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If you saw the animated movie franchise Ice Age becoming an integral part of the Alien universe, then you've got some serious soothsaying skills.

As it turns out, the family-friendly films created by screenwriter Michael J. Wilson play a pivotal role in Noah Hawley's FX series Alien: Earth, serving as a crucial connection between two main characters. Here's how it plays out.

Where does Ice Age come up in Alien: Earth? Joe (Alex Lawther) watches "Ice Age" for sad reasons. Credit: FX

First things first, it's not just any old Ice Age — it's Ice Age: Continental Drift.

The fourth movie in the franchise appears in Alien: Earth's first episode, when Prodigy military medic Joe (Alex Lawther) gets home to his apartment in New Siam, Prodigy City. He sits down to watch the film, and it's obvious he's seen it many times before, as he quotes it aloud. (Notably, this movie came out in 2012; given Alien: Earth is set in 2120, it's an 108-year-old weeknight screening Joe's going for here.)

But he's not the only one watching. Joe's sister Marcy (Sydney Chandler), is watching Joe watch Continental Drift through security cameras back on Neverland, Prodigy's secret research facility. The thing is, Joe thinks Marcy is dead — she's not, her consciousness has been transferred into a hybrid called Wendy by Prodigy. But despite her new synthetic body, Marcy remembers watching this film with her brother (there's a flashback), and also quotes the scene aloud.

It's specifically a scene in which mammoth Manny, smilodon Diego, and ground sloth Sid encounter giant ape pirate Captain Gutt. "Surrender your ship or face my fury," says the captain. "Or face your furry what?" replies Sid.

Why is Ice Age: Continental Drift important in Alien: Earth?

Turns out quoting movies is the most human thing you can do in the reality that is Alien: Earth.

Ice Age: Continental Drift comes up again when Joe tries to resign from his post as medic to go to medical school on Mars, while Marcy watches on the cameras. He's rejected by the robot attendant, who says he has seven months left on his Prodigy contract. "Have a heart," Joe says. "Or face my fury."

At this moment, Marcy places her hand on the screen, somehow rewrites the code, and makes the robot attendant say, "Or face your furry what?" In the moment, Joe is stunned not only to hear this corporate robot quoting Continental Drift, but the specific response in Joe and Marcy's favourite scene.

It's a sign, an in-joke sent from Marcy to Joe, that she might not be gone for good. And luckily, they won't have to wait long to watch the whole movie together again.

Considering both the Alien and Ice Age franchises are produced by 20th Century Studios (formerly known as 20th Century Fox), it's also extremely convenient IP to drop into the narrative — much like those Disney movies on Boy Kavalier's roof. And honestly, if you haven't seen all the Ice Age films, then doom on you, doom on you, doom on you…

Alien: Earth premieres Aug. 12 at 8 p.m. ET on Hulu and FX with two episodes, with new episodes dropping weekly on Tuesdays.

Alien: Earth takes place before the first Alien movie chronologically, at a time when the globe — and some of space — is ruled by five different corporations.

Some of these are names we've heard before in the Alien universe, while others are brand new. Some appear to be more relevant to the story Alien: Earth is telling than others. To help you keep track, we've broken down the five corporations, and everything we know about them so far.

SEE ALSO: 'Alien: Earth' review: Xenomorphs get upstaged in this sci-fi treat What are the five corporations in Alien: Earth?

Although only three of the corporations have been mentioned so far in the show, the names of all five have been revealed in the official Alien: Earth press release. These are:

• Weyland-Yutani

• Lynch

• Dynamic

• Threshold

• Prodigy

We get a brief glimpse of the people who presumably run these five corporations near the start of episode 1, during an impromptu politics lesson given by Maginot engineer Shmuel (Michael Smiley) to his apprentice Malachite (Jamie Bisping).

What do we know about the corporations?

We know quite a bit about a couple, and basically nothing about some others. The two corporations that have been key to the Alien: Earth story so far are Weyland-Yutani, which owns the USCSS Maginot deep space research vessel that crashes on Earth carrying the alien specimens, and Prodigy, a newer corporation that owns Prodigy City in New Siam, where the ship lands, and the "Neverland" research island where the hybrids are based.

Featured Video For You 'Alien' was my gateway to horror. Now I'm obsessed with the franchise.

Prodigy is owned by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blevin), the "youngest trillionaire ever" who we learn founded the company around a decade ago — Alien: Earth is set in 2120. Prodigy is known for synths and AI, but as we discover in episode 1, they're in the process of pioneering something new: hybrids, which are essentially synths with a downloaded human consciousness.

