Comment on Merck Is Paying $17 Billion For A Company Most People Have Never Heard Of — Here's What It Does

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto) Two weeks ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk enacted widespread layoffs throughout the company, including the 500-strong team responsible for the brand's Supercharger. Now, Tesla is looking to hire some of them back, Bloomberg reports, as Musk promises to spend $500 million expanding the network. The Supercharger network is inarguably Tesla's crown jewel.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Joe Raedle ) AT&T's application to end its landline phone obligations in California is likely to be rejected by state officials following protest from residents worried about losing access to phone lines. An administrative law judge at the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) recommended rejection of the application in a proposed decision released Friday.

Krysten Ritter stars as Lucy in Orphan Black: Echoes, which picks up in 2052, 37 years after the original series ended. Fans of the dystopian sci-fi thriller series Orphan Black have been waiting to see more of the new TV show set in the same fictional world: Orphan Black: Echoes, starring Krysten Ritter (of Jessica Jones fame).

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Monday, OpenAI debuted GPT-4o (o for "omni"), a major new AI model that can ostensibly converse using speech in real time, reading emotional cues and responding to visual input. It operates faster than OpenAI's previous best model, GPT-4 Turbo, and will be free for ChatGPT users and available as a service through API, rolling out over the next few weeks, OpenAI says. OpenAI revealed the new audio conversation and vision comprehension capabilities in a YouTube livestream titled "OpenAI Spring Update," presented by OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and employees Mark Chen and Barret Zoph that included live demos of GPT-4o in action. OpenAI claims that GPT-4o responds to audio inputs in about 320 milliseconds on average, which is similar to human response times in conversation, according to a 2009 study, and much shorter than the typical 2–3 second lag experienced with previous models.

Enlarge / Timely art from the game Traverser, soon to be published by developer Gatling Goat Studios. (credit: Gatling Goat Studios/Adult Swim Games) Warner Bros. Discovery has spent at least two months threatening more than a dozen indie games developers with the "retirement" of their games, with little to no response as to why they couldn't do something simple and much better for the games' players and creators. Late last week, one of the Adult Swim Games creators impacted by Warner Bros.

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News) An Australian federal court sided with Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting an Australian safety regulator's request to extend a temporary order blocking a terrorist attack video from spreading on Musk's platform X (formerly Twitter). The video showed a teen stabbing an Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel—whose popular, sometimes controversial TikTok sermons often garner millions of views—during a church livestream that rapidly spread online. Police later determined it was a religiously motivated terrorist act after linking the 16-year-old charged in the stabbing to a group of seven teens "accused of following a violent extremist ideology in raids across Sydney," AP News reported.