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Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI
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Blue Planet III is keeping the rough edges in the age of AI

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Better Retrieval Won’t Fix Your RAG Bot

The real problem is knowing when your documents don’t contain the answer. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Your OpenCode Key Didn’t Expire. The Breach Killed It. Here’s the 5-Minute Fix

What the two OpenCode errors mean, the hidden key that breaks even free models, and how to stop a leaked key from running up your AI bill. Continue reading on Towards AI »

‘Synthetic twin’: Why Socceroo Cristian Volpato is the latest footballer to license his AI clone

Athletes’ scramble to control – and monetise – their digital identities at the cutting edge of AI rights deals Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast The Socceroos star stares at the camera as he strides through an enormous atrium, the sound of his football boots on polished concrete echoing around him. Suddenly, he spawns four digital clones that peel off out of view to re-emerge in different settings around the world. This scene from a social media video is fake and gene

Pennsylvania will require labels on AI-generated ads

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as the ad itself. That applies to TV commercials from multi-billion-dollar companies, as well as restaurants' ugly, crowded flyers about their

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Gemini 4 Argon vs Claude Opus 5.5: Pick Wrong, Pay Twice

Gemini 4 Argon vs Claude Opus 5.5 for developers: benchmarks, real pricing after November 30, and which model wins for coding, long… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Anthropic Just Introduced Claude Duet. AI That Works While You Step Away

Claude Duet is Anthropic’s new proactive AI agent that works in the cloud while you step away. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Block said that the voice model can run locally on a MacBook M4 Max

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Recursive’s AI Helped Build a Coding Model in Under 4 Months, and It Runs 125 Tokens a Second on a…

Flint is a 40B open-weight coding model with only 2.5B parameters active per token. Here is what the AI researcher behind it changed, what… Continue reading on Towards AI »

LG’s brilliant C6 OLED TV is already $400 off ahead of Black Friday

LG’s C6 OLED TV is on sale in multiple sizes starting at $999.99 ($300 off). | Image: LG Black Friday is still over a month away, but if you’re hoping to upgrade your TV, you don’t need to wait until November. LG has already kicked off its early Black Friday sale, letting you save on the LG C6 and various soundbars through November 1st. Right now, for instance, you can snag a 55-inch C6 for an all-time low of $999.99 ($400 off), with Amazon and Best Buy matching said price. Other sizes are als

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Fielded is obsessed with scammers and unhinged Japanese cyberpunk

Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B even means. Her first album, Ninety-Thirty-Thirty, includes songs heavily indebted to '80s synth-pop and features multiple saxophone solos. Boy

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A new study found Grok's AI overwhelmingly recommends Republican candidates while OpenAI's GPT favors Democrats, with the two AI models disagreeing in more than 90% of nearly 500 election races.

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What to expect from Apple’s ‘Pro and tell’ event

It feels like Apple's Welcome Home event just happened. And the iPhone Duo announcement isn't all that far in our rearview mirror, either. Yet, the company is back with another launch, focused on the MacBook Pro, it looks like. Its "Pro and tell" event is scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles. While obviously nothing is confirmed yet, it sure seems like we're finally going to get that long-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro. Beyond that? There could be an OLED update for the iPad Mini

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I hope Apple’s touchscreen MacBook takes some lessons from this Lenovo laptop

The Lenovo Yoga 9n is a pricey workstation laptop, but being a 2-in-1 also makes it fun. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge It looks like the long-rumored touchscreen MacBook might actually get announced next week, and after using the Lenovo Yoga 9n for our testing of Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, it got me thinking: this is a lot of what I want from a touchscreen MacBook. Like the Apple silicon in modern MacBook Pros, RTX Spark is an Arm-based processor with a beefy integrated GPU an

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Unitree’s Robot Bodyguard Would Die for You. But Can It Tell Who to Fight?

