Tesla on trial after car on autopilot kills woman, iPhone 17 to launch week beginning September 8th?

A jury will decide whether Tesla is partly to blame for the death of a young woman who was hit by an electric car on autopilot. Naibel Benavides was stargazing at the time of the collision, which sent her flying 22m (75ft) through the air in Florida. Her boyfriend was seriously injured in the 2019 incident, while her body was discovered in a wooded area. George McGee, the Tesla’s driver, is not a plaintiff – and reached a separate settlement with the victims’ families. Lawyers argue that the car’s driver assistance feature should have warned the driver and braked before the collision. Sky News

The week after its Grok chatbot identified itself as “MechaHitler” and generated antisemitic posts, Elon Musk’s xAI firm announced a contract with the US Department of Defense worth nearly $200m. The deal is for developing and implementing artificial intelligence tools for the agency. The DoD on Monday also announced similar contracts with $200m ceilings with several other major US-based artificial intelligence developers, including Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. The Guardian 

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting news of when the iPhone 17 series might launch, a reliable leaker has just listed what they say the most likely dates for Apple’s new phones to make their debut – and while nothing official has been announced yet, the suggested dates make a lot of sense. In his latest Power On newsletter ($/£), Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman noted that Apple usually launches new iPhones in the week after Labor Day – and since Labor Day falls on September 1 this year, that makes the week starting September 8 the most likely candidate.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building data centres to supercharge its artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The social media giant’s first one-gigawatt (GW) data centre mega-project, dubbed Prometheus after the Greek titan, will come online next year with plans for “multiple more titan clusters”, the Facebook founder said. These one gigawatt (GW) data centres will consume more power than about 750,000 standard homes. Telegraph

The cost of some new electric cars will soon be reduced by up to £3,750 under grants being introduced by the UK government to encourage drivers to move away from petrol and diesel vehicles. The discounts will apply to eligible vehicles costing up to £37,000, with the most environmentally friendly vehicles seeing the biggest reductions, the Department for Transport (DfT) said. Carmakers can apply for funding from Wednesday, with the RAC saying discounted cars should start appearing at dealerships “within weeks”. BBC 

Google’s Pixel 10 family is rumored to be making its debut on August 20, and today purported specs for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold have been leaked. Let’s dive in. The phone allegedly comes with a 6.4-inch cover display with a 3,000-nit peak brightness, and the same cameras as its predecessor (a 48 MP main, 10.5MP ultrawide, 10.8MP telephoto with 5x optical zoom, and two 10 MP selfie snappers).

Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold

The Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s battery capacity will grow to 5,015 mAh. The device will be powered by the Tensor G5 SoC, paired with 16GB of RAM and 256GB/512GB/1TB of storage. GSM Arena