It can't afford not to. Rivian's future ' and chances at profitability ' hinges on the success of the R2. If it struggles to ramp production and sales of the R2, shareholders could flee. At the very least, it would raise questions about the company's strategy of burning through billions now to prepare for mass-market scale. Rivian told investors last month that it expects to sell between 20,000 and 25,000 R2s this year, with the first SUVs likely to head to customers in June once production begins. Even if Rivian hits the low end of that target, its sales rate will outpace every other comparable electric vehicle at or under $60,000 other than the Tesla Model Y. The Model Y, launched in March 2020, took only around four months to surpass 20,000 vehicles sold. Rivian is aiming to do it in about six months, or roughly the same amount of time it took the Honda Prologue to reach that sales milestone when it debuted in 2024. The next-quickest EV to hit 20,000 in sales in the U.S. was the Chevy Equinox EV, which did it in around eight months after it hit the market in 2024. Ford's Mustang Mach-E took a similar amount of time after launching in 2021, while Korean EVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 took around 10 and 11 months, respectively....

OpenAI has raised $110 billion in private funding, the company announced Friday morning, commencing one of the largest private funding rounds in history. The new funding consists of a $50 billion investment from Amazon as well as $30 billion each from Nvidia and SoftBank, against a $730 billion pre-money valuation. 'We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale,' OpenAI said. 'Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on.' As part of the investment, OpenAI is launching significant infrastructure partnerships with both Amazon and Nvidia. As in previous rounds, it is likely that a significant portion of the dollar amount comes in the form of services rather than cash, although the precise split was not disclosed. As part of its Amazon partnership, OpenAI plans to develop a new 'stateful runtime environment' where OpenAI models will run on Amazon's Bedrock platform. The company will also expand its previously announced AWS partnership, which committed $38 billion in compute services, by $100 billion. OpenAI has committed to consuming at least 2GW of AWS Trainium compute as part of the deal, and also plans to build custom models to support Amazon consumer products....

All that's left of T. J. Semmes Elementary School is the scattered slabs of the building's brick foundation. The otherwise empty lot on the corner of Jourdan Avenue and North Rampart Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, is covered in clovers and dandelions, and surrounded by barbed-wire fencing contorted by time and neglect. Built in 1900 and named after a Confederate senator, the school remained open until 1978, when it closed due to financial problems. Hurricane Katrina accelerated the building's dilapidation, and in 2019 it was demolished. But in 1965, when the building still stood and the school still operated, my mother was a 6-year-old student at Semmes, a child with books in her hand and butterflies in her stomach as she entered her new school for the first time. She remembers walking with her big brothers down a sidewalk fractured by the roots of old oak trees while children played hopscotch on the playground. She remembers going outside and clapping erasers together so that plumes of chalk dust rose above her head. And she remembers being told that she was attending a school that many white parents had taken their children out of just a few years earlier because they didn't want them sitting in class with Negroes....

This week brought another round in President Trump's war against Black history. A federal judge rebuked his administration for removing panels that mentioned 'the dirty business of slavery' from the President's House in Philadelphia, where George Washington lived. (Among other inconvenient facts, the ruling reminded the public that the nation's first president rotated his slaves between his homes to duck state emancipation laws.) Judge Cynthia Rufe opened her ruling with a quote from George Orwell, and wrote that an agency 'cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership.' All in all, a robust defense of accuracy. But the administration is still fighting the facts of Black history on many fronts. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to our staff writer Clint Smith, the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, about what's unprecedented in this administration's approach to whitewashing history. The Atlantic staffer Adam Harris makes the case for a different approach to Black History Month. They both also talk about the civil-rights leader Jesse Jackson, who died this week....