Merger with loss-making xAI looks to some investors more like a bailout than a rocket trip to the future

• Elon Musk merges SpaceX with xAI at $1.25tn valuation

To Elon Musk’s fan club, there is nothing to see apart from more evidence of the great man’s visionary genius. SpaceX , the rocket firm, is buying xAI , the artificial intelligence developer, and the combination of these two Musk-controlled entities is being valued at $1.25tn (£910bn). Feel the positive vibes ahead of a stock market debut due in June ! The most valuable private company in history! The largest ever transaction!

Or, as Musk described it , he is creating “the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free-speech platform”.

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AIs are not sentient – but tweaks to their ethical codes can have far-reaching consequences for users

Do you want an AI assistant that gushes about how it “loves humanity” or spews sarcasm? How about a political propagandist ready to lie? If so, ChatGPT, Grok and Qwen are at your disposal.

Companies that create AI assistants from the US to China are increasingly wrestling with how to mould their characters, and it is no abstract debate. This month Elon Musk’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI caused international outrage when it pumped out millions of sexualised images. In October OpenAI retrained ChatGPT to de-escalate conversations with people in mental health distress after it appeared to encourage a 16-year-old to take his own life.

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A raft of online videos show parents serving up dinner without a single plate in sight, to the amazement of their families

Name: Dump dinners.

Age: Horribly new.

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Known as ‘white gold’, lithium is among the most important mined elements on the planet – ideal for the rechargeable batteries used in tech products. Can Europe’s largest deposit bring prosperity to the local community?

It looks more like the past than the future. A vast chasm scooped out of a scarred landscape, this is a Cornwall the summer holidaymakers don’t see: a former china clay pit near St Austell called Trelavour. I’m standing at the edge of the pit looking down with the man who says his plans for it will help the UK’s transition to renewable energy and bring back year-round jobs and prosperity to a part of the country that badly needs both. “And if I manage to make some money in the process, fantastic,” he says. “Though that is not what it’s about.”

We’ll return to him shortly. But first to the past, when this story begins, about 275-280m years ago. “There was a continental collision at the time,” Frances Wall, professor of applied mineralogy at the Camborne School of Mines at the University of Exeter, explained to me before my visit. This collision caused the bottom of the Earth’s crust to melt, with the molten material rising higher in the crust and forming granite. “There are lots of different types of granite that intrude at different times, more than 10m years or so,” she says. “The rock is made of minerals and, if you’ve got the right composition in the original material and the right conditions, then within those minerals there are some called mica. Some of those micas contain lithium.”

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The funding round valued the Alphabet subsidiary at $126bn as company aims to expand more cities worldwide

Self-driving car company Waymo on Monday said it raised $16bn in a funding round that valued the Alphabet subsidiary at $126bn.

Waymo co-chief executives Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov touted the massive investment as a sign that the age of large-scale autonomous mobility has arrived.

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New US-owned app struggled with a storm and was accused of blocking content critical of Trump – can it recover?

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Doha, where I’m moderating panels about AI and investing as part of the Web Summit Qatar.

I want to bring your attention to the impact of a Guardian story. In December, we published a story, “ ‘A black hole’: families and police say tech giants delay investigations in child abuse and drug cases ”, about grieving families and law enforcement officers who say that Meta and Snapchat have slowed down criminal investigations. (The tech companies contend that they cooperate.) This month, Colorado lawmakers introduced a bill to compel social media platforms to respond to warrants in 72 hours.

Elon Musk had more extensive ties to Epstein than previously known, emails show

Tesla discontinues Model X and S vehicles as Elon Musk pivots to robotics

What is Moltbook? The strange new social media site for AI bots

The slopaganda era: 10 AI images posted by the White House – and what they teach us

Apple reports record iPhone sales as new lineup reignites worldwide demand

South Korea’s ‘world-first’ AI laws face pushback amid bid to become leading tech power

Can you guess our screen time? A priest, pensioner, tech CEO and teenager reveal all

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Stocks in Pearson, London Stock Exchange Group and Experian plunge amid fears over impact of AI

European publishing and legal software companies have suffered sharp declines in their share prices after the US artificial intelligence firm Anthropic announced a tool aimed at companies’ in-house lawyers.

The UK publishing group Pearson’s shares fell by 4%, while the information and analytics firm Relx plunged nearly 11% on the London stock exchange, and the Dutch software company Wolters Kluwer dropped almost 9% in Amsterdam.

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Information Commissioner’s Office to investigate whether Elon Musk’s companies have complied with data protection law

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has opened formal investigations into X and xAI over whether Elon Musk’s companies have complied with data protection law after the chatbot Grok was used to generate sexual deepfake images without consent.

More details soon …

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Prosecutors summon tech billionaire and company’s ex-CEO for questioning as part of expanded investigation

• Europe live – latest updates

Prosecutors have raided the French headquarters of Elon Musk’s social media platform X and summoned the tech billionaire and the company’s former chief executive for questioning as part of an investigation into alleged cybercrime.

“A search is under way by the cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office, the national police cyber unit and Europol,” the Paris prosecutors’ office said in a post on X on Tuesday , adding that it would no longer be publishing on the network.

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