n explosion from the side of an old brick building. A crashed bicycle in a city intersection. A cockroach in a box of takeout. It took less than 10 seconds to create each of these images with the Reimagine tool in the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. They are crisp. They are in full color. They are high-fidelity. There is no suspicious background blur, no tell-tale sixth finger. These photographs are extraordinarily convincing, and they are all extremely fucking fake.
Anyone who buys a Pixel 9 — the latest model of Google’s flagship phone, available starting this week — will have access to the easiest, breeziest user interface for top-tier lies, built right into their mobile device. This is all but certain to become the norm, with similar features already available on competing devices and rolling out on others in the near future. When a smartphone “just works,” it’s usually a good thing; here, it’s the entire problem in the first place.
Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed. (Consider Victorian spirit photos, the infamous Loch Ness monster photograph, or Stalin’s photographic purges of IRL-purged comrades.) But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule.
If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them. Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes.
This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.
A real photo of a stream.
Edited with Google’s Magic Editor.
A real photo of a person in a living room (with their face obscured).
Edited with Google’s Magic Editor.
No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus — for as long as any of us has been here, photographs proved something happened. Consider all the ways in which the assumed veracity of a photograph has, previously, validated the truth of your experiences. The preexisting ding in the fender of your rental car. The leak in your ceiling. The arrival of a package. An actual, non-AI-generated cockroach in your takeout. When wildfires encroach upon your residential neighborhood, how do you communicate to friends and acquaintances the thickness of the smoke outside?
And up until now, the onus has largely been on those denying the truth of a photo to prove their claims. The flat-earther is out of step with the social consensus not because they do not understand astrophysics — how many of us actually understand astrophysics, after all? — but because they must engage in a series of increasingly elaborate justifications for why certain photographs and videos are not real. They must invent a vast state conspiracy to explain the steady output of satellite photographs that capture the curvature of the Earth. They must create a soundstage for the 1969 Moon landing.
We have taken for granted that the burden of proof is upon them. In the age of the Pixel 9, it might be best to start brushing up on our astrophysics.
For the most part, the average image created by these AI tools will, in and of itself, be pretty harmless — an extra tree in a backdrop, an alligator in a pizzeria, a silly costume interposed over a cat. In aggregate, the deluge upends how we treat the concept of the photo entirely, and that in itself has tremendous repercussions. Consider, for instance, that the last decade has seen extraordinary social upheaval in the United States sparked by grainy videos of police brutality. Where the authorities obscured or concealed reality, these videos told the truth.
The persistent cry of “Fake News!” from Trumpist quarters presaged the beginning of this era of unmitigated bullshit, in which the impact of the truth will be deadened by the firehose of lies. The next Abu Ghraib will be buried under a sea of AI-generated war crime snuff. The next George Floyd will go unnoticed and unvindicated.
A real photo of an empty street.
Edited with Google’s Magic Editor.
A real photo inside a New York City subway station.
Edited with Google’s Magic Editor.
You can already see the shape of what’s to come. In the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, the defense claimed that Apple’s pinch-to-zoom manipulates photos, successfully persuading the judge to put the burden of proof on the prosecution to show that zoomed-in iPhone footage was not AI-manipulated. More recently, Donald Trump falsely claimed that a photo of a well-attended Kamala Harris rally was AI-generated — a claim that was only possible to make because people were able to believe it.
Even before AI, those of us in the media had been working in a defensive crouch, scrutinizing the details and provenance of every image, vetting for misleading context or photo manipulation. After all, every major news event comes with an onslaught of misinformation. But the incoming paradigm shift implicates something much more fundamental than the constant grind of suspicion that is sometimes called digital literacy.
Google understands perfectly well what it is doing to the photograph as an institution — in an interview with Wired, the group product manager for the Pixel camera described the editing tool as “help[ing] you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.” A photo, in this world, stops being a supplement to fallible human recollection, but instead a mirror of it. And as photographs become little more than hallucinations made manifest, the dumbest shit will devolve into a courtroom battle over the reputation of the witnesses and the existence of corroborating evidence.
This erosion of the social consensus began before the Pixel 9, and it will not be carried forth by the Pixel 9 alone. Still, the phone’s new AI capabilities are of note not just because the barrier to entry is so low, but because the safeguards we ran into were astonishingly anemic. The industry’s proposed AI image watermarking standard is mired in the usual standards slog, and Google’s own much-vaunted AI watermarking system was nowhere in sight when The Verge tried out the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor. The photos that are modified with the Reimagine tool simply have a line of removable metadata added to them. (The inherent fragility of this kind of metadata was supposed to be addressed by Google’s invention of the theoretically unremovable SynthID watermark.) Google told us that the outputs of Pixel Studio — a pure prompt generator that is closer to DALL-E — will be tagged with a SynthID watermark; ironically, we found the capabilities of the Magic Editor’s Reimagine tool, which modifies existing photos, were much more alarming.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Neil Armstrong, Dorothea Lange, Joe Rosenthal
Google claims the Pixel 9 will not be an unfettered bullshit factory but is thin on substantive assurances. “We design our Generative AI tools to respect the intent of user prompts and that means they may create content that may offend when instructed by the user to do so,” Alex Moriconi, Google communications manager, told The Verge in an email. “That said, it’s not anything goes. We have clear policies and Terms of Service on what kinds of content we allow and don’t allow, and build guardrails to prevent abuse. At times, some prompts can challenge these tools’ guardrails and we remain committed to continually enhancing and refining the safeguards we have in place.”
The policies are what you would expect — for example, you can’t use Google services to facilitate crimes or incite violence. Some attempted prompts returned the generic error message, “Magic Editor can’t complete this edit. Try typing something else.” (You can see throughout this story, however, several worrisome prompts that did work.) But when it comes down to it, standard-fare content moderation will not save the photograph from its incipient demise as a signal of truth.
We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.
Some electric car brands are hemorrhaging value, with the worst losing as much as $600 a day. Learn which models to watch, why this is happening, and how you can game the market to your advantage.
Electric vehicle depreciation is something of a hot topic right now, and for good reason. On one hand, there are some fantastic deals to be had on the secondhand market, but on the other of course, there’s the thorny issue of some EVs losing half of their value in a single year.
Cars losing you a chunk of cash the instant they’re driven off the dealer lot is nothing new, especially at the pricier end of the market. And if you intend to keep your shiny new EV for a long time, then its worth after just a year or two matters far less. But what if you’ve experimented with your first EV then decided its range or your local charging infrastructure isn’t up to scratch, and want to sell within the first year? If that’s you, you’d better be prepared for a significant loss.
In a bid not to tar all EVs with the same brush, we’ve aimed to be balanced in our approach to discovering trade-in valuations. There’s plenty of color to be reported here, too—like the US dealer who actively warned our reporter against selling him their EV, or the story of a Mercedes EQE that lost more than $600 each day—but for now let us deliver the cold, hard numbers.
We are using two tools for this research. The first is an online appraisal system by Edmunds, the US automotive industry resource, and the second is Cap HPI, a vehicle valuation service for the UK auto trade. Let’s start with the UK electric trade-in landscape, then compare it with the US’s.
Main Offenders
Our first discovery was that, in the UK, various new electric cars lose 50 percent of their value in the first 12 months. Yes, you read that right—some EVs depreciate by 50 percent in a single year.
Now, this cannot be said of every EV, but Cap HPI data provided to WIRED by Parkers, a respected UK online car resource, revealed how six different EVs are all projected to halve in value after 12 months and 10,000 miles. These include the Audi e-Tron GT, which plummeted by 49 percent from £107,675 ($138,000) to £54,700 ($70,100), and the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which fell by 52 percent from £59,325 to £28,575. According to the data, a Polestar 2 would also lose 52 percent of its £52,895 sticker price in just 12 months.
The Tesla Model 3 fared only slightly better, falling by 45 percent in its first 12 months and 10,000 miles, while the Porsche Taycan fell by 49 percent and the Hyundai Ioniq 5 lost exactly half in the same period. These prices are all based on a midspec version of each car, since factors like battery size, trim level, and even paint color can have a marked effect on trade-in value.
Miley Face
But do you know what has less of an impact on depreciation? Mileage. If the long-range Polestar 2 mentioned above had covered 20,000 miles in its first year instead of 10,000—well above the annual UK average of just 7,000—its estimated trade-in value falls by only an extra £975, or a further 2 percent of its original price.
It’s a similar story with the Taycan. A 4S model with the long-range battery fell from £100,200 to £50,700 in its first 12 months and 10,000 miles. But if it had covered 20,000 miles in the same year it would have fallen by only another £2,650. Or, after two years and 20,000 miles it would be worth £44,175, according to the Cap HPI data. Age (beyond the first 12 months) has a similarly insignificant effect. A 10,000-mile Taycan is worth £50,700 after one year, or £46,600 after two years.
YouTuber The MacMaster has been charting the decrease in value of his own two-year-old Taycan, which dropped from a new price of £120,000 down to a Porsche dealership valuation of £44,650 in March earlier this year, leaving him in negative equity as he still owes approximately £64,700 on the EV. To make matters worse, the Porsche dealership giving the valuation supposedly refused to take his Taycan.
Remember, these are all estimated trade-in values. You would expect to earn more by selling the car privately, and you’d see the same car advertised for more by a dealer to ensure they make a profit.
Depreciation of the Tesla Model 3 also slows significantly after the first year. Cap HPI data states how a 2023 Model 3 Long Range would fall from £50,000 to £27,550 after one year and 10,000 miles, then by only an additional £2,500 after two years and 20,000 miles. Had the first 10,000 miles been spread over 18 months instead of 12, the price would fall by only an extra £825 in those six months.
