Business Briefly: Dec. 19, 2014

Enlarge / The X-62A VISTA Aircraft flying above Edwards Air Force Base, California. (credit: Kyle Brasier, U. S. Air Force) An AI test pilot has successfully flown a jet fighter in dogfights against human opponents. It's the latest development for DARPA's Air Combat Evaluation program, which is trying to develop aerospace AI agents that can be trusted to perform safely. Human test pilots have a bit of a reputation thanks to popular culture—from The Right Stuff to Top Gun: Maverick, the profession has been portrayed as a place for loose cannons with a desire to go fast and break the rules.

Enlarge / This image taken by NASA's Orion spacecraft shows its view just before the vehicle flew behind the Moon in 2022. (credit: NASA) Although NASA is unlikely to speak about it publicly any time soon, the space agency is privately considering modifications to its Artemis plan to land astronauts on the surface of the Moon later this decade. Multiple sources have confirmed that NASA is studying alternatives to the planned Artemis III landing of two astronauts on the Moon, nominally scheduled for September 2026, due to concerns about hardware readiness and mission complexity. Under one of the options, astronauts would launch into low-Earth orbit inside an Orion spacecraft and rendezvous there with a Starship vehicle, separately launched by SpaceX.

Enlarge / The Tesla Cybertruck. (credit: Tesla) On Monday, we learned that Tesla had suspended customer deliveries of its stainless steel-clad electric pickup truck. Now, the automaker has issued a recall for all the Cybertrucks in customer hands—nearly 4,000 of them—in order to fix a problem with the accelerator pedal.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg) Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing helped the streaming service blow past Wall Street’s earnings forecasts, but its shares fell after it said it planned to stop regularly disclosing its subscriber numbers. The company’s operating income surged 54 percent in the first quarter as it added 9.3 million subscribers worldwide, proving that the efforts to reduce password sharing it launched last year have had more lasting benefits than some investors expected. However, Netflix said on Thursday that from next year it would stop revealing its total number of subscribers, a metric that has been a crucial benchmark for investors in the streaming era.

Enlarge / A sample image from Microsoft for "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." (credit: Microsoft) On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track.

Two more Walmart stores—one in St. Louis, Missouri, and one in Cleveland, Ohio, are getting rid of their self-checkout machines, according to a statement shared with Business Insider. The self-checkout machines will reportedly be removed after hours and the process will be completed within two weeks. “We believe the change will improve the in-store shopping experience and give our associates the chance to provide more personalized and efficient service,” Walmart spokesperson Brian Little told Insider.