Even though new vehicle prices remain stubbornly high, it’s a fantastic time to lease an electric vehicle. We’ve seen $299 per month leases on Honda Prologues and some crazy cheap Colorado-specific leases on entry-level EVs, and now a new challenger has stepped into the ring. The Volkswagen ID.4 just became ridiculously cheap to lease, and it’s possible a stop-sale order may have contributed to the current deal.

See, back in September, Volkswagen hit a roadblock in its U.S. electric vehicle sales plan by way of a recall on ID.4 crossovers. Specifically, a door handle recall due to defective parts that could lead to doors opening unexpectedly while you’re driving. That could definitely be a safety problem if you enter a turn and your door suddenly swings wide open.

Thankfully, the recall report states that “Volkswagen is not aware of any crashes or injuries as a result of this issue,” but that doesn’t make the experience of having a door open while you’re driving any less scary. So what was the culprit? According to the initial bulletin to dealerships:

The affected vehicles may have been built with door handles that do not meet the factory specifications for protection against water ingress. Water ingress into the printed circuit board can lead to malfunctions causing an “open command” to the door lock.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if the ID.4 used normal mechanical door handles, but the newfangled electronic door handles meant that sales were sidelined until Volkswagen could come up with a fix. As another bulletin to dealers outlines, a fix didn’t become available until Dec. 19, leading to a multi-month gap that caused sales to crater. Just 646 ID.4s were sold in the fourth quarter of last year, which means that Volkswagen likely has a backlog to clear out.

This isn’t a Colorado special or a hypothetical best-case scenario that almost nobody would be approved for, this is a national deal on the base rear-wheel-drive ID.4 Standard model, the one with a 68 kWh battery pack, a single 201-horsepower electric motor, and 206 miles of EPA-rated range.

It’s a 24-month lease with 10,000 allotted miles per year, and before you add tax, the monthly payment comes out to $149. The catch? This deal requires a $999 downpayment, raising the effective payment to about $190.63. Still, that’s incredibly cheap for a spacious, practical electric crossover. Before sales tax, you’d effectively be paying $4,575 to drive a $40,000 electric car for two years. If you can charge primarily at home, even by making plugging into a 120-volt household outlet at night work for you, this is a pretty attractive alternative to not just a new car, but potentially even a used combustion-powered one thanks to the energy savings.

So, if you’re willing to put up with the technological quirks of the ID.4 like the use of two window switches to control four windows, and touch-sensitive sliders instead of volume and temperature knobs, you can bag one hell of a deal on one of these battery-powered crossovers.

[Hat-tip to Steven!]

(Photo credits: Volkswagen)

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Disney is buying Fubo and plans to merge the sports streaming platform with its Hulu + Live TV service, gaining 70 percent ownership of the company that up until today was suing it over antitrust concerns and allegations of anticompetitive practices.

According to Fubo’s announcement today, the unified company will be known as Fubo, and Fubo executives will run it. People will also continue to be able to subscribe to Fubo without subscribing to Hulu + Live TV and vice versa. Also part of the announcement is the revelation that Fubo has settled its antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) over Venu, a joint venture sports app that the companies plan to launch and that Fubo was seeking to block, citing the three firms' allegedly anticompetitive practices.

Fubo had previously claimed that Disney, Fox, and WBD had forced it to pay for irrelevant channels that don’t appeal to sports fans by bundling those networks with sports networks. Fubo’s lawsuit accused Disney and Fox of forcing it to spend millions on unwanted content and forcing it “to drop valuable channels” through price hikes.

Under the Disney merger, though, Fubo will seemingly gain access to channels that it wants. Per the announcement:

In connection with the Transaction, Disney will enter into a new carriage agreement with Fubo that will allow Fubo to create a new Sports & Broadcast service, featuring Disney’s premier sports and broadcast networks including ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SECN, ACCN, ESPNEWS, as well as ESPN+.

Sweetening the deal is an agreement from Disney, Fox, and WBD to pay Fubo an aggregate cash payment of $220 million upon the deal’s closure.

