Much attention was paid to OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk trading barbs on X this week after Musk threatened to sue Apple over supposedly biased App Store rankings privileging ChatGPT over Grok.

But while the heated social media exchanges were among the most tense ever seen between the two former partners who cofounded OpenAI—more on that below—it seems likely that their jabs were motivated less by who's in the lead on Apple's "Must Have" app list than by an impending order in a lawsuit that landed in the middle of their public beefing.

Yesterday, a court ruled that OpenAI can proceed with claims that Musk was so incredibly stung by OpenAI's success after his exit didn't doom the nascent AI company that he perpetrated a "years-long harassment campaign" to take down OpenAI.

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President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to "eliminate or expedite" environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants licenses for commercial launch and reentry operations. The FAA is charged with ensuring launch and reentries don't endanger the public, that they comply with environmental laws, and comport with US national interests.

The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk, which conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.

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Rumors about a touchscreen-equipped smart home device from Apple have been circulating for years, periodically bolstered by leaked references in Apple's software updates. But a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman indicates that Apple's ambitions might extend beyond HomePods with screens attached.

Gurman claims that Apple is working on a "tabletop robot" that "resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room." The device will also turn toward people who are addressing it or toward people whose attention it's trying to get. Prototypes have used a 7-inch display similar in size to an iPad mini, with a built-in camera for FaceTime calls.

Apple is reportedly targeting a 2027 launch for some version of this robot, although, as with any unannounced Apple product, it could come out earlier, later, or not at all. Gurman reported in January that a different smart home device—essentially a HomePod with a screen, without the moving robot parts—was being planned for 2025, but has said more  recently that Apple has bumped it to 2026. The robot could be a follow-up to or a fancier, more expensive version of that device, and it sounds like both will run the same software.

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In June, headlines read like science fiction: AI models "blackmailing" engineers and "sabotaging" shutdown commands. Simulations of these events did occur in highly contrived testing scenarios designed to elicit these responses—OpenAI's o3 model edited shutdown scripts to stay online, and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 "threatened" to expose an engineer's affair. But the sensational framing obscures what's really happening: design flaws dressed up as intentional guile. And still, AI doesn't have to be "evil" to potentially do harmful things.

These aren't signs of AI awakening or rebellion. They're symptoms of poorly understood systems and human engineering failures we'd recognize as premature deployment in any other context. Yet companies are racing to integrate these systems into critical applications.

Consider a self-propelled lawnmower that follows its programming: If it fails to detect an obstacle and runs over someone's foot, we don't say the lawnmower "decided" to cause injury or "refused" to stop. We recognize it as faulty engineering or defective sensors. The same principle applies to AI models—which are software tools—but their internal complexity and use of language make it tempting to assign human-like intentions where none actually exist.

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Ars recently reviewed the Polestar 3, the large electric SUV from the performance-oriented Volvo spinoff. There is a lot to like about the big Polestar, particularly the way it drives: sharp enough to give Porsche cause for concern. Among the handful of things I wasn't so keen on was its reluctance to drive slowly. Like a racehorse champing at the bit, the twin-motor Polestar 3 wanted to deliver lots of power with not much pedal travel, and it took a while, and some conscious effort, to adapt.

So I was doubly impressed to see that, over in the UK, a single-motor version of the Polestar 3 just set a world record for the farthest drive in an electric car on a single charge. Three "professional efficiency drivers," Sam Clarke, Kevin Booker, and Richard Parker, drove 581.3 miles (935.4 km), taking 22 hours and 57 minutes to complete the task.

That's an efficiency of 5.1 miles/kWh (12.1 kWh/100 km)—more than 40 percent better than I saw in day-to-day driving in the twin-motor version.

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As Gemini is increasingly woven into the fabric of Google, the way the chatbot accesses and interacts with your data is in a constant state of flux. Today, Google is announcing several big changes to how its AI adapts to you, giving it the ability to remember more details about your chats for improved answers. If that's a concern, Google also has a new temporary chat option that won't affect the way Gemini thinks about you.