In terms of the other corporations, we know basically nothing about Lynch and Threshold — these haven't been mentioned in Alien: Earth yet — and the only thing we know about Dynamic is that they control the moon, thanks to a passing comment by Zaveri (Richa Moorjani) in the Maginot canteen. As Shmuel explains further in the scene, Weyland-Yutani has control of both North and South America and Mars and Saturn.

As we already know from the Alien franchise as a whole, Weyland-Yutani has an obsession with Xenomorphs, and acquiring alien species for its own shady purposes (often at the expense of the humans involved with said acquiring). Given the lengths the corporation has already gone to to gather the specimens onboard the Maginot, what lengths might they go to to try and get them back?

Alien: Earth premieres Aug. 12 at 8 p.m. ET on Hulu and FX with two episodes, then weekly on Tuesdays.

Alien: Earth is packed so full of near-sociopathic characters that it's sometimes easy to lose track of whether you're dealing with an AI, a human, or some combination of the two.

The good news is, although there are various artificially intelligent beings in Noah Hawley's Alien universe prequel, the show starts by providing us with a handy guide to remember them all. We've transcribed that opening lore below, along with some more information (and examples) of the different types of being in Alien: Earth, from cyborgs to synths and hybrids.

SEE ALSO: 'Alien: Earth' review: Xenomorphs get upstaged in this sci-fi treat What does the Alien: Earth intro tell us about cyborgs, synths and hybrids?

At the start of episode 1, text appears briefly explaining the difference between three beings: cyborgs, synths, and hybrids. We've transcribed it in full below:

"In the future the race for immortality will come in three guises:

Cybernetically enhanced humans: Cyborgs
Artificially intelligent beings: Synths
Synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness: Hybrids

Which technology prevails will determine what corporation rules the universe."

Let's break those three down in some more detail.

What are cyborgs? Credit: Patrick Brown / FX

Cyborgs have a rich history in sci-fi, and Alien: Earth is no exception. A cyborg is essentially a human being with some kind of robotic enhancement. We meet our first one fairly early on in the form of Morrow (Babou Ceesay), the head of security onboard Weyland-Yutani's USCSS Maginot, the doomed ship carrying multiple alien species that crash lands into Earth.

Morrow may have a fairly robotic demeanour, but he has the brain of a human. His arm, on the other hand, is pretty much a Swiss Army Knife, complete with a blade and various handy power tool attachments.

What are synths? Credit: Patrick Brown / FX

Remember Ash (Ian Holm) from the original Alien movie? He was a synthetic, which is basically an entirely man-made being with an AI brain. Our main Alien: Earth synth is Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), a Prodigy employee who works alongside Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and his new batch of hybrids (more on those below).

What are hybrids? Credit: FX

Synthetics crossed with humans, hybrids are Prodigy's brand new experiment and the core focus of Alien: Earth. Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is the first of a group of terminally ill children who have their consciousness' transferred into the bodies of synthetics. This means Wendy is capable of super-human speed and strength, but still has the memories and emotions of the little girl she was before her procedure.

Alien: Earth premieres Aug. 12 at 8 p.m. ET on Hulu and FX with two episodes, then weekly on Tuesdays.

James Cameron has never hesitated to give good quotes on anything, so naturally, he has thoughts on generative AI.

The 70-year-old director is the all-time box office GOAT, with an impressive string of hits such as Titanic and the Avatar series. He recently took to a couple of different venues to discuss generative AI, which is impacting movie-making in the same way it's impacting virtually everything else.

In a conversation with Screen Daily, an international film industry publication, Cameron said that artists will need to "master" generative AI so they can harness its potential on their own terms.

“I can’t think of anything coming up that is bigger and more important to us right now than confronting this generative AI issue,” Cameron told Screen Daily. “It is critical that we master it and control it so that it remains an artistic tool and it doesn’t replace artists."

Cameron is known to be as verbose as he is opinionated, and he has consistently been on the cutting edge of visual effects technology. In general, generative AI has been extremely controversial in Hollywood, with even the smallest whiff of generative AI leading to fierce backlash. However, in recent conversations, Cameron staked out a more measured point of view.

"There are some very dangerous things ahead of us right now, but I’ve never been afraid of new technology,” the director said to Screen Daily. “I want to learn it, I want to master it for myself, then use my own best judgment about how I apply it to my personal art.”

