Weeks after agreeing to settle a lawsuit that accused Google of illegally tracking browsing activity even after users activated Chrome’s incognito mode, the company has quietly updated how the browser describes its private browsing feature. The updated text, spotted by MSPowerUser, can be found in the latest Canary build of Google Chrome, version 122.0.6251.0.
Here’s the updated text (emphasis added):
“Others who use this device won’t see your activity, so you can browse more privately. This won’t change how data is collected by websites you visit and the services they use, including Google. Downloads, bookmarks and reading list items will be saved. Learn more”
In contrast, here’s the text Chrome’s current stable version shows when you...
It’s extremely weird that we’ve somehow normalized the fact that scammers, scumbags, debt collectors, and marketers have made the U.S.’ primary voice communication platform largely unusable.
There is some good news: according to data from the YouMail Robocall Index, U.S. consumers received just under 3.8 billion robocalls during the month of December, a 16.3% decrease from the month before.
The bad news: that November to December decrease usually happens (predatory scumbags take breaks over the holidays like everybody else) and may not be fully representative of a meaningful trend. The company also found that Americans received more than 55 billion robocalls in 2023, a 9% increase from 2022.
There was a 38 percent drop in scam calls, thanks (in part) to efforts at the FCC. The agency has, belatedly, been trying to force long-apathetic wireless carriers into implementing better SHAKEN/STIR anti-number-spoofing tech, and it seems to be helping. Though popping the bubbly is premature given we’re still talking about 8.1 billion scam calls made every year to U.S. consumers alone:
“There was a 38% reduction in scam calls, down to just over 8.1 billion scam calls for the year. This stems from a combination of much less call spoofing due to Stir/Shaken being rolled out almost universally, as well as scammers getting much more targeted in their calling campaigns. Secondly, this reduction in scam calls led to likely unwanted calls declining from 49% of all calls to 43% of all robocalls, with over 1.3 billion fewer likely unwanted calls for the year.”
One major problem, as we’ve discussed previously, is that focusing exclusively on “scam” calls doesn’t paint an accurate picture of the problem. Groups like the National Consumer Law Center have pointed out for years that legitimate corporations and debt collectors are among the biggest contributors to robocall annoyance, and use many of the same tactics as outright scammers.
The National Consumer Law Center has been testifying before Congress for years that our robocall problem persists for several key reasons:
Lobbying by a coalition of industries has routinely led to Supreme Court rulings that have curtailed the FCC’s authority to pursue “scammers” and legitimate companies alike.
Lobbying by those same mainstream industries has resulted in a paradigm where the discourse fixates on “scammers,” when “legitimate” corporations are routinely the biggest culprits, often using the same exact tactics as scammers to do things like harass heavily-indebted people they know can’t pay, or upsell consumers to services they’ve already said they don’t want (telecom loves this one).
The FCC has long lacked the backbone to stand up to telcos and wireless providers that for 20+ years turned a blind eye on robocalling and other scams because they profited from the traffic running over their networks (and in many cases still do).
The current system allows the FCC to fine robocallers, but doesn’t give the FCC the authority to actually collect those fines. That falls to the DOJ, which often doesn’t bother. The FCC has repeatedly asked for the authority to collect fines itself, but a corrupt Congress ignores the request, thanks to a prevailing “wisdom,” seeded by industry, that competent regulatory oversight is somehow bad.
We could truly put the robocall problem to bed if we addressed the fact that major corporations and corporate-friendly, rightward-lurching courts have turned our robocall regulatory enforcement into swiss cheese. But that’s not a bet I’d be willing to make anytime soon.
The notable increase comes despite an endless parade of FCC proclamations that they’re finally taking the problem more seriously. Every so often the agency insists it’s taken historic steps toward fixing the problem, yet the problem continues to grow.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Juniper Networks acquisition could challenge the dominance of market leader Cisco Systems, but more competition is a win for the networking space, Cisco partners tell CRN in response to the HPE-Juniper Networks acquisition news.
The 8-1 Qi2 charger announced by Anker during CES 2024. | Image: Nathan Edwards / The Verge
Last year, you couldn’t mention CES without bringing up Matter. It was a pivotal year for the smart home standard, as big names like Samsung, GE, and Amazon promised better interoperability between their devices and a world of sensors, appliances, and accessories. But that promise largely started and ended with smart home tech.