The ability for Tesla, and other EV manufacturers, to update and upgrade a car’s software months or even years after it left the factory should help with long-term depreciation. We’ve seen how Tesla can push out major user interface upgrades, and even add entirely new features, over the air. Back in 2019, Jaguar pushed out a software update that claimed to increase the range of its I-Pace by up to 8 percent, and in 2022 the Polestar 2 gained Apple CarPlay—a feature that manufacturers used to charge handsomely for—via a free OTA update.
EV vs. ICE
As we said earlier, heavy day-one depreciation has long been par for the car ownership course. But how do year-old EVs stack up against similar internally-combusted cars? And more specifically, what happens when you compare two cars of a similar size and price from the same manufacturer? Cap HPI data has the answers and, again, the results are best viewed sitting down.
When comparing a gas-powered Audi Q7 55 with an electric Audi e-tron 55 SUV, both one year old and with 10,000 miles, the gas-powered car is worth 42 percent more after 12 months, despite costing less when new.
This is also true with lower-value cars. Cap HPI data showed how, after three years and 30,000 miles, a gas-powered Volkswagen Golf has a 46 percent price premium over an electric Golf.
We expected to find a similar difference between the gas-powered Porsche Panamera and electric Porsche Taycan. However, Cap HPI data suggests similar, midlevel 4S variants of each lose a similar amount of value over two years and 20,000 miles. The Panamera fell from £93,140 to £63,250, while the Taycan dropped from £84,030 to £53,000.
Auto America
Now for the US prices. According to Edmunds, a 2022 Porsche Taycan Turbo with 10,000 miles (well under the US annual average of 14,000) was worth about $106,000 at the time of writing in July 2024. That’s about $50,000 below what it would have cost new, not including optional extras, which pump up the retail price but tend not to affect resale value.
Historical data produced by Edmunds shows how the car’s value briefly rose from $129,000 to almost $131,000 between August and October 2023, but has fallen markedly since, tumbling by as much as $4,000 per month between November 2023 and February 2024 before dropping a further $10,000 over the next five months.
The valuation tool states: “This vehicle’s value is likely to decrease within the next month. Time is not on your side if you’ve been waiting to sell/trade for maximum value.” WIRED found just such a Taycan for sale in Los Angeles for $120,000, suggesting a dealer profit of roughly $13,000 before any negotiation.
Although initial depreciation isn’t as brutal in the US as the UK, there are still plenty of deals to be had. WIRED found a fully-loaded 2020 Taycan Turbo with just 5,000 miles on the clock for $92,000—a saving of $86,000 on the original purchase price. That’s the equivalent of more than $17 per mile in depreciation.
A 2023 Polestar 2 Long Range Single Motor with 10,000 miles on the clock has a trade-in value of $30,500, according to the Edmunds appraisal tool. This increases to $32,500 if sold privately, and the tool states an estimated dealer price of $35,000. The trade-in value represents a $20,000 or 40 percent drop from the car’s approximate retail price.
As with the Taycan, Edmunds says the Polestar 2’s value is trending down, but interestingly it increased in three of the previous eight months to July 2024. During our research WIRED saw how, in some cases, Edmunds would suggest holding onto the vehicle, since prices were on the up. As one EV specialist stressed to us, car values constantly change regardless of how they are powered.
Covid Consequences
The used-car market was turned on its head in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as production slowed, key components such as microchips became scarce, and secondhand prices rose. According to iSeeCars, a US car search and research company, the effects are still being felt, and all cars held their value better in 2023 than in 2019. Prior to the pandemic, the average car would lose 50 percent of its value in five years, the company said, but by late 2023 this had fallen to 38.8 percent.
However, electric cars are performing less well, losing an average of 49.1 percent of their value in five years, according to analysis of more than 1 million 2018-model-year cars sold between 2022 and 2023.
A June 2024 study, also from iSeeCars, found used EV prices had fallen below gas-powered cars for the first time. Having analyzed more than 2.2 million used cars between May 2023 and May 2024, iSeeCars found the average used EV had fallen from $41,000 to $28,800, while the average gas car had fallen only slightly, from $32,700 to $31,400.
“It’s clear used-car shoppers will no longer pay a premium for electric vehicles, and in fact consider electric powertrains a detractor, making them less desirable—and less valuable—than traditional models,” said Karl Brauer, an analyst from iSeeCars.
Secondhand Supremacy
While undoubtedly a concern for anyone who plans to sell their nearly-new EV, the data is great news for secondhand buyers. From a £5,000 ($6,400) Renault Zoe and £12,000 ($15,000) Citroen e-C4 to a $25,000 Polestar 2 or a $30,000 Jaguar I-Pace, there are amazing deals to be had. And, what’s more, EV batteries are lasting longer than expected, according to Recurrent, whose community of 20,000 EV drivers states just 2.5 percent of battery packs have been replaced outside of manufacturer recalls.
It’s common knowledge among EV buyers that replacing a failed battery pack can be incredibly expensive. According to Recurrent, replacing an EV battery out of warranty costs between $6,500 and $20,000.
The fear of coughing up more cash than the car is worth to swap out a broken pack lingers in the mind of any driver whose EV is no longer protected by its manufacturer’s battery warranty, which often lasts for eight years or 100,000 miles. That said, battery failure is rare, and many aftermarket warranty providers now include EV battery cover, according to the RAC, a British breakdown company.
And the Loser Is …
Yet despite EV batteries lasting longer than expected, year-one depreciation horror stories remain. The most acute eample we’ve seen was of a Mercedes EQE run for six months by TopGear. An anonymous call to a Mercedes dealer revealed it had lost £40,000 ($51,000) in just three months and 4,500 miles. That’s close to 50 percent in 12 weeks, or the equivalent of about £480 ($615) per day.
Parkers data provided to WIRED told a less extreme story, but still revealed how a midrange Mercedes EQE 350 is estimated to plummet from a retail price of £89,290 to just £49,500 in its first 12 months. A gas-powered Mercedes E-Class also fell to just under £50,000 after one year, but it cost £20,000 less to start with.
Why Is This Happening?
Car depreciation is nothing new, especially at the luxury end of the market; anyone who has shelled out six figures for a German executive sedan will know what steep losses feel like.
Factor in the even higher costs of electric cars and their optional extras, plus the omnipresent concerns of EV range and charging infrastructure—then look at how quickly EVs are improving with every facelift, with new models gaining extra range, performance, and charging speed over their predecessors—and soft residuals are bound to occur.
Consider too how many of the EVs grabbing depreciation headlines right now are examples of first-generation technology. The Porsche Taycan, Audi e-tron, and Mercedes EQ families are all first attempts by legacy manufacturers caught napping by Tesla and, more recently, by a slew of low-cost, state-backed upstarts from China. They are the original, non-3G iPhones of their day and are now already being replaced by facelifted versions that go much farther and charge more quickly.
Discounts on new EVs also have an effect on the used market. Tesla is well known for its wildly fluctuating prices, but others have slashed prices recently, too. WIRED found official Porsche dealerships in the UK offering several brand-new (but previous-generation) Taycans with a £20,000 ($25,000) discount on their £110,000 list price. One example, a GTS Sport Turismo was being offered with a £33,500 discount.
With the new 2025 Taycan having only just arrived, discounts on last year’s tech are to be expected, and that’ll twist the knife even further on used prices, as well as on a secondhand market already filling up with three-, four- or five-year-old EVs that have just reached the end of their lease deal.
So, What Should You Do?
Despite rampant depreciation, EV sales are still on the up. They accounted for 18.5 percent of all new vehicle sales in the UK in July, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, up 18.8 percent on the previous year, and are outselling plug-in hybrids 2 to 1. According to Edmunds, 6.8 percent of new vehicles sold in the US in May were fully electric, four times that of plug-in hybrids.
For buyers who can charge at home—and perhaps benefit from associated tax incentives, too—buying a new EV can still be a sound financial decision, providing you intend to keep it for the long term. Buying the car outright, or with a bank loan, and selling it within 12 months will likely leave you significantly out of pocket. But, as the data in both the US and UK shows, prices tend to stabilize through subsequent years.
The best advice? Buy secondhand, unless you can truly afford to not care otherwise, and enjoy your bargain EV—complete with its low running costs and minimal maintenance requirements—for the half-decade or more still on the battery warranty.
Temu, the Chinese e-commerce platform, offers products at remarkably low prices, which raises concerns about its business practices. One significant issue is the undervaluation of parcels entering the EU. Estimates suggest that around 65% of parcels are deliberately undervalued in customs declarations to avoid tariffs, which undermines local businesses and creates an uneven playing field [1]. Additionally, Temu employs a direct-to-consumer model, sourcing products directly from manufacturers in China, allowing them to benefit from bulk discounts and reduced shipping costs [2].
Benefits for the Chinese State
The low pricing strategy of Temu serves multiple purposes for the Chinese state. Firstly, it helps expand China’s influence in global e-commerce by increasing the market share of Chinese companies abroad. This can lead to greater economic ties and dependency on Chinese goods. Secondly, by facilitating the export of low-cost products, Temu contributes to the Chinese economy by boosting manufacturing and logistics sectors. Lastly, the data collected from users can be leveraged for insights into consumer behavior, which may benefit Chinese businesses and potentially the state itself in terms of economic planning and strategy [1].
Overall, while Temu’s low prices attract consumers, they also raise significant regulatory and ethical concerns in Europe, prompting scrutiny from authorities regarding compliance with local laws and standards.
Deeper Analysis of Future Benefits for the Chinese State
Temu’s aggressive pricing strategy in Europe not only serves immediate commercial interests but also aligns with broader strategic goals of the Chinese state. Here are several potential future benefits for China:
Economic Expansion and Market Penetration: By establishing a strong foothold in European markets through low prices, Temu can facilitate the expansion of Chinese goods into new territories. This not only increases sales volume but also enhances brand recognition and loyalty among European consumers. As more consumers become accustomed to purchasing Chinese products, it could lead to a long-term shift in buying habits, favoring Chinese brands over local alternatives.
