A Big Tech-backed campaign to plant trees might have taken a wrong turn

Two plains zebras in the savannah looking at the camera in Seronera, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. | Photo by: Sergio Pitamitz / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Roughly half of the land targeted by a major tech-backed forest restoration campaign in Africa was never meant to be forest, according to a new analysis. Planting trees in the identified area could actually harm grasslands and savannas that may have been inadvertently mislabeled as “forests” in need of help, the report concludes.

The paper, published in the journal Science today, takes stock of AFR100, an initiative endorsed by 34 governments in Africa and that counts the Bezos Earth Fund and Meta among its major funders. The goal of AFR100, short for African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, is to restore at least 100 million hectares of land by 2030. AFR100 disputes the new analysis.

For forest restoration to be successful, the...

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OpenAI introduces Sora, its text-to-video AI model

Image: OpenAI

OpenAI is launching a new video-generation model, and it’s called Sora. The AI company says Sora “can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.” The text-to-video model allows users to create photorealistic videos up to a minute long — all based on prompts they’ve written.

Sora is capable of creating “complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” according to OpenAI’s introductory blog post. The company also notes that the model can understand how objects “exist in the physical world,” as well as “accurately interpret props and generate compelling characters that express vibrant emotions.”

Image: OpenAI

The model can also...

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YouTube Shorts adds music video remixing as UMG goes silent on TikTok

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube now lets creators add and remix music videos in their Shorts. In its post announcing the feature, YouTube points out that creators can use music videos from artists like Beyoncé and Maggie Rogers — even as TikTok fights with the record label representing them. The timing suggests it’s a direct response to TikTok’s current music licensing battle.

Earlier this month, TikTok lost tracks from artists like Taylor Swift, Drake, and Olivia Rodrigo due to a dispute with Universal Music Group (UMG). TikTok and UMG never renewed their licensing deal after the music label accused TikTok of trying to “bully” it into a bad deal and claimed the social platform wants to “build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music.”...

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How to make the most of Google Keep

The Verge

As part of my job as a tech writer, and as part of my ongoing efforts to get organized at some point, I’ve tested a whole pile of note-taking apps through the years: the simple, the sophisticated, the quirky, the AI-powered, and on it goes. It’s a popular app category, and there’s no shortage of options.

Amid all these different choices, one of the apps that I find myself regularly coming back to is Google Keep. It’s fast and easy to get around, it works on just about any device, and once you dig a little deeper into its colorful sticky note interface, there are plenty of useful features to take advantage of.

Whether you’re a current Google Keep user looking to do more with the app or you’re wondering whether Google Keep has enough to...

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Scout Motors wants to put the ‘mechanical’ back into electric trucks

“The godfather is returning,” Scout CEO Scott Keogh said. “If you think about it, Scout sort of invented the segment.” | Image: Scout

The VW-owned brand broke ground on its new factory in South Carolina, where it eventually will churn out hundreds of thousands of rugged, battery-powered off-roaders. And that includes “chunky buttons.”

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New York City is suing TikTok and Instagram for ‘addicting’ children

Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

New York City is the latest government to go after big tech companies for allegedly addicting kids to their platforms.

Several city agencies, including NYC’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Department of Education, filed suit against Meta, TikTok, Snap, and Google, accusing them of “fueling the nationwide youth mental health crisis.” The city charged them with public nuisance and negligence.

The city claims that the platforms’ design features, including recommendation algorithms and likes, addict children to the services and manipulate them into spending more and more time online.

The lawsuit adds to a growing wave of litigation from state and local governments that target tech platforms for allegedly addictive features...

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The first X-Men ‘97 trailer is a return to the days of mutant supremacy

Marvel’s larger X-Men brand has evolved a lot during the almost 30 years since X-Men: The Animated Series went off the air, but the first trailer for Disney Plus’ new X-Men ‘97 show from executive producer Beau DeMayo will take you right back to the good old days when mutants reigned supreme.

Picking up right after the events of X-Men: The Animated Series’ finale, X-Men ‘97 is set to continue the stories of all the mutants Charles Xavier left behind when he departed Earth to journey to the Shi’ar homeworld. In the new trailer, it’s clear that all of Xavier’s former students are still reeling from the loss of their beloved mentor, but even after all the times mutants have saved the world, humanity still hates their kind and is dead set on...

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Meta is passing on the Apple tax for boosted posts to advertisers

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta said Thursday that it will start charging a 30 percent fee when advertisers pay to boost the visibility of their posts in Facebook’s and Instagram’s iOS apps.

