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Shark attacks increased around the world in 2021 following three consecutive years of decline, though beach closures in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic could be making the numbers seem more dramatic than they are.

Researchers with the International Shark Attack File recorded 73 unprovoked incidents last year, compared to 52 bites in 2020, according to a new report.

The research is administered by the Florida Museum of Natural History and the American Elasmobranch Society.

International Shark Attack File manager Tyler Bowling pointed out that 52 bites in 2020 were the lowest documented in more than a decade. The 73 bites in 2021 more closely align with the five-year global average of 72.

"Shark bites dropped drastically in 2020 due to the pandemic." Bowling said in a statement.

"This past year was much more typical, with average bite numbers from an assortment of species and fatalities from white sharks, bull sharks and tiger sharks."

There were 11 shark-related fatalities last year, with nine considered unprovoked.

Australia led the world with three unprovoked deaths, followed by New Caledonia with two. The United States, Brazil, New Zealand and South Africa each had a single unprovoked fatal shark attack.

Unprovoked attacks occur when there is no human provocation. Provoked attacks are defined as when humans initiate contact, such as divers trying to touch a shark or fishermen removing a shark from a fishing net, according to the International Shark Attack File.

© AP 2022

Business confidence has taken a massive hit from the outbreak of the Omicron variant, which is threatening to dampen the Australian economy's post-lockdown recovery.

The National Australia Bank's monthly business survey for December showed confidence tumbling by 24 points to an index of minus 12 from plus 12 the previous month.

Business confidence - a guide to future hiring and investment - was down in every state.

"The confidence index fell below the level recorded at the beginning of the Delta outbreak, showing just how concerned business are about the current virus wave," NAB chief economist Alan Oster said.

However, while business conditions also fell three points, they remained just above the long-run average at eight index points.

Mr Oster said conditions have been surprisingly stable through the past few months with both lockdowns and reopening having only limited effects, despite big swings in confidence.

"That should provide some comfort that businesses are continuing to find ways to adapt through difficult circumstances," he said.

But overall the survey results are consistent with an economy that's starting to slow.

"That probably means conditions will fall in early 2022. However, we don't expect the Omicron variant to derail the recovery longer-term," he said.

Meanwhile, consumer confidence has stabilised after a rocky start to 2022, buoyed by the latest labour force figures that showed the unemployment rate plunging to a 13-year low.

However, concerns about the inflation outlook remain elevated.

The weekly ANZ-Roy Morgan consumer confidence index - a pointer to future household spending - rose 2.2 per cent, partly recovering from its 7.6 per cent tumble the previous week, which was the weakest January result since 1992.

ANZ head of Australian economics David Plank said the recovery came in the same week that the jobless rate dropped to 4.2 per cent and amid signs that COVID-19 cases appeared to have peaked.

Confidence was driven by rises of 7.7 per cent in Victoria, 8.8 per cent in Western Australia and 3.7 per cent in Queensland.

However, NSW and South Australia posted declines of 2.4 per cent and 2.6 per cent respectively.

The survey's consumer inflation expectations rose 0.1 percentage point, returning to a recent seven-year high of five per cent.

It came ahead of the latest inflation figures which are expected to show prices remained at the top of the Reserve Bank's two-to-three per cent target, fed by higher fuel and housing costs.

In the past week, the average national petrol price rose by 3.3 cents to equal a recent record high of 170.4 cents per litre, according to the Australian Institute of Petroleum.

Inflation pressures and the drop in the unemployment rate have rekindled speculation the RBA may be forced to raise interest rates this year, and earlier than it had previously anticipated.

© AAP 2022

Facebook's parent company Meta says it has created what it believes is among the fastest artificial intelligence supercomputers running today.

The social media giant on Monday said it hopes the machine will help lay the groundwork for its building of the metaverse, a virtual reality construct intended to supplant the internet as we know it today.

Facebook said it believes the computer will be the fastest in the world once it is fully built around the middle of the year.

Supercomputers are extremely fast and powerful machines built to do complex calculations not possible with a regular home computer. Meta did not disclose where the computer is located or how much it is costing to build.

The computer, which is already up and running but is still being built, is called AI Research SuperCluster. Meta says it will help its AI researchers build "new and better" artificial intelligence models that can learn from "trillions" of examples and work across hundreds of different languages simultaneously and analyse text, images and video together.

The way Meta is defining the power of its computer is different from how conventional and more technically powerful supercomputers are measured.

That's because it relies on the performance of graphics-processing chips, which are useful for running "deep learning" algorithms that can understand what's in an image, analyse text and translate between languages, said Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor and co-director of the AI centre at Carnegie Mellon University.

"We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together," Meta said in a blog post.

The company said its supercomputer will incorporate "real-world examples" from its own systems into training its AI. It says its previous efforts used only open-source and other publicly available data sets.

"They are going to, for the first time, put their customer data on their AI research computer," Sandholm said.

"That would be a really big change to give AI researchers and algorithms access to all that data."

© AP 2022