Strengthening Supply Chains: Temu’s model emphasizes direct sourcing from manufacturers, which can help streamline supply chains. This efficiency can be replicated across various sectors, allowing China to become a dominant player in global supply chains. By controlling more aspects of production and distribution, China can mitigate risks associated with international trade tensions and disruptions, ensuring a more resilient economic structure.
Data Collection and Consumer Insights: The platform’s operations will generate vast amounts of consumer data, which can be analyzed to gain insights into European consumer behavior. This data can inform not only marketing strategies but also product development, allowing Chinese manufacturers to tailor their offerings to meet the specific preferences of European consumers. Such insights can enhance competitiveness and drive innovation within Chinese industries.
Geopolitical Influence: By increasing its economic presence in Europe, China can leverage its commercial relationships to enhance its geopolitical influence. Economic ties often translate into political goodwill, which can be beneficial in negotiations on various fronts, including trade agreements and international policies. This strategy aligns with China’s broader goal of expanding its influence globally, as outlined in its recent political resolutions emphasizing the importance of state power and common prosperity.
Promotion of Technological Advancements: As Temu grows, it may invest in technology to improve logistics, customer service, and user experience. This could lead to advancements in e-commerce technologies that can be exported back to China, enhancing domestic capabilities. Moreover, the emphasis on technology aligns with China’s ambitions to become a leader in areas such as artificial intelligence and data analytics, as highlighted in its national strategies.
Cultural Exchange and Soft Power: By making Chinese products more accessible and appealing to European consumers, Temu can facilitate a form of cultural exchange. As consumers engage with Chinese brands, they may also become more receptive to Chinese culture and values, enhancing China’s soft power. This cultural integration can help counter negative perceptions and foster a more favorable view of China in the long term.
In conclusion, Temu’s low pricing strategy is not merely a tactic for market entry; it is a multifaceted approach that can yield significant long-term benefits for the Chinese state. By enhancing economic ties, gathering valuable consumer data, and promoting technological advancements, China positions itself to strengthen its global influence and economic resilience in an increasingly competitive landscape.
One of the most fascinating and frightening incidents in computer security history started in 2022 with a few pushy emails to the mailing list for a small, one-person open source project.
A user had submitted a complex bit of code that was now waiting for the maintainer to review. But a different user with the name Jigar Kumar felt that this wasn’t happening fast enough. “Patches spend years on this mailing list,” he complained. “5.2.0 release was 7 years ago. There is no reason to think anything is coming soon.”.
A month later, he followed up: “Over 1 month and no closer to being merged. Not a suprise.” [sic]
A few weeks ago, the world learned a shocking twist. “Jigar Kumar” does not seem to exist at all. There are no records of any person by that name outside the pushy emails. He — along with a number of other accounts — was apparently part of a campaign to compromise nearly every Linux-running computer in the world. (Linux is an open source operating system — as opposed to closed systems from companies like Apple — that runs on tens of millions of devices.)
That campaign, experts believe, was likely the work of a well-resourced state actor, one who almost pulled off an attack that could have made it possible for the attackers to remotely access millions of computers, effectively logging in as anyone they wanted. The security ramifications would have been huge.
How to (almost) hack everything
Here’s how events played out: In 2005, software engineer Lasse Collin wrote a series of tools for better-compressing files (it’s similar to the process behind a .zip file). He made those tools available for free online, and lots of larger projects incorporated Collin’s work, which was eventually called XZ Utils.
Collin’s tool became one part of the vast open source ecosystem that powers much of the modern internet. We might think that something as central to modern life as the internet has a professionally maintained structure, but as an XKCD comic published well before the hack shows, it’s closer to the truth that “all modern digital infrastructure” rests on “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” XZ Utils was one such project — and yes, you should find it a little worrying that there are many of them.
Starting in 2021, a user going by the name “Jia Tan” — he, too, doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else — started making contributions to the XZ project. At first, they were harmless small fixes. Then, Tan started submitting larger additions.
The way an open source project like this one works is that a maintainer — Collin, in this case — has to read and approve each such submission. Effectively, Tan was overloading Collin with homework.
That’s when “Kumar” showed up to complain that Collin was taking too long. Another account that doesn’t seem to exist joined the chorus. They argued that Collin clearly wasn’t up to the task of maintaining his project alone and pushed for him to add “Jia Tan” as another maintainer.
“It seems likely that they were fakes created to push Lasse to give Jia more control,” engineer Russ Cox writes in a detailed timeline of the incident. “It worked. Over the next few months, Jia started replying to threads on xz-devel authoritatively about the upcoming 5.4.0 release.” He’d become a trusted “maintainer” who could add code to XZ Utils himself.
Why does any of this matter? Because one of the many, many open source tools that happened to incorporate XZ Utils was OpenSSH, which is used to remotely access computers and is used by millions of servers around the world.
“Tan” carefully added to XZ Utils some well-disguised code that compromised OpenSSH, effectively allowing the creators to log in remotely to any computer running OpenSSH. The files containing the (heavily disguised) code were accepted as part of the larger project.
Fortunately, almost all of the millions of potentially targeted computers were not affected because it’s routine for such a new update to first be released as “unstable” (meaning expected to have some bugs), and most administrators wait for a subsequent “stable” release.
Before that happened, “Jia Tan”’s work got caught. Andres Freund, a software engineer at Microsoft, was off work and doing some testing on a computer that had the “unstable” new release. Under most circumstances, the hack ran seamlessly, but under the circumstances he was testing in, it slowed down SSH performance. He dug deeper and quickly unraveled the whole scheme.
Which means that, thanks to one Microsoft engineer doing some work off-hours, your computer remains secure — at least, as far as I know.
Can we do better than getting lucky?
There was nothing inevitable about this hack getting discovered. Lots of other people were running the unstable new build without noticing any problems. What made Freund suspicious in the first place wasn’t the suspicious code but a bug that had been accidentally introduced by “Jia Tan.”
No one wants to believe that modern computer security essentially relies on “a lot of coincidences.” We’d much rather have reliable processes. But I hope this narrative makes it clear just how hard it is to reliably defend the jury-rigged internet we have against an attack like this.
The people behind “Jia Tan” spent more than two years building the access they needed for this attack. Some of the specifics have to do with the dynamics of open source software, where decades-old projects are often in a quiet maintenance stage from which, as we saw, an aggressive actor can seize control. But with the same resources and dedication that were behind “Jia Tan,” you could get hired at a software company to pull off the same thing on closed-source software too.
Most of all, it’s very hard to guess whether this attempted attack was unprecedented or unusual simply in that it got caught. Which means we have no idea whether there are other land mines lurking in the bowels of the internet.
Personally, as someone who doesn’t work in computer security, the main thing I took away from this was less a specific policy prescription and more a sense of awe and appreciation. Our world runs on unsung contributions by engineers like Collin and Freund, people who spend their free time building stuff, testing stuff, and sharing what they build for the benefit of everyone. This is inconvenient for security, but it’s also really cool.
I wasn’t able to reach Collin for comment. (His website said: “To media and reporters: I won’t reply for now because first I need to understand the situation thoroughly enough. It’s enough to reload this page once per 48 hours to check if this message has changed.”) But I hope he ultimately comes to think that being personally targeted by this fairly extraordinary effort to make his work on XZ utils feel inadequate is, in fact, a remarkable vindication of its importance.
The attempted supply chain attack against XZ Utils is raising troubling questions about the motivations of the suspected threat actor behind the incident as well as the overall security of the larger open source ecosystem.
A Microsoft engineer accidentally found obfuscated malicious code installed in the xz library, which could lead to a major supply chain compromise.
Security researchers and other industry experts are pointing to the suspicion that a longtime contributor is behind what is now considered a multiyear effort to establish themselves as an insider, leading up to the attempted supply chain attack.
XZ Utils, a data compression software utility found in most Linux distributions, has long been considered a widely trusted project, according to researchers.
“The most unique and unsettling aspect of this attack is the significant effort and investment made by the attacker in gradually establishing themselves over several years as a credible open-source contributor and carefully advancing their position until they gained trust and the opportunity to maintain and add malicious code into a widely used package,” Jonathan Sar Shalom, director of threat research at JFrog, said via email.
Researchers point to a Github account @JiaT75, which has since been suspended, as the suspected original source of the backdoor.
GitHub confirmed that it “suspended user accounts and removed the content” in keeping with its acceptable use policies, however after an investigation the account belonging to @Larhzu was reinstated.
What followed was a multiyear effort to gain trust within the community, while at the same time allegedly testing the waters by making subtle changes that failed to raise any immediate alarm bells.
“Now when we look back at the tale of the tape, what we see is Jia kind of surreptitiously inserted all these little changes over time,” Omkhar Arasaratnam, general manager at the Open Source Security Foundation, said in an interview. “None of them catastrophic, none of them very flashy. But you know, just to see if people were watching.”
Maintainers in focus
The open source community has seen previous cases of maintainers throwing tantrums or using the community as a platform to protest larger issues. But the patience and sophistication of this attack is raising questions for an increasing pool of experts about whether nation-state support is a factor.
“Our analysis suggests that the sophistication and operational security observed in this incident, including the strategic use of email addresses and IP addresses, point to a highly trained and sophisticated adversary,” said Brian Fox, co-founder and CTO of Sonatype, a supply chain management platform. “The lack of tangible evidence of the threat actor’s existence beyond their precise and limited engagements further distinguishes this from the actions of a rogue open source contributor.”