The change, which goes into effect later this month, stems from a 2022 App Store update where Apple extended its typical 30 percent cut of digital purchases to boosted posts, which are essentially ads. The change particularly targeted Meta and other social apps that let people pay in app to increase the reach of their content. Meta notes in a statement shared with The Verge that small business owners and influencers who want to purchase a boost on iOS will now be billed through Apple, “which retains a 30% service charge on the total ad payment, before any applicable taxes.”

M...

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Gemini 1.5 is Google’s next-gen AI model — and it’s already almost ready

Gemini is still new — and it’s already getting an upgrade. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Barely two months after launching Gemini, the large language model Google hopes will bring it to the top of the AI industry, the company is already announcing its successor. Google is launching Gemini 1.5 today and making it available to developers and enterprise users ahead of a full consumer rollout coming soon. The company has made clear that it is all in on Gemini as a business tool, a personal assistant, and everything in between, and it’s pushing hard on that plan.

There are a lot of improvements in Gemini 1.5: Gemini 1.5 Pro, the general-purpose model in Google’s system, is apparently on par with the high-end Gemini Ultra that the company only recently launched, and it bested Gemini 1.0 Pro on 87 percent of benchmark tests. It was...

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How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct

Illustration: The Verge

Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and for the next few weeks, we’re going to stay focused on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI.

There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and Stability AI. So for this episode, we brought on Verge features editor Sarah Jeong, who’s a former lawyer just like me, and we’re going to talk about those cases and the main defense the AI companies are relying on in those copyright cases: an idea called fair use.

All the big generative AI models from every company are tried on huge swaths of data that are scraped from...

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In defense of busywork

Illustration by Erik Carter

Thanks to AI, rote tasks are ripe for automation. But is that really a good thing?

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TikTok’s native app arrives for the Vision Pro

The Vision Pro app offers a familiar interface. | Image: TikTok

Apple’s Vision Pro headset now has a native TikTok app, the shortform video service has announced.

The interface will look relatively familiar to anyone who has used TikTok’s traditional iOS or Android apps, with a vertically oriented player for videos as well as buttons to like, comment, favorite, and share. But the company has taken advantage of the increased screen real estate offered by the Vision Pro to spread out other interface elements, showing comments and creator profiles on a pane to the right so they don’t obscure the main video player.

TikTok teased the launch of its Vision Pro app last month, when product lead Ahmad Zahran wrote that his team had “redesigned the entire TikTok experience from the ground up” for the headset....

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Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds are its boldest, most unique earbuds yet

With a design that clings to your outer ear, these earbuds are unlike anything the company has made before — and Bose hopes they’ll find more success than its unconventional products of the past.

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Lucid slashes prices for its luxury EVs for the third time in seven months

Photo by Tim Stevens for The Verge

Lucid Motors announced it was slashing prices on most of its electric vehicles and would also provide up to $1,000 for customers to purchase charging equipment. It was the third price reduction announced by the company in just seven months and came as the company continues to struggle to generate demand amid a broader slowdown in EV sales growth across multiple markets.

Lucid said its base Air Pure model with rear-wheel drive would now start at $71,400, which includes a $1,500 destination fee. That’s down from Air Pure’s $78,900 price announced in October, which itself was down from the $83,900 price that was reported in August.

The Lucid Air Touring with all-wheel drive will now start at $79,400, while the Lucid Grand Touring, with a...

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Bose’s new earbuds don’t go inside your ears at all

Image: Bose

After a soft launch with fashion / culture brand Kith, Bose is officially announcing its new Ultra Open Earbuds today. Priced at $299, they feature a very unique design that wraps around and attaches to your outer ear instead of extending into your ear canal. A silicone-coated flex arm attaches the “earbud” piece to a round battery barrel that sits behind your ear and also has a button for controlling your music.

Bose designed these to be fashionable; the company’s logo isn’t even present on the outer earbuds. The Ultra Open Earbuds are available in either black or smoke white and feature Bose’s OpenAudio tech, which directs sound toward your ears while minimizing noticeable sound leakage to others nearby. You can expect around 7.5...

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How AI can make history

Illustration by Erik Carter

Large language models can do a lot of things. But can they write like an 18th-century fur trader?

