Elon Musk has fingers in many pies and those pies have been producing major engineering marvels lately. It's difficult to ignore the engineering endeavors he associates himself with because they are so current and so 'now'. From securing a high-speed tube train to developing the next battery-powered cars to landing a rocket, the list truly does go on.
Musk also has his money in an artificial intelligence company named OpenAI. You guessed it, they develop artificial intelligence. They are actively working on a robot that would assist with "basic housework". The company won't be manufacturing the robot but they will be concerning themselves with the artificial intelligence that would understand what housework is to begin with. The robot that they will most probably test the AI with would be similar to BRETT. The robot is Berkley University's Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks.
Berkely's robot reportedly has the ability to perform housework duties and continue learning about how to do them more efficiently. Through trial and error, the robot eliminates any room for error once it has learned a lesson from grappling with different tasks.
So, will we be communicating with our household robots in our mother tongue and expecting them to reply to us? OpenAI says this will be possible. In a statement, they said: "Today, there are promising algorithms for supervised language tasks such as question answering, syntactic parsing, and machine translation but there aren't any for more advanced linguistic goals, such as the ability to carry a conversation, the ability to fully understand a document, and the ability to follow complex instructions such as natural language."
Further afield, in other Elon Musk news. Tesla, who Musk is the CEO of, is going to buying a company called Solar City. The CEO of Solar City is Elon Musk. The company's modus operandi is in the name, really. They focus on solar power systems for homes, businesses and governments.
"The SolarCity team has built its company into the clear solar industry leader in the residential, commercial and industrial market, with significant scale and growing customer penetration," Tesla Motors wrote in a press statement. The company says they are excited to be a company that offers end-to-end clean energy products. "This would start with the car that you drive and the energy that you use to charge it, and would extend to how everything else in your home or business is powered."
Talking about Tesla Motors, Elon Musk has confirmed that their much-anticipated Model S vehicle will also be able to survive a swim. He said in a tweet: "We *def* don't recommend this, but Model S floats well enough to turn into a boat for short periods of time. Thrust via wheel rotation."
Musk felt he had to address the situation after a video out of Kazhakstan showed that the vehicle had powered through at least a meter of water:
