Knowledge catalogue
According to every product demo from the last four years, planning a trip is a killer use case for AI. Just tell it where you're going, they all promise, and your chatbot / agent / other buzzword will
Google is launching a new feature for its Phone app that aims to protect you from AI impersonation scams. Now, when you receive a call from a scammer that appears to be coming from the same number as
Microsoft’s annual developer conference is kicking off on June 2nd in San Francisco with the keynote presentation streaming live at 12:30PM ET / 9:30AM PT, and we will be following along here with eve
Microsoft just kicked off Build 2026 with a keynote from CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders. As expected, it was filled with announcements, ranging from new Surface hardware to an always-on p
Microsoft only just announced a new Surface Laptop Ultra at the weekend, and it's now revealing a miniature Surface PC aimed at developers. The new Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is powered by Nvidia's new
Much like Google, Microsoft is launching its own version of OpenClaw. Microsoft Scout is an always-on assistant that integrates into Microsoft 365 apps like Outlook, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams, all
Microsoft just announced 'Project Solara,' a new OS designed for gadgets that run AI agents, at Build 2026. The company is calling it 'a new platform built from the ground up to power agent-driven exp
Microsoft announced a bunch of new in-house AI models at Build 2026, including a new 'flagship' model: MAI-Thinking-1. It's an ambitious step into model development for Microsoft, which introduced its
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday creating a 'voluntary framework' for AI companies to share their frontier models with the federal government before they're released 'to promot
Today I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr., who is CEO of the Recording Academy — that’s the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. I last talked to Harvey in 2024, when it was obvious that generative AI
After months of speculation about whether OpenAI or Anthropic would be first in their race to IPO, Anthropic on Monday reached a key milestone: filing to kick off the process with the U.S. Securities
Google's new '24/7' AI agent, Gemini Spark, can be shockingly good at doing things on your behalf. But I'm not sure it's worth the financial cost and potential privacy tradeoffs. The company gave me a
Meta's AI support chatbot helped hackers hijack Instagram accounts, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In a video shared on Telegram, a hacker shows how they could take over an account by asking Meta's
Microsoft is heading to San Francisco this week in a bid to win back developers at its Build conference. I've been attending Build since the days when Microsoft called it the Professional Developers C
The popular fitness-tracking platform, Strava, is restricting access to its API as part of efforts to clamp down on AI scraping, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Developers who want to build an app
Nvidia's announcement that it's getting into the consumer laptop chip space with RTX Spark is huge. Apple has proved for years that Arm-based chips can perform incredibly well while also delivering gr
The crypto weed vape found me on 4/20, the high holiday of cannabis enthusiasts everywhere. It arrived over Slack with the thumbnail of a man exhaling a plume of vapor, the words 'every hit delivers B
Aliyah, a light-skinned Black woman dressed in country-western gear, is struggling to sell metal buckles she handmade on TikTok. In a video for the social media platform from March, she cries to the c
Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website. Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He's a former engineer at Met
I haven't seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time - that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bank
AI image tools rarely make me feel like I'm part of the creative process. They are, after all, mostly designed so that people with no design experience can type in a few words and get back a usable re
Most people will never own, drive, or even sit inside a Ferrari Luce. (If you can, or do… hit us up.) There's still no question that Ferrari's first electric vehicle is one of the most interesting, su
This week, an AI training startup called Shift said it would clean New Yorkers' homes for free. It has plans to expand into other cities as well, including London, and looking around my flat, I get th
AI training startup Shift wants to clean your home for free. The catch - because, despite what its website says, there's always a catch - is that it will record cleaners as they scrub, vacuum, dust, t
Next month's Tribeca Festival will include the premiere of an AI-generated film: Dreams of Violets. The 75-minute film is a fictional dramatization of the Iranian government's mass killing of protesto
Anthropic is releasing Claude Opus 4.8 on Thursday, and the company is touting the model's 'honesty.' According to Anthropic, it trains 'all [its] models to be honest - for instance, to avoid making c
CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, claiming that the startup's AI tools generate 'verbatim' copies of its work, as reported earlier by CNN. The lawsuit, filed in a New York court on Thursday,
Microsoft is launching a revamped version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, offering a cleaner design that the company claims loads twice as fast. As part of this update, Copilot will provide more reliable an
Today, I’m talking with Wassym Bensaid, the chief software officer at Rivian, and the co-CEO of Rivian’s platform joint venture with Volkswagen, which everyone just calls RV Tech. That joint venture k