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GM is preparing for another major expansion of its hands-free Super Cruise system

Image: General Motors

General Motors may be struggling when it comes to fully autonomous driving, but the company is still feeling bullish about the future of hands-free driving. Today, it announced plans to expand its Super Cruise advanced driver-assist system, which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel on certain roads, to cover nearly double the number of miles it did before.

Today, Super Cruise is operational on 400,000 miles of road in the US and Canada. The company plans on adding around 40,000 miles of new roads every quarter over the course of two years, so by the end of 2025, Super Cruise will cover approximately 750,000 miles in the US and Canada.

Launched in 2017 with the Cadillac CT6, Super Cruise uses information from...

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SpaceX successfully launches Odysseus in bid to return US to the lunar surface

Following its successful deployment, the Nova-C spacecraft now faces a two-week journey to reach the Moon’s south pole. | Photo by GREGG NEWTON/AFP via Getty Images

A robotic lunar lander built by private aerospace company Intuitive Machines was successfully launched by SpaceX on Thursday, with hopes of being the first American spacecraft to successfully touch down on the Moon’s surface since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. The Nova-C lander named “Odysseus” was carried into orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which launched from Cape Canaveral at 1:05AM ET on February 15th.

The launch was originally scheduled to take place on Wednesday but was delayed due to concerns regarding the temperature of the rocket’s methane fuel. Shortly after liftoff, SpaceX confirmed that the IM-1 mission’s Odysseus lander had been successfully deployed and that the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that delivered it into...

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Lenovo’s transparent laptop concept resurfaces in new leak

Transparent screens, touch-sensitive keyboards, and stylus support. | Image: Evan Blass / Lenovo

Leaker Evan Blass has offered another look at Lenovo’s transparent laptop concept ahead of its presumed unveiling at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month. The new leaked press image shows two of the concept laptops on a desk, with one of the devices being visible through the transparent screen of another. This is our second look at the concept device, after WindowsReport published leaked press shots of it earlier this month.

See-through screens aren’t exactly a new technology. They’ve been cropping up in concept devices for over a decade, and Samsung even showed off a transparent laptop concept back at CES 2010. But 14 years later it seems like companies are ready to actually commercialize the technology. We’ve already...

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Nvidia is now worth more than Amazon and Alphabet

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Nvidia surpassed Alphabet in market capitalization on Wednesday, only a day after it overtook Amazon. Bloomberg is reporting that the chip maker’s stock is now worth $1.83 trillion, beating the Google owner’s $1.82 market cap by a hair. This makes Nvidia the world’s fourth most valuable company in the wake of the AI boom, after Microsoft ($3.04T), Apple ($2.84T) and Saudi Aramco. The company is currently making the H100 chip, which powers the majority of LLMs in use today, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the majority of AI projects from Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.

The world’s largest tech companies are involved in an AI chip arms race, with each of them hoping to create their own GPU chip to topple Nvidia’s virtual monopoly. Ironically,...

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Stability AI tries to stay ahead of the pack with a new image-generating AI model

Collage of Stabie Cascade art | Stability AI

Stability AI’s newest model for image generation is Stable Cascade promises to be faster and more powerful than its industry-leading predecessor, Stable Diffusion, which is the basis of many other text-to-image generation AI tools.

Stable Cascade can generate photos and give variations of the exact image it created, or try to increase an existing picture’s resolution. Other text-to-image editing features include inpainting and outpainting, where the model will fill edit only a specific part of the image, as well as canny edge, where users can make a new photo just by using the edges of an existing picture.

Image: Stability AI

Stable Cascade images generated from the prompt “Cinematic photo of an anthropomorphic...

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The best Presidents Day deals you can already get

More than two dozen great products are already on sale ahead of the holiday, including Google’s Pixel Buds Pro. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Presidents Day has us thinking about the upcoming election season — not to mention the hotly contested debates and the inevitable onslaught of presidential memes, some of which are likely to be dangerously believable. Regardless of how you feel about politics, however, the holiday remains a great time to save, especially since many deals go beyond the furniture and big-name appliances that will dominate most circulars in the run-up to the holiday on Monday, February 19th.

We’re already seeing tech sales pop up at trusted retailers like Amazon and Best Buy, where you can find great deals on the gadgets we’ve tried, tested, and wholeheartedly recommend. We’re seeing great prices on devices like Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max and the Roomba...

