The Verge - All Posts

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Zoom Zoom founder Eric Yuan has big ambitions in enterprise software, including letting your AI-powered digital twins' attend meetings for you. Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is about to launch a new AI-powered Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on your PC. Recall is part of the new Copilot Plus PCs that are debuting on June 18th, but experts who have tested the feature are already warning that Recall could be a disaster" for cybersecurity.Recall is designed to use local AI models to screenshot everything you see or do on your computer and then give you the ability to search and retrieve anything in seconds. There's even an explorable timeline you can scroll through. Everything in Recall is designed to remain local and private on-device, so no data is used to train Microsoft's AI models.Despite Microsoft's promises of a secure and encrypted Recall experience, cybersecurity expert... Continue reading...

The first headphones from Sonos deliver on comfort, sound, and more - with a unique TV Audio Swap feature that's very convenient (when it works). But the ongoing app fiasco casts a cloud over the company's big moment. Continue reading...

Image: Qualcomm Apple's former I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long defected to Intel a few years ago, and now he's looking to switch to a Qualcomm-powered Windows PC. During Qualcomm's Computex 2024 keynote today, Long appeared in a brief 30-second skit where he was bombarded by macOS notifications and nag screens causing him to start searching for a Snapdragon-powered PC instead.Justin Long used to star in Apple's Get a Mac" TV commercials nearly 20 years ago. Long took on the persona of a Mac guy, humorously mocking the PC guy (actor John Hodgman) for picking up viruses and spyware, or not having access to creative tools and being too focused on boring work stuff.Things change," jokes Long to camera, after searching for a Windows on Arm PC following... Continue reading...

World-famous photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams (pictured, 1983) is best known for his black-and-white landscape photographs. | Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images Adobe found itself in hot water this weekend after the Ansel Adams estate publicly scolded the company for selling generative AI imitations of the late photographer's work. On Friday, Adams' estate posted a screenshot to Threads showing AI-generated images available on Adobe Stock that were labeled as Ansel Adams-style," telling Adobe it was officially on our last nerve with this behavior."While Adobe permits AI-generated images to be hosted and sold on its stock image platform, users are required to hold the appropriate rights or ownership over the content they upload. Adobe Stock's Contributor Terms specifically prohibits content created using prompts containing other artist names, or created using prompts otherwise intended to... Continue reading...

Image: AMD AMD announced at Computex 2024 its next generation of Ryzen laptop processors for generative AI workloads: the Ryzen AI 300 Series. It's a re-brand of its top-tier Ryzen 9 chips. The new naming convention still includes the HX suffix AMD introduced in 2022, but it doesn't indicate how many watts of power the chip draws. Instead, HX will simply refer to top of stack" or the best and fastest Ryzen AI 300 chip.The new Ryzen AI chips are built on AMD's latest architectures for neural, integrated graphics, and general processing: XDNA2 for the NPU, RDNA 3.5 for the iGPU, which now has up to 16 compute units, and Zen 5 for the CPU. The first two processors in this series are the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365. Both have 50 TOPS NPU,... Continue reading...

Image: AMD AMD is launching its first Zen 5 desktop processors in July, with the Ryzen 9 9950X flagship leading the pack as the world's most powerful desktop consumer processor." Based on AMD's existing AM5 platform, the new Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs include the Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X.The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU, with 80MB of L2+L3 cache and a 5.7GHz boost clock. AMD is promising around a 16 percent instructions per cycle (IPC) uplift in performance over the previous-generation Ryzen CPUs, with big promises of performance gains in productivity as well as gaming. Image: AMD The Ryzen 9000 series lineup. It's a big leap, and we're very very proud of it,"... Continue reading...

Getty More chips, more AI. Continue reading...

MrBeast is now the most-subscribed YouTube channel. | Photo: Chris Unger / Zuffa LLC via Getty Images Bollywood music label T-Series had the most-subscribed YouTube channel for years after Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, conceded his protracted and problematic fight for the top spot to it. But now that honor belongs to YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, who posted yesterday that his MrBeast YouTube operation had avenged' PewDiePie by overtaking T-Series.The news apparently prompted a rush, as Donaldson published a screenshot showing he'd gained 2 million more yesterday, which he said is a one-day record for the channel. The online tracker Social Blade now puts him at 268 million subscribers.

Maezawa in 2022. | Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had once planned to take eight artists on a flight around the Moon aboard SpaceX's Starship. But now, with Starship still in development the flight already indefinitely delayed, Maezawa says he has canceled the trip.The X account for the flight, called dearMoon, announced the news on Friday, followed by posts from the billionaire himself. In those, he said he had signed on in 2018 expecting to fly in 2023, but that it's still uncertain when Starship can launch."I can't plan my future in this situation," Maezawa added.