Apple's long-awaited Siri overhaul, expected to arrive in iOS 27, might look a lot like ChatGPT with a splash of Liquid Glass. Renders from Bloomberg offer a preview of iOS 27, including the new app a
New features coming to YouTube could make it better for listening to podcasts, rolling out to Premium subscribers starting today on Android and coming later to iOS. A new 'on-the-go mode' shifts YouTu
YouTube is launching a new AI feature that creates a personalized video feed based on descriptions of what you want to watch. In its announcement, YouTube says custom content feeds can be built around
By the time that the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district wraps up in June, Anthropic and OpenAI will have spent millions on their battle over the political future of AI: who
Robinhood is opening its trading platform to AI agents. In an announcement on Wednesday, Robinhood says traders can now create a separate account for an AI agent and add a specific amount of money, al
How newsrooms should use AI - or if they should at all - has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the barg
On Monday, Pope Leo XIV unveiled an encyclical letter addressing the societal implications of artificial intelligence. The letter, titled Magnifica Humanitas, warned that the 'use of AI is never a pur
Since moving to South Carolina's Lowcountry, I've been spellbound by the myriad of beautiful birds that share the coast with us - ospreys raising their babies in towering nests beside the road to my d
In the wake of Google expanding its AI verification efforts at I/O, YouTube is now finally going to start taking AI labeling seriously. YouTube has announced that it's relocating AI disclosures on Sho
The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, an international forum that focuses on lethal autonomous systems, is hosted twice a year at the United Nations in Geneva. When Branka Marijan attended i
It's possible that AI was used to write parts of Pope Leo XIV's latest encyclical about AI's impact on humanity. An analysis by Linch Zhang posted on the forum LessWrong found certain paragraphs of Ma
There's this alarming trend in the Suno subreddit. People aren't just prompting AI songs; they're sitting around listening almost exclusively to their own slop. And in some cases, they proudly proclai
Today, I’m talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I/O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I/O
After reportedly exhausting its annual AI budget just four months into 2026, Uber is now questioning whether it's actually seeing meaningful returns on its investments. In an interview with Rapid Resp
Pope Leo XIV warned of the risks of AI and unconstrained technological power in his first major papal document released on Monday. Magnifica Humanitas is the pope's manifesto on 'safeguarding the huma
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI mischief, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET
Last year I deepfaked my kid's stuffed animal to make it look like his plush deer was on vacation. It was an experiment to see if I could re-create the events depicted in a Gemini ad Google was runnin
There is a harsh truth about Elon Musk's 'truth-seeking' AI chatbot Grok: It's not very good, and not many people are using it. That's the takeaway of a new Reuters report, which found that Grok barel
Google's AI Overviews are running into an interesting problem right now. Earlier on Friday, if you searched for the term 'disregard,' the AI Overview section would include a response like what you'd s
Details have emerged about a tentative deal struck between Samsung and semiconductor employees who had threatened to strike. The deal reportedly makes some workers eligible for average annual bonuses
AI covers and remixes of songs are already a blight on the internet. Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are awash in flat reggae versions of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' dinky country renditions of
Since 2012, the British literary magazine Granta has published the regional winners of the annual Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This year, however, there was something off about one of the selection
This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Hollywood is cooked - or so a growi
Earlier this month, SpaceX and Anthropic announced a new compute partnership that provides access to the rocket company's Colossus data centers in Memphis, TN. Now, with the release of SpaceX's IPO fi
Yesterday, I built my first Android app. Then, I made two more - three in one afternoon. For one, I literally typed 148 words into my web browser and walked away. Ten minutes later, I had an entire ne
University graduates are booing and heckling corporate executives who praise AI during their commencement ceremonies, and the only people who seem to be genuinely surprised by this are the executives
Meta has reportedly notified thousands of employees that they've been laid off as the company attempts to compensate for its hefty AI investments. In an email from Meta management shared by Business I
Today I’m talking with Liz Lopatto, who spent the last month covering the Musk v. Altman trial in all its chaos. You’ll hear her describe the courthouse as a “zoo” and explain that there were protests
Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) just announced a licensing deal that will allow users to prompt the creation of AI-generated remixes and covers for streaming songs. The tool will be a paid add
Studio by Spotify Labs is a new standalone AI app that generates a daily briefing, podcasts, and playlists on your PC using chatbot prompts. The AI-generated content draws from your Spotify listening
I'm not sure anyone was really asking for an AI guitar pedal. But it was inevitable that someone would build one. One of the first to take the plunge is Polyend, a well-respected music gear maker with