Unilever axes jobs for AI; Apple faces US antitrust lawsuit

Antitrust lawsuit accuses Apple of monopolising smartphone market

Apple has been sued by the US Department of Justice and 15 states, that claim the tech giant has used demand for its iPhone and other products to increase prices for services and impair smaller rivals.

Google, Meta, and Amazon have previously been sued by US regulators in the country’s crackdown on big tech over the last couple of years.

“Consumers should not have to pay higher prices because companies violate the antitrust laws,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “If left unchallenged, Apple will only continue to strengthen its smartphone monopoly.”

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Unilever to cut 7,500 jobs as it looks to invest in AI and IT

The group, which makes products such as Dove and Marmite, said the jobs affected would be largely office-based.

It hopes investing into AI and IT to make up for the job cuts will also boost productivity, expecting to save around £684 million over the next three years.

The redundancies are projected to happen over the next two years.

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Elon Musk’s AI firm releases Grok as open source

Over the weekend, the billionaire’s firm, xAI, announced that it had open-sourced the base code of its Grok AI model on GitHub.

Musk said that the move will allow developers and researchers to look into the model and build upon it.

No training data has been made available, so users are not able to see what the model was fed during its development.

Plus, xAI said in its blog post that the model wasn’t tuned for any particular application such as dialogue.

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New optical disc can store the same amount as 15,000 DVDs

Scientists have created a new type of optical disc that can store information to “petabit” level capacity – 125 terabytes of data.

Similar-looking discs such as Blu-Ray discs can store 25 gigabytes, in comparison, and some USB flash drives can store 1 terabyte, while hard disk drives can store up to 16 terabytes.

The new disc is designed with a new type of material called “dye-doped photoresist with aggregation-induced emission luminogens” with a high areal density, which essentially means it can offer a far denser storage capacity than typical hard drives.

The disc is expected to help with the increasing amount of data that is now generated each day through instant messaging and video streaming. Plus, they claim to be more environmentally friendly, and less expensive than current alternatives.

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Neuralink brain chip enables paralysed man to play video games

Since the implementation of the brain chip in US man Noland Arbaugh, who has been paralysed from the shoulders down for eight years, he has allegedly been able to move a computer cursor just with his thoughts.

The neuroscience technology, created by another one of Elon Musk’s companies, Neuralink, is said to have even allowed Arbaugh to play video games. Arbaugh played eight hours of the game Civilisation VI until the battery ran out, reports claim.

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UK bakery chain Greggs forced to close stores due to IT glitch

A technical issue meant that some stores’ tills were unable to take cash or card payments. As a result, the hospitality chain had to close some of its shops temporarily.

“Our IT Colleagues are working hard to get the issue sorted as soon as they can,” stated paper notes displayed on the door.

The British bakery, known for its sausage rolls, steak pies, doughnuts and other baked goods, has more than 2,450 stores across the UK.

Thankfully, technology was still on hand to help some stores receive orders.

“You can order through click and collect or Uber Eats,” the notice read. It follows several similar outages earlier in the week across UK firms including Tesco, Sainsbury’s and McDonalds, though the firms claim these are unrelated.

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