Vietnam’s Richest Man Is Launching an Ambitious Gambit to Sell Americans Electric Cars
On northern Vietnam’s Red River Delta, the world’s most ambitious electric-vehicle (EV) upstart occupies a factory complex fringed with mango trees and palms. Outside VinFast’s plant by the port city of Haiphong, fishermen in conical hats still plumb mudflats for grass carp and tilapia; inside, each car negotiates an overhead ergonomic conveyor assembly line measuring 2.5 miles. A gauntlet of 1,250 robot arms twirl like pneumatic ballerinas, adding some 3,000 components and wielding rivet after rivet in a flurry of sparks.
Everything here is top of the line: machinery sourced from Germany, Japan, Sweden. Welding is 98% automated. Capacity is 250,000 cars a year. Impressively, instead of individual assembly lines tailored for each vehicle, the facility can simultaneously assemble multiple models on the same line. Even more impressively, Google Maps shows half of the 877-acre site sits beneath the South China Sea—a quirk because it was reclaimed from the waves and made operational in just 21 months.
Read More: The Biden Administration Is Trying to Kickstart the Great American Electric Vehicle Race
VinFast CEO Le T…
Read moreOpenAI in ‘Intense Discussions’ to Unify Company, Memo Says
OpenAI said it’s in “intense discussions” to unify the company after another tumultuous day that saw most employees threaten to quit if Sam Altman doesn’t return as chief executive officer.
Vice President of Global Affairs Anna Makanju delivered the message in an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg News, aiming to rally staff who’ve grown anxious after days of disarray following Altman’s ouster and the board’s surprise appointment of former Twitch chief Emmett Shear as his interim replacement.
Read More: What We Know So Far About Why OpenAI Fired Sam Altman
OpenAI management is in touch with Altman, Shear and the board “but they are not prepared to give us a final response this evening,” Makanju wrote.
The drama surrounding the company behind ChatGPT has transfixed the technology world and set off a race by OpenAI investors to contain the damage. On Monday, more than 700 of the startup’s 770 staff signed a letter saying they would quit if the board doesn’t resign and re-hire Altman, who was recruited by Microsoft Corp. — OpenAI’s largest shareholder — to run a new artificial intelligence team.
Th…
Read moreWhy Business Leaders Need to Be More Curious
Seth Goldenberg wants us all to be more curious. The designer and entrepreneur brings design-based principles and questions to a variety of enterprises. He runs a design-based management consultancy, and has worked with many companies, including Apple and Oprah Winfrey’s OWN to help rethink their business structures and processes.
Goldenberg, who also runs a Dickensian-sounding bookstore, Curiosity & Co., that doubles as a wine bar and cultural center in Jamestown R.I., has recently turned his attention to the role of curiosity—instead of just knowledge—in the culture and especially in the way businesses operate. His book, Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures argues that the workplace of the future needs to be asking a lot more fundamental questions if it’s going to thrive.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What do you think the role of curiosity is in the workplace?
For me, it’s central. It’s the foundation. I mean, work is certainly turning itself inside out right now. We are having to recheck the questions we as…
Read moreWhat Elon Musk Really Believes
“We have democracy?” Elon Musk interjected, with an impish smile. He’d just been asked how worried he was about the state of the American system of government. “We have a sort of democracy, I guess,” Musk went on, balancing his toddler son on his knee at a party marking his selection as TIME’s Person of the Year last December. “We have a two-party system, which generally means that issues get assigned in a semi-random manner into one bucket or the other, and then you’re forced to pick one bucket. Or like there’s two punchbowls, and they both have turds in it, and which one has the least amount of turds? So I don’t agree with, necessarily, what either party does.”
The exchange was a revealing one, both for the answer Musk provided and the question he avoided. His interviewer, TIME editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal, had hoped to engage him on the concern, widely shared among political experts, that our democracy is in danger—that the rule of law and free, fair elections are under threat from creeping authoritarianism, disinformation and institutional deterioration. But Musk seemed to regard American demo…
Read moreWhat Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Means for Trump’s TRUTH Social
Conservatives on Twitter are celebrating a potential turning of the tide in the wake of Elon Musk’s deal to buy the social media platform–and many of them this week are heralding the departure of liberal users by mockingly tweeting trending hashtags like #ByeTwitter and #LeavingTwitter.
“Prepare for blue check mark full scale meltdown after @elonmusk seals the deal and I should get my personal Twitter account restored,” tweeted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal account was permanently suspended earlier this year for spreading COVID-19 misinformation.
Musk’s $44 billion deal with Twitter has led to increased speculation over whether the billionaire Tesla CEO, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” plans to reinstate the accounts of prominent conservatives like Greene and, most notably, former President Donald Trump on the social media site. Musk’s purchase, which won’t be finalized until October, has also left a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the fate of Trump’s own alternative social platform, TRUTH Social.
TRUTH Social did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment on…
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