SEE ALSO: ChatGPT fans are shredding GPT-5 on Reddit as Sam Altman responds in AMA (updated)

Cameron went on to tell Screen Daily that we're in a sort of "wild west" with AI right now. “We as the artists in movies, in television, have to set the rules for it. Right now, there are no rules. It’s the Wild West.”

And in an appearance on the Boz to the Future podcast, Cameron said that generative AI could be critical for filmmakers trying to drastically lower the costs of making big, effects-heavy films, citing Dune as an example. However, he stressed that doesn't mean taking away work from humans.

"Now that’s not about laying off half the staff and at the effects company," the director said, according to Variety. "That’s about doubling their speed to completion on a given shot, so your cadence is faster and your throughput cycle is faster, and artists get to move on and do other cool things and then other cool things, right? That’s my sort of vision for that."

If you haven't kept up with Cameron throughout his filmmaking career, this is entirely in keeping with his approach for the past few decades. He has consistently advocated for new technologies like CGI (pioneered in Terminator 2) and performance capture and 3D filmmaking, like the kind seen in Avatar. Where this gets tricky is that CGI and performance capture still require a human touch to work properly, while some generative AI advocates believe the technology can be used to write screenplays or make movies without human input at all.

Currently, the use of AI in Hollywood has become a battleground for unions like SAG-AFTRA negotiating with big studios.

U.S. antitrust regulators have been on a roll, and Google may soon be forced to sell its popular Chrome browser, which is by far the leading web browser among Americans.

Now, Google has reportedly received a massive 'longshot' offer from a surprising source: Perplexity AI.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news today that Perplexity AI has reportedly offered Google $34.5 billion to buy Chrome, which is surprising for a few reasons. Most notably, Perplexity itself is only valued at $18 billion, the Journal reports. Second, while the exact valuation of Chrome is not known, some estimates place the web browser's value at either $20 or $50 billion, depending on who's asking.

Perplexity is best known as an AI-powered search engine, but the company recently launched Comet, an agentic AI browser.

SEE ALSO: I’m testing Perplexity’s new AI browser Comet. Here are 3 features I tried right away.

So, how would Perplexity AI fund this offer? According to the Wall Street Journal, Perplexity has the backing of several venture-capital funds and other investors, who would back their offer.

OpenAI has also reportedly expressed interest in buying Google Chrome, though it's unclear if Google would be willing to sell such a popular asset to its chief AI rival.

All of this is unfolding as tech companies brace for the ripple effects of the Department of Justice’s landmark antitrust case against Google. Indeed, Google is unlikely to sell Chrome unless forced to do so.

The antitrust case over Google's monopoly of the search marketplace determined that Google “illegally [monopolized] the search engine and search advertising markets.” Google has already lost that case, and now U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is weighing potential remedies, one of the most dramatic being a forced sale of Chrome.

At the same time, major tech companies are looking to a post-Google Search web economy and trying to get a head start in the race for AI browser dominance

Many analysts think a sale of Google Chrome is ultimately unlikely, but that hasn’t stopped rivals like Perplexity from moving fast to put their name in the hat. On top of the Chrome question, Judge Mehta could also restrict Google’s ability to pay for default search engine placement on browsers and devices — a move that reportedly had Apple eyeing Perplexity as a potential acquisition target in the first place.

Chrome boasts roughly 3.5 billion users worldwide and commands more than 60 percent of the global browser market — a dominance that makes any talk of a forced sale one of the most consequential antitrust remedies in tech history.

Pine64, the creator of the PinePhone line of Linux-focused smartphones, is apparently killing off the Pro edition of the PinePhone. You can still get the original PinePhone though.

Life with kids can be chaotic. Trust me, I know. So when I find something that works, I want to tell everyone about it. As a mom to a toddler and a preschooler, these are the Amazon finds that I use and rely on every single day.

Do you remember vibrating with excitement at the thought of a new video game when you were a child? What about being planted in front of a screen for a whole weekend, much to your parents’ disapproval?

Meta is quickly becoming the forerunner in Big Tech's chorus against "Woke AI," as it announces a collaboration with known conservative influencer Robby Starbuck to ensure its AI tools are free of "ideological bias."