The merger is still subject to regulatory and Fubo shareholder approval as well as “other customary closing conditions,” per Fubo. It’s expected to take 12 to 18 months to close, The Hollywood Reporter said.

Fubo’s about-face

Fubo's merger with Disney represents a shocking about-face for the sports-streaming provider, which previously had raised alarms (citing Citi research) about Disney's ownership of 54 percent of the US sports rights market—ESPN (26.8 percent), Fox (17.3 percent), and WBD (9.9 percent). Fubo successfully got a preliminary injunction against Venu in August, and a trial was scheduled for October 2025.

Fubo CEO David Gandler said in February that Disney, Fox, and WBD “are erecting insurmountable barriers that will effectively block any new competitors.

"Each of these companies has consistently engaged in anticompetitive practices that aim to monopolize the market, stifle any form of competition, create higher pricing for subscribers, and cheat consumers from deserved choice," Gandler also said at the time.

Now, set to be a Disney company, Fubo is singing a new tune, with its announcement claiming that the merger “will enhance consumer choice by making available a broad set of programming offerings.”

In a statement today, Gandler added that the merger will allow Fubo to “provide consumers with greater choice and flexibility" and "to scale effectively," while adding that the deal "strengthens Fubo’s balance sheet” and sets Fubo up for “positive cash flow.”

Ars Technica reached out to Fubo about its previously publicized antitrust and anticompetitive concerns, whether or not those concerns had been addressed, and new concerns that it has settled its lawsuit in favor of its own business needs rather than over a resolution of customer choice problems. Jennifer Press, Fubo SVP of communications, responded to our questions with a statement, saying in part:

We filed an antitrust suit against the Venu Sports partners last year because that product was intended to be exclusive. As its partners announced last year, consumers would only have access to the Venu content package from Venu, which would limit choice and competitive pricing.

The definitive agreement that Fubo signed with Disney today will actually bring more choice to the market. As part of the deal, Fubo extended carriage agreements with Disney and also Fox, enabling Fubo to create a new Sports and Broadcast service and other genre-based content packages. Additionally, as the antitrust litigation has been settled, the Venu Sports partners can choose to launch that product if they wish. The launch of these bundles will enhance consumer choice by making available a broad set of programming offerings.

“... a total deception”

Some remain skeptical about Disney buying out a company that was suing it over antitrust concerns.

"My initial reaction is that a defendant should not be able to buy its way out of antitrust liability by purchasing the plaintiff in a lawsuit. To the extent the plaintiff’s (Fubo’s) claims had any merit, then the deal will enshrine those anticompetitive effects,” Hal Singer, an economics professor at the University of Utah and managing director at Econ One, told Ars.

Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, which had joined two amicus briefs supporting Fubo's lawsuit, said in a statement shared with Ars that Fubo had previously "led sports fans and industry observers to believe they were genuinely interested in challenging Disney’s illegal joint venture in sports streaming, only to cash a check and leave consumers and the entire streaming industry worse off.

"It’s a total deception," Hepner continued. "This deal does not resolve any of the concerns laid out by Fubo in litigation against Disney’s attempts to concentrate the sports streaming market and in fact worsens the status quo. We urge President-Elect Trump’s antitrust enforcers, along with state AGs and private stakeholders, to challenge this blatantly illegal deal to protect consumers and competition.”

A statement from the American Economic Liberties Project today also described the merger as "a troubling escalation" that showed Disney "reinforcing its dominance in the sports streaming market and silencing opposition to its monopolistic practices."

"This move will leave consumers with fewer choices, higher prices, and less innovation in an already concentrated industry," the group said.

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On Sunday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman offered two eye-catching predictions about the near-future of artificial intelligence. In a post titled "Reflections" on his personal blog, Altman wrote, "We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it." He added, "We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies."