This year, things were a little different at CES: the idea of making products work nicely across ecosystems bled into other areas of the showcase and rippled across a range of different devices — even putting rivals on the same page to better serve users.
Google, for instance, revealed several updates to Android that show a clear push toward interoperability. One of Google’s biggest updates was to Nearby Share,...
Fun new game just dropped! Go to the internet platform of your choice, type “goes against OpenAI use policy,” and see what happens. The bossmandropped a link to a Rick Williams Threads post in the chat that had me go check Amazon out for myself.
Screenshot by Liz Lopatto
Hell yeah, [product name]!
On Amazon, I searched for “OpenAI policy” and boy, did I get results! I’m not entirely sure what this green thing is but I’ve been assured that it will “Boost your productivity with our high-performance [product name], designed to deliver-fast results and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition.“ Phenomenal! Unfortunately, there are no customer reviews — yet, anyway!
It may be the year of AI at CES, but many of these “AI” features have been around for a while — it’s just that companies are only now embracing the branding of artificial intelligence. AI has entered the public consciousness: it’s cool and hip to place it front and center in a product, a sign that companies are ambitious and forward thinking. That’s led the term to be adopted wherever possible, even when it’s not strictly the AI most people know.
But as more companies rebrand anything involving algorithms as AI, how are we meant to separate...
Apple isn’t at CES, but it had a huge presence anyway. On Monday, just before a string of CES keynotes were set to kick off, the company announced that its Vision Pro headset would be launching on February 2nd. Apple had already promised that the headset would launch early this year. So the stage was set for its rivals to compete by making CES 2024 a showcase of new ideas about virtual and augmented reality.
Ultimately, that didn’t pan out. Lots of companies showed up with AR and VR tech. A lot of the headsets offered similar functionality to the Vision Pro, like an AR / VR monitor for your computer or a substitute TV. But none were as impressive a package as Apple’s headset, nor were most arriving nearly as soon.
Platformer, the tech newsletter started by Verge alum Casey Newton, is leaving Substack over its policies around and response to pro-Nazi publications using the platform.
Newton notes that after identifying seven Substack publications “that conveyed explicit support for 1930s German Nazis and called for violence against Jews, among other groups,” the platform removed one on its own along with five others on the list. The other thing that happened was that the platform’s co-founders asked to keep their conversations off the record and then leaked those conversations to another publication.
The issue has been building up over the past several weeks. After The Atlantic published an article saying that Substack had been hosting and...
Discord is laying off 17 percent of its staff, a move that CEO Jason Citron said is meant to “sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization.”
The cuts were announced today to employees in an all-hands meeting and internal memo I’ve obtained. They’ll impact 170 people across various departments.
Based on Citron’s message to employees and my understanding of the business, Discord isn’t in dire financial straits, though it has yet to become profitable and is still trying to revive user growth after a surge during the pandemic. In his memo to employees, which you can read in full below, Citron said Discord grew its headcount too fast over the last few years — an admission that has become...
Wi-Fi 7 and an RGB touchpad? I’m in. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
The biggest names in laptops showed up to CES this week with new designs, new chips, and usually some way to sneak in the term “AI.” But most of them also quietly arrived with one of the most important upgrades of all for competitive gamers on the go: better Wi-Fi, with support for Wi-Fi 7. It’s about time, because router companies shoved Wi-Fi 7 routers out the door throughout 2023, and we’ve been waiting on machines that can put the standard’s ludicrous speed promises to the test.
Wi-Fi 7 came to gaming laptops first and foremost, and the focus on gaming makes sense. One of the biggest benefits of Wi-Fi 7 is that it allows for one device to connect to your router on multiple bands — a feature called Multi-Link Operation — which gives...
Will OpenAI’s new chatbot store finally make AI useful?
On Wednesday, OpenAI announced an online storefront called the GPT Store that lets people share custom versions of ChatGPT. It’s like an app store for chatbots, except that unlike the apps on your phone, these chatbots can be created by almost anyone with a few simple text prompts.
Over the past couple of months, people have created more than 3 million chatbots thanks to the GPT creation tool OpenAI announced in November. At launch, for example, the store features a chatbot that builds websites for you, and a chatbot that searches through a massive database of academic papers. And like the developers for smartphone app stores, the creators of these new chatbots can make money based on how many people use their product. The store is only available to paying ChatGPT subscribers for now, and OpenAI says it will soon start sharing revenue with the chatbot makers.
