Of course it will, or shall we say Elon will. Do you think his Memphis AI complex is there solely to provide better search results and more strategic ad placements for the American consumer dopes? Fusion will solve world hunger, and it will be achieved. Lets just call Memphis the new... Heard it here 1st.
Side note to the below story. My sister is friends with another woman who is the sister of the Judge in this case. Nothing else to add so no side track whatsoever of how she might rule once the trial is all said and done. So let the chips fall where they may. Who am I kidding? I hope Elon has to pay out yuuuuuuuuugely for his years of nonsense spewing how safe auto-pilot is encouraging drivers to just sit back and let the car do everything. (MORNINGBREW) LAW Who’s responsible for driverless vehicle crashes? Joe Raedle/Getty Images Assessing responsibility in a car crash where all parties are humans can be difficult, but determining who—or what—is at fault when a self-driving vehicle is involved presents a new complication for the legal system. But clarity is coming—a federal trial began in Miami last Monday over whether Tesla should be blamed for the 2019 death of 22-year-old Naibel Benavides after she was struck and killed by a Model S on Autopilot with a human driver present. In this case: George Brian McGee, 48, was behind the wheel, dropped his phone, and reached down to grab it with his foot on the gas. The vehicle blew through a stop sign, striking and killing Benavides and severely injuring her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, while they were parked legally. The arguments in Tesla’s first federal jury trial—the company had previously settled at least four suits over fatal crashes—are pitting human vs. machine: The plaintiffs contend that Tesla is at least partly responsible, since its technology failed to warn the driver of an imminent crash and didn’t recognize a stop sign, plus the automatic brakes didn’t activate. Tesla’s defense is that McGee had been speeding at 90 miles per hour earlier that evening and was “aggressive” and “distracted” while behind the wheel. The legal standard could make proving Tesla’s liability difficult: As The Verge reported, it’s likely an uphill climb for the plaintiffs, since the court is using Florida’s standard, which is “whether the car manufacturer exhibited a reckless disregard for human life equivalent to manslaughter by designing and marketing the vehicle.” As for other states…few have language on the books to determine who is liable in the case of an autonomous vehicle accident. In Alabama, the human in the car is liable for any accident. But many states still do not specify who would be at fault in an accident. Bottom line: Should Tesla lose this case, it could hurt the company’s reputation and further damage its already flagging sales, as the company has staked its future on growing its robotaxi fleet.—DL
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-partly-liable-florida-autopilot-182442969.html Tesla partly liable in Florida Autopilot trial, jury awards $200M punitive damages Sean O'Kane Fri, August 1, 2025 at 2:24 PM EDT1 min read A jury in federal court in Miami has found Tesla (TSLA) partly to blame for a fatal 2019 crash that involved the use of the company’s Autopilot driver assistance system. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $200 million in punitive damages, along with “compensatory damages for pain and suffering,” according to NBC News. Neither the driver of the car nor the Autopilot system braked in time to avoid going through an intersection, where the car struck an SUV and killed a pedestrian. The jury assigned the driver two-thirds of the blame, and attributed one-third to Tesla. (The driver was sued separately.) NasdaqGS - Nasdaq Real Time Price•USD Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) 301.44 -6.83 (-2.22%) As of 3:22:49 PM EDT. Market Open. Advanced Chart Date 8/1 2:12 PM Close 301.92 Open 301.90 High 302.04 Low 301.73 The verdict comes at the end of a three-week trial over the crash, which killed 20-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and severely injured her boyfriend Dillon Angulo. It’s one of the first major legal decisions about driver assistance technology that has gone against Tesla.
Tesla's AI future is dead. This was supposed to be their great competitive advantage in Full Self-Driving and as well as its Optimus humanoid robot. Tesla Disbands Dojo Supercomputer Team in Blow to AI Effort https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-disbands-dojo-supercomputer-team-214056292.html (Bloomberg) — Tesla Inc. is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer team and its leader will depart the company, according to people familiar with the matter, upending the automaker’s effort to develop in-house chips for driverless technology. Peter Bannon, who was heading up Dojo, is leaving and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has ordered the effort to be shut down, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The team has lost about 20 workers recently to newly formed DensityAI, and remaining Dojo workers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, the people said. Tesla plans to increase its reliance on external technology partners, including Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. for compute, and Samsung Electronics Co. for chip manufacturing, the people said. Tesla, Musk and Bannon didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The decision marks a major shift for a program years in the making, with Dojo once positioned as central to Tesla’s multibillion-dollar plan to gain computing muscle in the artificial intelligence race. The Dojo system is a Tesla-designed supercomputer used to train the machine-learning models behind the electric-vehicle maker’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving programs, as well as its Optimus humanoid robot. The computer takes in data captured by vehicles and rapidly processes it to improve the company’s algorithms. Analysts have said Dojo could be a key competitive advantage, with Morgan Stanley estimating in 2023 it could add $500 billion to Tesla’s value. DensityAI, which is poised to come out of stealth soon, is working on chips, hardware and software that will power data centers for AI that are used in robotics, by AI agents and in automotive applications, among other sectors, Bloomberg reported this week. The company was founded by Ganesh Venkataramanan — the former head of Dojo — and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering. Tesla’s shares extended postmarket declines after Bloomberg’s report, trading down less than 1% as of 5:29 p.m. in New York. Talent Drain Tesla has faced an exodus of key talent this year as it has grappled with rising competition, falling sales and a consumer backlash to Musk’s political activity. Milan Kovac, the head of engineering for Optimus, and David Lau, vice president of software engineering, departed earlier this year, while Bloomberg reported in June that longtime Musk confidant Omead Afshar had abruptly left. The EV maker last month reached a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to secure AI semiconductors through 2033. The plan is for an upcoming plant in Texas to produce Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip, diversifying Tesla’s sourcing beyond leading chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Musk hinted at a strategic pivot during Tesla’s most-recent quarterly earnings call, suggesting future iterations of the company’s in-house technology could converge with that of its partners. “Thinking about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it seems like intuitively, we want to try to find convergence there, where it’s basically the same chip,” Musk said on the July 23 call. Tesla’s CEO last year acknowledged that the company might not pursue Dojo in perpetuity and instead lean more on external partners. “We’re pursuing the dual path of Nvidia and Dojo,” Musk said in January 2024. “But I would think of Dojo as a long shot. It’s a long shot worth taking because the payoff is potentially very high.”