Users were urged to immediately stop using Fedora Rawhide instances for work or personal use and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned developers and users to downgrade to an uncompromised version.
Andres Freund, a principal software engineer at Microsoft, stumbled upon some anomalous activity last week and publicly disclosed the incident. Freund observed sshd processes using an unusual amount of CPU, however noted that the wrong usernames had been applied.
“Recalled that I had seen an odd valgrind complaint in automated testing of postgres, a few weeks earlier after package updates,” Freund said in a post on Mastodon.
Jake Williams, a faculty member at IANS Research, said the incident highlights the need for defense in depth, including the need to have properly staffed vulnerability intelligence teams and proper investments in tooling.
“Organizations with strict firewall rules preventing access to their SSH servers limited exploitation opportunities, even for vulnerable deployments,” Williams said via email. “Some [cloud security posture management systems] had scans for vulnerable instances released the same day this was detected.”
Decades after her dad’s iconic sports car time-traveled into movie history, Kat DeLorean wants to build a modern remake. There’s just one problem: Someone else owns the trademark on her name.
Video: Getty Images; Ángel Guerra
In the fall of 2020, bored and restless in Covid-restricted Spain, Ángel Guerra doodled a dream car. The automotive designer, then 38, wanted to make a tribute to his first four-wheeled love: the time-traveling DeLorean DMC-12 that rolled out of a cloud of steam in Back to the Future. The sketch that took shape on Guerra’s computer had all the iconic elements of the 1980s original—gull-wing doors, stainless-steel cladding, louver blades over the rear window, a rakish black side stripe—plus a few modern touches. Guerra smoothed out the folded-paper angles, widened the body, stretched the wheel arches to accommodate bigger rims and tires. After two weeks, he decided he liked this new DeLorean enough to stick it on Instagram.
The post blew up. Gearheads raved about the design. The music producer Swizz Beatz DM’d Guerra to ask how much it would cost to build. Guerra started to think that maybe his sketch should become a real car. He reached out to a Texas firm called DeLorean Motor Company, which years earlier had acquired the original DeLorean trademarks, but was gently rebuffed. The design seemed destined to live in cyberspace forever. Then, by some algorithmic magic, a different kind of DeLorean showed up on Guerra’s Instagram feed in the spring of 2022—a human DeLorean by the name of Kat. Her posts showcased her love for her puppy, hair dye, and above all her late father, John Z. DeLorean. Although the general public often remembers him as a high-flying CEO with fabulous hair and a surgically augmented chin who went down in a federal sting operation, Guerra chiefly thought of him as a brilliant engineer. He sent Kat a message with some kind words about her dad and a link to the design. Kat saw it and got stoked.
Kat DeLorean is a frequently stoked type of person. At the time, she had recently dyed her long hair in rainbow colors to, in her words, “create the rainbows in my heart on my head.” Yet for much of her life, her relationship to the DeLorean name had been an unhappy one. When people asked why she didn’t own a DMC-12, she would reply: “If there was an iconic representation of your entire life falling apart, would you park it in your driveway?” She would say, only half-jokingly, that the initials stood for “Destroy My Childhood.” A fortysomething cybersecurity professional, Kat lived in a ramshackle farmhouse in New Hampshire with her husband and a few kids. But when Guerra’s note arrived, she was undergoing a pandemic- and work-stress-induced reevaluation of her life’s purpose. She was dreaming up ways to reclaim her father’s legacy. She wanted to launch an engineering education program in his name.
One thing she insisted she didn’t want was to start a car company. It was a car company, after all, that had ruined her father. But then something happened that changed her mind. In April 2022, the Texas company that had given Guerra the cold shoulder announced it would soon reveal a new DeLorean. Kat kept her feelings about this to herself only briefly. First she drew attention to Guerra’s design, posting it on Instagram. (“A timeless classic given the treatment it deserves!”) Two days later, she made her feelings explicit: “@deloreanmotorcompany Is not John DeLorean’s Company,” she wrote. “He despised you.” Details about the new Texas DeLorean emerged a few days after that: Called the Alpha5, it would have four seats instead of two, would reportedly be built mostly from aluminum rather than stainless steel, and would be available in red. Like many DeLorean purists, Kat hated it.
As people kept messaging her about the pretty design they’d seen on her Instagram feed—some even offered to help build it—a new plan took shape. Kind of a crazy one. She started to think: Why not build one car and film the process of building it for the engineering students? Eventually that turned into: Why not make several and sell them to fund the engineering program? But then why not …
As Kat’s ideas tend to do, this one snowballed: an engineering program in every state, funded by cars; her mind could easily leap from there to notions of rebuilding the industrial Midwest and rejiggering American work culture in general, the ultimate realization of her oft-stated belief that “everyone should have the same opportunity to live their dream.” John DeLorean had plotted to return to the car market until the day he died. Now, she thought, shouldn’t she give the nerds what they wanted? Fine, she had zero experience running a car company, but she could find people for that, and anyway she’d spent, by her estimate, thousands of hours talking engine design with her dad. She described herself as having “gasoline in her veins.”
Which didn’t really change the fundamentals, including how difficult and outrageously expensive it is to bring a car to market, not to mention the itchy point that the “DeLorean” branding technically belonged to someone else. Never mind all that. Kat was a DeLorean—a name, for good or ill, associated with wild ambition.
John Z. DeLorean was a suave, swashbuckling General Motors executive who dated young models and palled around with celebrities. He became automotive royalty in the mid-1960s, when he had the idea of sticking a bigger engine into an “old lady” car, thereby reinventing the Pontiac brand and launching the “muscle car” era. But DeLorean felt stifled at GM, and he dreamed of building what he called an “ethical car”: safe, reliable, affordable, and environmentally friendly. He left the company in 1973, the same year he married the supermodel Cristina Ferrare, his third wife. Two years later, he founded the DeLorean Motor Company. And two years after that, DeLorean and Ferrare, who shared an adopted 6-year-old son named Zach, welcomed their baby daughter Kathryn.
The original DeLorean Motor Company’s brief and turbulent history spanned Kat’s early childhood. She has few direct memories of the time her dad spent assembling a team of mavericks and dreamers enticed by the idea of building a whole car company from a blank sheet of paper. With a generous investment from the British government, DeLorean opted to put his factory outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. This was during the Troubles, when the idea of Catholics and Protestants working side-by-side seemed impossible. But, for a time, it worked. “There was a bog, then there was a factory, then there were jobs,” William Haddad, an executive for the company, recalled in a 1985 interview. “It was really exciting as hell.”
It also happened to be an era of inflation and soaring gas prices. An inexperienced workforce and frequent bomb scares further complicated production. Timelines slipped, production costs ballooned, demand collapsed, debt accrued. The company had to recall a couple thousand cars. DeLorean’s original vision, described by one classic car aficionado as a $12,000 “Corvette killer” featuring “unprecedented safety and efficiency attributes,” morphed into a $25,000 vehicle with few of those qualities. Then, in October 1982, with little Kat approaching her fifth birthday, came the world-famous denouement: John DeLorean caught on tape with an FBI informant in a room with nearly 60 pounds of cocaine. The informant had pitched the sale of the drugs as a way to raise enough money to save DeLorean’s struggling company.
Kat was 6 when her dad’s high-profile trial ended in an acquittal in the late summer of 1984, on the grounds of entrapment. Her dad’s company and career were destroyed; as he ruefully asked reporters outside the courtroom: “I don’t know, would you buy a used car from me?” Also destroyed was a kind of childhood idyll for Kat, who went very suddenly from living in an intact, wealthy, and famous New York City family—complete with an apartment on Fifth Avenue worth $30 million in today’s dollars—to being a child of bicoastal divorce. Within the year, her mother was remarried to a television executive, and Kat was mostly living in California. She was allowed 10 minutes a day on the phone with her dad back East, which she extended by enlisting his help with math homework.
Back to the Future came out a year after John’s acquittal. Although a studio official had pushed the filmmakers to use a Mustang for their time machine—Ford was willing to pay handsomely for the product placement—the screenwriter reportedly replied, “Doc Brown doesn’t drive a fucking Mustang.” The selection of the DMC-12 for the honor (cue Marty McFly: “Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?”) prompted John to write a thank-you letter to the director and screenwriter, who he said had “all but immortalized” his car. Unlike Guerra, Kat has no recollection of seeing Back to the Future for the first time. “It just felt like the movies were always there, always a part of my life,” she told me.
As a teenager, Kat was allowed to choose which parent to live with, and she picked her dad. She spent her high school years on a farm in Bedminster, New Jersey. (The exact site that would later become the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster.) She rode dirt bikes around the vast property, did musical theater in private school, and sometimes endured cocaine jokes from her peers. Her best friend at the time taught Kat how to fix her own computer and inspired her habit of tinkering with the machines.
She modeled for a few years after high school but stayed geeky, spending her nights on hacking competitions. Then, in her early twenties, pregnant with her first child from a brief first marriage, she decided she didn’t want to raise her son in the world she’d known as the daughter of a supermodel. (These days she refers to “that world” of fabulous wealth from an almost mystified remove, as if the visit on the Schwarzeneggers’ private jet and the pajama party with Kourtney Kardashian had happened to someone else.) Instead, she took an IT internship at Countrywide Financial—later to be acquired by Bank of America—and started working her way up. She met a systems engineer named Jason Seymour at a company Christmas party and married him a little more than a month later at a drive-thru wedding chapel in Las Vegas. (Jason had wanted an Elvis impersonator to officiate, but he wasn’t available.) The following year, in 2005, her father died. John DeLorean had spent some of his final months attempting to trademark the name “DeLorean Automobile Company” through a company called Ephesians 6:12, which he’d set up with Kat and Zach as co-owners. (The name is a reference to a biblical verse about struggling “against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”) But he passed away before application could be approved, so it was officially listed as “abandoned.”
