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China launches first AI news anchor on state media that mimics a real human

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China’s official state media, Xinhua News Agency, has added artificial intelligence anchors to its news team through a partnership with Chinese search engine Sogou. The AI anchors are created using machine learning to program speech and facial movements which accurately imitate real humans, and they are programmed to read out anything entered into their system. One of the characters used in the newscasts is based on a real human anchor currently working for the agency, Zhang Zhao.

The AI anchors have already been launched on Xinhua’s official website, social media platforms, apps, and online streaming TV with broadcasts in both English and Chinese. One of the goals stated for the technology is to continue advancing the field of global AI synthesis so that even broader applications will be possible. As another goal, the agency has promoted the move towards AI broadcasting as a function of efficiency with 24-hour availability for newscasting without added personnel cost.

Xinhua’s English AI anchor. | Credit: Xinhua News Agency

The technology is very similar to the “Deep Fake” image processing software, another AI creation which synthesizes facial features to generate realistic videos. It has been infamously used to create celebrity videos and pornography over the years, but other legitimate purposes such as game design and filmmaking are the real drivers of its development. Serious efforts are being made towards detecting fake videos for legitimate ones, and it can be expected to be an ongoing battle as both sides struggle to keep up with the other.

Xinhua’s Chinese AI anchor, one real, one AI. | Credit: Xinhua News Agency

While the march towards integrating technology with daily life in new ways is welcome in many arenas, the decision to use AI for Chinese state media purposes has been met with resistance. In the 2018 World Press Freedom Index maintained by the organization Reporters Without Borders, China is ranked in the bottom 5 out of 180 countries, the lower numbers being the least free. According to the organization’s feature page on China’s media summary, this low rank is due to an oppressive “new international media order” being promoted by President Xi Jinping to bring all media outlets under the state’s Communist Party’s close control.

Reporters Without Borders also cites China’s tough Internet regulations which threaten the public with jail time for comments and posts shared on social media that are not compliant with state laws. Given the state of Chinese media, critics of the AI anchors argue they function as propaganda “puppets” rather than a move towards efficiency. Since the anchors report text as provided without any additional human oversight, this new technology is seen to enhance the state’s existing tool belt against free thought.

Watch the below clip to see a sample of the anchor in action:

Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Musk’s massive Terafab project will get final location soon

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Credit: SpaceX

Elon Musk’s massive Terafab project, which will be the first true conglomeration between each of his major entities, is set to get its final location soon, the CEO said on Tesla’s recent earnings call.

“The Terafab, we expect to announce a location soon, and provide more details about our plans in that regard. We’ll leave that to the product, the launch announcement rather than try to squeeze it into an earnings call,” Musk said last Wednesday.

Tesla Terafab set for launch: Inside the $20B AI chip factory that will reshape the auto industry

Terafab was announced by Musk back in March and was essentially a massive, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing project that would provide all the chips the three companies needed for their AI initiatives without needing third-party companies.

The plant will produce over 1 terawatt of AI compute each year, and will help back up projects like Optimus, Full Self-Driving, and other AI-based projects that Musk’s companies are working on.

In April, less than a month after the project was launched, Intel announced it would join the project, contributing manufacturing expertise and consulting to Terafab as a whole. Intel is one of three chip manufacturers that produce sub-5 nanometer chips at scale. TSMC and Samsung are the other two.

However, there was no true indication of where Terafab would end up, but most believe it will likely be somewhere in Texas. Business Insider has reported that SpaceX plans to build out Terafab in Grimes County, Texas, but this is unconfirmed.

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Musk confirmed recently that it would not be on Giga Texas property, as it is simply too large.

Terafab holds much of Musk’s grand ambitions for the future within its construct. It holds so much responsibility for the future and the biggest projects that Musk’s companies can imagine.

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“I think this is a very big announcement and it deserves to have its own day in the spotlight and not be squeezed into an earnings call,” he said. “I do think Terafab is going to be an amazing initiative and a necessary one, and one without which we will be constrained in our ability to scale Optimus production, because we simply won’t have enough AI chips.”