SEE ALSO: Truth Social's new AI search is 'woke' enough to disagree with Trump

Starbuck, to clarify, is not an expert in developing or training AI tools or LLMs. Instead — as explained in an August 8 statement posted to the X accounts of Starbuck and Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joe Kaplan — he will provide guidance to the company's developers on how to further "mitigate" political bias in AI tools. Meta's stance is that removing such "DEI bias" makes its models "more accurate." The advisory role is part of a deal struck in a settlement between Meta and Starbuck, who sued the company for $5 million, alleging the company's AI chatbot falsely claimed he was at the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

“We don’t want a future where you’ve got AI putting the thumb on the scale when it comes to politics,” Starbuck said in an interview with CNBC, explaining his goal was "ethical" and "neutral" AI. Starbuck has previously advised the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and head Brendan Carr on eliminating DEI and equal opportunity initiatives in telecommunications, a strategy that includes withholding FCC approvals for companies that don't comply with the Trump administration's mandates.

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The move comes after President Trump announced a new federal AI Action Plan and executive order targeting what conservatives have deemed "Woke AI," or Large Language Models with ideological or political "bias" that promote liberal beliefs, including the concept of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Many considered the move to be a capitulation to Big Tech's leaders, most of whom funded and now advise the Trump administration.

Starbuck, a former music video director, has become a leading figure among conservative social media influencers, gaining popularity for videos that attack companies with diversity initiatives and galvanize his followers to boycott or pressure them to capitulate to right wing demands by removing DEI policies. Like many other conservative influencers, Starbuck often shares alarmist comments about gender affirming healthcare for trans youth, refers to liberal commentators as "mentally challenged" and "lunatics," and has declared DEI policies a "war on men." He's also a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind that crafted the controversial Project 2025 movement.

SEE ALSO: Metadata on U.S. government memos reveals authors linked to Project 2025

Even before the president's sweeping anti-DEI orders, Meta had already struck down its DEI mandates and related policies, including protections for LGBTQ communities, women, and people of color. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has been gradually shifting the company's policies and priorities to the right in the name of "free speech" — echoing the sentiments of the current administration — including donating $1 million to the Trump campaign in the company's name.

"Since engaging on these important issues with Robby, Meta has made tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias," the company said in a statement.

Privacy-focused phones are not a new concept, even as they might be a little gimmicky and silly. You need to make a lot of uncomfortable compromises to go truly locked down. Another one of those privacy-first devices has just popped up, but you should probably not buy this one.

Training AI models requires choosing an optimizer and for nearly a decade, Adam( (opens in new tab)–W) (opens in new tab) has been the optimizer of choice. Given that durability and success, it was fair to doubt that any further improvement was possible. And yet, last December, a new optimizer called Muon (opens in new tab) showed serious promise by powering a nanoGPT speedrun (opens in new tab). This proved out, with multiple AI labs (e.g., Kimi-AI (opens in new tab) and Essential-AI (opens in new tab)) reporting 2x scale improvements and the release of the 1T parameter Kimi K2 (opens in new tab) model. Restated: you can train a model to similar performance with half as many GPUs.

There’s one fly in the ointment: Muon requires large matrix multiplications in the optimizer, which requires heavy communication in large models at the scale where FSDP (opens in new tab) and TP (opens in new tab) parallelization becomes desirable. Going back to the inspiration for Muon, (opens in new tab) the key idea is an orthonormal update, which sparked the search for more scalable alternative linear algebras realizing the same goal. That’s exactly what Dion is. We have open-sourced this new optimizer to enable anyone to train large models more efficiently at scale.  

What’s an orthonormal update? Figure1. Illustration of matrix parameters

At the core of Transformers, a set of input activations is multiplied by a learned weight matrix to produce a new set of output activations. When the weight matrix is updated during training, the resulting change in the output activations generally depends on the direction of the input activations. As a result, the learning rate must be chosen conservatively to accommodate the input direction that induces the largest change. Orthonormalized updates alter this behavior by (approximately) making the change in output activations invariant to the direction of the input. This is achieved by enforcing orthonormality (opens in new tab) on the update matrix, thereby equalizing its effect across all input directions.

What is Dion?

While Muon has shown strong empirical results, scaling it to very large models poses challenges. As reported by Essential AI (opens in new tab), applying Muon to large architectures like LLaMA-3 becomes compute-bound—and potentially communication-bound—due to the cost of the Newton–Schulz orthonormalization steps (opens in new tab).

Figure 2. Pseudocode of the centralized version of Dion

This is where Dion enters. At a high level, Dion introduces a new axis for scalability: the rank. Specifically, for a given rank r, Dion orthonormalizes only the top r of the singular vector space, reducing communication and compute overhead while preserving performance. Empirically, we observe that the necessary rank for good performance grows much more slowly than the number of parameters in larger models.

