The Verge

Aerial view of an offshore wind farm on July 2nd, 2022, in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province of China. | Photo by Yao Feng / VCG via Getty Images The wind energy industry is recovering from a worrying slump in 2022, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. Growth in global capacity — encompassing offshore and onshore wind — dropped 15 percent last year. The decline in new offshore wind installations was more stark, falling 46 percent from 2021.Until last year, winds looked favorable for the industry. Turbines have gotten significantly cheaper over the past couple decades. Governments are setting targets to bring more renewable energy online. And within a few years, renewable sources of electricity like wind and solar are expected to dominate global power sector growth.Nevertheless, after two years of record growth at the start of the decade, supply chain constraints and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge FTX’s failure revealed the flaws and risky financial strategies that fueled the recent crypto and NFT boom. Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge OpenAI is adding support for plug-ins to ChatGPT — an upgrade that massively expands the chatbot’s capabilities and gives it access for the first time to live data from the web.Up until now, ChatGPT has been limited by the fact it can only pull information from its training data, which ends in 2021. OpenAI says plug-ins will not only allow the bot to browse the web but also interact with specific websites, potentially turning the system into a wide-ranging interface for all sorts of services and sites. In an announcement post, the company says it’s almost like letting other services be ChatGPT’s “eyes and ears.”In one demo video (below), someone uses ChatGPT to find a recipe and then order the necessary ingredients from Instacart.... Continue reading…

Image: Patrick George “All electric vehicles drive the same.” That’s a criticism I hear pretty often lately, especially from car enthusiasts who are none too happy to lose things like engine noises and manual transmissions. It’s not exactly accurate; a Porsche Taycan will deliver a pretty radically different experience from a Volkswagen ID.4, for example, and they come from the same parent company. But that assessment isn’t completely incorrect, either.The truth is that there probably are fewer ways EVs feel different from one another compared to internal combustion cars. And the general auto industry consensus seems to be that cars of the future will be less defined by individual driving dynamics and more by software-driven functions and special features.T... Continue reading…

Don’t expect Sonos to drastically change the design of the second-gen Move. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge It’s fixing to be a very busy year of new hardware from Sonos. The company is days away from releasing its latest products, the Era 300 and Era 100 speakers. CEO Patrick Spence has repeatedly stated that Sonos will enter a new product category sometime in 2023. And now, The Verge has learned more details about the company’s next portable speaker. According to people familiar with Sonos’ product road map, the Move (Gen 2) is currently under development for release sometime in the second half of 2023. I’d expect it in the late summer / early fall timeframe.The second-generation speaker, model number S44, will feature a design similar to the original device. That puts it among the larger “portable” Bluetooth speakers on the market, but... Continue reading…

Looks like an XPS, right? | Image: Dell Dell’s new Latitude 9440, as far as I can glean from the photos, is a Latitude with XPS vibes. It’s a convertible made of machined aluminum, it weighs a bit over three pounds, it’s got a 16:10 display, and it’s got a 91.5 percent screen-to-body ratio — which is, according to Dell, the best screen-to-body ratio on a “14-inch commercial ultra-premium PC”. (It’s 12.2. x 8.46 x 0.59 inches.)Hilariously specific accolades aside, this 2-in-1 device (which does not yet have announced pricing and availability, though I’ll spare you the suspense and predict that it will not be cheap) looks like a C-suite-oriented commercial product with a few funky features that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see on... well, a Dell Latitude.For one, the... Continue reading…

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew is set to testify before Congress for the first time on Thursday, facing some of his app’s most dogged opponents in an attempt to mitigate a nationwide ban attempt.For more than three years, TikTok has been operating under the threat of a potential ban in the US. Now, with more than 150 million American users, the threats have escalated into legislation and an ultimatum from the Biden administration. Thursday’s hearing with the GOP-led House Committee on Energy and Commerce could be Chew and TikTok’s last shot at convincing lawmakers that the app is safe.“TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, U.S. user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request if one were ever... Continue reading…