John’s death devastated Kat. Although she remained fiercely proud of her father and kept attending car shows in her capacity as a DeLorean, she went professionally by her married name, Seymour, and maintained a separation between those two identities. But in the 2020s, as the DMC-12’s 40th anniversary approached, John’s name was popping up in documentaries and movies again, and Kat was not happy with some of the portrayals depicting him as a kind of narcissistic hustler. She became determined to get the positive story of John DeLorean out.
As a big “trust the universe” person, she believed it was meaningful that an actual angel (Guerra) had shown up in her life with a design. So through the summer and fall of 2022, Kat’s ambitions took the shape of a car. The model would be called JZD, her dad’s initials, and the company would pour the sales revenue into more education programs—expanding into underserved areas in the industrial Midwest where her dad made his career. She resisted even calling the venture a “car company”; she much preferred to say it was a “dream-empowerment company fueled by automobiles,” in the same way Girl Scouts is a youth-empowerment organization fueled in part by cookies.
Whatever the company was, the New Hampshire farmhouse turned into its de facto headquarters. Kat and Jason took video meetings, recruited talent, and entertained wild ideas about what a new car “with DeLorean DNA” could do. (She joked: “Leave it to me to start a car company right when nepo babies are a thing.”) Could they source sustainable stainless steel for their first car by melting down old appliances? Could they use recycled computer chips to control it? Could they make virtual-reality manufacturing labs for their students, to assemble first a virtual car and then a real one? This was going to be a brand-new kind of car company—among the first ever founded by a woman and likely the first intended to be a not-for-profit.
With these big visions came big promises. In August 2022, Kat posted a screenshot from John’s final automotive business plan, which promised to “shake the automotive world” with a car that would kick off “an affair with man and machine at a price point that will be affordable.” She expressed an intent to follow these wishes with her own car company. The company’s name: DeLorean Next Generation.
The news spread, first with an item on Fox News and then in outlets all over the world. Jason was so high on enthusiasm for the new company, and pride in his wife’s ambition, that he dashed off a public promise on the DNG Motors Instagram account. “UNVEILED SEPTEMBER 13, 2023,” read an image of white text on a black background, with Jason’s caption: “DeLorean is back in the Motor City.” He’d just committed them to building a car for the Detroit Auto Show. When Kat saw the post, she flipped out.
Soon afterward, the DeLorean Motor Company in Texas sent Kat a cease-and-desist, demanding she stop using the DeLorean name for her planned car. She and Jason had their lawyer send a reply asserting their rights and expressing their willingness to litigate, and kept going.
DeLorean Motor Company sits in a squat building off a tangle of highways in suburban Houston—you drive past some shabby lots and fields, and then the 1980s spring up around a curve in the road, where a retro-looking DMC logo looms over a row of DMC-12s in the parking lot. You might even spot a JIGAWAT license plate there. Inside the garage/warehouse is an array of disembodied gull-wing doors that evoke a flock of injured birds. Old covers of Deloreans magazines stare out from frames in the showroom.
This is the realm of Stephen Wynne, a Liverpool-born mechanic who has devoted his life to DeLorean the car—to the point of driving his son Cameron to kindergarten in DMC-12s that appeared in Back to the Future. Wynne is less impressed with DeLorean the man, however. “I have more respect for the team that he put together,” he says. “All you hear about is John DeLorean and not the team, and that, to me, is not right.” John was, Wynne said, ahead of his time as an engineer. But: “He made the company, and he also, you know, killed the company in the end.”
It was Wynne who picked up the pieces, effectively securing a monopoly on the small, strange market for DeLorean parts. This was not a decision about preserving someone else’s legacy; it was about securing his own future. “It felt to me like, to control my destiny, going forward, it was to have control of the parts,” he told me in the shop as tools clanked against cars behind us. “If someone was going to get it, I wanted it to be me.” He founded the new DeLorean Motor Company in 1995.
Wynne considers the original buyers of the 1980s DeLorean to have been “entrepreneurial, outside-of-the-box-thinking type people,” with something a “little bit different about them”—less interested in owning a really fast sports car than a piece of cultural history. (The original DeLorean did 0 to 60 in about 10.5 seconds, something my used Hyundai can easily beat.) “We believe that there’s much more wealth in that market these days,” Wynne says.
Over the years, Wynne and team made various plans to serve this market of “modern nerds” with new cars built mostly from original parts. But federal regulators were slow to relax the rules that said these historic replicas had to meet current safety standards, so the revival of the DMC-12—with its lack of airbags, a third brake light, and antilock brakes, for instance—never happened. Still, the company did a thriving business in parts sales and car service. It also made a good buck from the DeLorean brand, which it alternately licensed for apparel, video games, and the like, or zealously protected via cease-and-desists and lawsuits.
Finally, Wynne got to talking with a Tesla alum named Joost de Vries, who’d been involved in previous efforts to electrify the DeLorean. The DeLorean brand, de Vries argued, was so universally beloved, and startup costs for electric vehicles were so much less than even 15 years earlier, that they could partner up to build a brand-new electric DeLorean. Together they formed a San Antonio–based spinoff of DeLorean Motor Company, called DeLorean Motors Reimagined, with the Wynne family as the largest shareholders and de Vries as CEO. (Wynne’s son, the former time-traveling kindergartner, is now the companies’ chief brand officer.) De Vries would lead the development of the car, and funding would come largely from private investors. The company incorporated in Texas in November 2021 (smack in between when Guerra posted his design in late 2020 and when Kat got involved in mid-2022). Wynne and de Vries hired Italdesign, the same firm that had drafted the original DMC-12, to design the Alpha5.
DeLorean Motors Reimagined hoped to build 88 cars to start (88 mph being the speed at which Doc Brown’s DeLorean traveled through time), then about 9,500. The car would be “low volume, high-end, very exclusive, weird, wild technology,” according to de Vries, an imposing, bald Dutchman with the hard-charging swagger of the Silicon Valley executive he once was. “DeLorean was always attainable luxury. My price tag is not going to be attainable luxury.”
DeLorean Motors Reimagined went from founding to concept car within nine months. The company even bought a 15-second Super Bowl spot in February 2022, cryptically teasing the new car and setting off buzz in the automotive press. The Alpha5 premiered at the Pebble Beach auto show that August. It was only a concept, meant to show off design and technology, not a finished product that could operate on the road. But it was a real object that existed in the real world and was promised to be on sale to the public in 2024.
By that point, the JZD, Kat’s model, was still in the design phase, living for the most part in computers.
The steps to getting a new car from invention to production are standard, whether you’re General Motors, DeLorean Motors Reimagined, or DeLorean Next Generation. On average, the process takes about five years. You have to design and engineer the car; find suppliers for thousands of parts, from wheels to seats to instrument panels; get tools custom-made to stamp out your body panels; and find or build the facility and the workforce to put these things together. This is all before you can actually mass-produce something that resembles the original design.
So it is not at all unusual for a concept car to appear at an auto show and then for nothing resembling it to ever materialize on actual roads. A paint facility alone can set a company back hundreds of millions of dollars. This is in fact why the original DeLorean was stainless steel: John DeLorean couldn’t afford a paint plant. (His marketing genius, Kat says, was that “he made you all think it was intentional.”) John Z. DeLorean had his first prototype by 1976, within about a year of founding his company; the first DMC-12s went on sale in 1981.
Theoretically, then, it was possible to build a one-off JZD concept car—if not a production-ready prototype—in the 11 months Kat and Jason had between founding the company and the 2023 Detroit Auto Show. Kat projected confidence onstage at a Miami auto show in January 2023, while a digital rendering of the JZD zoomed along mountain roads on a screen behind her. But shortly after that appearance, she started getting stressed out about the timeline. Potential manufacturing partners were telling her it was wildly unrealistic. Even getting the doors to open and close the same way every time was its own feat of engineering, and Kat couldn’t tell them whether the car would run on gas, batteries, or both. (She wanted students to make that decision as part of an engineering challenge she had yet to set up.) Kat began to have visions of living the same arc of ambition and collapse that befell her father.
This was her preoccupation when she showed up on a warm March 2023 morning in Augusta, Georgia, as a special guest at a “DeLorean Day” event. Well before 8 am, she was stalking around the parking lot in a rainbow plaid skirt and a NERD (Northeast Region DeLorean Club) hoodie with Jason in tow, enthusing to fans about their cars, talking not just with her hands but sometimes with her feet. She literally jumped up and down after a green ’66 Pontiac GTO Tri-Power pulled onto the lot. She inspected the carburetors under the hood and declared that this model, in midnight blue, was her “ultimate dream car,” shout-laughing when the owner confessed to the absurd gas mileage—about 8 miles per gallon in the city—then apologizing, through laughter, for laughing.
By 8 am she was posted up behind a mic to discuss her father and her own plans. “My father was my best friend in the whole world,” she said. “In the summers, I sat and played gin rummy with him on the couch, to the point where there was a worn spot in each place where we sat—a big one and a little one.” She got teary-eyed during the Q&A period when a kid of maybe 10 told her of his plans to be a robotics engineer. He hoped, he said, to make cars that could turn into robots that could “help people and protect humans from like, anything bad that can happen.” She would later tell me that this moment and others like it in Augusta added up to a turning point for her—that “all of a sudden it was like, OK, whatever I have to do, whatever pain I have to go through, if it means building a car company, then I’m going to do it, because I want that moment every day for the rest of my life.”
And when a well-meaning questioner brought up the Alpha5, she spoke carefully through a tight smile. “That is being made by the company DeLorean Motor Company Texas, and they’re not affiliated at all with the family or the original car. And I think that’s about all I’m going to say about that one.”