Download Dion optimizer 

Dion implements orthonormalization using amortized power iteration (opens in new tab). Power iteration typically pulls out the largest singular value by repeated matrix multiplication. By amortizing this process over optimization steps—applied to the slowly-evolving momentum matrix—we reduce the cost to just two matrix multiplications per step. Incorporating a QR decomposition allows us to extract an approximate orthonormal basis spanning the top singular directions, rather than just the leading one. This amortized power iteration is fully compatible with standard distributed training techniques such as FSDP and tensor parallelism. Here, we show a simple centralized version, but the technique works for more complex forms of parallelization as presented in the paper. In other words, we can orthogonalize a matrix without ever seeing a full row or column of it. 

Low-rank approximation would ordinarily introduce error, but Dion overcomes this through an error feedback mechanism. This keeps the residual of low rank approximation in the momentum matrix so that any systematic gradient structure not initially captured accumulates to eventually be applied in a future update.

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Something very strange happened in our experiments. Usually, adding an extra constraint on the way an algorithm works can be expected to decrease overall performance. And indeed, at the 120M parameter scale of the speedrun, we see Dion’s update taking more time than Muon, while not yielding any significant gains. But at larger scales, we observed a different trend: Dion began to outperform Muon.

Figure 3. Wall-clock time speedup of Dion for 3B model training

Why would adding a constraint improve the update rule? The answer lies in what the constraint enforces. Dion achieves a much closer approximation to true orthonormalization than Muon. This precision, initially subtle, becomes increasingly important as the number of singular vectors grows. Over increasing model scale and training steps, this small advantage accumulates—leading to a measurable improvement in performance.

This edge further grows with batch size—with larger batches the update quality tends to degrade, but notably more slowly with Dion than Muon (and Muon is already a significant improvement over AdamW).

Figure 4. Scaling of Dion across different batch sizes

Here you can see how the number of steps to reach a pretraining loss compared to AdamW varies as batch size grows with full rank and ¼ rank Dion (in orange) and Muon (in blue).   

In our experiments, these benefits extend to various post-training regimes as well.

We also experimented with rank, discovering empirically that larger models tolerate smaller rank well.

Figure 5. Low-rank Dion across different model sizes

Projecting this trend out to the scale of the LLaMA-3 (opens in new tab) 405B parameter models suggests that Dion is fully effective even with rank fractions as low as 1/16 or 1/64 for large dense models like LLaMA-3.    

Using hardware timings of the individual update steps suggests a story that looks this:

Figure 6. Estimated wall-clock time of each optimizer step for Llama 3 405B. Lower is better. Muon is highlighted in orange as our baseline, next to Dion with varying rank fractions. Suggested rank fractions for a 405B parameter model are shown in blue. Using Dion with rank fraction 1/16 or lower offers an order-of-magnitude speedup over Muon.

We’ve open-sourced a PyTorch FSDP2 + Tensor Parallel (TP) implementation of Dion, available via a simple pip install. Our goal is to make faster training with Dion accessible to everyone. As a bonus, the repository also includes a PyTorch FSDP2 implementation of Muon.

Dion optimizer Acknowledgements

We thank Riashat Islam and Pratyusha Sharma for their helpful feedback on the writing and presentation.

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The post Dion: the distributed orthonormal update revolution is here appeared first on Microsoft Research.

Although macOS isn’t known for being the most configurable operating system, the System Settings app provides many options. You name it; everything, from wallpaper slideshow timings to Dock magnification, is customizable. But more settings are hiding just below the surface, and this app can help you uncover them.

The current Nissan Leaf is in its final lap, with a next-gen crossover set to take its place soon. It’s been around since 2018 in this form and, while it never lit up the sales charts, it’s quietly remained one of the most important and most affordable electric cars out there.

Razer has released the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro 8K PC, a brand new wireless controller designed for competitive PC gaming. This controller is packed with top-tier features that you expect from a brand name like Razer, but the price tag matches the features.

Finding a good budget phone can be a challenge, but there are some neat options out there. T-Mobile's Revvl line is a pretty good option for those wanting to save a buck, and the newest member is here—and while I think there are still some better options, there are a few reasons why this could also be fine for some.

Syncthing, the cross-platform file synchronization tool that doesn’t need cloud storage, has finally released its big 2.0 update. The new version has some great performance and reliability improvements, updated terminal commands, and much more.

From the widely memed "Labubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate" slang overload to viral brands that everybody on your timeline seems to go crazy about, the ripple of social media influence can be widely felt in every app you use.