Rewind’s “ChatGPT For Me” feature is a chatbot with access to all of your stuff. | Image: Rewind The idea of a personal search engine is a powerful and enticing one. What if there were an app that knew everything about my meetings, my tasks, my browser history, my email, and everything else and could help me comb through it to find the stuff I care about? Sounds super helpful! Also, in an era of increasing surveillance and the ongoing monetization of our every thought and action, sounds like a terrifying hellscape dystopia!There’s probably a middle ground in there somewhere that works. That’s what Rewind.ai is trying to find with the feature it’s launching today. It’s called “ChatGPT For Me,” and it’s a GPT-4 chatbot that you can use to interact with all the information Rewind’s app collects about you.(Rewind, if you haven’t... Continue reading…

If we automate venture capital, will the hype generate itself? | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge The AI hype is marketing, baby. Continue reading…

Less than half the price of a Super73-ZX but with more inattention to detail. Continue reading…

Image: Canva Web-based design platform Canva is introducing a colossal suite of new brand management products and AI-powered design tools focused on helping entire workplaces streamline their content creation process. Announced today at Canva’s Create event, most of these new features are designed to make creating content like social media graphics, presentations, and advertising materials more accessible to those without professional design experience. The idea is this would leave graphic designers free to tackle more pressing tasks. The number of features announced is impressive and could challenge Adobe’s ubiquity in some offices.A new Brand Hub is being added to Canva’s Visual Worksuite, providing tools meant to help users remain consistent with... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Coinbase execs revealed today that the crypto exchange has received a “Wells Notice” from the Securities and Exchange Commission, indicating that after an investigation, the agency’s staff plan to recommend some kind of enforcement action. That could include charges or lawsuits, but none of that has happened yet.Last month, the SEC reached a settlement with Kraken over its crypto staking operation, where the company paid a $30 million fine and shut down US operations right around the same time it sent another Wells Notice to the crypto firm Paxos over its minting of the Binance USD (BUSD) token.

Image: MSCHF If you still haven’t filed your taxes (tax day is April 18th!), MSCHF’s free dating simulator that’s launching soon might be able to help. The art collective’s latest stunt is Tax Heaven 3000, a “visual novel dating game that actually prepares your 2022 US federal tax return,” according to the game’s now-removed Steam page (and I’ll talk more about removal in a second).The game’s description, which seems to be written from the point of view of the game’s anime waifu, Iris, is largely a rant against the infuriatingly complex tax filing process in the US, and Tax Heaven 3000 seems like it could make the process easier. When I used to use TurboTax, the experience was largely just answering a series of questions about my finances. Preparing... Continue reading…

If you do the math, that factors out to just over $22 a pop. | Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’re someone who has a penchant for losing everything you own — your keys, fanny pack, what have you — a set of ultra-wideband Bluetooth trackers is a good bet for keeping tabs on your belongings. And right now, Apple’s handy AirTags are on sale in a four-pack at Amazon and Walmart for $89.99, a slight $10 discount but one we seldom see.If you’re unfamiliar with Apple’s hyper-accurate trackers, there are a couple of things to note. Even though you can detect them using an Android device, they’re really an ideal option for those already invested in the Apple ecosystem since they make use of Apple’s extensive Find My network to locate your lost items. They also carry an IP67 water and dust resistance rating and boast end-to-end... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Epic Games has just wrapped its State of Unreal 2023 keynote, where it showed off new enhancements coming to Unreal Engine 5.2, stunning new MetaHuman technology, a big push to unify its disparate assets marketplaces, and Fortnite’s long-awaited Unreal Editor tools. Given the popularity of Unreal Engine and Fortnite, the day’s announcements could have a major impact on the games we play in the future.Here are the biggest announcements from the show.Epic showed off a stunning, foliage-filled Unreal Engine 5.2 demo One of Unreal Engine 5.2’s biggest additions is new procedural generation tools, which Epic showed off in a gorgeous “Electric Dreams” demo that took place in a dense, foliage-filled forest partially created... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Epic Games’ next big plan for the metaverse is to unify all of its disparate asset marketplaces under one brand, Fab. The new store will include assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace, Quixel Bridge, Artstation Marketplace, and Sketchfab, and Epic will give creators 88 percent of earnings on the store, like it does for the Epic Games Store.“In the old days, every game developer built all of the content in their product from the ground up. Increasingly, content marketplaces such as Unreal Engine Marketplace and Unity’s Asset Store have provided huge libraries of content which game developers can license from independent content creators and use in their games,” Epic said in a blog post. “We think this trend will grow significantly as... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Amazon Luna, the cloud gaming service, is expanding to Canada, Germany, and the UK. I certainly didn’t have that on my bingo card.Remember: Google Stadia is dead as a doornail, and Amazon Luna, the company’s rival cloud gaming service, wasn’t doing much better. It lost a lot of games, and that was after the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority estimated it had less than 5 percent of the cloud gaming market. Oh, also, Amazon’s in the middle of layoffs so brutal that even iconic camera review site DPReview is about to shut its doors.But this? This feels like a sign that the company’s planning to take advantage of the gap left by Stadia instead of throwing in the towel. Image: UK Competition and Markets Authority ... Continue reading…