This probably means that in 2024, a lot more people will do what I did in 2023: spend an ungodly amount of time playing with AI chatbots. The problem is, there are already too many of them. It’s hard to know where to start, and although the introduction of a store makes it easier to find chatbots, it’s not yet clear if a third party will do for chatbots what third-party developers did for smartphone apps: make them essential and revolutionary at the same time. If that happens, maybe the tremendous buzz around AI right now will actually turn into a trillion-dollar industry — and change the world.
My own experience trying to get into chatbots highlights the confusion well. I started out with ChatGPT, trying to amuse myself by getting the multibillion-dollar bot to write smutty poetry. Then, Microsoft added ChatGPT to Bing and let it browse the web, causing me to change my default search engine — Google, duh — for the first time in my life. Then Google launched Bard, its own chatbot, so I switched back.
From there, the list of chatbots kept growing. I spent hours discussing fascism with a chatbot likeness of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Character.ai, a chatbot startup founded by former Google employees, and pouring my insecurities and deep, dark secrets into the patient ears of Pi, a friendly personal assistant created by Inflection AI, during a brutal summer of job hunting. I asked Claude, a chatbot from Anthropic, a startup founded by former OpenAI employees, to analyze my resume and suggest improvements (it did a solid job), and searched the web with Perplexity, a slick little chatbot that wants to be the next Google. When Metastuffed AI-powered chatbots into WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, I used them to compose cheesy goodnight poems for my partner. I even coughed up $16 to access Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor trained on data from X, formerly Twitter, which promptly analyzed my tweets and roasted me (“you’re not a journalist, you’re a hack, a glorified tech blogger.”).
For those who believe generative AI will be transformative, the chaotic world of chatbots presents a problem. Chatbots are the most obvious application of generative AI technology, and powerful large language models, or LLMs, that power modern-day generative AI are making chatbots more sophisticated than ever. However, it’s still not clear if chatbots themselves are generative AI’s killer apps. And if they are, it’s not clear what they’re really good for, other than streamlining customer service interactions. The fact that we’re drowning in chatbots isn’t making it any easier for the general public to know what to do with this new technology.
Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics and data science at Bentley University and author of How Algorithms Create and Prevent Fake News: Exploring the Impacts of Social Media, Deepfakes, GPT-3, and More, told me that it wasn’t the number of chatbots that was the problem — it was the amount of money flowing into them.
“So many of these chatbots are the entire product of some AI company, and often, that company has a valuation of a billion dollars,” Giansiracusa said. “I don’t know if there are too many chatbots. I think there’s too much money going to companies but all they’re doing is producing chatbots.”
Indeed, companies that make chatbots have been raising money at an alarming rate lately in what is widely considered to be a tough economic environment to do so. OpenAI, which Microsoft has already poured $13 billion into, is reportedly in early discussions to raise a fresh round of funding that would value the seven-year-old company above $100 billion. Anthropic is in talks to raise a $750 million funding round that would value it at up to $18 billion, and Character.ai is in talks with Google about getting an investment. Last week, Perplexity raised $74 million from a host of investors, including Jeff Bezos, valuing the startup at $520 million. And on Tuesday, Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora, announced a $75 million funding round from Andreessen Horowitz to grow its chatbot Poe, which aggregates other chatbots into one tool. Tech giants like Meta and Google, meanwhile, are reportedly spending tens of billions on AI already.
What is still unclear, despite the funding frenzy, is whether any of these chatbots or any of those coming to OpenAI’s new custom GPT Store will attract users. It’s even less clear if they’ll ultimately make money. Most chatbots currently have a freemium model that allows casual users to use a basic version of the product while charging between $10 and $20 a month to unlock advanced features such as asking an unlimited number of questions or letting them choose a more powerful large language model.
“It’s really hard to get people to pay for chatbots,” Giansiracusa said. “I think companies saw people paying to access the premium version of ChatGPT and thought, ‘Hey, here’s a new source of money.’”
Perplexity, the high-profile startup with a lofty ambition of replacing Google Search, for instance, makes just $6 million in annual revenue, almost all of which comes from offering a $20 monthly subscription, according to a recent report in The Information. The company is mulling putting ads into its AI-generated search results, founder Arvind Srinivas told the publication. Last year, Neeva, another startup with an AI chatbot aimed at taking on Google Search, killed it after failing to get enough traction, and sold itself to cloud computing company Snowflake.
