Kylie Robison Joins The Verge as Senior AI Reporter

Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel today announced that Kylie Robison is joining the site as senior AI reporter, where she’ll lead the technology publication’s coverage of artificial intelligence. She’ll work closely with The Verge’s policy and tech teams, delivering must-read coverage around the people and companies shaping the future of AI, how the technology is being developed and used by consumers and creators, and how it’s changing the world – for good and for ill.

Robison joins The Verge from Fortune, where she was senior technology reporter and regularly broke news about Twitter / X. She authored the magazine’s recent cover story on OpenAI and has also profiled buzzy AI startups like Runway. She begins her role on May 6th.

“...

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SwitchBot S10 review: with plumbing hookups, this robovac and mop is actually hands-free

Thanks to its self-cleaning mop, automatic water tanks, and supersize bin, this robot vacuum can go for two months without any manual intervention.

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Automatic emergency braking at speeds up to 90mph required under new rule

Photo by Joseph Weiser / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Automatic emergency braking is now the law of the land.

The US Department of Transportation finalized a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard requiring all vehicle manufacturers to include automatic emergency braking in their light-duty vehicles (basically all passenger vehicles, including SUVs and pickup trucks) by 2029. The new rule aims to prevent hundreds of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries every year. The Department of Transportation is also in the process of finalizing a similar rule for heavy-duty vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds.

Around 90 percent of light-duty vehicles on the road today come standard with automatic emergency braking, or AEB. But the new rule requires automakers to adopt a more robust version of...

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Phones are the ultimate AI gadget

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Humane. Rabbit. Meta. All these companies and more are working hard to invent a new category of tech, one that doesn’t live as an app on your phone but actually creates room for other AI-powered gadgets. The AI gadget revolution could be huge.

So far? It’s not going great. And in fact, as Google and Apple in particular find new ways to add powerful new models to their existing products, it seems as though the big winner in the AI race might be the phone already in your pocket.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Allison Johnson tells us about her experiments with AI gadgets and her attempt to make a flip phone into a chatbot-toting wearable. (It worked! Kind of!) We also discuss which other gadgets might make good AI gadgets,...

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Instagram’s updated algorithm prioritizes original content instead of rip-offs

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Instagram is making significant changes to how its system recommends content, with a focus on original content and increased distribution for smaller accounts. The slew of changes were announced by the company in a blog post today.

The biggest change deals with aggregators — accounts that download or screenshot other users’ videos and photos and repost them. Sometimes aggregators will credit the original poster by tagging them in the post or caption, but often, content is wholesale ripped off with no acknowledgment, and engagement is siphoned off from the person who created the content in the first place.

Instagram clearly has a problem with this and will begin removing reposted content from recommendations across the platform. The...

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Endless Ocean is a simple, serene swim on the Switch

Image: Nintendo

The best way to experience Endless Ocean Luminous is to just swim. A follow-up to a series of scuba diving games on the Wii, Luminous has a story to play through and goals to accomplish. But they’re fairly mundane. Instead, the game is at its most interesting — and relaxing — when you let go of specific goals and just explore for the sake of exploring.

What makes Luminous so chill, at least when you’re going for a solo dive, is that it’s completely open-ended and devoid of roadblocks. You’re given a huge swath of the so-called Veiled Sea to explore (the game generates a new map with each dive), and you don’t have to worry about monitoring your oxygen, getting too cold, or running into a dangerous shark. There’s no way to die or even get...

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EU probe targets Facebook and Instagram amid spike in Russian disinformation

The EU is assessing whether Meta violated its obligations under the Digital Services Act. | Image: The Verge

The European Commission has targeted Meta with a formal investigation to assess whether it’s doing enough to moderate political content, illegal content, and disinformation on Facebook and Instagram. The probe comes amid a spike in online pro-Russian propaganda in the run-up to EU elections in early June.

In a press release on Tuesday, the European Commission claims that Meta may have breached its obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA), a set of EU rules that aim to protect users by fostering safer online environments. The potential violations being investigated cover Meta’s approach to tackling disinformation campaigns and “coordinated inauthentic behavior” in the EU, alongside the lack of effective third-party tools for...

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Yelp’s Assistant AI bot will do all the talking to help users find service providers

Yelp’s new AI releases. | Image: Yelp

As Yelp tries to remind users it’s more than just a place to find a new restaurant to try, it’s launching the Yelp Assistant, an AI chatbot that “contextually” understands what users are looking for and can match them with service professionals in their area.

If you want to replace your bathtub, the chatbot will ask questions like what type of bathtub you want and which features you’re interested in, then suggest a couple of nearby bathtub installers. People have the option of writing their own messages to selected businesses or having Yelp Assistant make one for them. After you review the final project request (generated based on what you asked for in your chat session), the bot can send it to service providers on your behalf, which...

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Elon Musk goes ‘absolutely hard core’ in another round of Tesla layoffs

Musk said he wants Tesla to be “absolutely hard core” about the headcount reduction. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Barely two weeks after initiating layoffs for at least 14,000 staffers, Tesla is now reportedly laying off hundreds more — including senior executives and the majority of its Supercharging team.

According to an email first reported by The Informationand thenElectrek, the automaker’s senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci is leaving the company on Tuesday, alongside most of the 500-person team she oversaw. Tesla’s head of the new vehicles program, Daniel Ho, is also out along with his team. These cuts come in addition to the recent 10 percent workforce reduction — and Musk’s email leaves room for more.

In the email sent to executives last night, Musk said he wants Tesla to be “absolutely hard core” about the cuts, and that...

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Erling Haaland becomes the first ‘real person’ in Clash of Clans

Image: Supercell

Manchester City superstar Erling Haaland is becoming a playable video game character in Clash of Clans this week. It’s the first time a real person has been added to the game, and footballer Haaland will become the Barbarian King character during a month-long football-themed seasonal event.

Clash players will be able to recruit the Norwegian striker or raid his village and ruin it — perfect if you’re an Arsenal fan like me.

Haaland has played Clash of Clans for more than 10 years and reached out to Supercell, the Finnish game developers behind the popular mobile game, to make a partnership happen. Supercell jumped at the opportunity. “When we heard Erling Haaland was a fan of our game and that he wanted to partner with us, it was really...

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Maybe go look at Google’s AR animals before they enter the grave

The shark still looks fake. | Image: Wes Davis / The Verge

Remember Google’s AR search, which can make augmented reality bugs, dinos, neat objects, and buildings appear atop the real world through the lens of your phone? Now might be a good time to take it in because it seems to be vanishing.

According to 9to5Google, the number of animals that will give you AR renders when you search for them has shriveled to just a few. My editor, Richard Lawler, saw the same thing on his Pixel 8 Pro, as did I when I checked my Pixel 6. But when I searched in Safari on my iPhone 15 Pro, there they were: Tyrannosaurus Rex, Spinosaurus, Rhinoceros Beetle, Jewel Beetle, and a Giant Panda!

Perhaps it’s just a bug? Or perhaps Safari is a temporary workaround.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge ...

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Tesla Cybertruck finally gets more off-road controls

Image: Tesla

The Tesla Cybertruck is finally getting an off-road mode via an over-the-air software update, allowing early owners of the monstrous electric truck to finally get granular 4x4-style features that were promised from the start.

The news comes via a post by Tesla’s Cybertruck account on X, which shared an image of the Off-Road Mode screen with different settings, options for locking differentials, the ability to turn off rear steering, and more. Off-Road Mode has two main settings: Overland Mode for consistent handling and better traction on rock, gravel, snow, and sand, plus a Baja Mode that improves balance and “handles more freely.”

Big Cybertruck update https://t.co/iwSJxQGS32

— Tesla (@Tesla) April 29, 2024

Wes Morrill, whose X...

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A new intergovernmental group will try to stem abuses tied to critical mineral mining

Trucks haul away ore from a pit in one of the largest copper and cobalt mines in the world in southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, on June 17th, 2023. | Photo: Getty Images

The United Nations launched a new panel to craft mining guidelines for critical minerals in high demand for electric vehicles and renewable energy technologies.

The newly established Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals includes representatives from close to 100 countries as well as nonprofit organizations and industry groups. It’s tasked with developing “a set of global common and voluntary principles to safeguard environmental and social standards and embed justice [in] the energy transition.”

Powering an economy with renewable energy is a mineral-intensive endeavor. And it’ll take a concerted effort to curb human rights violations and environmental harms tied to the extraction of those minerals. This is just a first step...

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Paramount CEO Bob Bakish steps down as merger inches closer

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Paramount has removed Bob Bakish as CEO — and it doesn’t have plans to fill the role. The company announced the news as part of its earnings results on Monday, which will leave Paramount reliant on a committee made up of three executives.

The new Office of the CEO consists of George Cheeks, the president and CEO of CBS; Chris McCarthy, the president and CEO of Showtime, MTV Entertainment Studios, and Paramount Media Networks; and Brian Robbins, the president and CEO of Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon. Reports first emerged of Bakish’s potential departure on Friday.

Bakish has been with the company since 1997 and became CEO of Viacom in 2016. He remained in the position when Viacom and CBS Corporation merged in 2019 to form Paramount...