Both statements are notable coming from Altman, who has served as the leader of OpenAI during the rise of mainstream generative AI products such as ChatGPT. AI agents are the latest marketing trend in AI, allowing AI models to take action on a user's behalf. However, critics of the company and Altman immediately took aim at the statements on social media.

"We are now confident that we can spin bullshit at unprecedented levels, and get away with it," wrote frequent OpenAI critic Gary Marcus in response to Altman's post. "So we now aspire to aim beyond that, to hype in purest sense of that word. We love our products, but we are here for the glorious next rounds of funding. With infinite funding, we can control the universe."

AGI, short for "artificial general intelligence," is a nebulous term that OpenAI typically defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." Elsewhere in the field, AGI typically means an adaptable AI model that can generalize (apply existing knowledge to novel situations) beyond specific examples found in its training data, similar to how some humans can do almost any kind of work after having been shown few examples of how to do a task.

According to a longstanding investment rule at OpenAI, the rights over developed AGI technology are excluded from its IP investment contracts with companies such as Microsoft. In a recently revealed financial agreement between the two companies, the firms clarified that "AGI" will have been achieved at OpenAI when one of its AI models generates at least $100 billion in profits.

Tech companies don't say this out loud very often, but AGI would be useful for them because it could replace many human employees with software, automating information jobs and reducing labor costs while also boosting productivity. The potential societal downsides of this could be considerable, and those implications extend far beyond the scope of this article. But the potential economic shock of inventing artificial knowledge workers has not escaped Altman, who has forecast the need for universal basic income as a potential antidote for what he sees coming.

Criticism of predictions of impending AGI

Artificial workers or not, some people have already been calling "BS" on Altman's optimism. It's nothing new. Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, often serves as a public foil to Altman's pronouncements, a trend that largely began when Marcus appeared before the US Senate in a May 2023 hearing as a skeptical counterpoint to Altman's testimony during the same session.

On Sunday, Marcus laid out his most recent criticisms of OpenAI's prediction of achieving AGI soon in a series of posts where he detailed how current language models sometimes fail at basic tasks like math problems, "commonsense reasoning," and maintaining accuracy when faced with novel problems.

OpenAI's current "best" released AI model, o1-pro, what you might call a "simulated reasoning" or SR model, reportedly performs well on some mathematical and scientific tasks but still shares weaknesses with OpenAI's GPT-4o large language model, such as failing to generalize well beyond its training data. And it may not be as strong as OpenAI claims in some cases.

For example, Marcus cited a recent benchmark conducted by All Hands AI that reportedly shows that OpenAI's o1 model scored only 30 percent on SWE-Bench verified problems (a set of GitHub-based problems), which is below OpenAI's claimed 48.9 percent performance rate, while Anthropic's Claude Sonnet (which is not purported to be an SR model) achieved 53 percent on the same benchmark.

Even so, OpenAI claims further progress on its AI model capabilities over time. In December, OpenAI announced o3, its latest SR model that impressed some AI experts by reportedly performing well on very difficult math benchmarks, but it has not yet been released for public examination.

Superintelligence as well?

Altman's post follows his September prediction that the AI industry may develop superintelligence "in a few thousand days." Superintelligence is an industry term for a hypothetical AI model that could far surpass human intelligence. Former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever founded a company around the pursuit of the technology last year.

Altman addressed the topic in his latest post as well.

"We are beginning to turn our aim beyond [AGI], to superintelligence in the true sense of the word," he wrote. "We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity."

Despite frequent and necessary skepticism from critics, Altman has been responsible for at least one verifiable tech catalyst: the release of ChatGPT, which served as an unexpected tipping point, he says, that brought AI to the masses and launched our current AI-obsessed tech era. Even if OpenAI doesn't get to AGI as soon as Altman thinks, there's no doubt that OpenAI has taken the technology to unexpected places and spurred wide-ranging research on AI models in the tech industry.

"We started OpenAI almost nine years ago because we believed that AGI was possible and that it could be the most impactful technology in human history," he reflected in his post. "At the time, very few people cared, and if they did, it was mostly because they thought we had no chance of success."

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