply with SEC rules if he could find time to buy Twitter shares, meet with company executives, and post online about Twitter.

He also found evidence that Musk understood the 5% disclosure rule, including that he had testified about it under oath, and had properly disclosed stakes in his electric car maker Tesla and the former SolarCity at least 20 times.

Katie Sinderson, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, declined to comment. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October. Under the SEC rule, investors have 10 days to disclose when they have acquired 5% of a company.

Twitter shares rose 27% on April 4, 2022, to $49.97 from $39.31, after Musk revealed his 9.2% stake. Musk’s takeover valued Twitter at $54.20 per share.

The case is Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System v. Musk et al, US District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 22-03026.

Musk has grand ambitions for Neuralink, saying it would facilitate speedy surgical insertions of its chip devices. (File)
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink said on Tuesday it has received approval from an independent review board to begin recruitment for the first human trial of its brain implant for paralysis patients.

Those with paralysis due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis may qualify for the study, it said, but did not reveal how many participants would be enrolled in the trial, which will take about six years to complete.

The study will use a robot to surgically place a brain-computer interface (BCI) implant in a region of the brain that controls the intention to move, Neuralink said, adding that its initial goal is to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.

The company, which had earlier hoped to receive approval to implant its device in 10 patients, was negotiating a lower number of patients with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after the agency raised safety concerns, according to current and former employees. It is not known how many patients the FDA ultimately approved.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

Musk has grand ambitions for Neuralink, saying it would facilitate speedy surgical insertions of its chip devices to treat conditions like obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia.

In May, the company said it had received clearance from the FDA for its first-in-human clinical trial, when it was already under federal scrutiny for its handling of animal testing.

Even if the BCI device proves to be safe for human use, it would still potentially take more than a decade for the startup to secure commercial use clearance for it, according to experts

 US government says Elon Musk should not be immune to testifying about X Corp. (File)
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

The US government says the former Twitter’s request to end oversight of its data privacy and security practices is “meritless” and owner Elon Musk should not be immune to testifying about the company since he has “first-hand knowledge” of the conduct being investigated.

This includes decisions he made since acquiring the company — including mass layoffs, hasty product launches and an overall “chaotic environment” — that could be in violation of a government order limiting its privacy and security practices.

The company now called X Corp. had filed a motion in July for a protective order that would prevent Musk from having to testify about the company — and for relief from its 2022 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

In a Monday filing on behalf of the FTC, the US Department of Justice said that in seeking to end the FTC’s order, X merely “complains the FTC asked too many questions after Elon Musk acquired the company”.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

But the FTC was asking questions, according to the filing, because of “sudden, radical changes at the company” after Musk took over. Within weeks, half of Twitter’s employees were terminated or resigned, “including key executives in privacy, data security, and compliance roles”.

There were also “alarming site outages, product malfunctions, and issues with data access controls,” the filing says — so the FTC had “every reason to seek information” about whether the company was still complying with the order.

The FTC has been watching the company for years since Twitter agreed to a 2011 consent order alleging serious data security lapses. But the agency’s concerns spiked with the tumult that followed Elon Musk’s October 27 takeover of the company.

In March it was disclosed that the FTC was investigating Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter and trying to obtain his internal communications as part of ongoing oversight of the social media company’s privacy and cybersecurity practices, according to documents described in a congressional report.

Twitter paid a USD 150 million penalty in May 2022, about five months before Musk’s takeover, for violating the 2011 consent order. An updated version established new procedures requiring the company to implement an enhanced privacy-protection program as well as beef up information security. The company’s July filing seeks relief from the consent order, saying that the FTC’s investigation has “spiralled out of control”.

But the government’s filing on Monday said the FTC was requesting information because it wanted to see if the company was properly protecting user data during its transformation from Twitter into X under Musk’s rule. The FTC heard from five former X employees during its investigation, who “revealed a chaotic environment at the company that raised serious questions about whether and how Musk and other leaders were ensuring X Corp.’s compliance” with the consent order.

For instance, Twitter’s former director of security engineering, Andrew Sayler, testified that he had “ongoing questions about Elon’s commitment to the overall security and privacy of the organisation” because “the manner in which Elon was requesting us to grant access to third parties that had not undergone our regular vetting process struck” Sayler as “having some degree of disregard for the overall sensitivity and security at that level of access”, according to the filing.

In another example from the filing, Musk “insisted on launching the new Twitter Blue user verification service on an accelerated basis, despite staffing limitations”.

The Tesla CEO, according to another former employee’s testimony, “insisted” that the service had to launch “right now” even though Twitter’s staffing was reduced so drastically that remaining employees were “struggling to keep the service up”.

Representatives for X did not immediately respond to a message for comment on Tuesday.

Musk has disbanded the Trust and Safety Council. (File)
| Photo Credit: AP

Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter has sued the state of California over a law requiring social media companies to publish their policies for removing offending material such as hate speech, misinformation and harassment.

The first-of-its-kind legislation was signed into law a year ago by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a lawsuit filed Friday against state Attorney General Robert Bonta, X Corp. challenges the “constitutionality and legal validity” of the law, saying it violates the First Amendment.

The California law requires social media platforms to post their content moderation policies — which they already do — and twice a year submit a report to the state on how they address hate speech, racism, misinformation, foreign political interference and other issues.

The law, “compels companies to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments of companies such as X Corp.” and has pressures companies to remove or demonetize “constitutionally-protected speech,” says the lawsuit, filed in federal court in California.

(For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today’s Cache)

Since taking over Twitter in October 2022, Musk has upended the platform’s content moderation system, laying off workers responsible for weeding out problematic content and reinstating accounts banned for engaging in hate speech, promoting Nazi and white nationalist material and harassing users.

Musk also disbanded a key advisory group, the Trust and Safety Council, made up of dozens of independent civil, human rights and other organizations. The company formed the council in 2016 to address hate speech, harassment, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform. He has referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist” — though the billionaire has at times proven sensitive about critical speech directed at him or his companies. Last year, he suspended the accounts of several journalists who covered his takeover of Twitter.

The law’s author, Democratic Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, said it is a “a pure transparency measure that simply requires companies to be upfront about if and how they are moderating content. It in no way requires any specific content moderation policies – which is why it passed with strong, bipartisan support.”

“If Twitter has nothing to hide, then they should have no objection to this bill,” he added.

The attorney general’s office said it will review the complaint and respond in court.

Representatives for X did not immediately respond to messages for comment on Friday.

File photo of Twitter and SpaceX owner Elon Musk
| Photo Credit: Reuters

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tapped the rocket maker for a $1 billion loan around the time he was acquiring social media company Twitter, now known as X, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

SpaceX approved the loan, which was backed by some of his SpaceX stock, in October, and Mr. Musk drew all of it down the same month, the newspaper said, citing documents reviewed by it.

Mr. Musk paid back the $1 billion with interest to SpaceX in November, the WSJ report said, adding that the reason for the loan could not be determined.

SpaceX and the social media platform X did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Last year, Musk closed the $44 billion deal to take Twitter private and took ownership of the social media platform by firing top executives immediately.