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📈 Apple hits record sales despite chip shortage
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- Apple brought in $57 billion from iPhone sales during its record March quarter, contributing to total revenue of $111.2 billion, with Tim Cook crediting strong demand for the iPhone 17 lineup on Thursday's earnings call.
- Cook cautioned that memory chip costs will climb significantly starting in June due to "RAMageddon," the AI industry's heavy appetite for memory chips, which has already quadrupled RAM prices and may push iPhone prices higher.
- Apple's March spending on memory chips already rose, though the company offset costs by selling stockpiled inventory, and Cook told Reuters there is "just a little less flexibility in the supply chain at the moment for getting more parts."
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👀 Musk says xAI trained Grok on OpenAI
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- Elon Musk admitted on the stand in a California federal court on Thursday that xAI trained Grok using distillation on OpenAI models, saying the practice was common across AI companies when asked directly.
- The admission came during Musk's trial against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman, where he alleges they broke the original nonprofit mission by shifting the entity to a for-profit structure.
- Musk also ranked the leading AI providers during testimony, placing Anthropic first, followed by OpenAI, Google, and Chinese open source models, and described xAI as a smaller company with just a few hundred employees.
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🚛 Tesla starts Semi truck mass production after 9 years
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- Tesla has kicked off mass production of its Semi electric truck nearly a decade after the 2017 unveiling, with the first big rig rolling off the high volume line at a dedicated plant near Gigafactory Nevada.
- The Semi comes in a 325-mile Standard Range trim priced around $260,000 and a 500-mile Long Range version near $300,000, both packing a 1,072HP tri-motor system that charges at up to 1.2MW on Megachargers.
- Deliveries start later this year and undercut the Freightliner eCascadia ($400,000, 230 miles) and Volvo VNR Electric ($350,000, 275 miles), though Tesla won't hit the factory's 50,000-truck yearly peak output.
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🐧 Severe Linux threat catches world flat-footed
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- Researchers at security firm Theori released attack code on Wednesday for a Linux bug called CopyFail that lets regular users seize full control of almost every version of Linux, leaving companies racing to protect servers and personal machines.
- Known as CVE-2026-31431, the flaw was quietly reported to Linux kernel maintainers five weeks ago and fixed in updates such as 7.0 and 6.19.12, but most Linux distributions had not yet shipped those fixes when the code went public.
- One script works against every unpatched system without changes, letting attackers take over shared servers, escape Kubernetes containers that isolate apps, and sneak the code into pull requests so it runs inside automated build and deployment pipelines.
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👓 Meta fires 1,100 AI trainers over Ray-Ban leaks
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- Meta has cut ties with Sama, a Kenya-based contractor that trained its generative AI systems using Ray-Ban smart glasses footage, triggering the layoff of 1,108 workers after some spoke out about the recordings they reviewed.
- Sama employees told Swedish newspapers in February that they labeled footage showing banking information, private conversations, naked people in bathrooms, and intimate encounters, often captured from subjects who seemingly did not know they were being recorded.
- Meta says its terms of service cover these details and the glasses need explicit permission to engage AI mode, but Sama workers reported being forced to sit idle under tighter security as the firm hunts for the whistleblowers.
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🤖 1X opens US humanoid factory targeting 100,000 NEO robots
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- 1X has begun full-scale production of its NEO humanoid robot at a new 58,000-square-foot factory in Hayward, California, with plans to build more than 100,000 units per year by 2027.
- The factory uses a vertically integrated model, with 1X designing and making motors, batteries, sensors, structures, and transmission systems in-house, and its first-year run of over 10,000 units sold out within five days of its October launch.
- Each NEO runs on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor platform for onboard AI inference and is trained using NVIDIA Isaac simulation tools, with customer shipments starting in 2026 through a $20,000 early access program or a $499 monthly subscription.
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