Author: News Room

Several people are gathered around a bleach blond man in a bright pink suit suspended in a clear plastic tube. With a microphone in front of him and a giant sign reading TALK TO ME placed above, “Mike” waits, hands clasped patiently in front of his body, to take questions from his public. “Mike” is a hologram, powered by ChatGPT and created by a company called Hypervsn.The responses “Mike” gives to audience comments and questions are on a three-ish second delay, but the stunted flow of conversation might not matter much — an attendant at the Hypervsn booth tells me…

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, some impressive alleged sales figures have gone viral — but they might be too good to be true.This week, I saw something new in my regular scouring of the web for updates on the Trump phone: a repeated claim that Trump Mobile has secured nearly 600,000 preorders for the phone. With a $100 deposit per device, that would make for a tidy $60 million…

Google is appealing a federal court’s decision ruling it an illegal online search monopolist. The company filed a notice to appeal on Friday, requesting a pause on the court-ordered remedies meant to restore competition to the online search market.“As we have long said, the Court’s August 2024 ruling ignored the reality that people use Google because they want to, not because they’re forced to,” Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs Lee-Anne Mulholland said in a blog post. “The decision failed to account for the rapid pace of innovation and intense competition we face from established players and well-funded start-ups. And…

Netflix has committed to ensuring Warner Bros. movies have a 45-day exclusivity window in cinemas before they’ll be offered to subscribers via the streaming platform. As the battle to take control of the vast Warner Bros. Discovery empire continues to rage, Netflix boss Ted Sarandos is on a PR tour addressing one of the greatest and gravest concerns about WB ending up in Netflix hands. Speaking to the New York Times, Sarandos rebuffed previous report suggesting Netflix planned to offer only 17 days of exclusivity to the theatres, a possibility that mortified industry trade groups. Thankfully, Sarandos is for now…

ChatGPT will soon start showing you sponsored products or services if they’re related to your conversation. In an announcement on Friday, OpenAI says it will start testing ads in the coming weeks for logged-in users in the US who use the app for free or have a ChatGPT Go subscription.The “clearly labeled” ads will surface in a separate area at the bottom of your chat. OpenAI says it will “keep your conversations with ChatGPT private from advertisers,” adding that it will “never sell your data” to them. Advertisers also won’t influence the answers you see, which will remain “optimized based…

Apple is reportedly ahead of the previously expected schedule for launching the first-ever MacBook Pro with an OLED display, according to a new rumour. A report this week claims Samsung Display is aiding the process by getting the production line for the all-important screen technology up and running and ready to roll this month. According to the known-leaker yeux1122 (via MacRumors), the production of the panels will get underway this month, suggesting Apple is now happy with the product and it has passed all of the requisite tests for quality and reliability. In a post (translated, which is why it…

As we predicted, the world’s biggest consumer electronics show was a bit of a bust for gamers this year! CES 2026 brought us several neat gamepads, but barely any handhelds and no new desktop GPUs — not from Nvidia, not from Intel, and not from AMD.But if you dig deep, AMD said two things at this year’s show that are worthy of attention. Did you catch that the company’s about to make socketed mobile chips again? Or that its answer to Intel is to lower the price of its monster Strix Halo silicon?Publicly, AMD barely acknowledged consumers at the Consumer…

Google is seemingly planning to introduce a new “left behind” feature for the Pixel Watch range that could send an alert to your phone if the smartwatch is left unattended. The in-development feature, which would finally offer Pixel Watch users the same courtesy as Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch users, was spotted within code strings by the snoops at Android Authority. The strings discovered within the Pixel Watch system app is called “Notify when left behind.” Pretty self explanatory, huh? The code features the messages: Notify when left behind Notify when phone is left behind To use this feature,…

Google is expanding access to its AI videomaking tool. Launched last May, Flow was initially only available to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers, but now, those with Business, Enterprise, and Education Workspace plans can access it, too.Flow uses Google’s AI video generation model Veo 3.1 to generate eight-second clips based on a text prompt or images. You can stitch together the clips to create longer scenes, as well as access a bunch of other tools that allow you to change the lighting, adjust the “camera” angle, and insert or remove objects in scenes. Earlier this week, Google added…

As spotted by 9to5Google, a message sent to Visible customers explains: “Yesterday we let you down and for that we are sorry. We are giving you a $5 credit towards your next month of service that can be redeemed after Jan 16 when paying with a credit card online.”The same message was shared by a user on the Visible subreddit on Thursday, although the user mentioned that they didn’t have issues related to the Verizon outage. Some users replied to the post commenting that they also received the $5 credit, but only after reaching out to customer support. Read the…

OpenAI is expanding a low-cost subscription tier called ChatGPT Go to the US and the rest of the world. Go was released in India in August and later became available in another 170 countries prior to Friday’s global release. “In markets where Go has been available, we’ve seen strong adoption and regular everyday use for tasks like writing, learning, image creation, and problem-solving,” the company’s announcement stated.For $8 per month, Go subscribers get more messages, file uploads, and image generation than the free ChatGPT tier subscribers. The price slots Go between the free version of the AI chatbot and the…

On Friday morning, X and Grok went offline for users around the world on both the websites and apps. Outage reports began spiking on DownDetector around 10:00AM ET, while Cisco’s ThousandEyes outage map noted over 600 X servers around the world that were having problems.Attempts to load the site with either the Twitter.com or X.com addresses were showing a Cloudflare connection error or failing to show any posts or feeds initially. It’s currently unclear what caused the outage, and while the site is back up for many users, it’s still not working normally yet, frequently displaying “Something went wrong. Try…