The temporary outage of ChatGPT this morning left thousands of users struggling with their daily tasks, highlighting a growing reliance on AI.
Social media was flooded with humorous yet telling posts from users expressing their inability to perform even basic functions without AI. This incident has reignited concerns about society’s increasing dependence on closed-source AI tools for work and everyday life.
OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is currently investigating the technical issues that led to ‘elevated error rates and latency.’ The widespread disruption underscores a broader debate about AI’s impact on critical thinking and productivity.
While some research suggests AI chatbots can enhance efficiency, others, like Paul Armstrong, argue that frequent reliance on generative tools may diminish critical thinking skills and understanding.
The discussion around AI’s role in the workplace was a key theme at the recent SXSW London event. Despite concerns about job displacement, exemplified by redundancies at Canva, firms like Lloyd’s Market Association are increasingly adopting AI, with 40% of London market companies now using it.
Industry leaders maintain that AI aims to rethink workflows and empower human creativity, with a ‘human layer’ remaining essential for refining and adding nuanced value.
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Apple has unveiled a range of AI features at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, focusing on tighter privacy, enhanced user tools and broader integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These updates will appear across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 and visionOS 26, set to launch in autumn.
While Apple Intelligence was first teased last year, the company now allows third-party developers to access its on-device AI models for the first time.
CEO Tim Cook and software chief Craig Federighi outlined how these features are intended to offer more personalised, efficient apps. Users of newer iPhones will benefit from tools such as live translation in Messages and FaceTime, and AI-powered image analysis via Visual Intelligence.
Apple also enables users to blend emojis creatively and use ChatGPT through its Image Playground to stylise photos. Enhancements to the Wallet app will help summarise order tracking from emails, and AI-generated voices will offer fitness updates.
Despite these innovations, Apple’s redesign of Siri remains incomplete and is not expected to launch soon.
The event failed to deliver major surprises, as many details had already been leaked. Investors responded cautiously, sending Apple shares down by 1.2%. The firm has lost 20% of its value in the year and no longer holds the top spot as the world’s most valuable company.
Nonetheless, Apple is expected to reveal more AI advancements in 2026.
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Marks & Spencer has resumed online clothing orders following a 46-day pause triggered by a cyberattack. The retailer restarted standard home delivery across England, Scotland and Wales, focusing initially on best-selling and new items instead of the full range.
A spokesperson stated that additional products will be added daily, enabling customers to gradually access a wider selection. Services such as click and collect, next-day delivery, and international orders are expected to be reintroduced in the coming weeks, while deliveries to Northern Ireland will resume soon.
The disruption began on 25 April when M&S halted clothing and home orders after issues with contactless payments and app services during the Easter weekend. The company revealed that the breach was caused by hackers who deceived staff at a third-party contractor, bypassing security defences.
M&S had warned that the incident could reduce its 2025/26 operating profit by around £300 million, though it aims to limit losses through insurance and internal cost measures. Shares rose 3 per cent as the online service came back online.
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Amazon has announced a massive $20 billion investment to build two new AI-focused data centres in Pennsylvania. The exact locations are yet to be finalised, but Salem Township and Falls Township are currently leading candidates.
The move signals Amazon’s ongoing commitment to expanding its AI infrastructure amid an increasingly competitive technology race.
Alongside the data centres, Amazon has pledged to support education and workforce development across the state. Collaborations with local institutions will bring programmes for data centre technicians, fibre optic workshops and STEM learning initiatives aimed at school-aged children.
These efforts are intended to prepare the future workforce for careers in AI and cloud computing infrastructure.
The investment is part of Amazon’s broader strategy to establish the US as a global AI leader. The company highlighted that its advanced computing infrastructure and AI hardware are designed to power the next generation of generative and agentic AI, defining digital innovation’s future.
Meanwhile, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft are also scaling AI operations, and crypto mining firms like Riot Platforms and Hive Digital are shifting part of their infrastructure towards high-performance computing for AI, reflecting a wider industry transformation.
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Samsung Electronics is testing a new open-source AI coding assistant called Cline, which is expected to be adopted by its Device eXperience (DX) division as early as next month, according to Yonhap News Agency.
Cline leverages Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s advanced agentic coding capabilities to autonomously handle complex software development tasks. The goal is to significantly boost developer productivity across Samsung’s mobile and home appliance units, which are both part of the DX division.
The move aligns with Samsung’s broader AI for All strategy. Last month, the company created a dedicated AI productivity innovation group within the DX division.