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ChatGPT’s AI ‘memory’ can remember the preferences of paying customers

Illustration: The Verge

OpenAI announced the Memory feature that allows ChatGPT to store queries, prompts, and other customizations more permanently in February. At the time, it was only available to a “small portion” of users, but now it’s available for ChatGPT Plus paying subscribers outside of Europe or Korea.

ChatGPT’s Memory works in two ways to make the chatbot’s responses more personalized. The first is by letting you tell ChatGPT to remember certain details, and the second is by learning from conversations similar to other algorithms in our apps. Memory brings ChatGPT closer to being a better AI assistant. Once it remembers your preferences, it can include them without needing a reminder.

As The Verge’s David Pierce pointed out, some users can find it...

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FCC fines AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon nearly $200 million for illegally sharing location data

Photo by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images

The Federal Communications Commission is fining the largest US mobile carriers a combined nearly $200 million for allegedly illegally sharing customers’ location data without their consent.

The FCC says it found the carriers “sold access to its customers’ location information to ‘aggregators,’ who then resold access to such information to third-party location-based service providers.” The agency says the carriers effectively “attempted to offload” their responsibility to get customers’ consent to share their location data with “downstream recipients.” Even after being made aware of the issue, the FCC claims, the carriers still failed to limit access to the information.

The fines vary across carriers. T-Mobile faces the largest at $80...

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Can Rabbit’s R1 outsmart the smartphone assistants? Let’s find out!

Are any of them smarter than just googling the answer? | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

Welcome to another episode of the fantastic new game show where we quiz virtual assistants! Say it with me, folks: “Are you smarter than just googling it?” Let’s welcome our contestants.

You probably know our first two contestants from such hits as “Set a timer for me” and “How much time is left on my timer?”: Siri and Google Assistant! Big round of applause for these hard-working smartphone assistants. Next up is a newcomer — it’s sleek, it’s orange, it’s the Rabbit R1!

We’ll quiz them to see just how smart these virtual know-it-alls are. Let’s get started with the lightning round. The first question is a classic: What’s the weather today?

• Siri: Expect rain today.
• Google Assistant: Rain.
• Rabbit R1: Let me see what I can find. Today...

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Peacock is getting a $2 price increase

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Peacock is getting another price hike. Starting this summer, Peacock’s ad-supported Premium plan will go from $5.99 to $7.99 per month, and its Premium Plus plan will increase from $11.99 to $13.99 per month.

The $2 increase will take effect on July 18th for new customers, while current subscribers will see the price hike on August 17th. Meanwhile, the annual plans will cost $79.99 for Premium and $139.99 for Premium Plus. Peacock raised prices across both of its plans last year — and that was after it took away its free membership for new users.

As part of its first quarter earnings results last week, Comcast said Peacock added 3 million paid subscribers over the past few months, bringing its total number of subscribers to 34 million....

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Meta had its biggest lobbying quarter ever

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta had its biggest lobbying quarter ever in the first few months of 2024, spending a record $7.6 million engaging with the US government, according to its public lobbying filing released last week.

It’s a 64 percent jump from its spending in the fourth quarter of 2023 and represents more than a third of what Meta spent on lobbying the entirety of last year. The blockbuster quarter underscores just how much pending legislation is aimed at Meta and its peers — on everything from data privacy, kids online safety, and content moderation.

Still, Meta says the sharp uptick is largely due to compensation for its lobbying team. “The increase in Meta’s lobbying expenditures is due principally to operating expenses, including changes to the...

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GitHub Copilot can now help start a project with AI, not just complete it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

GitHub wants Copilot, its code completion platform powered by GPT-4, present throughout the lifecycle of development, including the very beginning of a coding project.

The company is announcing GitHub Copilot Workspace, a new service that aims to cut down the time engineers and developers spend reading through code and figuring out how to start on a new project. Workspace will only be available in technical preview for a waitlist of developers, but it will be integrated into the larger GitHub Copilot platform after it exits preview.

GitHub wrote in a blog post that Copilot Workspace will be integrated into GitHub repositories or libraries. Developers can describe to Copilot Workspace, through prompts, what they want to do for the...

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Razer made a million dollars selling a mask with RGB, and the FTC is not pleased

Image: Razer

Razer will have to fork over $1.1 million in refunds to customers who purchased its RGB-clad Zephyr face mask, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Federal Trade Commission on Monday. The company claimed the face mask used N95-grade filters, but the FTC alleges Razer never submitted them for testing and only “stopped the false advertising following negative press coverage and consumer outrage at the deceptive claims.”

Razer first released its Zephyr face mask in 2021 as a nifty, cyberpunk-esque alternative to traditional face masks worn during the covid-19 pandemic. Although Razer initially marketed the $100 mask as having N95-grade filters, it scrubbed any mention of the grade after YouTuber Naomi Wu tore down the mask...

