Month: April 2023

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Sales of new Tesla electric vehicles rose for the first quarter of 2023, according to sales and production figures released by the EV maker on Sunday. For the three months between the start of the year and the end of March, Tesla delivered 422,875 EVs; in 2022 they managed 310,048 deliveries during Q1.

That represents a 36 percent increase year on year for the EV company and a 4 percent increase from Q4 2022.

As expected, the vast majority of its sales were split between the Models 3 and Y—Tesla does not break out details any further, nor does it report by regions. In Q1 2023 it delivered 412,180 Models 3 and Y, 5 percent of which were leased.

Enlarge / Concept art of Venus Aerospace's Stargazer aircraft. (credit: Venus Aerospace)

HOUSTON SPACEPORT—On a cloudy day in late March, Andrew Duggleby guided me a safe distance away from a rocket engine. We did not have to go far, maybe 50 meters, because the prototype engine designed and built by his small engineering team is not that large.

We waited for a few minutes before steam began to hiss out of the engine. And then, for a few seconds, the engine emitted a distinctive whistling sound. "There it is!" Duggleby exclaimed. By it, he meant the sound of a rotating detonation engine firing after its ignition. The sound indicated that a reaction was successfully rotating at 20,000 times a second around the engine.

Duggleby is chief technology officer of a company he co-founded with his wife, Sassie. Venus Aerospace has the goal of building a hypersonic aircraft that can carry perhaps a dozen passengers and travel at the astonishingly fast speed of Mach 9, or more than 11,000 kilometers an hour.

Image generated by Stable Diffusion with the prompt “Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonalds sign.” (credit: Timothy B. Lee / Stable Diffusion)

The AI software Stable Diffusion has a remarkable ability to turn text into images. When I asked the software to draw “Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonald's sign,” for example, it generated the picture you see above.

Stable Diffusion can do this because it was trained on hundreds of millions of example images harvested from across the web. Some of these images were in the public domain or had been published under permissive licenses such as Creative Commons. Many others were not—and the world’s artists and photographers aren’t happy about it.

In January, three visual artists filed a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, the startup that created Stable Diffusion. In February, the image-licensing giant Getty filed a lawsuit of its own.