Image: Epic Games Epic Games is trying to make a better economy for Fortnite creators with what its calls “Creator Economy 2.0,” which it announced at its State of Unreal keynote on Wednesday.Previously, Epic creators participated in the company’s “Support-A-Creator” program. In the program, creators were issued individual codes, and if somebody bought something in the Fortnite store with that code, that creator would get 5 percent of your purchase. But the significant downside of that model is that creators would have to promote their code and just hope that people would remember to use it when making purchases.Fortnite generates “billions” of dollars of revenue per year from purchases of outfits and items from the game’s in-game shop, Saxs Persson,... Continue reading…

Image: Epic Games Epic Games finally showed off the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at its State of Unreal 2023 presentation on Wednesday. It’s a new PC application that’s set to launch Wednesday on the Epic Games Store as a public beta, and it will also feature a new scripting language called “Verse.”UEFN has “many of the same features” Epic uses to make Fortnite proper, the company said in a video demo. You’ll be able to import custom assets to create worlds that may end up looking nothing like Fortnite’s usual cartoony vibe. In a live demo onstage, Epic showed a gritty, largely brown world, which significantly contrasts with the brightly-colored Fortnite player characters. Epic also wants interoperability between Fortnite and Unreal Engine assets so... Continue reading…

Customers can link their MyPanera membership to the Amazone One service to collect rewards and pay for purchases in a single action. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has announced that Amazon One — the e-commerce giant’s palm-reading payment technology — will be deployed at Panera Bread locations around the US. The restaurant chain will be the first to leverage Amazon One’s new loyalty card linking capabilities, allowing customers to connect a MyPanera loyalty membership to their Amazon One account and collect rewards when paying for purchases with their palm.Linking the two accounts is completely optional. Customers can decide to use Amazon One just for payments, just for loyalty rewards, or for both, though Amazon claims that linking a MyPanera membership will allow restaurant staff to greet customers by name and provide a “highly personalized experience.” Some folks (like myself) would... Continue reading…

Hipstamatic’s social network recaptures the experience of using early versions of Instagram (better late than never). | Image: Hipstamatic Back in 2010, Hipstamatic was one of the most popular apps for early smartphone photography before it was superseded by Instagram’s vibrant social network. Now, over a decade later, Hipstamatic is attempting a comeback, relaunching with new networking features similar to those that originally drove Instagram’s success.In fact, the new Hipstamatic social network looks very similar to early versions of Instagram — allowing photographers to publish images to a chronological feed and share their snaps with friends or like-minded users. It’s a simple format that Instagram itself has long since abandoned in favor of stuffing its platform with algorithms and features like Reels. Hipstamatic seemingly has little interest in any of that, which... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Apple Music users have started noticing a strange issue that’s causing other people’s playlists and songs to show up in their libraries, as reported earlier by 9to5Mac. Several users on Reddit have reported this problem over the span of several weeks, with some saying that they have even lost some of their songs or entire playlists as a result.In some cases, these random playlists and songs are actually replacing the ones already in users’ libraries, leaving them unable to access the music they once had. Meanwhile, others say unknown music was simply added to their library without erasing any of their content.As noted by 9to5Mac, it seems that this issue is only affecting the Apple Music app on iOS. We still don’t know why this is... Continue reading…