When I asked Joost de Vries about Kat DeLorean’s efforts a few weeks later, he was less diplomatic. “There’s just something loose in her head,” he said. “Kat’s thing is illegal. And she’s being shut down.” He said in a later conversation that she would be “hammered with lawsuits” as soon as her car appeared at the Detroit Auto Show.
De Vries and I were in a bland tech office park in San Antonio, where he sat in his glass-walled office. He was well aware that the Alpha5 design was polarizing in the DeLorean community. (Some DeLorean forum users had groused that the model just looked like another Tesla with gull-wing doors; one called the whole effort “little more than slapping the name of a beloved car on an unrelated vehicle.”) He also knew the discouraging fate that had befallen many an EV brand before his. Other high-end EV companies such as Lucid, Rivian, and the failed-then-resurrected Fisker had burned through billions and missed production targets, and even market leader Tesla was then struggling to bring its hyped (stainless-steel) Cybertruck to market. DeLorean Motors Reimagined had hit supply-chain snags and cut its planned production run by more than half, to 4,000 cars. But de Vries had something most EV companies didn’t: a brand that much of the world already knew. “The only thing I need to do is put good product into an existing brand,” he said.
The question, of course, is whose brand “DeLorean” really is. Both companies insist on their own rights to use it. And each calls the other’s claim transparently illegitimate.
Stephen Wynne registered and enforced trademarks on “DeLorean” and “DeLorean Motor Company” in the 2000s, as John’s trademarks were canceled or abandoned, and he has renewed and protected them ever since. Furthermore, in a 2015 settlement with John DeLorean’s estate, a woman named Sally Baldwin DeLorean, acting as John’s widow, acknowledged “the worldwide rights of DMC to use, register, and enforce any of the DeLorean Marks for any and all goods and services” related to cars, clothes, and “promotional items”—for which DMC paid her an undisclosed sum. So, yes, it is Kat’s name. But it’s someone else’s trademark, and it’s one she has never tried publicly to contest until now.
Kat’s argument includes that seemingly simple but possibly irrelevant part—it’s her name—but also a convoluted part. She doesn’t believe John actually ever married Sally. Nor do several people I spoke to from John’s orbit at the time, including his son, Zach, none of whom can recall John mentioning a marriage to her. Kat told me she searched for and never found a marriage certificate. Nor did a private detective she hired. (Sally Baldwin DeLorean’s lawyer did not return requests for comment, and attempts to reach her directly via listed phone numbers were unsuccessful.) John’s will names his son as executor. Zach, balking at the prospect of attorney’s fees, never actually filed the will. Kat contends that Sally’s settlement with the DeLorean Motor Company is illegitimate, as she was never in a position to act on behalf of the estate in the first place. What should have happened, Kat thinks, is for the US Patent and Trademark Office to reach out to her and Zach, as co-owners of Ephesians 6:12, about her dad’s pending application.
Then there is the question of infringement, a key standard for which is “likelihood of causing confusion.” Kat’s DeLorean Next Generation is not using the exact same set of words as Wynne’s DeLorean Motor Company, but it is fair to say, based on the Alpha5 question that Kat got in Augusta—and on a well-meaning Reddit commenter who’d tried to buy Kat’s car only to accidentally reserve an Alpha5—that some members of the public are indeed confused. Yet each side accuses the other of doing the confusing.
Both sides have told me a lawsuit is inevitable. No jury decision is guaranteed—determining “likelihood of confusion” itself involves a (confusing!) 13-factor test. But New Jersey trademark attorney Richard Catalina, who is not affiliated with either party, told me that the “stronger legal arguments” belong to the Texas company. “Trademark rights only accrue with use. If you’re not using the mark, you can lose your rights to it,” Catalina said.
“I just learned the. Craziest. Thing,” Kat told me on the phone last summer. She’d recently come across the 1985 interview with William Haddad, the executive who’d found it “exciting as hell” how much good DeLorean Motor Company had achieved in Northern Ireland. Haddad had been crushed by the company’s collapse, and now, in 1985, called it a “scam” and John himself a thief. (John had always denied this and was never convicted of financial misdeeds.) But Haddad was wistful about John’s squandered ambition to locate factories where they could do the most social good. “If only he had done it … Can you imagine it?” Haddad mused in the interview.
Kat knew the Northern Ireland story well already, but Haddad had put John’s goal and his downfall in terms that suddenly clicked for her. She and Jason had been so caught up in the crazy timeline they’d set for themselves that they were risking following precisely her dad’s path—letting one car distract them from their bigger goal of supporting young engineers. “If my car company fails, that’s OK,” Kat said. Her goal had always been to create an education program for students who have “dreams that have been robbed from them,” she said. “And if I can’t do that with this car, then it’s not worth the car.”
One thing was obvious: They were moving too fast. Kat decided she would not unveil the prototype of the JZD until her father’s 100th birthday, in 2025. In the meantime, they would have students build a clay model for Detroit—not a full-size one, as automakers typically do during development, but one about the size of a shoebox—and debut it not at the Auto Show but concurrently at the Detroit Historical Society. Later on, they’d enlist students to help build a prototype of their Model JZD on top of a Corvette C8 platform, picking participants through an online contest in which students described their dreams. After that would come a separate line of cars under something called Project 42, involving a hand build of 42 customized cars. These would have a sales price of probably over a million dollars each (which would also include driving outfits and a motorcycle to go with each car). They’d use the proceeds to fund the education program. So if the Alpha5 was going to be “unattainable luxury” and its likely market rich tech bros, then these custom cars would be yet less attainable and probably serve a market of billionaires.
It’s been two years since DMC Texas and Kat DeLorean both announced their new car projects. Neither has sued the other yet, and both are cagey about plans to do so. Joost de Vries stepped down from the helm of DeLorean Motors Reimagined last October, for reasons the company won’t disclose. A lawsuit against de Vries and other DeLorean Motors Reimagined executives, in which de Vries’ former employer Karma Automotive accused him and others of stealing the EV maker’s intellectual property, was dismissed after a reported out-of-court settlement. Timelines have slipped enough now that Cameron Wynne won’t specify exactly when the Alpha5 will be on sale—he says sometime in 2025. For Kat’s venture, meanwhile, Ángel Guerra continues to revise the design. The car will not be stainless.
DeLorean fans have been burned many times by promises of the next car, and given the delays in both projects, skepticism about both potential new ones pervades DeLorean-related internet forums. (Indeed, as this story went to press in April, a San Antonio paper reported that DeLorean Reimagined had shut down its headquarters; a DMC executive told me the company was just moving locations.) Both companies continue to promise big things. Promises, after all, are part of the DeLorean legacy too.
Arati Prabhakar has the ear of the US president and a massive mission: help manage AI, revive the semiconductor industry, and pull off a cancer moonshot.
one day in March 2023, Arati Prabhakar brought a laptop into the Oval Office and showed the future to Joe Biden. Six months later, the president issued a sweeping executive order that set a regulatory course for AI.
This all happened because ChatGPT had stunned the world. In an instant it became very, very obvious that the United States needed to speed up its efforts to regulate the AI industry—and adopt policies to take advantage of it. While the potential benefits were unlimited (Social Security customer service that works!), so were the potential downsides, like floods of disinformation or even, in the view of some, human extinction. Someone had to demonstrate that to the president.
The job fell to Prabhakar, because she is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and holds cabinet status as the president’s chief science and technology adviser; she’d already been methodically educating top officials about the transformative power of AI. But she also has the experience and bureaucratic savvy to make an impact with the most powerful person in the world.
Born in India and raised in Texas, Prabhakar has a PhD in applied physics from Caltech and previously ran two US agencies: the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. She also spent 15 years in Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist, including as president of Interval Research, Paul Allen’s legendary tech incubator, and has served as vice president or chief technology officer at several companies.
Prabhakar assumed her current job in October 2022—just in time to have AI dominate the agenda—and helped to push out that 20,000-word executive order, which mandates safety standards, boosts innovation, promotes AI in government and education, and even tries to mitigate job losses. She replaced biologist Eric Lander, who had resigned after an investigation concluded that he ran a toxic workplace. Prabhakar is the first person of color and first woman to be appointed director of the office.
We spoke at the kitchen table of Prabhakar’s Silicon Valley condo—a simply decorated space that, if my recollection is correct, is very unlike the OSTP offices in the ghostly, intimidating Eisenhower Executive Office Building in DC. Happily, the California vibes prevailed, and our conversation felt very unintimidating—even at ease. We talked about how Bruce Springsteen figured into Biden’s first ChatGPT demo, her hopes for a semiconductor renaissance in the US, and why Biden’s war on cancer is different from every other president’s war on cancer. I also asked her about the status of the unfilled role of chief technology officer for the nation—a single person, ideally kind of geeky, whose entire job revolves around the technology issues driving the 21st century.
Steven Levy: Why did you sign up for this job?
Arati Prabhakar: Because President Biden asked. He sees science and technology as enabling us to do big things, which is exactly how I think about their purpose.
What kinds of big things?
The mission of OSTP is to advance the entire science and technology ecosystem. We have a system that follows a set of priorities. We spend an enormous amount on R&D in health. But both public and corporate funding are largely focused on pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and very little on prevention or clinical care practices—the things that could change health as opposed to dealing with disease. We also have to meet the climate crisis. For technologies like clean energy, we don’t do a great job of getting things out of research and turning them into impact for Americans. It’s the unfinished business of this country.
It’s almost predestined that you’d be in this job. As soon as you got your physics degree at Caltech, you went to DC and got enmeshed in policy.