“We have to figure out how to make conversational AI profitable,” said Amanda Stent, director of the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Colby College, whose research in AI and natural language processing led to the development of several applications including Siri. “That’s going to be the big question for thousands of startups and big companies over the next couple of years.”
The ease with which it’s possible to make general purpose chatbots in 2024 will lead to commodification, Stent believes. “I think chatbots have to be embedded in a software or a hardware product,” she said, citing how Microsoft embedded ChatGPT into Bing, ultimately branding the product Microsoft Copilot. “Companies that haven’t figured out how to embed their chatbots in other verticals are going to die. I don’t see people paying for general purpose chatbots over time.”
That tracks with my own chatbot usage over the last year. Even though ChatGPT kicked off our modern chatbot era, I used it rarely, mostly because getting it to access the internet or using its more advanced GPT-4 model requires a $20 payment. Perplexity is slick and provides coherent answers with citations to questions that Google completely flubs (“How likely is Donald Trump to win the 2024 US election?”), but years of muscle memory means I still head to Google Search. Pi’s responses are empathetic and delightful, but I have to remember to actually go to its website and use it. Grok is good for roasts, but little else. And while having Meta’s AI chatbots embedded in WhatsApp, an app that I use every single day, might sound useful, I’ve struggled to find reasons to actually use it while texting with someone. It also doesn’t help that generative AI systems continue to hallucinate — that’s jargon for when an AI confidently makes something up — giving me pause no matter which chatbot I use.
What I did find myself naturally gravitating toward was Bard, not because it was better than the others — it was, in many cases, noticeably worse — but because it was simply there whenever I used Google Search. More importantly, Google lets you hook Bard into the company’s other services, like YouTube, Google Flights, and Google Maps, as well as your personal Gmail and Google Drive. Doing this makes Bard function like a true personal assistant that’s aware of your data, your correspondence, your documents, and your flight tickets, among other things, and answer questions relevant to you. When I asked the bot which terminal my flight would take off from while coming back from vacation last month, Bard combed through my email, found the information on my flight ticket, and presented it to me in seconds. It’s not always perfect, but when it does work, it feels like something a chatbot should have been able to do all along, something slightly closer to a killer app for AI.
“Chatbots that are successful won’t exist in a vacuum,” Giansiracusa said. “It’ll be about how easy it is for them to become a personal assistant for you. Which is why, I think, existing monopolies like Google will ultimately win because they have all your stuff in one place and can link it all together with a chatbot. I can even see Google charging for it,” Giansiracusa added. “We’re going to think a little less about the overall chatbot and more about the specific applications we can use it for.”
Unlike me, Rushi Luhar, chief technology officer of Jeavio, a software startup headquartered in Boston, likes to bounce among multiple AI chatbots. He uses ChatGPT for work, summarizing call transcripts, helping with presentations, writing on LinkedIn, and getting feedback on blog posts before they are published. When he’s off work, though, he likes to chat with Pi. “It’s great for conversations because it’s so good at being friendly and asking follow-up questions,” he said. “If you squint a little, you can almost pretend that you’re having a conversation with … something, you know?”
Chatbots by themselves, Luhar thinks, are simply vessels to showcase the underlying capabilities of the LLMs that power them. “Ultimately, we’re going to move beyond the basic chatbot experience. The whole text-heavy thing is going to disappear as these things get more multimodal,” he said, referring to more advanced capabilities that let LLMs work not only with text but other input and output formats like images, video, and sound.
Levin Stanley created and released his custom GPT the same day in November that OpenAI announced the feature and the GPT Store, which finally launched this week. Stanley’s bot, called Find & Shop Assistant, is dead simple: feed it a photo of an item and it will trawl the internet, find where you can buy it online, and present you with a price and a link.
“I created the whole thing in my iPhone’s browser in about a minute or two,” Stanley, a product designer based in Newfoundland, Canada, said. “The system also generated a logo for my bot (a magnifying glass in front of a shopping bag) on its own.” So far, Stanley has used his own bot to find and buy a LEGO set for his son and a Brooklyn Brewery beer glass after clicking a picture of one with his phone.
This is ultimately how OpenAI’s GPT Store could do for generative AI what the Apple App Store did for the iPhone: crowdsource the development of applications, see what users flock to, and let that inform how the tech continues to develop. But the millions of custom chatbots could also further fragment an already fragmented chatbot landscape. We won’t know until people start using them.