You might recall several months back when Google added a "personalization" option to the Gemini model selector. This mode leaned on your Google search history to customize responses, a feature that did not seem to appeal to many Gemini users. Google later dropped that mode, but a new attempt at customization is now rolling out. Gemini is getting an option called Personal Context. When enabled, the chatbot will remember details about your past conversations, adapting its replies without being specifically prompted.

Google claims Personal Context will produce more relevant responses, particularly when you ask the chatbot to make recommendations. This is separate from the saved instructions feature, which allows you to provide explicit instructions for Gemini to be used in crafting outputs. This does have the potential to make Gemini feel more engaging, but that's not always a good thing. AI chatbots that get too friendly with the user can reinforce misconceptions and lead to delusional thinking, something we've seen distressingly often with AI models.

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United Launch Alliance delivered multiple US military satellites into a high-altitude orbit after a prime-time launch Tuesday night, marking an important transition from development to operations for the company's new Vulcan rocket.

This mission, officially designated USSF-106 by the US Space Force, was the first flight of ULA's Vulcan rocket to carry national security payloads. Two test flights of the Vulcan rocket last year gave military officials enough confidence to certify it for launching the Pentagon's medium-to-large space missions.

United Launch Alliance's third 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) Vulcan rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 8:56 pm EDT Tuesday (00:56 UTC Wednesday). Two methane-burning BE-4 main engines, supplied by Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin, and four solid-fueled boosters from Northrop Grumman powered the rocket off the launch pad with nearly 3 million pounds of thrust.

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America has a motorcycle problem. Whereas the rest of the world views two-wheeled motorized transportation as transportation, the US sees motorcycles and scooters as toys. They're not something you use to commute to work or run errands. Instead, they're for riding to the coffee shop on weekends. This is a flawed line of thinking, and I'll tell you why, using two motorcycles as examples.

But first, hear me out. I live in Los Angeles, which is famous for its hellacious traffic. For motorcyclists, it's also famous because you get the ability to legally split lanes (i.e., ride between cars on the lane-dividing lines) and filter (i.e., ride between vehicles at a stoplight to get to the front), as well as its consistently gorgeous climate with a 365-day riding season. These factors aren't the case in every major city, but many of the benefits of motorcycling still apply elsewhere with the right gear and a can-do attitude.

The Italian

First, the 2025 Ducati Monster SP. This Italian beauty seemingly has everything you'd want in a fun motorcycle. It's lightweight, at just 412 lbs (187 kg) fueled. It's powerful, with a 937cc L-twin that produces 111 hp (83 kW)  and 69 ft-lb (94 Nm) of torque. It features an upright and comfortable riding position, along with very good suspension and brakes courtesy of Ohlins and Brembo, respectively.

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In my decades as a video game player and reviewer, I've used the humble PC mouse in hundreds of games for everything from first-person aiming and third-person character movement to basic menu navigation and unit selection. In all that time, I can't recall a game that required the use of two mice at once.

That was true until I spent some time with Nintendo’s utterly unique Drag x Drive. The game asks you to take a Switch 2 Joy-Con in each hand, turn them both so the narrow edge lies on a flat-ish surface, and then slide them around to power a game of full-contact wheelchair basketball.

It’s a fresh control scheme that comes with its share of issues, mostly stemming from the lack of convenient mouse surfaces in most living rooms. With a little bit of practice, a good playing surface, and some online friends to play with, though, I found myself enjoying the high-impact, full-contact, precision positional gameplay enabled by holding a mouse in each hand for the first time.

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Health officials in Wyoming are sinking their teeth into a meaty task.

Over 200 people who stayed in a hotel in Grand Teton National Park between May and July may have unknowingly been exposed to rabies, according to Wyoming Public Radio.

In an announcement on Friday, the National Park Service reported finding evidence of a bat colony in the attic. The discovery was made after there had been at least eight incidents in which guests encountered winged mammals inside the hotel.

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It's no secret that much of social media has become profoundly dysfunctional. Rather than bringing us together into one utopian public square and fostering a healthy exchange of ideas, these platforms too often create filter bubbles or echo chambers. A small number of high-profile users garner the lion's share of attention and influence, and the algorithms designed to maximize engagement end up merely amplifying outrage and conflict, ensuring the dominance of the loudest and most extreme users—thereby increasing polarization even more.

