Oliver T Lord
Head of Petrology, School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol. Melts rocks with lasers for a living. Die hard England Cricket fan.
linktr.ee/olivertlord
- Some good news from #Bristol! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
- While #xAI and #SpaceX merge, #Tesla is being left to rot it seems. Sales are down (again) by 44% across five #EU countries: #France, #Norway, #Sweden, #Denmark and the #Netherlands electrek.co/2026/02/02/t...
- Meanwhile, in #Austin, #Texas, still the only place you can get a #Tesla #Robotaxi, further bad news. Especially given that Robotaxi, alongside the #Optimus humanoid robot, was supposed to drive growth at Tesla (and presumably make up for lost sales of its cars). electrek.co/2026/01/29/t...
- @waymo.bsky.social raised $16B at a $126B valuation, the largest funding round in history for an autonomous vehicle company. The funding will support expansion to more than 20 new cities in 2026, including international launches in #London and #Tokyo. More here: electrek.co/2026/02/02/w...
- We are, apparently, only in the early stages of the coming wave of #AI #datacenters. Some could consume more power than entire cities. But how much of this will actually be built? Given each GW costs ~$35B, where will the money, and power, come from? Really interesting insights from epoch.ai
- Elon Musk on the merger between #SpaceX and #xAI: “This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI’s mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!” Meanwhile, on Earth:
- Elon Musk’s flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, continues to generate sexualized images of people when users explicitly warn that the subjects do not consent. In 17 tests, Grok generated images after being told they would be used to degrade the person. www.reuters.com/business/des...