This follows the establishment of an AI centre within its chip business in December 2024, further underscoring the tech giant’s commitment to embedding AI across its operations.
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Chinese social media giant Rednote, also known as Xiaohongshu, has released its first open-source large language model, dots.llm1, marking a major step in its AI ambitions. The model is now publicly available via Hugging Face, a popular developer platform.
By joining the growing number of firms from China open-sourcing AI models—such as Alibaba and DeepSeek—Rednote aims to foster a developer community, expand global influence, and showcase its technical progress amid US-led restrictions on advanced technology exports.
Open-sourcing also enables collaboration and experimentation in contrast to proprietary models kept under wraps by some US companies.
Although dots.llm1 performs slightly behind cutting-edge models like DeepSeek-V3, its coding capabilities rival Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 series. The launch follows Rednote’s recent AI-powered search app, Diandian, which helps users explore Xiaohongshu’s ecosystem more intuitively.
The company began investing in large language models shortly after ChatGPT’s debut and has accelerated its AI strategy in recent months.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said AI is not a threat to human jobs—particularly in engineering—but rather a tool to make work more creative and efficient.
In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, Pichai explained that AI is already powering productivity across Google, contributing to 30% of code generation and improving overall engineering velocity by around 10%.
Far from cutting staff, Pichai confirmed Google plans to hire more engineers in 2025, arguing that AI expands possibilities rather than reducing demand.
‘The opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too,’ he said. ‘It makes coding more fun and frees you up for creativity, problem-solving, and brainstorming.’
Rather than replacing jobs, Pichai sees AI as a companion—handling repetitive tasks and enabling engineers to focus on innovation. He believes this shift will also democratise software development, empowering more people to build and create with code.
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The UK government is launching a nationwide AI skills initiative aimed at both workers and schoolchildren, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing partnerships with major tech companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
The £187 million TechFirst programme will provide AI education to one million secondary students and train 7.5 million workers over the next five years.
Rather than keeping such tools limited to specialists, the government plans to make AI training accessible across classrooms and businesses. Companies involved will make learning materials freely available to boost digital skills and productivity, particularly in using chatbots and large language models.
Starmer said the scheme is designed to empower the next generation to shape AI’s future instead of being shaped by it. He called it the start of a new era of opportunity and growth, as the UK aims to strengthen its global leadership in AI.
The initiative arrives as the country’s AI sector, currently worth £72 billion, is projected to grow to more than £800 billion by 2035.
The government also signed two agreements with NVIDIA to support a nationwide AI talent pipeline, reinforcing efforts to expand both the workforce and innovation in the sector.
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A small-scale quantum device developed by researchers at the University of Vienna has outperformed advanced classical machine learning algorithms—including some used in today’s leading AI systems—using just two photons and a glass chip.
The experiment suggests that useful quantum advantage could arrive far sooner than previously thought, not in massive future machines but in today’s modest photonic setups.
The team’s six-mode processor doesn’t rely on raw speed to beat traditional systems. Instead, it harnesses a uniquely quantum property: the way identical particles interfere. This interference naturally computes mathematical structures known as permanents, which are computationally expensive for classical systems.
By embedding these quantum calculations into a pattern-recognition task, the researchers consistently achieved higher classification accuracy across multiple datasets.
Crucially, the device operates with extreme energy efficiency, offering a promising route to sustainable AI. Co-author Iris Agresti highlighted the growing energy costs of modern machine learning and pointed to photonic quantum systems as a potential solution.
These early results could pave the way for new applications in areas where training data is limited and classical methods fall short—redefining the future of AI and quantum computing alike.
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Meta Platforms is reportedly in talks to invest over $10 billion in Scale AI, a data labelling startup already backed by Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta itself.
The deal, if finalised, would mark Meta’s largest external investment in AI to date, representing a notable shift away from its prior reliance on in-house research and open-source projects.
Founded in 2016, Scale AI supports the training of AI models through high-quality labelled datasets. It also provides a platform for AI research collaboration, now with contributors in more than 9,000 locations.
The company was last valued at nearly $14 billion following a 2024 funding round involving Meta and Microsoft.
Meta’s planned investment signals an aggressive expansion of its AI ambitions. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced up to $65 billion in AI spending for 2025. It includes Meta’s Llama chatbot, now embedded into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, reaching one billion users monthly.
The move puts Meta in closer competition with Microsoft, which has committed over $13 billion to OpenAI, and Amazon and Alphabet, which are backing rival AI firm Anthropic. Scale AI declined to comment, while Meta has yet to respond publicly.
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