Bard prominently tells users it’s an experiment, but that doesn’t mean they’ll listen. | Image: Google If you don’t believe the rushed launch of AI chatbots by Big Tech has an extremely strong chance of degrading the web’s information ecosystem, consider the following:Right now,* if you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.(*I say “right now” because in the time between starting and finishing writing this story, Bing changed its answer and now correctly replies that Bard is still live. You... Continue reading…

The budget Fire TV 2-Series sticks to HD resolution. | Image: Amazon Amazon announced today that it has sold a total of over 200 million Fire TV devices. That number is a combination of Fire TV streamers, third-party TVs that run Fire TV software, and the company’s own televisions that debuted in 2021 (with new models introduced last year). The last update came at CES 2022, when Amazon said it had crossed 150 million sales.Alongside that news, Amazon is introducing new TVs at the top and bottom of its lineup. It’s adding new sizes of the flagship Fire TV Omni QLED series and launching a new cheaper TV lineup called the 2-Series. These smaller-size budget sets are limited to HD resolution, but the entire pitch here is that you’re getting the Fire TV experience built in for prices that start at just $199.... Continue reading…

Image: GitHub Microsoft-owned GitHub is overhauling its Copilot system today to integrate OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and bring chat and voice support to its AI pair programmer. GitHub Copilot X is a giant upgrade that includes a new ChatGPT-like experience inside code editors, allowing the chatbot to recognize and explain code and recommend changes and fix bugs.“With Copilot X we’re laying out our future vision of Copilot, which means AI is at every step of the developer lifecycle,” explains GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke in an interview with The Verge. “It will fundamentally influence the developer experience.”GitHub Copilot X, which enters technical preview today, goes beyond Copilot’s basic auto-complete comments and coding. It’s closer to a true coding... Continue reading…

Nanoleaf’s low-cost LED smart bulbs have been reengineered to work with Matter. | Image: Nanoleaf After a slow rollout of devices that support Matter, the first Matter-over-Thread light bulbs are finally here. You can preorder Nanoleaf’s Essentials Matter smart lighting line starting today at Nanoleaf’s site. Its new A19 smart bulb ($19.99) and light strip ($49.99) feature full-color and tunable white light and will ship in early April. A BR30 bulb ($49.99 for a three-pack) will be available next month, and a GU10 bulb ($49.99 for a three-pack) and recessed downlight ($34.99) will join the lineup later this year.Anyone looking to add Matter and Thread devices to their smart home will be excited by the launch of these inexpensive smart lights. Thread is a wireless protocol that promises faster response times and a stronger local... Continue reading…

Image: Mozilla.ai Mozilla is creating a new startup called Mozilla.ai, which the company hopes “will build a trustworthy and independent open-source AI ecosystem.” Moez Draief, a longtime AI researcher and scientist, is leading the new startup, and Mozilla is investing $30 million to get it started.As products like ChatGPT, Bing, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion have become hugely popular, they’re also encountering huge problems with misinformation and are being put to use creating deepfakes and copyright problems. Plus, they’re already beginning to change the way the internet works. If chatbots become our primary interface to information and inspiration, that has huge ramifications for user privacy, copyright, and much more. Mozilla has been tracking this... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Epic Games is nearly ready to reveal its latest updates to Unreal Engine, its hugely popular suite of development tools. The company is just about to host its 2023 State of Unreal keynote, where the company plans to “take a look at some new projects, dive into the latest Epic tech, and have some fun along the way.”The keynote is taking place as part of this year’s Game Developers Conference, and the company’s tech talks following the keynote give some clues as to what might be discussed. A few sessions include Unreal Engine 5.2 in the title, so you can expect Epic will share some news on that during the keynote. If you want to see what’s possible with Unreal Engine 5.1, just hop into a match of Fortnite. And speaking of Fortnite, Epic... Continue reading…