Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner is seen atop an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

Throughout this spring, NASA and Boeing had been working toward a July launch date of the spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts for the first time. However, just weeks before this launch was due to occur, Boeing announced on June 1 that there were two serious issues with Starliner. One of these involved the “soft links” in the lines that connect the Starliner capsule to its parachutes, and the second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft found to be flammable.

On Wednesday, as a part of its quarterly earnings update, Boeing announced that the Starliner program had taken a loss of $257 million “primarily due to the impacts of the previously announced launch delay.” This brings the company’s total write-down of losses on the Starliner program to more than $1.1 billion. Partly because of this, Boeing’s Defense, Space, & Security division reported a loss of $527 million during the second quarter of this year.

Enlarge / The Renault Zoe (left) and Nissan Leaf (right) were two early mass-market EVs. (credit: Nissan)

Nissan has agreed to invest $663 million (600 million euros) in Ampere, Renault’s electric vehicle operation, the two companies announced today. It’s a sign of a renewed alliance between the two automakers that have been in a partnership since 1999, but relations have strained following the 2019 arrest of Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn.

“With the finalization of the definitive agreements, we have entered the next phase of collaboration with Renault and Mitsubishi Motors in mutually beneficial areas of innovations,” said Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida. “This will create additional value through initiatives aligned to Nissan’s Ambition 2030 and electrification strategy. The investment opportunity in Ampere complements and strengthens Nissan’s ongoing electric push in Europe and will deliver numerous synergies, including cost efficiencies, regulatory compliance, and a broader range of EV products and powertrains.”

Both Nissan and Renault have been early entrants into the EV market, with more than a million Nissan EVs sold since 2010 and about 300,000 Renault Zoes delivered since that car went on sale in 2012.

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI)

On Tuesday, OpenAI released an official ChatGPT app for Android, now available in the Google Play Store in four countries: the US, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil, with more coming soon. As a client for OpenAI’s language model family, the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models run on the cloud and provide results to your Android device. It also integrates OpenAI’s Whisper model for speech recognition.

ChatGPT, launched in November, is a conversational AI language model interface. As an AI assistant, it can help with summarization, text composition, and analysis. OpenAI bills its use cases as a way to seek “instant answers,” “tailored advice,” “creative inspiration,” “professional input,” and “learning opportunities.”

A series of images showing OpenAI’s proposed uses of the ChatGPT Android app, taken from the Google Play Store. (credit: OpenAI)

However, as we’ve noted in the past, ChatGPT is occasionally prone to confabulation (that is, making things up)—especially the GPT-3.5 model—so it’s not entirely trustworthy as a factual reference. It can come in handy as a way to analyze data you provide yourself, though, so long as you’re familiar with the subject matter and can validate the results.

Enlarge / Neither of these test BMWs has a human in the driver’s seat. (credit: BMW)

A closer look at one of the instrumented BMWs. (credit: BMW)

“It’s boring for human drivers,” says BMW’s project lead for driverless development, Philipp Ludwig. When a human is asked to perform the exact same task repeatedly, the quality of the work diminishes as they lose interest or become fatigued. For a computer-controlled car, it can do this all day. And it has done exactly that.

Enlarge (credit: Karol Serewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis are creating a joint venture to significantly expand the number of fast charging sites in the US and Canada. The sites will use the new National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure guidelines, which means, among other things, 97 percent uptime for each charging port. The sites will support both CCS1 and NACS plugs, and the chargers will also support the plug-and-charge protocol.

“North America is one of the world’s most important car markets—with the potential to be a leader in electromobility. Accessibility to high-speed charging is one of the key enablers to accelerate this transition. Therefore, seven automakers are forming this joint venture with the goal of creating a positive charging experience for EV consumers. The BMW Group is proud to be among the founders,” said BMW Group CEO Oliver Zipse.

Samsung’s newest foldable phones are the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5. The two devices were made official at a South Korean show early this morning.

First is the Z Fold 5, which is phone-sized when closed and opens up to be a bigger device. The changes here are mostly just a spec bump and a new “double rail Flex Hinge” system. The new hinge design brings the phone more in line with most other foldables. When closed, the support plates under the display crease swing out of the way, allowing the bent-over display to sit more loosely in a teardrop shape rather than crushing it into a hard crease. This means the phone can fold flat instead of having a gap when closed. Most executions of this style of hinge still have a divot or trench in the middle of the screen, but it’s easier on the display.

The Fold was a pioneer as the first foldable phone, but it now seems to be spending this release catching up to the competition. Besides adopting the competition’s hinge design, Samsung still has some work to do on the thinness front. Foldables are giant devices in your pocket, and thinness really matters when you’re potentially talking about double the weight and thickness of a normal phone. The fold-flat hinge and some work slimming down the phone puts the Z Fold 5 at 13.4 mm thick when folded up. With a 4400 mAh battery, that’s just not very impressive. In the US, the Pixel Fold manages to be 12.1 mm thick with a 5000 mAh battery. In China, the Honor Magic V2 is somehow 9.9 mm thick when folded, with a 5000 mAh battery.