Image: Hyundai The Hyundai Ioniq 5 will reportedly be the first car rolling out of the company's new Georgia factory this fall. Moreover, company CEO Jose Munoz tells Automotive News he expects the US-made version will net buyers the full $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which the South Korea-made vehicle isn't otherwise eligible for (outside of a leasing loophole).Hyundai will start producing the Ioniq 5 at the Georgia plant in October, but the company won't be making batteries there for about a year," Automotive News writes. For now, the article says the company will source its batteries from a Hungarian factory operated by Hyundai's partner for its Georgia battery production, SK On.One important question, though, is whether or not the first... Continue reading...

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge It sounds like Apple's WWDC plans go beyond sprinkling AI fairy dust on everything (though that's going to be a big part of it, too). Besides Siri gaining new AI-powered app control, the company also plans to overhaul things like the Settings apps for iOS and macOS, Control Center, Messages, Mail, and more.A new, cleaner" Settings app UI will mean better organization and improved search, Mark Gurman writes in his Power On Newsletter for Bloomberg today. He adds that a similar revamp is also coming to the macOS System Settings app.Apple will also update Control Center, the slide-down menu of quick settings in iOS, with a new music widget and improvements to how it operates smart home appliances." Gurman didn't specify what would... Continue reading...

Nvidia leans into RTX AI PCs. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia and AMD are gearing up to launch gaming laptops that include the AI Copilot Plus features that Microsoft just announced for Qualcomm-powered laptops. At Computex today, Nvidia briefly teased that RTX AI PC" laptops are on the way from Asus and MSI that will eventually include Copilot Plus PC features.Newly announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and power-efficient systems-on-a-chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities," says Nvidia in a blog post. Nvidia confirmed to The Verge in a briefing that these laptops will come with AMD's latest Strix CPUs.AMD hasn't officially detailed its AMD Strix laptop CPUs yet, which it will undoubtedly announce during its own keynote later today. Nvidia... Continue reading...

G-Assist is a real tech demo from Nvidia. | Image: Nvidia When Nvidia first announced G-Assist it was an April Fools' prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant being able to help you play a game while you ran to the door for your pizza delivery. Now, seven years later, G-Assist is back as a real demo of a powerful GeForce AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RTX GPU owners.Project G-Assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it's a brief look at how an AI assistant could guide you through PC games and even configure optimal settings for you based on chat inputs in the future.In a demo, Nvidia shows G-Assist responding to voice queries asking what's the next early game weapon and where do I find the crafting materials for it?" inside A... Continue reading...

Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 40, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, send me all your recommendations immediately, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I've been reading about Shein and Reese Witherspoon and Hollywood Ponzi schemes, journaling in Papery, testing Lazy for all my link dumps and notes, drinking a lot of Poppi soda, developing a mac and cheese recipe my toddler will actually like, and pricing out plane tickets for the Wu-Tang Clan listening party in Australia.I also have for you a great new app for capturing video, a nifty new Chrome trick, a MoviePass documentary worth watching, a smartwatch for kids, and much more.... Continue reading...

Minecraft is 15 years old, so it's only natural that Lego should honor the anniversary with a set just for the game's many adult fans. The company has started taking preorders for The Crafting Table, a 1,195-piece 18-and-up build, as Jay's Brick Blog writes. The set will cost $89.99 in the US when it's released on August 1st.Lego says the set will include familiar biomes, favorite mobs and hidden Easter eggs." As the name suggests, the kit looks like an in-game crafting table. But inside of it is a Minecraft diorama featuring 12 biomes including Plains (with a village), Taiga (with a dripstone cave), and Cherry Grove (with an abandoned mineshaft). Image: Lego It also has eight microfigures; among them are Steve,... Continue reading...

Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images Boeing, NASA, and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) scrubbed today's launch of Starliner less than 4 minutes before liftoff. The setback comes after a string of disappointments, but as with its early May delay, the issue wasn't with Boeing's crew vehicle.NASA says the ULA is currently investigating why a computer, called a ground launch sequencer, didn't enter the correct operational configuration," triggering an automatic hold. During a press conference afterward, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said the issue was that one of three redundant launch sequencers, which are used to control things like releasing connections to the rocket prior to launch, was slow to respond.

Scarlett Johansson at Cannes in 2023. | Photo: Laurent Koffel / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images Researchers at Arizona State University found that Scarlett Johansson's voice does indeed sound like Sky," OpenAI's currently discontinued GPT-4o voice, according to NPR, which commissioned the comparison. After using AI models developed to analyze vocal similarities to compare Sky to roughly 600 other actresses, the lab reportedly found Johansson's voice was more similar to Sky than 98% of the other actresses."But the models also often" found that the voices of Anne Hathaway and Keri Russell resembled Sky's more than did Johansson's. Visar Berisha, the professor who led the analysis, told NPR that Johansson's voice is similar, but likely not identical" to that of Sky.One similarity was reportedly that if Sky had a vocal tract -... Continue reading...