Right now, we are really, really early in the chatbot lifecycle. As long as the money continues to flow through the streets of Cerebral Valley, everyone who can cobble together a chatbot is going to do it.
“Current chatbots are like cars,” said Beerud Sheth, co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, a company that helps businesses create custom chatbots to engage with their customers. “Some are for speed, some are for comfort, some are for size. Once the money runs out and the novelty wears off, that’s when people will figure out what to actually use them for.”
A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
Turns out Google’s postpandemic reckoning didn’t just hit the Google Hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit products — it’s taken similarly sized bites out of Google’s core engineering and Google Assistant teams too. Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone, if we use a reasonable definition of “few”.
And those are only the cuts we know about. We asked Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini to say if this was the complete and total number of job cuts in this round of layoffs, but she stopped replying at that point, only confirming existing layoff reports at 9to5Google and S...
Don’t be sad, Tom Brady. I’m sure the EVs will find a nice home. | Image: Hertz
Hertz went from scaling back its electric vehicle ambitions to selling off its actual EVs in the span of three months. The rental car agency said in a regulatory filing today that it will sell 20,000 vehicles, or roughly one-third of its global EV fleet, and use that money to buy gas guzzlers.
The decision was made after Hertz reported higher depreciation and damage than expected to its EVs, amounting to $245 million in costs for the company. Also, Hertz apparently couldn’t find enough customers for the EVs in its fleet, so selling a huge chunk of them will “better balance supply against expected demand of EVs,” the company said. The company had previously set a target for 25 percent of its fleet to be electric by the end of 2024.
“While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse Bitcoin,” said SEC chairman Gary Gensler, in a statement. “Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with bitcoin and products whose value is tied to crypto.”
For the last 10 years, the SEC has denied every attempt to create a Bitcoin ETF,...
By Dave Michels Office productivity is ripe for a new way of working. The big benefit that many vendors are working toward is reduced app switching. These new apps (Notion, Coda, Quip, Zoom Docs, etc.) take a modular approach to work and collaboration and touch on other application areas, such as project management and content publishing.
UPDATE 1/9/24: Hours after reporting out this initial story, some of the suspended X accounts returned. X has not explained what happened and the affected account owners have no idea why they were briefly suspended. The reinstatement came after notable users such as George Galloway, a former member of the British Parliament, called out Musk for banning the accounts.
Suspended journalist Steven Monacelli told Motherboard that he wasn’t able to contact X. “The only message I received from Twitter was this buggy response to my appeal,” he said. “I think this is the reason I was unbanned. Elon Musk playing customer service rep to a far right misinfo and conspiracy theory poster.” Musk responded to far-right conspiracy theorist Jackson Hinkle’s X post calling out the suspensions before accounts were reinstated.
Image via Steven Monacelli.
The original story follows.
The X accounts of several prominent journalists and leftist pundits were suspended from the site, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday morning with no clear explanation.
The suspensions affected several journalists and commentators, including Texas Observer journalist Steven Monacelli, Ken Klippensten of The Intercept, podcaster Rob Rousseau, and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News. The landing page for their accounts says it’s been suspended, but does not give any explanation as to why. A message on the profiles simply states “X suspends accounts which violate the X rules.”
The ban didn’t just hit journalists either. Several prominent-left leaning accounts were also purged from the website, including the account for the TrueAnon podcast and @zei_squirrel, a cartoon squirrel that tweets media criticism.
The ban was carried out with no overarching explanation; suspended accounts link to the X terms of service, which cover a wide range of possible violations.
“I haven't received any communications from Twitter/X about why I have been suspended,” Monacelli told Motherboard in an email. “I can't think of anything I've posted lately that would be worthy of suspensions. Although I have written multiple critical reports about Twitter/X and Elon Musk.”
MacLeod posted a brief explanation of events on his Telegram and Instagram accounts. “Today, without warning or explanation, Twitter suspended my account,” he said. “They told me to check my email for a reason, but no email has been forthcoming. I have never even remotely been involved in any controversy/ been reported/ been stuck in Twitter jail before, so I assume the real reason is political, especially as high-profile leftist accounts like Rob Rousseau and Ze_Squirrel were also targeted today.”
