&w=3840&q=100)
Hubris Maximus: Pride, prejudices, and the nine lives of Elon Musk
Prosenjit Datta
Listen to This Article
Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk
by Faiz Siddiqui
Published by HarperCollins
268 pages ₹599
Elon Musk's life and business shenanigans make for highly readable books. Apart from becoming staggeringly rich — and at one point the world's richest man — he is eccentric, utterly arrogant, super confident in his own abilities, extremely inconsistent and, finally, given to impulsive decisions. He has built a legion of followers who swear by him and are willing to go to war against his perceived enemies after a single post by him on X (earlier Twitter). His personal life and beliefs are even more colourful.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
Tesla scraps Project Dojo: What it means for full self-driving and future of AI
Earlier this week, Tesla ended Project Dojo, which was a partnership between Tesla and Dojo computers. This brought an end to the automaker's efforts to build in-house chips for its driverless technology goals. Tesla has been focused on building driverless cars for almost a decade now. So why did Tesla end its attempts to produce chips in-house for its autonomous vehicles? The decision came because Tesla CEO Elon Musk shifted to relying on Nvidia and AMD for compute chips, along with Samsung for manufacturing. According to Musk, Tesla was closing Project Dojo because it would be inefficient for the business to split its resources and scale two distinct AI chip designs. Dojo would not be included in Tesla's consumer goods because it was intended to train the company's autonomous driving programme. Dojo was the automaker's effort to build custom supercomputers designed to train Tesla's neural network for driverless cars. A neural network functions like a simulated brain, supporting Tesla's goal of launching Robotaxi and Full Self-Driving (FSD) cars. This network is installed across a large fleet of Tesla cars today, enabling some automated driving functions that still require a human to be attentive behind the wheel. Tesla's decision to shut down Dojo, which Musk had been talking about since 2019, marks a major strategic shift. Musk had previously described Dojo as the cornerstone of Tesla's AI ambitions and its push for full self-driving, thanks to its ability to 'process truly vast amounts of video data.' He even mentioned it briefly during the company's second-quarter earnings call. The primary reason is Tesla's vision-only philosophy. For FSD to work, its neural networks must identify and categorise objects in the environment, then make driving decisions in real time. This requires training on enormous volumes of driving data so that, when activated, FSD can continuously gather and process visual data at speeds comparable to human depth and motion detection. In essence, Tesla wants to build a digital model of how the human brain and visual cortex function. To achieve this, Tesla must store, process, and run millions of simulations on video data gathered from vehicles worldwide. Although Tesla depended on Nvidia to run its Dojo training computer, the aim was to reduce reliance on a single supplier and improve performance by boosting bandwidth and lowering latency. Tesla's Dojo system was intended to serve as an AI training platform for FSD. A supercomputer consists of thousands of smaller computers, or nodes. Each node has a central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU). While the CPU manages the node overall, the GPU handles more complex tasks, such as splitting workloads into many parts and processing them in parallel. GPUs are critical for machine learning tasks like FSD training in simulation. Musk's broader vision is for Tesla to become an AI company capable of making self-driving cars by mimicking human vision. Most other companies in the autonomous driving sector use a combination of sensors—lidar, radar, cameras—and high-definition maps. Tesla believes it can achieve full autonomy with cameras alone, paired with advanced neural networks to analyse data and make instant driving decisions. In August 2024, Musk began promoting Cortex, Tesla's new AI training supercluster being built at its Austin headquarters to tackle real-world AI challenges. This shifted focus away from Dojo. Bloomberg reports that Tesla will now rely more on Nvidia and other partners such as AMD for computing and Samsung for chip fabrication. On 28 July 2025, Tesla and Samsung signed a $16.5 billion agreement to produce AI6 inference processors for high-performance AI training, FSD, and Tesla's Optimus humanoid robots. Meanwhile, Dojo's lead, Peter Bannon, is leaving the company, and the remaining team members will be reassigned to other data centre and compute projects within Tesla.