Image: Toho International Godzilla Minus One is officially streaming worldwide on Netflix as of today, everywhere except Japan and France, according to film distributor Toho International in a release shared with The Verge. You can also buy ($14.99) or rent ($5.99) digital copies, either in color (Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play) or black and white (Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play).Written and directed by Takashi Yamakazi, Godzilla Minus One goes back to the giant radioactive kaiju's origins. It's set just at the end of World War II after the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film follows a kamikaze pilot named Kichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who after deciding to land on Odo Island rather than sacrifice himself for the war becomes one of the... Continue reading...

The Beats Studio Buds Plus are on sale in all styles, including their slick translucent option. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Beats may be releasing a new pair of budget earbuds later this month, but their $80 price tag comes at the expense of active noise cancellation. Thankfully, if you're looking for a cool-looking pair of earbuds that will let you listen to music and tune out the world, the Beats Studio Buds Plus remain a great buy. And right now, they're joining the Beats Solo Pro 4 in dropping to one of their best prices to date at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, where you can pick them up for $129.99 ($40 off). That matches the best price we've seen so far this year and is only $10 shy of their all-time low.Here at The Verge, we're big fans of the translucent Beats Studio Buds Plus, which are more eye-catching than most wireless earbuds - including... Continue reading...

Photo Illustration: Alex Parkin / Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images Unsettled host Ilana Levinson spent two months trying to reach one of her contacts in Gaza for an interview. She had stayed in touch with Isam Hammad, a manager for a medical equipment company in Gaza City, since covering his work organizing the March of Return protest in 2018. But after he fled the city in November, the two hadn't shared much more than the occasional WhatsApp voice note with one another.When Levinson finally got ahold of Hammad in January, he was in Rafah, trying to get his family to Ireland on a family reunification visa. I have no internet," he said. I have had to wake up every night since I made my [visa] application and go to the rooftop, turn on Vodafone Egypt, get the internet, check the list, and go back to... Continue reading...

Stompers, where hitting your co-workers will not end in an HR violation. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge Violence is never the answer. That said, it was fun when I opened a walking app and whacked a Verge editor with a baseball bat and made another slip on a banana peel. After, I continued on my peaceful commute home. A bit later, one of my fellow writers walloped me not once but twice with their own baseball bat. I wasn't actually mad, but it did prompt me to go on a walk around the block so I could hit them back.That, in a nutshell, is the appeal of Stompers - an iOS app that encourages you to whack, trick, and out-walk your friends (or colleagues) in a Looney Tunes-like race.The app is the creation of designer Soren Iverson. You may know Iverson from his unhinged UI" design series, in which he posts conceptual app mock-ups for... Continue reading...

Sharing this solar generator's batteries with a 3-in-1 solar fridge, freezer, and ice-making combo is a good idea that might get better. Continue reading...

Mike Tyson, Nakisa Bidarian, and Jake Paul pose onstage during a press conference on May 16th, 2024 | Photo by Cooper Neill/Getty Images for Netflix Netflix is increasingly getting into live events, with comedy specials, NFL games, and even the WWE, but live action means unpredictability, and today, the streamer announced that a planned July 20th boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson is being rescheduled. While Tyson recovers from an ulcer flare-up that required medical attention during a recent flight, he has been advised to do minimal to light training" over the next few weeks.Due to the interrupted training schedule for the officially sanctioned fight - Tyson's first since 2005 -they're now planning on a date later this year, which Netflix said will be announced by the end of next week.My body is in better overall shape than it has been since the 1990s and I will be... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A data breach potentially affecting as many as 560 million Ticketmaster accounts and a confirmed one for Santander Bank may have stemmed from attacks on the cloud storage accounts with a company called Snowflake. As spotted by Bleeping Computer, an investigation from cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock reports that a bad actor gained access to Ticketmaster and Santander by using the stolen credentials of a single Snowflake employee.According to Hudson Rock, the hacker bypassed the authentication service Okta using these credentials and then generated session tokens to obtain a trove of information from Snowflake. In addition to Ticketmaster - which publicly acknowledged the breach later on Friday evening - and Santander Bank, Hudson Rock... Continue reading...

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge If you've been on the Facebook app lately, you might've seen Meta's AI inject itself into the comment section with summaries of what people say. Given how wild Facebook comment sections often become, it's not hard to imagine how ridiculous some of these summaries turn out. (This isn't the first time Meta's AI has appeared in the comment section, by the way: 404 Media spotted it pretending to be a parent in a Facebook group.)After seeing screenshots of the feature shared on Threads and Reddit, I decided to check the comment sections on my Facebook app. I found the AI summaries popping up on many of the posts I checked - unhinged responses and all. One AI summary on a post about a store closure said, Some commenters attribute the closure... Continue reading...

