Tesla's massive investments in humanoid robots , self-driving cars and AI chips are hurting profits, but the company says it'll all pay off down the line. Why it matters: CEO Elon Musk indicated he's "never been more optimistic about the future," but acknowledged the investments could lead to uneven results. Zoom in: Tesla revenue jumped on record vehicle deliveries in the second quarter, but the company saw a significant dip in operating profit because of its heavy spending on R&D. - Tesla plans to spend more than $25 billion on capital investments this year, and that spending rate will grow over the the next two or three years, CFO Vaibhav Taneja told investors and analysts on a call late Wednesday. - Additionally, Tesla plans to…
Artificial intelligence is dramatically speeding up drug development — and a proprietary survey shows how it's priming a bigger automation push that's changing the trajectory of early stage pharma research. Why it matters: The TD Cowen survey of 80 biopharma leaders and insiders finds AI is compressing drug developers' preclinical costs and timelines by as much as 70%. - That's fueling demand for cutting-edge software, sequencing tools and computer models that will help churn out more experimental treatments in the next five years. The big picture: AI can't replace scientific intuition. But the way it can streamline the grueling R&D before human testing begins is making computer screens as important a feature of drug design as…
Energy Department undersecretary Darío Gil is taking a long-term view of science and technology. Why it matters: While President Trump's second term has been marked by high-drama fights over AI policy, Gil's been working behind the scenes to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in science and tech. The big picture: A familiar pattern is unfolding in AI policy. - An AI lab comes out with a frighteningly powerful model, sending officials scrambling, and states advance AI laws — which spark congressional efforts to get a federal standard in place. - Gil is trying to spearhead a different approach where the federal government plays a larger role in shaping emerging technologies before crises emerge or competitors like China gain an…
Andrej Karpathy, one of the best-known AI researchers in the world and a founding member of OpenAI , announced Tuesday that he's joining rival AI lab Anthropic . Why it matters: The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent — and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds. Driving the news: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. - Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research — an increasingly important frontier as AI…