He continued by stating that Terafab is necessary for scaling Optimus, which Musk said could be the biggest product of any kind of all time. “It’s crucial to solve that, and we’ll have to solve memory, logic, and packaging in order to scale Optimus.”

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Elon Musk reveals SpaceX performed secret Starship test on Flight 13

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Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX performed a secret test on a specific portion of Starship with its recent 13th test flight last week, CEO Elon Musk revealed.

Starship’s 13th test flight took place last Friday, and in many aspects, it was one of the most overwhelmingly successful launches in the project’s history.

All of the mission objectives were met without incident, both the Super Heavy Booster and Ship managed to perform safe splashdowns in the Gulf of America and the Indian Ocean, respectively, and the deployment of Starlink satellites came and went without any complications.

However, there was more on the agenda for SpaceX with Flight 13. Musk revealed an internal test of the ship’s heat shield tiles, as the space exploration company wanted to push them to the limits after previous issues.

Many noticed that Starship’s initial launch seemed to be more accelerated than normal, and that was not a mistake. Musk revealed that SpaceX decided to give Flight 13 an intentionally aggressive acceleration rate in an effort to test how well the tiles would remain attached to the ship:

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SpaceX had issues with some of the heat shield tiles remaining attached early on in the Starship program. The first six test flights presented some kind of anomaly with them, so the company’s big focus with them was to figure out a way to keep them intact through the duration of the flight.

Things truly improved as Flight 10 showed that ceramic tiles generally stayed attached to the ship far better due to refined attachment, as SpaceX utilized pins instead of adhesives. Flights 10 through 13 truly showed some clear progress with the heat shield tiles, and this latest test seems to be where some real progress was noticed, especially by Musk.

The 13th Starship launch last Friday was the second with Starship V3, SpaceX’s latest and greatest iteration of the spacecraft. Goals and ambitions are getting even grander as the project continues to progress. Musk has already hinted that SpaceX will likely try to catch Starship with Flight 14.

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Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride

Tesla owner David Moss just pushed his intervention free FSD streak past 20,000 miles total.

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Tesla FSD 14.3 [Credit: TESLARATI)

Tesla Model 3 owner David Moss has spent the better part of eight months turning his vehicle into a rolling stress test for Full Self-Driving, and this week he pushed his single, continuous FSD streak past 20,000 miles without a human intervening.

Moss, a Tacoma, Washington resident who sells LiDAR scanning equipment for a living, first drew wide attention in December 2025 when he logged 10,000 consecutive miles on FSD v14.2. Days later he drove from the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covering 2,732 miles in two days and 20 hours with zero disengagements, the first verified coast to coast autonomous drive in Tesla’s history. Tesla even featured the trip as an official customer story in March. That original streak eventually reached 12,961 miles across 30 states before ending in rural Wisconsin in January, when snow and single digit temperatures forced Moss to take over.

Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions

He started over, and this run has gone further. In late May, Moss drove 3,760 miles across Canada with two companions, from Horseshoe Bay in Vancouver to a Tesla showroom in Halifax, again without a single intervention, a trip Tesla AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated him for on X. In June, he pushed the same unbroken streak south, aiming to link the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and crossed 10,000 miles on Tesla’s newly added in car streak counter along the way, the first driver to do so since Tesla began showing confetti animations for the feature.


It’s worth noting that every mile is logged through the FSD Database, a community run tracker built by Tesla influencer Omar Qazi, well known as @WholeMars on X, that pulls telemetry straight from the car and records disengagements down to a tenth of a mile. That verification is what separates Moss’s numbers from casual claims on social media.

The streak itself is a fairly recent addition to Tesla’s software. FSD v14.2 introduced a Self Driving Stats panel tracking the ratio of autonomous to manual miles, and v14.3.4 added the live streak counter in June, which resets the moment a driver brakes, wrenches the wheel or cancels navigation. Reaching 20,000 miles on that counter means a single Tesla drove itself through countless highways, city grids, construction zones and Supercharger stalls without a single reset.

Moss has said the goal was never to set a record for its own sake, but to show, mile by verified mile, what the software can already do.

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