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Terrorists are allegedly buying blue checks on X

Illustration: The Verge

A report from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project (TTP) alleges that X has been selling premium subscriptions to subjects of US sanctions, including leaders of the US-designated terrorist organization Hezbollah. The TTP report identifies 28 accounts that were granted checkmarks under owner Elon Musk’s paid verification plan, evading rules that formally state they’re banned from using it. The allegations raise new questions about how strictly social media platforms should vet users — after the Supreme Court ruled just last year that the platform formerly known as Twitter was not responsible for abetting a terrorist attack.

The TTP report lists the full series of sanctioned entities that got verified on Twitter. The wide range of names...

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Tesla’s latest update takes aim at cold weather woes

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tesla rolled out two changes in its latest vehicle software update — 2024.2.6 — that appear to be aimed squarely at battery issues that immobilized cars during an extreme cold weather event in January. One of those new features will tell Tesla drivers how much time they can expect until their battery is warm enough for DC fast charging, while the other will automatically defrost the charge port.

According to the update’s release notes published by Not a Tesla App, the charge port will start warming automatically when drivers use the car’s navigation feature to get to a charging station. Frozen charge ports could be one of the issues that left drivers stranded during an extreme cold snap in Chicago earlier this year, especially if the...

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Microsoft Build 2024 starts on May 21st

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft tweeted that its annual Build conference for developers will take place in Seattle from May 21st through 23rd. The announcement tells everyone to expect to hear updates about “AI, Copilots, and more.”

The 2023 event marked a return to the in-person portion, and this year’s event promises to take place both in Seattle and online. Last year, Microsoft ramped up AI efforts that now include tools for developers like Copilot Studio and Windows AI Studio, while its growing AI ambitions around Windows and Microsoft 365 will surely be front and center again.

No schedule of events for this year’s gathering has been posted yet, and the page is currently inviting potential attendees to sign up to find out when registration opens. On the...

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It’s time for Microsoft to build an Xbox Steam Deck

The Asus ROG Ally, with the Xbox app on Windows. This is not enough. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

The Nintendo Switch is on track to become the bestselling game console of all time. Sony’s PS5 will likely surpass the Xbox One’s entire lifetime sales later this year. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s newer Xbox Series X and S, with their comparatively disappointing exclusive games, are firmly in third place yet again — and it doesn’t look like Xbox Game Pass will ever fill the gap.

Microsoft isn’t planning to take this lying down. It’s among the largest video game companies in the world now that it owns Activision Blizzard, and it’s going to act. This Thursday, we expect the company to reveal a seismic shift in strategy, one where it could bring Xbox exclusives like Hi-Fi Rush, Starfield, even Indiana Jones to PlayStation and / or Switch.

To...

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Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros

It doesn’t help that there’s no real killer app yet. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over.

It’s no coincidence that there’s been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they’re returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase — and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we’re right about at that point.

Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge’s product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other...

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The remastered Tomb Raider trilogy destroyed my nostalgia goggles

Image: Aspyr

I have been waiting for Tomb Raider I-III Remastered for 21 years. That’s when I first played the second entry in the series, it having been a “gift” from my mother’s boyfriend who gave me both his PlayStation and a handful of games — sans jewel cases — for no other reason than wanting to free up some space in his closet. I played it ceaselessly, enamored with the game’s action and puzzles and the fact it was the first game I ever owned that starred a woman. But after reconnecting with the Tomb Raider II portion of Aspyr’s remaster, I’m left asking: what in the natural hell was 15-year-old Ash thinking?

Playing Tomb Raider II on the Switch — it’s also available on Xbox, PC, and Playstation — was an exercise in self-flagellation, with the...

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Madame Web is a love letter to the golden age of bad comic book movies

Sony’s Madame Web isn’t especially great or terrible, but it’s surprisingly committed to transporting you back to 2003 — a golden age for comic book movies that were aggressively mid or worse.

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Apple’s latest prototype AI tool can animate images using text descriptions

SVG images and text descriptions fed into Keyframer are automatically converted into animation code. | Image: Apple

Researchers at Apple have unveiled Keyframer, a prototype generative AI animation tool that enables users to add motion to 2D images by describing how they should be animated.

In a research paper published on February 8th, Apple said that large language models (LLMs) are “underexplored” in animation despite the potential they’ve shown across other creative mediums like writing and image generation. The LLM-powered Keyframer tool is being pitched as one example of how the technology could be applied.

Utilizing OpenAI’s GPT4 as its base model, Keyframer can take Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) files — an illustration format that can be resized without interfering with quality — and generate CSS code to animate the image based on a text...

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