Time of India
4 hours ago
- Time of India
Sam Altman on Elon Musk: All day he does is tweeting, 'how much OpenAI sucks, our model is bad and ...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has bluntly responded to recent attacks from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, saying he doesn't spend much time thinking about the xAI founder. Speaking in an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box, Altman dismissed Musk's repeated criticisms of OpenAI and its newly launched GPT-5 creator OpenAI recently unveiled its latest AI model GPT-5. The company claims that the latest AI model offer advancements in accuracy, speed, reasoning and math capabilities. However, after the launch of GPT-5, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced full integration of GPT-5 across Microsoft ecosystem. Responding to Nadella's post, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, 'OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive'. Sam Altman responds to Elon Musk's comment about GPT-5 During the CNBC interview, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Altman his views on Musk's comment that 'OpenAI is going to eat Microsoft alive'. 'You knew I'd asked the question. I think you knew I'd asked the question. You probably saw Elon yesterday. He said, quote, OpenAI will eat Microsoft alive, and then Satya responding to that. What do you think when you read that?' asked Sorkin. Replying to the question Altman said, 'You know, I don't think about him that much.' Sorkin then said, 'I'm not sure what he means except to say that he thinks in the grand scheme of the partnership, that, ultimately, you'll have more power and more influence and more leverage over them than they'll have over you.' by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like The Secret Lives of the Romanovs — the Last Rulers of Imperial Russia! Learn More Undo To this Altman said that Elon Musk is someone who was just tweeting all day about how much OpenAI sucks, and our model is bad, and, you know, not going to be a good company and all that. 'I thought he was most -- I mean, I -- someone was -- I thought he was just like tweeting all day about how much like OpenAI sucks and our model is bad and, you know, not being a good company and all of that. So, I don't know how you square those two things,' said Altman. The remarks come amid escalating tensions between the two former collaborators, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before parting ways over disagreements about the company's direction. Musk has since launched his own AI venture, xAI, and recently claimed that OpenAI would 'eat Microsoft alive' following the tech giant's integration of GPT-5 across its platforms. GPT-5 launched, free for all OpenAI says that GPT-5 is the company's 'best model yet for coding and agentic tasks.' The model comes in three sizes — gpt-5, gpt-5-mini, and gpt-5-nano — for developers to balance performance, cost, and speed. In the API, GPT-5 is the reasoning model that powers ChatGPT 's top performance. A separate non-reasoning version, called gpt-5-chat-latest, will also be available. Sam Altman said GPT-5 is a major leap from GPT-4 and a 'pretty significant step' toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). 'GPT-5 is really the first time that I think one of our mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate expert, like a PhD-level expert, anything... We wanted to make it available in our free tier for the first time,' he said.
India Today
5 hours ago
- India Today
Last-minute Pixel 10 leak says no SIM tray, launch in 10 days at Made by Google event
Rumours are swirling once again in Pixel land, and this time they could spell a rather big change for Google's upcoming flagship series. The Pixel 10 family, expected sometime next year, might just wave goodbye to a little metal component that's been a part of every smartphone since the early days: the humble SIM card to a fresh post by well-known tipster Evan Blass on X (formerly Twitter), Google is allegedly plotting to strip the physical SIM slot from three of its next-gen handsets: the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL. Instead, these devices would rely entirely on eSIM technology, specifically, two active eSIM slots to keep you connected. In other words, if this leak is accurate, you'll never have to poke your phone with that little pin again, though you might also lose the ability to quickly swap SIMs on the Blass claims the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, the foldable expected to launch alongside the rest of the line-up, will still hang on to its physical SIM tray. It's almost as if Google has decided foldable owners deserve that extra bit of old-school flexibility. But there's another wrinkle: Blass responded to one curious follower asking whether this SIM tray removal would be a global decision or a region-specific one. His answer? The eSIM-only move could be limited to the United States. If that's the case, buyers in other markets might still get their beloved SIM slot, though, as always, that remains while the leak is intriguing, it's far from bulletproof. For starters, Blass is usually a deadpan, detail-first type of tipster, but this post began with an oddly vague 'tipster suggests' intro, unusual for someone with his track record. Then there's the matter of other Pixel 10 leaks we've already seen. Early CAD-based renders showed a perfectly ordinary SIM slot across all models. Even real-life prototype images that surfaced online featured a SIM tray in the frame. That doesn't exactly scream 'eSIM revolution'.It's also worth pointing out that the images we've seen in recent weeks haven't shown the top edge of the phone in great detail, which is where the SIM slot would usually be visible. That leaves just enough mystery for speculation to thrive. And thrive it has: the replies under Blass's post quickly filled with strong Pixel fans see this potential change as inevitable. Apple has already gone eSIM-only with its US iPhone 14 and 15 models, and the writing could be on the wall for physical SIMs in certain regions. eSIMs can make devices more waterproof, free up internal space for other components, and simplify network switching for those comfortable doing everything however, are less enthusiastic. Travellers, in particular, often prefer a physical SIM slot because it makes buying and popping in a local SIM card quick and painless. With eSIMs, the process can be more fiddly – and if your phone breaks, transferring an eSIM to another device isn't always as straightforward as swapping a Google does follow through with this change, it could find itself walking a tightrope between innovation and alienating a chunk of its audience. In the US, the transition to eSIMs has been slow but steady, with major carriers embracing the tech. Still, there are plenty of people who simply like the reassurance of having a physical card they can hold in their course, there's every chance this rumour turns out to be a false alarm, or at least a premature one. Google might be testing eSIM-only models internally, or exploring a regional rollout, without committing to ditching the SIM tray everywhere. After all, smartphone manufacturers often trial multiple hardware configurations before settling on the final production we see more concrete leaks, or hear from Google itself, it's wise to keep the salt shaker handy. But if you're a die-hard SIM card loyalist living in the US, you might want to brace yourself for the possibility that your next Pixel could be missing that little slot you've been using for years. On the bright side, you'll no longer have to rummage through drawers looking for that fiddly SIM ejector tool.- Ends
