| Hello, it's Drake here from New York. Today we'll take a look at Tesla's AI Day and the real star of the show. But first... Today's must-reads: The future of artificial intelligence according to Elon Musk arrived slightly behind schedule. Tesla's first AI Day, which took place and was streamed live last year on Aug. 19, started forty-five minutes late, a delay Musk apologetically attributed to "technical difficulties" when he took the stage. This year's Tesla AI Day No. 2, is also running behind—by six weeks, to deal with presumably bigger technical issues. The new, re-scheduled date is Friday. If you're interested in this stuff, you're probably already planning to watch. Even if you're not particularly interested, you may have heard about last year's presentation—specifically, about the lithe, humanoid Tesla Bot that Musk welcomed onto the stage. After walking out Mr. Roboto-style, it broke out a series of hip-hop dance moves, looking very much like a person in a robot costume, which Musk quickly confirmed was exactly what it was. This year, though, the company is expected to unveil an actual working prototype of the bot. Its nickname is Optimus, as in the noble Transformer. "If you say, what is the economy? At the foundation it is labor. So what happens when there is no shortage of labor?" Musk mused onstage at last year's AI Day. "Is there any actual limit to the economy? Maybe not." Optimus isn't the only attraction on this year's program. Tesla will update the world on advances in its Full Self-Driving mode, as well as its in-house supercomputer, Dojo. If last year's presentation is any guide, those parts of the presentation will be dense with detail about how the company's computer engineers are teaching its cars to make sense of the chaos of the world, evaluate the risks that arise and quickly decide what to do. If the accounts of real-world Tesla owners are to be believed, there is plenty of room for improvement. Still, the progress the company has already made is dizzying. Even for viewers who aren't intimately familiar with rasters and machine learning backbones, there's something mesmerizing about seeing a task like driving—or even spatial awareness—broken down into a set of discrete problems that are, one by one, ingeniously solved. That is where AI is already changing our world, and will keep doing so. Facial and voice recognition technology, medical diagnostics, algorithmic trading, automated customer service bots, those are all out there in the world right now, and getting better all the time. And none of them could really be called a robot. What humanoid robots like Optimus, or the Boston Dynamics menagerie, have proven best at so far is starring in viral videos. That may be part of the appeal for Musk. He clearly has thought deeply about the future of labor and AI and humanity. He also really likes attention. —Drake Bennett Google is still failing to label many ads from anti-abortion centers, even after updating its policies earlier this year. Ads from crisis pregnancy centers are running alongside some abortion-related searches with no warning for consumers. Musk wanted Twitter to include the word "Trump" in a search of corporate communications and documents to better understand the company's problem with fake accounts. Google is shutting down its Stadia cloud gaming service just about three years after its launch. The service failed to gain traction with gamers. SoftBank has started laying off employees at its loss-making Vision Fund and is expected to cut at least 30% of its staff, according to people familiar with the matter. | 
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