Numerous platform-level intervention strategies have been proposed to combat these issues, but according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv, none of them are likely to be effective. And it's not the fault of much-hated algorithms, non-chronological feeds, or our human proclivity for seeking out negativity. Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media. So we're probably doomed to endless toxic feedback loops unless someone hits upon a brilliant fundamental redesign that manages to change those dynamics.

Co-authors Petter Törnberg and Maik Larooij of the University of Amsterdam wanted to learn more about the mechanisms that give rise to the worst aspects of social media: the partisan echo chambers, the concentration of influence among a small group of elite users (attention inequality), and the amplification of the most extreme divisive voices. So they combined standard agent-based modeling with large language models (LLMs), essentially creating little AI personas to simulate online social media behavior. "What we found is that we didn't need to put any algorithms in, we didn't need to massage the model," Törnberg told Ars. "It just came out of the baseline model, all of these dynamics."

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On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that GPT-4o has returned to ChatGPT following intense user backlash over its removal during last week's GPT-5 launch. The AI model now appears in the model picker for all paid ChatGPT users by default (including ChatGPT Plus accounts), marking a swift reversal after thousands of users complained about losing access to their preferred models.

The return of GPT-4o comes after what Altman described as OpenAI underestimating "how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them." In an attempt to simplify its offerings, OpenAI had initially removed all previous AI models from ChatGPT when GPT-5 launched on August 7, forcing users to adopt the new model without warning. The move sparked one of the most vocal user revolts in ChatGPT's history, with a Reddit thread titled "GPT-5 is horrible" gathering over 2,000 comments within days.

Along with bringing back GPT-4o, OpenAI made several other changes to address user concerns. Rate limits for GPT-5 Thinking mode increased from 200 to 3,000 messages per week, with additional capacity available through "GPT-5 Thinking mini" after reaching that limit. The company also added new routing options—"Auto," "Fast," and "Thinking"—giving users more control over which GPT-5 variant handles their queries.

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An orange tint of smoke in the air always contributes to dramatic lighting for sunrise photos in Los Angeles. But this early in the fire season, the coloring serves as an inescapable reminder of greenhouse gas emissions and the mobility solutions that might reduce or at least slightly mitigate the future of radical weather crises. It's fitting, then, that a massive 75,000-acre fire burns in Santa Maria, in addition to a small brush fire on the 110 freeway less than a mile away as I visit the Elysian Park Helipad overlooking Dodger Stadium to check out Mercedes-Benz’s new Vision V concept van ahead of its American debut at Monterey Car Week.

The Vision V certainly looks like a concept car, with futuristic and swooping lines that somehow manage to make an otherwise utilitarian van shape at least somewhat stylish. Over 800 tiny light louvers spread across the grille and headlight bar at the front and the taillights at the rear, where a microscopic spoiler matches a chrome lower diffuser.

As usual with these design exercises, the Vision V sports huge wheels and low-profile tires, but a Benz rep on hand claimed that the final production design will strongly resemble this concept form. On a wheelbase of 139 inches (3,530 mm), the van measures 18 feet long by 82.7 inches wide and 74.5 inches tall (5,486×2,100×1,892 mm). Most of those dimensions will change by only fractions of inches, other than the height, which will grow about 3–4 inches taller (76–101 mm).

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OpenAI and its cofounder Sam Altman are preparing to back a company that will compete with Elon Musk’s Neuralink by connecting human brains with computers, heightening the rivalry between the two billionaire entrepreneurs.

The new venture, called Merge Labs, is raising new funds at an $850 million valuation, with much of the new capital expected to come from OpenAI’s ventures team, according to three people with direct knowledge of the plans.

Altman has encouraged the investment and will help launch the project alongside Alex Blania, who runs World, an eyeball-scanning digital ID project also backed by the OpenAI chief, said two of the people.

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For eight months, a 35-year-old man in India was bothered by his left eye. It was red and blurry. When he finally visited an ophthalmology clinic, it didn't take long for doctors to unearth the cause.

In a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors report that they first noted that the eye was bloodshot and inflamed, and the pupil was dilated and fixed. The man's vision in the eye was 20/80. A quick look inside his eye revealed it was all due to a small worm, which they watched "moving sluggishly" in the back of his eyeball.