Uni⁠tr‍ee’s H2-X “Kung Fu‌ Legen​d Guardian” kic‍ks dents int⁠o cars⁠, face​s do‌wn a knife-wieldin‌g intruder, holds up a ca​r to free​ a… Continue reading on Towards AI »

Lee Chang Dong ponders the ethics of the camera

Lee Chang Dong's seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff - 2,600 employees - after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity, that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic. A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Love picks up wit

It’s time to find a new browser

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 149, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy It Actually Feels Like Fall Now At Least In My Neighborhood), and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Demis Hassabis and computer chips and permafrost, enjoying the first episodes of Machine Gods, filming the next season of Version History (pet season!), seeing You Can See Everything and then rea

Laika has spent 20 years building up to Wildwood

Across several decades in Hollywood, Caleb Deschanel has seen a lot. He served as cinematographer on films like The Passion of the Christ and The Patriot, worked on sequences in The Godfather and Titanic, and directed a few episodes of Twin Peaks. Even still, nothing could quite prepare him for his first stop-motion project: working as the cinematographer on Wildwood, the latest release from Coraline studio Laika. While he knew that stop-motion was a long and involved process, he was still surpr

The datacentre next door: on the frontline of tech’s latest David v Goliath battle

The AI boom is pitting local residents against corporate giants seeking to power their energy-hungry networks – but one Welsh city is fighting back Dale Johnston opens the gate to his neat suburban garden on the western fringes of Newport in South Wales. There’s a trampoline and a slide on the lawn for his grandchildren, and chairs for him and his wife. He should be enjoying the light draining from the perfect autumnal sky – but almost his entire view is blotted out by a vast expanse of prefabri

John Healey pledges to use budget to harness power of AI to bolster Britain’s security

Chancellor says government to commit hundreds of millions to develop ‘distinctively British’ approach to AI John Healey has pledged to use Wednesday’s budget to harness the power of artificial intelligence to bolster Britain’s security and prosperity against the risks in the accelerating global technology arms race. As he prepares for his debut budget, the chancellor said that Andy Burnham’s government would commit hundreds of millions of pounds to develop a “distinctively British” approach to A

OpenAI will cut frontier models off from the internet weeks after one of its engineers said that solution wouldn't work.

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Blue Planet III features cloudier footage to prove authenticity amid AI boom

BBC series deliberately uses ‘more organic’ shots to assure viewers animals are not AI-generated, producers say The David Attenborough-narrated series Blue Planet III deliberately includes cloudier, less polished footage to counter AI fakery and assure viewers it is “authentic”, its producers have said. Nearly a decade after Blue Planet II shone a light on plastic pollution, and 25 years since the first Blue Planet aired, the hit BBC series is returning with more animal behaviour and cutting-edg

The robots, stomping their little feet and making tiny R2-D2 noises, sat, fell down dead for a "nap," and summersaulted on voice command.

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Xbox’s first chief operating officer is out after just a few months

Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief operating officer in July. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Chiang's departure in a surprisingly short memo today. "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today. I'm grateful for her years of

OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet access

OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September, after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies a

Abandoned Popcorn Time apps had to be disabled to prevent a zombie army

Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA's least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the "Netflix of Piracy" software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot army. Researchers at Eye Security found the updater for a Popcorn Time fork called "Time4Popcorn" still running on tons of Windows, macOS, and Android devices located around the w

Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend

Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between the model and the speaker does have a mostly natural back and forth (though for some reason, the model initially mistakes the speaker for somebody named "Ronald

Hosted by TechCrunch in partnership with Fidelity Private Shares, the full-day event goes beyond fundraising and AI to explore the realities of finding customers, building teams, sharpening a pitch, developing founder leadership, and scaling companies both inside and outside traditional startup hubs.

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‘Black October’: cybersecurity experts sound the alarm over new era of AI-enabled hacking

After discovery of severe bug in the PHP programming language, executives warn of ‘vulnerability tsunami’ Leaders in cybersecurity are sounding the alarm after the discovery of a major vulnerability this week. They are predicting that artificial intelligence tools will expose more fundamental weaknesses in global internet infrastructure in the months to come. “I no longer think we’re going to be able to patch all bugs,” said Sam Altman on Thursday evening, joining the chorus of executives. In th

Soundcore’s latest noise-crushing headphones are on sale for a new low price

The Space 2 comes in multiple colors, including an attractive seafoam green. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge My colleague John Higgins considered Soundcore’s Space One some of the best budget noise-canceling headphones you could buy when they launched in 2023 — and their successor has only improved upon their winning formula, albeit with a $30 price increase. Thankfully, the Soundcore Space 2 are currently on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart in all three colors for an all-time