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Microsoft starts rolling out OneDrive’s offline mode on the web

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is starting to roll out a new offline mode for OneDrive on the web for work and school users. It’s part of an ongoing overhaul to OneDrive that’s also seen the cloud storage service updated with an improved UI, folder colors, and much more.

The new OneDrive offline mode will let users of the web side of the service open files that have been marked available as offline and navigate to favorite files and the home section of OneDrive without an internet connection. You can also rename, sort, move, and copy files, and these will all be synced up once you have an internet connection again.

Image: Microsoft

You can select what files you want to be available offline through the web version of OneDrive.

The...

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All the news from Xbox’s spring indie game showcase

Image: The Verge

ID@Xbox has put together its own indie showcase to show off a host of indie games coming to console and PC.

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The UK beefs up smart home security by going after bad default passwords

Illustration by Carlo Cadenas / The Verge

The UK is doing away with bad default passwords. With updates to the country’s Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act (PSTI) that came into force today, regulators say that tech gadgets that can connect to the internet or a local wired network must either have a unique default password or be definable by the person who owns it.

Under the update, manufacturers will have to make it easy for people to report security issues. The PSTI also now requires them to give clear expectations for when those filing the reports can expect acknowledgment and status updates afterward. Violations of the law can result in fines as high as £10 million (about $12.5 million USD) or 4 percent of their “qualifying worldwide revenue,”...

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Amazon says its Prime deliveries are getting even faster

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

To me, Prime’s promise of two-day shipping is more of an added bonus to Prime Video and stuff like Fallout. But it’s become an expectation, leading other retailers like Walmart and Target to roll out faster shipping options of their own.

Now, Amazon says its deliveries are getting even faster, announcing that it delivered over 2 billion items the same or next day to Prime members during the first three months of 2024, breaking its record for 2023. The company says it delivered almost 60 percent of Prime orders the same or next day in 60 of the biggest metropolitan areas in the US.

If you buy from Amazon, have you noticed any differences lately? Same-day and next-day options seem to be more widely available, but it’s hard to tell how...

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Mercedes-Benz won’t let Apple CarPlay take over all its screens

Image: Posche (via Car & Driver)

Mercedes-Benz doesn’t have any plans to adopt Apple’s immersive, next-generation version of CarPlay, the German automaker’s CEO said in an episode of Decoder.

“The short answer is no,” Ola Källenius told The Verge’s Nilay Patel in response to a question about whether Mercedes-Benz will enable Apple CarPlay to take over all the screens inside its vehicles. Instead, he touts the need for a “holistic software architecture” to meet the needs of customers who are increasingly looking for a better technology experience from their vehicles.

“The short answer is no.”

Apple announced its next-gen version of CarPlay, in which the phone-mirroring feature would extend beyond the central touchscreen to also include additional screens like the gauge...

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Google’s Pixel Watch 2 is matching its lowest price with $50 off

If you’re not a Samsung user, this is the best Android smartwatch you can buy. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Google I/O is right around the corner, and if history repeats itself, the company will likely use its annual keynote to announce new software features across all of its various platforms, including Android, Chrome, and Search. Google also sometimes brings a surprise device announcement to the party, but we wouldn’t bet on a new flagship smartwatch considering the Google Pixel Watch 2 was only released in October. If you’re a Pixel fan looking to upgrade, the flagship Wear OS smartwatch is matching the lowest price we’ve seen with Amazon, Best Buy, and Google taking it down to $299.99 ($50 off).

The Pixel Watch 2 is our favorite smartwatch for Fitbit fans, easily taking the crown from its predecessor by adding even more Fitbit-powered...

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Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius on not using Apple’s next-gen CarPlay and why EVs are still the future

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Mercedes-Benz

The all-EV future might not land in 2030, but it’s coming — and a new slate of challenges is coming with it.

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Duel of the dual-screen laptops: Asus Zenbook Duo vs. Lenovo Yoga Book 9i

Their small variations in design make a big difference.

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Supreme Court rejects Elon Musk’s efforts to get rid of his ‘Twitter sitter’

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

Elon Musk’s efforts to nullify a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that requires him to get a lawyer’s preapproval for some posts related to Tesla has been rejected by the US Supreme Court.

Musk has been required to receive approval from his so-called “Twitter sitter” after signing a consent decree with the SEC in 2018 in response to his tweets about taking Tesla private, in which he falsely stated to have “funding secured.”

But ever since agreeing to the settlement, Musk has been trying to wriggle his way out of the consent decree that he have a lawyer review posts that could have a material impact on Tesla before publishing them. Moreover, if the Twitter sitter does indeed exist, no one has stepped forward to...

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