Daily AI Briefing
The latest breakthroughs in AI — aggregated from top sources and paired with original analysis.
iFixit’s look inside the iPhone Duo may explain those broken screens and hinges
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Choose by the work, the quota and the permissions you can actually grant. Continue reading on Towards AI »
The footage looks okay, as long as you're not seeking artistry, inspiration, or human interest.
In my mind, Spooky Season music comes in two distinct flavors. There are the fun, occasionally goofy songs like "The Monster Mash" and John Carpenter's "Halloween Theme." Then there is the genuinely terrifying: Throbbing Gristle, The Body, or Scott Walker's The Drift. This 2006 album from the singer-songwriter is truly upsetting. On it, Walker explores death, disease, and tragedy. But not just from some abstract perspective. There are visceral descriptions of the hanging of Benito Mussolini and
JOLT trains one model as both teacher and student, then grades the teacher on how much the student learns. Here is how it works, what the… Continue reading on Towards AI »
Social media and the iPhone Duo subreddit are filled with reports of Apple's foldable failing quickly and in spectacular fashion. Some users report having the phone for only a few hours before the hinge seems to catch on something, then audibly crack and break the screen. Tellingly, the cracks all seem to happen in the same place. YouTuber CuriousHagi was able to reproduce the cracked screen during some durability testing of the iPhone Duo. Then he pulled it apart to try and find the culprit. W
In 10,506 cases where a planted hint actually changed a reasoning model’s answer, the model admitted the hint inside its thinking tokens… Continue reading on Towards AI »
Launcher-like pinned tabs, pop-over glance view, and more make Zen my go to browser. | Image: Zen Browser I know many of you are mourning the loss of the Arc browser, and I get it. It felt like the first app in a long time to really offer a new approach to browser design. Atlassian bought the company last year and shifted its focus to developing Dia, its even more AI-focused browser. And soon enough, Arc will officially be no more, leaving dedicated users in a lurch. But I abandoned Arc quite
I froze a copy of the software web, as OpenAI now does. Half of it was out of date in three months. The security part rotted fastest. Continue reading on Towards AI »
Authentic Brands Group says AI company infringed on rights of songs by the King such as Can’t Help Falling in Love The owners of Elvis Presley’s music catalogue are suing artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic for allegedly using Presley’s songs to train their models without permission. Authentic Brands Group, the licensing organization that has ownership of both Presley’s music and likeness, is accusing Anthropic of infringing on the rights of 274 songs by Presley. The lawsuit, first re
Glimmer, Spark, Spark Open, Wonder and Wonder Full: what each is for, which you can run yourself, and the cheap tier that pays Meta with… Continue reading on Towards AI »
Could a brain kept alive in a jar still be conscious? We went from how human been thinking to how AI been thinking Continue reading on Towards AI »
The stick and face buttons are too close for comfort. | Photo: Cameron Faulkner / The Verge The Crkd Nitro Deck was a saving grace for the original Nintendo Switch. The slide-on $59.99 accessory brought Hall effect sticks to drift-plagued consoles - no need to open up your Joy-Con for a complicated repair. The Nitro Deck 2, made for both the original Switch and the larger Switch 2, continues the tradition of having better sticks than what Nintendo puts in even the newest Joy-Con (though these
"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."
Instagram is continuing its expansion into living rooms with Instagram for TV, for Apple TV. The company first started testing a version of the platform focused on Reels, live streams, and other video content, blown up for a bigger screen in December of last year. Then, in June, it launched a slew of new features for the app, which is available for Amazon's Fire TV, Samsung Smart TVs, and Google TV. Now Meta is bringing the app to Apple TV, though there's been little fanfare. MacRumors spotted
The draft prospectus says demand is limited by compute, not customers. That one fact explains how your limits move, who gets served first… Continue reading on Towards AI »
We compiled a list of all the hottest AI wearables, including Muse Charm, Bee, Friend, Plaud, and more.
The knowledge cutoff explains only part of it. The code around your request explains a lot more, and you can change that. Continue reading on Towards AI »
Actor’s storylines in the famous soap will be recut into vertical micro-episodes to be watched on phones – but her fellow cast members say they haven’t been consulted The long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours is being recut with AI into a microdrama designed to be watched on phones, sparking a debate among the show’s actors and the industry over the wider implications of television archives being mined for new content. RoseBerry Media, which specialises in making “vertical television” fo
State paid consultancy firm $166,000 for feasibility study on merging the three tertiary institutions Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The Western Australian government has said it is “extremely disappointed” and is seeking an “expedited” cost recovery from Deloitte after errors were discovered in a report about a potential university merger, including AI-hallucinated references and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost discrepancies. The government paid Deloitte $
The mods at r/opensource posted new submission rules that, among other things, banned projects that use AI. The post made Saturday evening opens by saying, "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community." The new rules have set off a firestorm in the comments, and even spurred the creation of a rival sub r/trueopensource. Moderator Wolvereness has waded into the comments to exp
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started The digital publishing industry has relied on Google for a very long time. Many outlets spent time and money optimizing their webpages to show up at the top of the search engine, with the goal of getting readers to click on their a
The real problem is knowing when your documents don’t contain the answer. Continue reading on Towards AI »
BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, crystal-clear footage that seemed almost too good to be real. But one dead giveaway of AI is when things look too polished and seamless. To counter that, Blue Planet III goes warts and all. Executive Producer Elizabeth White told The Guardian in the past, "the amount of plankton and things" floating in the water would hav
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 »
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
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
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 »
Claude Duet is Anthropic’s new proactive AI agent that works in the cloud while you step away. Continue reading on Towards AI »
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 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
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
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.
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
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
Unitree’s H2-X “Kung Fu Legend Guardian” kicks dents into cars, faces down a knife-wielding intruder, holds up a car to free a… Continue reading on Towards AI »
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
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
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 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
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.