Yeah, I left the track I was supposed to be on. My family came here from India when I was 3, and I was raised in a household where my mom started sentences with, “When you get your PhD and become an academic …” It wasn’t a joke. Caltech, especially when I finished my degree in 1984, was extremely ivory tower, a place of worship for science. I learned a tremendous amount, but I also learned that my joy did not come from being in a lab at 2 in the morning and having that eureka moment. Just on a lark, I came to Washington for, quote-unquote, one year on a congressional fellowship. The big change was in 1986, when I went to Darpa as a young program manager. The mission of the organization was to use science and technology to change the arc of the future. I had found my home.
How did you wind up at Darpa?
I had written a study on microelectronics R&D. We were just starting to figure out that the semiconductor industry wasn’t always going to be dominated by the US. We worked on a bunch of stuff that didn’t pan out but also laid the groundwork for things that did. I was there for seven years, left for 19, and came back as director. Two decades later the portfolio was quite different, as it should be. I got to christen the first self-driving ship that could leave a port and navigate across open oceans without a single sailor on board. The other classic Darpa thing is to figure out what might be the foundation for new capabilities. I ended up starting a Biological Technologies Office. One of the many things that came out of that was the rapid development and distribution of mRNA vaccines, which never would have happened without the Darpa investment.
One difference today is that tech giants are doing a lot of their own R&D, though not necessarily for the big leaps Darpa was built for.
Every developed economy has this pattern. First there’s public investment in R&D. That’s part of how you germinate new industries and boost your economy. As those industries grow, so does their investment in R&D, and that ends up being dominant. There was a time when it was sort of 50-50 public-private. Now it’s much more private investment. For Darpa, of course, the mission is breakthrough technologies and capabilities for national security.
Are you worried about that shift?
It’s not a competition! Absolutely there’s been a huge shift. That private tech companies are building the leading edge LLMs today has huge implications. It’s a tremendous American advantage, but it has implications for how the technology is developed and used. We have to make sure we get what we need for public purposes.
Is the US government investing enough to make that happen?
I don’t think we are. We need to increase the funding. One component of the AI executive order is a National AI Research Resource. Researchers don’t have the access to data and computation that companies have. An initiative that Congress is considering, that the administration is very supportive of, would place something like $3 billion of resources with the National Science Foundation.
That’s a tiny percentage of the funds going into a company like OpenAI.
It costs a lot to build these leading-edge models. The question is, how do we have governance of advanced AI and how do we make sure we can use it for public purposes? The government has got to do more. We need help from Congress. But we also have to chart a different kind of relationship with industry than we’ve had in the past.
What might that look like?
Look at semiconductor manufacturing and the CHIPS Act.
We’ll get to that later. First let’s talk about the president. How deep is his understanding of things like AI?
Some of the most fun I’ve gotten on the job was working with the president and helping him understand where the technology is, like when we got to do the chatbot demonstrations for the president in the Oval Office.
What was that like?
Using a laptop with ChatGPT, we picked a topic that was of particular interest. The president had just been at a ceremony where he gave Bruce Springsteen the National Medal of Arts. He had joked about how Springsteen was from New Jersey, just across the river from his state, Delaware, and then he made reference to a lawsuit between those two states. I had never heard of it. We thought it would be fun to make use of this legal case. For the first prompt, we asked ChatGPT to explain the case to a first grader. Immediately these words start coming out like, “OK, kiddo, let me tell you, if you had a fight with someone …” Then we asked the bot to write a legal brief for a Supreme Court case. And out comes this very formal legal analysis. Then we wrote a song in the style of Bruce Springsteen about the case. We also did image demonstrations. We generated one of his dog Commander sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.
So what was the president’s reaction?
He was like, “Wow, I can’t believe it could do that.” It wasn’t the first time he was aware of AI, but it gave him direct experience. It allowed us to dive into what was really going on. It seems like a crazy magical thing, but you need to get under the hood and understand that these models are computer systems that people train on data and then use to make startlingly good statistical predictions.
There are a ton of issues covered in the executive order. Which are the ones that you sense engaged the president most after he saw the demo?
The main thing that changed in that period was his sense of urgency. The task that he put out for all of us was to manage the risks so that we can see the benefits. We deliberately took the approach of dealing with a broad set of categories. That’s why you saw an extremely broad, bulky, large executive order. The risks to the integrity of information from deception and fraud, risks to safety and security, risks to civil rights and civil liberties, discrimination and privacy issues, and then risks to workers and the economy and IP—they’re all going to manifest in different ways for different people over different timelines. Sometimes we have laws that already address those risks—turns out it’s illegal to commit fraud! But other things, like the IP questions, don’t have clean answers.
There are a lot of provisions in the order that must meet set deadlines. How are you doing on those?
They are being met. We just rolled out all the 90-day milestones that were met. One part of the order I’m really getting a kick out of is the AI Council, which includes cabinet secretaries and heads of various regulatory agencies. When they come together, it’s not like most senior meetings where all the work has been done. These are meetings with rich discussion, where people engage with enthusiasm, because they know that we’ve got to get AI right.
There’s a fear that the technology will be concentrated among a few big companies. Microsoft essentially subsumed one leading startup, Inflection. Are you concerned about this centralization?
Competition is absolutely part of this discussion. The executive order talks specifically about that. One of the many dimensions of this issue is the extent to which power will reside only with those who are able to build these massive models.
The order calls for AI technology to embody equity and not include biases. A lot of people in DC are devoted to fighting diversity mandates. Others are uncomfortable with the government determining what constitutes bias. How does the government legally and morally put its finger on the scale?
Here’s what we’re doing. The president signed the executive order at the end of October. A couple of days later, the Office of Management and Budget came out with a memo—a draft of guidance about how all of government will use AI. Now we’re in the deep, wonky part, but this is where the rubber meets the road. It’s that guidance that will build in processes to make sure that when the government uses AI tools it’s not embedding bias.
That’s the strategy? You won’t mandate rules for the private sector but will impose them on the government, and because the government is such a big customer, companies will adopt them for everyone?
That can be helpful for setting a way that things work broadly. But there are also laws and regulations in place that ban discrimination in employment and lending decisions. So you can feel free to use AI, but it doesn’t get you off the hook.
There’s a line in there that basically says that if you’re slowing down the progress of AI, you are the equivalent of a murderer, because going forward without restraints will save lives.
That’s such an oversimplified view of the world. All of human history tells us that powerful technologies get used for good and for ill. The reason I love what I’ve gotten to do across four or five decades now is because I see over and over again that after a lot of work we end up making forward progress. That doesn’t happen automatically because of some cool new technology. It happens because of a lot of very human choices about how we use it, how we don’t use it, how we make sure people have access to it, and how we manage the downsides.
“I’m trying to figure out if you’re going to write a bunch of nice research papers, or you’re gonna move the needle on cancer.”
How are you encouraging the use of AI in government?
Right now AI is being used in government in more modest ways. Veterans Affairs is using it to get feedback from veterans to improve their services. The Social Security Administration is using it to accelerate the processing of disability claims.
Those are older programs. What’s next? Government bureaucrats spend a lot of time drafting documents. Will AI be part of that process?
That’s one place where you can see generative AI being used. Like in a corporation, we have to sort out how to use it responsibly, to make sure that sensitive data aren’t being leaked, and also that it’s not embedding bias. One of the things I’m really excited about in the executive order is an AI talent surge, saying to people who are experts in AI, “If you want to move the world, this is a great time to bring your skills to the government.” We published that on AI.gov.
How far along are you in that process?
We’re in the matchmaking process. We have great people coming in.
OK, let’s turn to the CHIPS Act, which is the Biden administration’s centerpiece for reviving the semiconductor industry in the US. The legislation provides more than $50 billion to grow the US-based chip industry, but it was designed to spur even more private investment, right?
That story starts decades ago with US dominance in semiconductor manufacturing. Over a few decades the industry got globalized, then it got very dangerously concentrated in one geopolitically fragile part of the world. A year and a half ago the president got Congress to act on a bipartisan basis, and we are crafting a completely different way to work with the semiconductor industry in the US.
Different in what sense?
It won’t work if the government goes off and builds its own fabs. So our partnership is one where companies decide what products are the right ones to build and where we will build them, and government incentives come on the basis of that. It’s the first time the US has done that with this industry, but it’s how it was done elsewhere around the world.
Some people say it’s a fantasy to think we can return to the day when the US had a significant share of chip and electronics manufacturing. Obviously, you feel differently.
We’re not trying to turn the clock back to the 1980s and saying, “Bring everything to the US.” Our strategy is to make sure that we have the robustness we need for the US and to make sure we’re meeting our national security needs.
The biggest grant recipient was Intel, which got $8 billion. Its CEO, Pat Gelsinger, said that the CHIPS Act wasn’t enough to make the US competitive, and we’d need a CHIPS 2. Is he right?
I don’t think anyone knows the answer yet. There’s so many factors. The job right now is to build the fabs.
As the former head of Darpa, you were part of the military establishment. How do you view the sentiment among employees of some companies, like Google, that they should not take on military contracts?
It’s great for people in companies to be asking hard questions about how their work is used. I respect that. My personal view is that our national security is essential for all of us. Here in Silicon Valley, we completely take for granted that you get up every morning and try to build and fund businesses. That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s shaped by the work that we do in national security.
Your office is spearheading what the president calls a Cancer Moonshot. It seems every president in my lifetime had some project to cure cancer. I remember President Nixon talking about a war on cancer. Why should we believe this one?