Image: Stellantis Earlier this week, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares took the stage at the Bernstein investor conference and threw down the gauntlet.Tavares, who oversees companies like Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and, most importantly, Jeep, said the launch of the new all-electric Jeep Wagoneer S would signal the start of an EV offensive" that would take the US by storm, according to multiple reports. And part of that offensive would include a more affordable electric Jeep, priced somewhere in the range of $25,000.For Jeep CEO Antonio Filosa, the announcement from his boss came as a bit of a shock.It's a big challenge," Filosa said Thursday, hours after unveiling the Wagoneer S in New York City. And unexpected." Photo by Michael... Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft Microsoft unveiled its new Copilot Plus PCs last week, designed to usher in a new wave of AI features in Windows that are exclusive to new laptops. Now, less than two weeks later, Windows enthusiasts have managed to crack Microsoft's flagship AI-powered Recall feature to run on unsupported hardware.Recall leverages local AI models on new Copilot Plus PCs to run in the background and take snapshots of anything you've done or seen on your PC. You then get a timeline you can scrub through and the ability to search for photos, documents, conversations, or anything else on your PC. Microsoft positioned Recall as needing the very latest neural processing units (NPU) on new PCs, but you can actually get it running on older Arm-powered... Continue reading...

Photo: Getty Images A big part of Microsoft Build that stood out to me last week was the potential of Windows on Arm for PC gaming, especially for laptops and handhelds. Microsoft and Qualcomm aren't talking much about this yet, but both companies have been dropping hints about game compatibility.Qualcomm said previously that most Windows games should just work" on Snapdragon X Elite laptops, and Microsoft took the time to demo some more games onstage at Build last week. Borderlands 3 was shown running around 60 percent faster than native 1440p resolution thanks to Microsoft's Auto Super Resolution technology. This taps into the NPU to boost frame rates and resolution, much like how Nvidia's DLSS utilizes its own GPUs to upscale games.Microsoft also... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge One thing right off the bat: the Google Search algorithm has not leaked, and SEO experts don't suddenly have all the answers. But the information that did leak this week - a collection of thousands of internal Google documents - is still huge. It's an unprecedented look into Google's inner workings that are typically closely guarded.Perhaps the most notable revelation from the 2,500 documents is that they suggest Google representatives have misled the public in the past when discussing how the biggest gatekeeper of the internet assesses and ranks content for its search engine.How Google ranks content is a black box: websites depend on search traffic to survive, and many will go to great lengths - and great expense - to beat out the... Continue reading...

I mean, has anyone else seen that Temu egg slicer meme? | Image: The Verge Temu, the popular Chinese shopping platform, is about to face stricter EU regulations after the European Commission deemed it a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the Digital Services Act (DSA).According to the Commission, Temu has confirmed that it has more than 45 million monthly users in the EU, the threshold for being considered a VLOP. That means it'll have to comply with the strictest rules under the DSA, particularly around assessing systemic risks" associated with its services, such as counterfeit goods, illegal products, and items that infringe on intellectual property rights.Temu is the latest retailer to get hit with stricter regulations under the DSA. The Commission did the same for Shein, a popular fast fashion... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A cyberattack was behind an incident last year that disabled over 600,000 internet routers across several Midwest states between October 25th and 27th, according to new research published by Lumen Technologies' threat research arm, Black Lotus Labs. The incident wasn't disclosed at the time, despite hundreds of thousands of routers being rendered inoperable.The investigation also didn't specify which company was targeted, but Reuters says it has identified the target as Windstream, an Arkansas-based ISP, based on cross-referencing internet outages reported during the same period. Windstream, which has a service area covering many rural or underserved communities, declined The Verge's request for comment.Black Lotus Labs investigated... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge OpenAI is making ChatGPT more accessible to schools and nonprofit organizations. In a pair of blog posts, the company shared that it's launching a version of ChatGPT for universities, along with a program that lets nonprofits access ChatGPT at a discounted rate.OpenAI says ChatGPT Edu will allow universities to responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations." It's built on its faster GPT-4o model, which offers improved multimodal capabilities across text, vision, and audio.For example, OpenAI says universities can use the tool to review student resumes, write grant applications, and assist professors with grading. ChatGPT for Edu offers enterprise-level" security and doesn't use data to train OpenAI's... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge The algorithm that powers Google Search is one of the most important, most complicated, and least understood systems that rule the internet. As of this week, though, we understand it a little better. Thanks to a huge leak of API documentation, we got an unprecedented look at what Google cares about, how it ranks content, and how it thinks the internet should work. The leaked documentation is dense, and it doesn't tell us everything about how Google ranks, but it does offer a set of signals we've never seen before.On this episode of The Vergecast, we discuss everything in the leaked documents, the SEO community's reaction, the potential regulatory implications of it all, and what it means to build a website in 2024.After that, we talk... Continue reading...