This isn't the first time the site has banned reporters. In April, it permanently suspended Wired reporter Dell Cameron after he spoke with a hacker who accessed conservative pundit Matt Walsh’s emails. In December of 2022, it suspended the accounts of ten journalists who’d been critical of site owner Elon Musk.
Motherboard could not reach X for comment, and instead received an automatic email response saying, "Busy now, please check back later." On X, Musk claimed that the bans were related to a routine spam filter sweep.
Update 1/10/24: The original text of this story referred to Ze_Squirrel as “a cartoon squirrel that tweets media criticism of figures like Glenn Greenwald. The squirrel often tweets praise of Greenwald, not criticism. We’ve updated the story and regret the error.
We’ve also added Musk’s explanation that the bans were related to a spam filter sweep.
The Asus Zenbook Duo with its two 14-inch displays in Dual Screen mode.
Asus is back with another Zenbook Duo, the latest device in its range of dual-screened laptops. But rather than including a small secondary display above this laptop’s keyboard like previousDuos, the revamped version for 2024 has two equally sized 14-inch screens. They’re both OLED, with resolutions of up to 2880 x 1800, aspect ratios of 16:10, and a maximum refresh rate of 120Hz. Between them, they offer a total of 19.8 inches of usable screen real estate.
It’s a similar approach to the one Lenovo took with last year’s dual-screen Yoga Book 9i, albeit with a couple of tweaks. Like Lenovo, Asus gives you a choice of typing on the lower touchscreen via a virtual keyboard or by using a detachable physical Bluetooth keyboard. But what’s...
The Saloon concept will be the basis for the first Honda Zero production model coming in 2026. | Image: Honda
Honda announced a new global electric vehicle series, dubbed Honda Zero, presenting it as an antidote to the recent trend of “thick, heavy” EVs seen on the road today. Honda says it will introduce its first model, based on a sleek, sedan-like concept called the Saloon, starting in North America in 2026.
In addition to the Saloon, Honda also introduced a boxier van-esque concept called the Space-Hub. The concepts are meant to demonstrate Honda’s lighter approach to EV development, riding atop a “thin” vehicle architecture with a low floor that’s meant to accentuate aerodynamics.
Yep, still an H.
“Thin” and “light” are two of the three principles, the third being “wise,” that Honda says is guiding the development of...
Just a couple of weeks after Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie defended the company’s decision to continue allowing Nazi content, Platformer reportsthat Substack will now remove “some” publications that express support for Nazis.
McKenzie’s December post was responding to a letter from over 200 Substack authors who cited, among other things, a recent report in The Atlantic that pointed out over a dozen newsletters with overt Nazi imagery, as well as many more with evidence of extremist views. Some newsletters have left Substack over the last couple of weeks for other platforms like Ghost or Beehiiv, and Platformer notes that it has seen many paying customers quit, saying they do not want to contribute to a platform that they see...
The Aether Monitor Light Bar is a desk lamp and RGB bias light in one. And it supports Matter, for some reason. | Image: Razer
Razer has already announced a bunch of stuff at CES 2024, including spec upgrades to its Blade gaming laptops, a USB-C dock, an upgraded gaming chair, and so forth. Very happy for them. Personally, I’m psyched about this business-in-the-front, party-in-the-back Aether Monitor Light Bar.
On the front, the Aether has a businesslike CRI 95 temperature-adjustable white light that goes up to 500 lux. By day, it illuminates your desk in high CRI light without creating glare on your monitor or cluttering your desk. It has capacitive touch controls. It’s tasteful. Practical. Utilitarian.
And once you’re off the clock? The back of the light bar is RGB city, baby. Bathe your walls in 16.8 million colors! Chroma RGB integration! Sync it to your...
Volkswagen is jumping on the generative AI bandwagon by announcing plans to install OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its vehicles starting in the second quarter of 2024.
The chatbot will be available across VW’s lineup, including in Tiguan, Passat, and Golf as well as the automaker’s ID family of electric vehicles. The feature will come to Europe first, and is being considered for customers in the US, though plans have yet to be finalized.
VW is using ChatGPT to augment its IDA in-car voice assistant to enable more naturalistic communication between car and driver. Vehicle owners can use the new super-powered voice assistant to control basic functions, like heating and air conditioning, or to answer “general knowledge questions.” (Though, given...
Apple’s long-rumored virtual and augmented reality headset Vision Pro headset launches in February. Here’s a timeline of all the details that have emerged about the device over the years and what we know so far.