We’ve made real progress. The president and the first lady set two goals. One is to cut the age-adjusted cancer death rate in half over 25 years. The other is to change the experience of people going through cancer. We’ve come to understand that cancer is a very complex disease with many different aspects. American health outcomes are not acceptable for the most wealthy country in the world. When I spoke to Danielle Carnival, who leads the Cancer Moonshot for us—she worked for the vice president in the Obama administration—I said to her, “I’m trying to figure out if you’re going to write a bunch of nice research papers or you’re gonna move the needle on cancer.” She talked about new therapies but also critically important work to expand access to early screening, because if you catch some of them early, it changes the whole story. When I heard that I said, “Good, we’re actually going to move the needle.”
Don’t you think there’s a hostility to science in much of the population?
People are more skeptical about everything. I do think that there has been a shift that is specific to some hot-button issues, like climate and vaccines or other infectious disease measures. Scientists want to explain more, but they should be humble. I don’t think it’s very effective to treat science as a religion. In year two of the pandemic, people kept saying that the guidance keeps changing, and all I could think was, “Of course the guidance is changing, our understanding is changing.” The moment called for a little humility from the research community rather than saying, “We’re the know-it-alls.”
Is it awkward to be in charge of science policy at a time when many people don’t believe in empiricism?
I don’t think it’s as extreme as that. People have always made choices not just based on hard facts but also on the factors in their lives and the network of thought that they are enmeshed in. We have to accept that people are complex.
Part of your job is to hire and oversee the nation’s chief technology officer. But we don’t have one. Why not?
That had already been a long endeavor when I came on board. That’s been a huge challenge. It’s very difficult to recruit, because those working in tech almost always have financial entanglements.
I find it hard to believe that in a country full of great talent there isn’t someone qualified for that job who doesn’t own stock or can’t get rid of their holdings. Is this just a low priority for you?
We spent a lot of time working on that and haven’t succeeded.
Are we going to go through the whole term without a CTO?
I have no predictions. I’ve got nothing more than that.
There are only a few months left in the current term of this administration. President Biden has given your role cabinet status. Have science and technology found their appropriate influence in government?
Yes, I see it very clearly. Look at some of the biggest changes—for example, the first really meaningful advances on climate, deploying solutions at a scale that the climate actually notices. I see these changes in every area and I’m delighted.
Microsoft’s Recall technology, an AI tool designed to assist users by automatically reminding them of important information and tasks, bears resemblance to George Orwell’s „1984“ dystopia in several key aspects:
1. Surveillance and Data Collection: – 1984: The Party constantly monitors citizens through telescreens and other surveillance methods, ensuring that every action, word, and even thought aligns with the Party’s ideology. – Recall Technology: While intended for productivity, Recall collects and analyzes large amounts of personal data, emails, and other communications to provide reminders. This level of data collection can raise concerns about privacy and the potential for misuse or unauthorized access to personal information.
2. Memory and Thought Control: – 1984: The Party manipulates historical records and uses propaganda to control citizens‘ memories and perceptions of reality, essentially rewriting history to fit its narrative. – Recall Technology: By determining what information is deemed important and what reminders to provide, Recall could influence users‘ focus and priorities. This selective emphasis on certain data could subtly shape users‘ perceptions and decisions, akin to a form of soft memory control.
3. Dependence on Technology:
– 1984: The populace is heavily reliant on the Party’s technology for information, entertainment, and even personal relationships, which are monitored and controlled by the state. – Recall Technology: Users might become increasingly dependent on Recall to manage their schedules and information, potentially diminishing their own capacity to remember and prioritize tasks independently. This dependence can create a vulnerability where the technology has significant control over daily life.
4. Loss of Personal Autonomy:
– 1984: Individual autonomy is obliterated as the Party dictates all aspects of life, from public behavior to private thoughts. – Recall Technology: Although not as extreme, the automation and AI-driven suggestions in Recall could erode personal decision-making over time. As users rely more on technology to dictate their actions and reminders, their sense of personal control and autonomy may diminish.
5. Potential for Abuse:
– 1984: The totalitarian regime abuses its power to maintain control over the population, using technology as a tool of oppression. – Recall Technology: In a worst-case scenario, the data collected by Recall could be exploited by malicious actors or for unethical purposes. If misused by corporations or governments, it could lead to scenarios where users‘ personal information is leveraged against them, echoing the coercive control seen in Orwell’s dystopia.
While Microsoft’s Recall technology is designed with productivity in mind, its potential implications for privacy, autonomy, and the influence over personal information draw unsettling parallels to the controlled and monitored society depicted in „1984.“
Natural Language Interaction:GPT-4o’s advanced natural language processing capabilities allow for seamless, conversational interaction between the driver and the vehicle. This makes controlling the vehicle and accessing information more intuitive and user-friendly.
Personalized Experience:The AI can learn from individual driver behaviors and preferences, offering tailored suggestions for routes, entertainment, climate settings, and more, enhancing overall user satisfaction and engagement.
Enhanced Autonomous Driving and Safety:
Superior Decision-Making:GPT-4o can significantly enhance Tesla’s autonomous driving capabilities by processing and analyzing vast amounts of real-time data to make better driving decisions. This improves the safety, reliability, and efficiency of the vehicle’s self-driving features.
Proactive Safety Features:The AI can provide real-time monitoring of the vehicle’s surroundings and driver behavior, offering proactive alerts and interventions to prevent accidents and ensure passenger safety.
Next-Level Infotainment and Connectivity:
Smart Infotainment System: With GPT-4o, the SUV’s infotainment system can offer highly intelligent and personalized content recommendations, including music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more, making long journeys more enjoyable.
Seamless Connectivity:The AI can integrate with a wide range of apps and services, enabling drivers to manage their schedules, communicate, and access information without distraction, thus enhancing productivity and convenience.
Continuous Improvement and Future-Proofing:
Self-Learning Capabilities:GPT-4o continuously learns and adapts from user interactions and external data, ensuring that the vehicle’s performance and features improve over time. This results in an ever-evolving user experience that keeps getting better.
Over-the-Air Updates: Regular over-the-air updates from OpenAI ensure that the SUV remains at the forefront of technology, with the latest features, security enhancements, and improvements being seamlessly integrated.
Market Differentiation and Brand Leadership:
Innovative Edge:Integrating GPT-4o positions Tesla’s new SUV as a cutting-edge vehicle, showcasing the latest in AI and automotive technology. This differentiates Tesla from competitors and strengthens its reputation as a leader in innovation.
Enhanced Customer Engagement: The unique AI-driven features and personalized experiences can drive stronger customer engagement and loyalty, attracting tech-savvy consumers and enhancing the overall brand image.
By leveraging these advantages, Tesla can create a groundbreaking SUV that not only meets but exceeds consumer expectations, setting new standards for the automotive industry and reinforcing Tesla’s position as a pioneer in automotive and AI technology.
The integration of advanced AI like OpenAI’s GPT-4o into Apple’s Vision Pro + Version 2 can significantly enhance its vision understanding capabilities. Here are ten possible use cases:
1. Augmented Reality (AR) Applications: – Interactive AR Experiences: Enhance AR applications by providing real-time object recognition and interaction. For example, users can point the device at a historical landmark and receive detailed information and interactive visuals about it. – AR Navigation: Offer real-time navigation assistance in complex environments like malls or airports, overlaying directions onto the user’s view.
2. Enhanced Photography and Videography: – Intelligent Scene Recognition: Automatically adjust camera settings based on the scene being captured, such as landscapes, portraits, or low-light environments, ensuring optimal photo and video quality. – Content Creation Assistance: Provide suggestions and enhancements for capturing creative content, such as framing tips, real-time filters, and effects.
3. Healthcare and Medical Diagnosis: – Medical Imaging Analysis: Assist in analyzing medical images (e.g., X-rays, MRIs) to identify potential issues, providing preliminary diagnostic support to healthcare professionals. – Remote Health Monitoring: Enable remote health monitoring by analyzing visual data from wearable devices to track health metrics and detect anomalies.
4. Retail and Shopping: – Virtual Try-Ons: Allow users to virtually try on clothing, accessories, or cosmetics using the device’s camera, enhancing the online shopping experience. – Product Recognition: Identify products in stores and provide information, reviews, and price comparisons, helping users make informed purchasing decisions.
5. Security and Surveillance: – Facial Recognition: Enhance security systems with facial recognition capabilities for authorized access and threat detection. – Anomaly Detection: Monitor and analyze security footage to detect unusual activities or potential security threats in real-time.
6. Education and Training: – Interactive Learning: Use vision understanding to create interactive educational experiences, such as identifying objects or animals in educational content and providing detailed explanations. – Skill Training: Offer real-time feedback and guidance for skills training, such as in sports or technical tasks, by analyzing movements and techniques.
7. Accessibility and Assistive Technology: – Object Recognition for the Visually Impaired: Help visually impaired users navigate their surroundings by identifying objects and providing auditory descriptions. – Sign Language Recognition: Recognize and translate sign language in real-time, facilitating communication for hearing-impaired individuals.
8. Home Automation and Smart Living: – Smart Home Integration: Recognize household items and provide control over smart home devices. For instance, identifying a lamp and allowing users to turn it on or off via voice commands. – Activity Monitoring: Monitor and analyze daily activities to provide insights and recommendations for improving household efficiency and safety.
9. Automotive and Driver Assistance: – Driver Monitoring: Monitor driver attentiveness and detect signs of drowsiness or distraction, providing alerts to enhance safety. – Object Detection: Enhance autonomous driving systems with better object detection and classification, improving vehicle navigation and safety.
10. Environmental Monitoring: – Wildlife Tracking: Use vision understanding to monitor and track wildlife in natural habitats for research and conservation efforts. – Pollution Detection: Identify and analyze environmental pollutants or changes in landscapes, aiding in environmental protection and management.
These use cases demonstrate the broad potential of integrating advanced vision understanding capabilities into Apple’s Vision Pro + Version 2, enhancing its functionality across various domains and providing significant value to users.