Fi’s GPS-equipped dog trackers are on sale for 30 percent off

If your dog or cat is prone to getting lost, or you frequently go on adventures together, you can save 30 percent on Fi pet trackers through October 25th when you enter coupon code SCARY at checkout. The sale includes several satellite-connected trackers, including the Fi Ultra GPS we previously tested, which is down to $209.30 after the discount. That effectively brings it down to its original launch price. The IP68-rated Fi Ultra is fully waterproof, even in saltwater, and lasts up to five day

Elon Musk’s dangerous grip on outer space

Last week, Starshield - the version of SpaceX's Starlink used by the Ukrainian military - was throttled to block terminals traveling above certain speeds from accessing the service. The Ukrainian army's interceptors, which counter Russian drones carrying bombs, suddenly stopped working at high speeds, making it easier for Russia to attack the country's energy infrastructure and leading to a reported two deaths and at least 17 injuries. The Ukrainian military reported receiving no advance warning

The iPhone Duo should have been an iPad

We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate whether the Duo deserved the score it got, and try to work through how this device might change over time. Is the outer screen, as Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggested, the worst iPhone ever? Would it

Learn how OpenAI scaled Habitat with reliable multi-tenancy, global caching, and Azure Cosmos DB to deliver 12× faster reads for ChatGPT.

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Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads

Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads. While the previous version simply said it wouldn't do that, as of October 16th, Google has added the line, "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google

The first broken iPhone Duos are here

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display. Here's how one user in Australia described what happened to their phone: Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer t

Opposition deepfake video sparks outrage in Spain ahead of election

Video shows AI likenesses of people linked to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party appearing to admit to wrongdoing A political ad from Spain’s main opposition party that used a deepfake video of the prime minister’s wife has sparked outrage and set off a wider debate on AI, as the deeply polarised country gears up for general elections next month. Launched this week across the social media channels of the conservative People’s party (PP), the video used artificial intelligence to manipulate the like

Modern life is stuck in a sea of sameness. The pursuit of beauty is a necessary antidote | Brigid Delaney

Everything has become so frictionless and optimised, that concerted efforts must be made to turn back towards beauty and individuality – even if it has no explicit market value By the time it’s 5pm on a Friday, the headache and dry eyes have well and truly settled in. Maybe it’s a long day in front of your four screens while funnelling white noise through a large pair of headphones to cancel out the calls of your co-workers. Or maybe it’s the almost chemical wash of white fluorescent lights that

Experts cast doubt on Anthropic report detailing how AI has altered work at the company

Anthropic claims AI will shift how work gets done and labor demand – but some experts are skeptical of the vision Last year, the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and that in six months it would be writing 90% of code. Neither of those predictions came to pass. Now, in a report Anthropic published on Thursday, the company said it was hiring fewer junior technical workers and that human attention has become the n

Is a job guarantee the solution to mass AI unemployment?

An old idea springs anew as a chorus of influential voices predicts that AI may trigger crises of vast magnitude In a preface to his book Capitalism and Freedom, the American economist Milton Friedman famously observed that a crisis can propel once-fringe ideas into the political mainstream. “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around,” he wrote. The job of intellectuals, thinktanks and

OpenAI explains how we strengthened containment for frontier model training and evaluation, including offline environments and high-compute red-teaming.

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Can AI really predict cancer survival better than a doctor? I have my doubts | Devi Sridhar

Take a selfie to see how healthy you are: the idea is enticing and this new research is promising. But so many factors have been ignored The idea that a single selfie could predict how long someone with cancer may live sounds like an incredible breakthrough. AI is getting better at spotting patterns in medical data, but can it be used to reliably predict what will happen to an individual patient? I asked a clinical colleague what she thought about the recent headlines. She found it an interestin

The company plans to begin testing Pony.ai's robotaxis in Kazakhstan's capital in the first half of 2027.

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MIT researchers marooned 13 AIs on a virtual island, and they responded by inventing games, mourning a lost ring and, eventually, getting better at their jobs.

OpenAI and Poland’s NASK are partnering on AI safety, security, and technical research to strengthen safeguards and support a more resilient digital ecosystem.

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