The AI wars roll on — this time with Anthropic stepping right in behind OpenAI by offering its Claude chatbot to the federal government for the bargain price of just $1 a year.

The San Francisco–based company becomes the latest AI player to pitch its flagship LLM to Washington, a move widely seen as a bid to win favor with President Donald Trump’s administration. The announcement on Tuesday comes less than a week after OpenAI revealed a nearly identical deal, making ChatGPT available to the General Services Administration for the same token fee.

SEE ALSO: Anthropic reportedly cut OpenAI access to Claude

According to the Financial Times, the Claude agreement clearly states that federal agencies aren’t obligated to use the chatbot at all. Even if they do, Claude’s use will be limited to sensitive but unclassified work.

Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have only recently been cleared to supply their chatbots to the US government. According to the Financial Times, Google is already working on a similar arrangement to offer its Gemini AI to federal agencies at a steeply discounted rate.

Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service — which oversees procurement for US agencies — told the FT that the goal is simple: “get widespread adoption [of AI tools] in the federal government.”

So far, multiple federal agencies have already begun experimenting with AI tools. The Pentagon has awarded $200 million in contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI. Wired has also reported on AI being used inside agencies like the GSA and HUD to identify redundant federal regulations, though according to their reporting, the results have been, at best, mixed.

Gruenbaum told the Financial Times that the government has no official preference for one AI provider over another. Still, it’s worth noting that President Trump has made it clear the White House will refuse to do business with what it calls "woke AI" — a label applied to any chatbot it deems to be pushing "partisan bias or ideological agendas."

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

National Public Data — the online background check and fraud prevention service targeted by hackers in what became one of the biggest social security breaches ever — is back. It may still pose a security threat.

SEE ALSO: AOL will pull the plug on dial-up internet, '90s nostalgia ensues

In 2024, the private company announced a malicious actor had gained access to its systems in a Dec. 2023 breach, leaking information for several months to the web's black market. It took National Public Data even longer to disclose details of the breach to the public, which exposed nearly three decades of Social Security records — it was estimated that the hackers accessed hundreds of millions of records. Data included Social Security numbers, full names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers, prompting many to freeze their credit and go on the defense against identity theft.

The site shut down last year following the scandal, but now it appears that National Public Data is back in the personal information game. PC Mag reports that the domain is once again active and running with a new, unnamed owner. The site, which is operating as a people search engine, appears to still store personal data pulled from publicly available sources, including federal databases.

At the bottom of the homepage, the new National Public Data links to a statement on the 2023 breach. "The security of our users’ data is the most important factor for us. That’s why we protect it by implementing robust encryption protocols, regularly updating our security systems, and complying with all relevant data protection regulations," the site's FAQ reads.

How to opt out of National Public Data's search

Like other people search engines, individuals must request their personal information not be displayed on the site. To do so, users have to fill out the company's Opt Out Form. Individuals will need to first find and copy the link to their personal data profile on the site itself.

Individuals can also use a personal data removal service to scrub their information from multiple sites at once or manually remove their information from search sites like Google.

Elon Musk, as is his way, fired off an accusatory tweet Monday night. The target of his ire? Apple.

He posted on X: "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action."

Unfortunately for Musk, his own social media site quickly fact-checked his statement. Community notes on his post noted that both Deepseek and Perplexity had hit the top of the App Store charts, even after Apple and OpenAI announced a partnership in 2024.

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Still, Musk kept posting about Apple and his belief that it was tamping down on the popularity of xAI and its signature AI chatbot, Grok.

"Unfortunately, what choice do we have?" he posted on X. "Apple didn’t just put their thumb on the scale, they put their whole body!"

Musk has not yet provided evidence that Apple has suppressed his apps. As of this writing, ChatGPT is the top app on the Apple App Store charts; Grok is in the fifth spot, lagging behind Threads.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman didn't take the accusation kindly. He quote-tweeted Musk's post and wrote, "This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn't like."

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The conflict this week between Musk, Altman, and Apple is yet another example of the billionaire men running the world getting into petty, public spats. Remember the Musk, Trump feud? Or Zuck and Musk? Or previous Altman vs. Musk fights?

Still, that's not to say there haven't been controversies and troubles on Apple's end regarding its App Store. Epic Games, for instance, has been locked in a years-long legal battle with Apple over listing its popular game Fortnite in the App Store. The judge in the case actually found in May that Apple violated a court order prohibiting the company from engaging in anti-competitive behavior.

It's not clear if Musk will actually take legal action, but it's interesting to see the tech giants going at one another in a public space.