The Verge

Image: Google Google just announced Gemini, its most powerful suite of AI models yet, and the company has already been accused of lying about its performance.An op-ed from Bloomberg claims Google misrepresented the power of Gemini in a recent video. Google aired an impressive what the quack" hands-on video during its announcement earlier this week, and columnist Parmy Olson says it seemed remarkably capable in the video - perhaps too capable.The six-minute video shows off Gemini's multimodal capabilities (spoken conversational prompts combined with image recognition, for example). Gemini seemingly recognizes images quickly - even for connect-the-dots pictures - responds within seconds, and tracks a wad of paper in a cup and ball game in real-time.... Continue reading...

Image: The Game Awards Geoff Keighley's annual celebration of video games is back. Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google's personal safety features in Android have expanded in the past year to include a potentially lifesaving feature that can relay critical medical data to first responders when a user dials 911.The technology works by sending important emergency information about the caller entered in the Personal Safety app (available on select devices, including recent Google Pixel devices, Nothing Phone 1, and several others), like age, weight, blood type, allergies, and more, to a platform called RapidSOS. Over 15,000 911 and field responder agencies are tapped into RapidSOS, which has supported relaying Medical ID data from iPhones since 2020.If you're dialing 911 from your phone, there's a chance you're hurt or, for some other reason,... Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft Linux is getting its own version of a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Phoronix reports that the latest release of systemd for Linux systems comes with a systemd-bsod service that's able to generate a full-screen error message on Linux distributions.Much like how the Blue Screen of Death originated in Windows, Linux's version will be used as an emergency tool to log errors. If a Linux system fails to boot, it will generate a full-screen message that displays a QR code to get more information on what's causing the boot issue. This was reportedly added as part of an Outreachy project, a group that provides internships for people to work on open-source tools.The systemd-bsod feature is still experimental, and a GitHub changelog notes that... Continue reading...

Ford and Resideo are testing an integration that could power your HVAC using a Honeywell Home smart thermostat and a Ford F-150 Lightning EV. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Smart homes can already help us charge our EVs more efficiently, but using an EV to power our smart homes is still largely sci-fi. However, a new partnership between Ford and Resideo (maker of Honeywell Home smart thermostats) may be a glimpse into that future. Today, the companies announced the EV-Home Power Partnership, a project that's exploring using Ford's F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck to power your HVAC via a smart thermostat during peak hours, saving homeowners money while reducing pressure on the grid.The simulation project will test the concept of vehicle-to-home (V2H) energy management by integrating Ford's truck with a Resideo smart thermostat, such as the Honeywell Home T9. Using the bidirectional charging... Continue reading...

It's like Microsoft Word, but Notepad. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft has been gradually improving its built-in Notepad app on Windows 11 in recent years, and now, it's finally getting a character count. In a new Canary channel test version of Windows 11, Microsoft has added the character count at the bottom much like Microsoft Word's count of the number of words in a document.When text is selected, the status bar shows the character count for both the selected text and the entire document," explains Microsoft's Windows Insider team in a blog post. If no text is selected, the character count for the entire document is displayed, ensuring you always have a clear view of your document's length."This is the latest addition in a line of changes to Notepad this year, with the app recently getting... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Tags - basically hashtags with a twist - are now rolling out globally on Threads, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday.Tags work a little differently than hashtags do on platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). When composing a Threads post, you start a tag by tapping the # symbol and then typing out your topic. But instead of being limited to just one word, you can type out a whole phrase (with spaces!) and add special characters, according to Mosseri. However, you can only make one tag per post.The purpose of tags on Threads is the same as a hashtag, though. If you share on Threads, [tags are] a great way to help connect with people who are interested in the topics you're talking about," Mosseri says. And... Continue reading...

The new Mammoth app is all about getting into Mastodon quicker. | Image: Mammoth One of the best things about Mastodon is the sheer number of apps available for it. The official Mastodon app is fine, but there's also Ivory, Mona, Fedilab, Ice Cubes, Elk, Mastoot, and many others. This openness is part of the whole appeal of the ActivityPub-powered social networking ecosystem, and it has already led to some solid new ideas. (I've personally been a very happy Ivory user for a while now.)Mammoth won some fans earlier this year with a really nicely designed Mastodon client, and then added a For You" feed that makes Mammoth a little more automatically personalized. Now, with the launch of Mammoth 2 for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, the app is going even deeper into curation and personalization: it's launching a series of... Continue reading...

Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images Geoff Keighley's Happy Holiday Game-a-palooza, also known as The Game Awards (but that's less fun), kicks off Thursday, December 7th, at 7:30PM ET / 4:30PM PT. You can watch the show on just about anything that permits livestreaming events. The list of participating platforms is actually pretty impressive. There are the standards, like Twitch and YouTube. TikTok makes an appearance, along with X / Twitter (enjoy watching in 720p, though). Then there are platforms like Kick, Instagram Live, and... Google Play (no, seriously).Regardless of where you decide to watch, your experience watching The Game Awards will be reminiscent of Mr. Keighley's summertime Game-a-palooza, Opening Night Live. There will be a lot of advertisements for games,... Continue reading...

Noomi Rapacein Constellation. | Image: Apple Apple TV Plus has been a solid run of science fiction of late - think Invasion, Monarch, For All Mankind, and Silo - and it looks like that will continue into the new year. This morning, the streamer released the first images and premiere date for Constellation, a psychological thriller starring Noomi Rapace (Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) as an astronaut struggling with life back on Earth after experiencing some kind of tragedy in space. It starts streaming on February 21st, with new weekly episodes on Wednesdays.Here's the official premise for the series:

Image: Epic Games In what's becoming increasingly common for Fortnite, the game is fusing with one of the biggest pop culture properties around. This time around, it's Lego. But the launch of Lego Fortnite is also much more involved than the typical tie-in - and the start of what seems like a new era for Fortnite.Lego Fortnite is a survival crafting game that's available inside of Fortnite starting today. It's sort of like a Lego version of Minecraft, only instead of downloading a whole new game, you just select a tile from the Fortnite menu the same way you would when you hop into battle royale.I was able to play around 30 minutes of the game earlier in the week, and it's very impressive, if somewhat familiar. Players are given a large, procedurally... Continue reading...

Image: GM General Motors struck a deal with commercial vehicle manufacturer Autocar to use its hydrogen fuel-cell technology to power a range of heavy-duty work vehicles.Hydrogen fuel cells - which use compressed hydrogen as their fuel and release water vapor as its only emission - have been in development for decades. GM has condensed its Hydrotec-branded system into a power cube" encompassing 300 individual hydrogen fuel cells, the current generation of which can put out 80 kW of net power.The automaker has said it wants to use the cubes for a variety of appliances, including mobile generators and temporary EV chargers. And now that list has grown to include vocational vehicles.Autocar, based in Birmingham, Ala., is a 126-year-old... Continue reading...

A startup called Lithos Carbon spreads crushed basalt across farmlands to trap carbon dioxide in rock. | Image courtesy of Frontier Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, and a slew of other companies plan to spend more than $57 million cumulatively to fight climate change by spreading crushed rock over farmland.The aim is to use rocks' natural ability to absorb carbon dioxide, which might sound low-tech, but speeding up the process and finding a way to reliably measure how much CO2 is sequestered has proven pretty hard. It's a tactic for trapping planet-heating carbon dioxide called enhanced weathering" that researchers have studied for decades, but it has lagged behind other emerging technologies in moving to commercialization.The deal was announced today by Frontier, a carbon removal initiative led by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability. Autodesk, H&M... Continue reading...

Image: Proton Proton Drive, the end-to-end encrypted cloud storage app, is getting more like Google Drive. The Android version of the app now lets you automatically back up and manage the photos on your phone.With the addition of a photo syncing and management feature, it's becoming more viable as an alternative to mainstream cloud storage options like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. Unlike both of these services, files stored within Proton Drive are end-to-end encrypted, which means third parties, including Proton itself, can't view your uploaded content. Image: Proton While Proton Drive currently lets you store photos and other files from your phone, it doesn't automatically sync new photos. The update will make it more... Continue reading...

Big Mac meets machine learning. | Illustration: The Verge McDonald's is partnering with Google to deploy generative AI beginning in 2024, when thousands" of stores will get hardware and software upgrades. Along with updates to other systems including ordering kiosks and the company's mobile app, McDonald's will be able to use generative AI on massive amounts of data to optimize operations. At least one outcome will be - according to the company - hotter, fresher food" for customers. Large orders of fries delivered hot, thanks to large language models? It's not completely clear what that means, but we can read between the lines: expect more AI-driven automation at a drive-through near you in the coming years.McDonald's isn't specific about how AI will be used but says it will include hardware... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has a solution for the sync issue that caused files to disappear for some users on Drive for desktop. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as a one-click update, but Google has posted a list of steps you can take to recover your files.After downloading and opening the latest version of Google Drive for Windows or macOS, Google says to run the app's recovery tool. To do this, click the Drive icon in the menu bar or system tray. From there, press and hold Shift, click Settings, and select Recover from backups." If all goes well, you'll receive a notice that says Recovery has started." Google will put all the recovered files into a new folder named Google Drive recovery" once the process is complete.In case you run into any... Continue reading...

