Check, Please At least one big Silicon Valley venture capital firm is considering a $6 billion cash infusion for Elon Musk's xAI startup and its troubled chatbot, Grok. As people close to the fundraising told The Information, Musk is closing in on a first-round fundraising deal with potential investors including Sequoia Capital, which invested $800 million into Twitter when he bought it back in 2022. The insiders did not specify how much Sequoia plans to commit or which other firms might be involved in the fundraising, but the Financial Times and Bloomberg have also confirmed that Sequoi ..read more

Down and Out After being sent a very guilt-inducing cease-and-desist, Drake has taken down his AI-generated diss track that deepfaked the voices of Tupac and Snoop Dogg. As The Verge reports, the Canadian-born rapper, née Aubrey Graham, has deleted the track "Taylor Made" from his profile on X-formerly-Twitter, though because it had been up for nearly a week, there are still tons of versions of it re-uploaded on YouTube and elsewhere. Part of his ongoing beef with Kendrick Lamar, the diss track drew the attention of Tupac Shakur's estate, and an attorney for the family sent Drake a stron ..read more

Blackmail Order A Baltimore-area educator has been arrested after he allegedly used AI to deepfake his school's principal into spewing bigotry, in a misfired blackmail scheme. As the Baltimore Banner and other news outlets report, now-former athletic director Dazhon Darien has been charged with several crimes after audio surfaced of Pikesville High School principal Eric Eiswert seeming to make racist and anti-Semitic comments about students and staff. In January, Eiswert was suspended from his principalship after the recordings, which included racial slurs and violent rhetoric, circulate ..read more

Abandon Ship Tesla is going through a crisis right now. The company, which posted disastrous first-quarter results earlier this month, isn't just losing over ten percent of its rank-and-file workforce due to layoffs. A number of high-profile insiders have also abandoned ship. Take longtime Tesla executive Drew Baglino, who joined Tesla in 2006 — and now, just ten days after announcing his resignation, he's sold a staggering $181.5 million worth of Tesla shares, according to a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Baglino is one of three top executives who ..read more

Road Rage A thin-skinned Cybertruck driver has had enough of being teased for his questionable life choices. A video making the rounds on social media shows the driver cussing out a group of cyclists, who purportedly poked fun at him over a recent recall affecting all Cybertrucks. The driver took the time to pull over to harass the cyclists in return — with strikingly violent language. "I don't want nothing more than rip off your heads and spit down your throats," the driver said in the video. "You cyclists screw up all the streets, you are unbearable." "Is this the best thing you have t ..read more

A video making the rounds on social media shows a self-driving Waymo car bombing down the wrong side of the road in downtown San Francisco — yet another glaring incident involving the company's vehicles acting unexpectedly. The footage shows the vehicle passing a group of electric-powered unicyclists and scooters in the city's Mission and Market district last week. Another video shows the same event from a different perspective, with the Waymo car seemingly trying to overtake the unicyclists — by taking over the entirety of the oncoming lane. Fortunately, one of the unicyclists managed to get ..read more

Heads Will Roll Amidst a chaotic month for Tesla — even by its continuously plunging standards — Facebook cofounder and multi-billionaire Dustin Moskovitz has made some pretty dire predictions for the automaker, accusing it of committing "consumer fraud on a massive scale." "This is Enron now, folks," Moskovitz wrote on Threads, referring to the corporation that went bankrupt in 2001 after it was exposed for one of the biggest accounting frauds in history. "It may keep going, but people are going to jail at the end." His concerns stem from a graph Tesla shared to mark a key milestone: one bil ..read more

Orb Ouchies Eyeball-scanning orbs are, apparently, not a dime a dozen — and now, a Sam Altman-backed crypto startup is running out of them. As Semafor reports, the Altman-backed Worldcoin crypto startup, which uses bespoke metallic orbs to scan one's iris and verify their identity, is running low on the spherical devices after giving out somewhere between 300 and 500 of them. This news, as the site notes, has been confirmed by Alex Blania, the CEO of the Tools for Humanity startup that acts as Worldcoin's parent firm. Launched with the help of the OpenAI CEO last year, Worldcoin made wav ..read more

Never Forget Where were you when NASA's Spirit rover drew a dick in Martian dust? For nearly 70 years, NASA — often with help from international friends — has been charting human history in the cosmos. Landing men on the Moon! Sending the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter! Launching the science-accelerating Hubble Space Telescope, and then vaulting the extraordinary James Webb Space Telescope into the heavens to change the game once again! There's one particular NASA moment, though, that some (us) would hate to see lost to the annals of history: that time 20 years ago when the Spirit rover ..read more

The Worst After raising a stink last year when someone used AI to spoof his voice, noted teen drama star Aubrey "Drake" Graham is now in hot water for doing the same to the late, great Tupac. As Billboard reports, an attorney for Tupac Shakur's estate sent a cease and desist letter to Drake, threatening a lawsuit if he doesn't take down his new Kendrick Lamar diss track, "Taylor Made Freestyle." The song, which deepfakes the voices of Shakur and Calvin "Snoop Dogg" Broadur Jr., is the latest forte in the Canadian rapper's seemingly mostly one-sided beef with Lamar, which began with anoth ..read more