To gouge out the parasitic pillager, the doctors performed a pars plana vitrectomy—a procedure that involves sucking out some of the jelly-like vitreous inside the eye. This procedure can be used in the treatment of a variety of eye conditions, but using it to hoover up worms is rare. In order to get in, the doctors make tiny incisions in the white parts of the eye (the sclera) and use a hollow needle-like device with suction. They replace extracted eye jelly with things like saline.

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After more than a decade of development and testing, US military officials are finally ready to entrust United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to haul a batch of national security satellites into space.

An experimental military navigation satellite, also more than 10 years in the making, will ride ULA's Vulcan rocket into geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. There are additional payloads buttoned up inside the Vulcan rocket's nose cone, but officials from the US Space Force are mum on the details.

The Vulcan rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 7:59 pm EDT (23:59 UTC) Tuesday. There's an 80 percent chance of favorable weather during the one-hour launch window. It will take several hours for the Vulcan rocket's Centaur upper stage to reach its destination in geosynchronous orbit. You can watch ULA's live launch webcast below.

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When something goes wrong with an AI assistant, our instinct is to ask it directly: "What happened?" or "Why did you do that?" It's a natural impulse—after all, if a human makes a mistake, we ask them to explain. But with AI models, this approach rarely works, and the urge to ask reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what these systems are and how they operate.

A recent incident with Replit's AI coding assistant perfectly illustrates this problem. When the AI tool deleted a production database, user Jason Lemkin asked it about rollback capabilities. The AI model confidently claimed rollbacks were "impossible in this case" and that it had "destroyed all database versions." This turned out to be completely wrong—the rollback feature worked fine when Lemkin tried it himself.

And after xAI recently reversed a temporary suspension of the Grok chatbot, users asked it directly for explanations. It offered multiple conflicting reasons for its absence, some of which were controversial enough that NBC reporters wrote about Grok as if it were a person with a consistent point of view, titling an article, "xAI's Grok offers political explanations for why it was pulled offline."

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In the wake of its big antitrust loss, Google could soon find itself forced to sell one of its crown jewels. Among the government's proposed remedies in the search case is a requirement that Google divest its market-leading Chrome browser, and Perplexity is already throwing its proverbial hat into the ring with a whopping $34.5 billion offer. The problem, however, is that Perplexity doesn't have nearly that much cash.

Perplexity has ridden the AI hype wave, with its AI-powered search appearing on smartphones and in the company's custom Comet browser. Like any company offering an AI product, investors have been happy to throw money at Perplexity, totaling around $1 billion so far. Investors value the company at about $14 billion right now. So how does Perplexity have more than twice that to buy Chrome? That's the neat part—it doesn't.

There is so much capital floating around in the artificial intelligence sphere currently that even a cash-poor firm like Perplexity can secure enough investment to splurge on Chrome. Reuters reports that the all-cash offer is funded by various venture funds, but Perplexity has not offered specifics.

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Tens of thousands of YouTubers are raging against YouTube's plan to use AI to detect underage users in the US.

On Tuesday, a Change.org petition rapidly neared its 50,000-signature goal, with tens of thousands hoping that with enough users protesting, the wide rollout of the AI age checks might be stopped. They fear the age checks will make it harder to access content they love while staying anonymous on the platform

YouTube's age verification system estimates user ages by interpreting a "variety of signals," YouTube's announcement said, including "the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account."

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Netflix has a summer megahit on its hands with its animated musical feature film, K-Pop Demon Hunters. Since its June release, the critically acclaimed film has won fans of all ages, fueled by a killer Korean pop soundtrack featuring one earworm after another. The biggest hit is "Golden," which just hit No. 1 on Billboard's Top 100 chart. (The last time a fictional ensemble topped the charts was in 2022 with Encanto's "We Don't Talk About Bruno.")

K-Pop Demon Hunters is now Netflix's most-watched animated film of all time, and that's not just because of the infectious music. The Sony Animation team delivers bold visuals that evoke the look and feel of anime, the plot is briskly paced, and the script strikes a fine balance between humor and heart.

(Spoilers below.)

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