Image: PaulSakuma.com AMD wants people to remember that Nvidia's not the only company selling AI chips. It's announced the availability of new accelerators and processors geared toward running large language models, or LLMs.The chipmaker unveiled the Instinct MI300X accelerator and the Instinct M1300A accelerated processing unit (APU), which the company said works to train and run LLMs. The company said the MI300X has 1.5 times more memory capacity than the previous M1250X version. Both new products have better memory capacity and are more energy-efficient than their predecessors, said AMD.LLMs continue to increase in size and complexity, requiring massive amounts of memory and compute," AMD CEO Lisa Su said. And we know the availability of GPUs is the... Continue reading...

Photo by Sean O'Kane / The Verge Electric vehicles with batteries that contain minerals and materials sourced from China won't be eligible for the $7,500 federal EV tax credit starting on January 1, 2024, according to guidelines recently released by the Internal Revenue Service.That means a lot of EVs are about to lose their eligibility - chief among them, the Ford Mustang Mach-E. Ford sent out a notice to dealers recently stating that it is unlikely that any Mustang Mach-Es will qualify for the Federal Tax Credit beginning on 1/1/24," according to a report in Cars Direct. (A Ford spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)Tesla is also warning customers that certain versions of the Model 3 - the Rear-Wheel Drive and Long Range trims - will... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Now that Apple has released a preview of the next iOS update, Anker says its upcoming Qi2-compatible wireless chargers will provide faster 15W charging for iPhone 13, iPhone 14, and iPhone 15 devices.Apple has not responded to a request for comment, but presumably, this support will extend to all Qi2 chargers. The only problem left is that there are no certified products available for purchase yet, despite companies like Anker, Belkin, and Mophie announcing Qi2-compatible hardware a few months ago.However, even if the products aren't named yet, Paul Golden of the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC, which manages the Qi2 spec) tells The Verge that six brands of transmitters have already been certified, from Belkin, Anker, BH-EVS, Shenzhen... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Bloomberg's Apple reporter, Mark Gurman, says Apple has some big changes coming for 2024 in the form of a bigger iPad Air joining the existing smaller size and the previously rumored iPad Pro with an OLED screen. In addition to that, the company will release an updated MacBook Air using Apple's new M3 processor that just debuted in the updated 14-inch MacBook Pro and new iMacs.The new iPad Air will reportedly have a 12.9-inch screen to join the 10.9-inch model, bringing the lineup much closer to the iPad Pro's 11- and 12.9-inch options. Gurman didn't provide a specific date, only saying the devices will arrive in early 2024," adding that Apple hopes to turn things around for sales of both product lines.The company will also release a... Continue reading...

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Google is bringing some sophisticated new AI smarts to the Pixel 8 Pro today, but it's not stopping there. The company is also rolling out its December feature drop for Pixel hardware, which includes two big software features for the 8 Pro - but plenty of new tricks for other devices as well.Video Boost, which is exclusive to Google's larger-size flagship, will be available starting today. It uploads your videos to the cloud where our computational photography models adjust color, lighting, stabilization and graininess," according to Google's blog post. After that, you receive a touched-up video that looks true to life." This isn't something anyone's really gotten to test much yet, so we're all about to find out together where Video... Continue reading...

Gemini was designed from the beginning to be about much more than just text. | Image: Google Google has been an AI-first company' for nearly a decade. Now, a year into the AI era brought on by ChatGPT, it's finally making a big move. Continue reading...

Bard has access to Google's appsand now its best large language model, too. | Image: Google While OpenAI's ChatGPT has become a worldwide phenomenon and one of the fastest-growing consumer products ever, Google's Bard has been something of an afterthought. The chatbot has steadily gained new features, including access to your data across other Google products, but its answers and information have rarely seemed to rival what you get from ChatGPT and other bots using GPT-3 and GPT-4.The case for Bard may have just gotten more compelling, though: as of today, for English-speaking users in 170 countries, Bard is now powered by Google's new Gemini model, which it says matches and even exceeds OpenAI's tech in a number of ways. (Google says Gemini is coming to more languages and countries in the near future.")Bard is now running... Continue reading...

The Pixel 8 Pro is the first Gemini-capable phone - but it won't be the last. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Gemini may be the biggest, most powerful large language model, or LLM, Google has ever developed, but it's better suited to running in data centers than on your phone. With Gemini Nano, though, the company is trying to split the difference: it built a reduced version of its flagship LLM that can run locally and offline on your device. Well, a device, anyway. The Pixel 8 Pro is the only Nano-compatible phone so far, but Google sees the new model as a core part of Android going forward.If you have a Pixel 8 Pro, starting today, two things on your phone will be powered by Gemini Nano: the auto-summarization feature in the Recorder app, and the Smart Reply part of the Gboard keyboard. Both are coming as part of the Pixel's December Feature... Continue reading...