Author: News Room

Today on Decoder, I’m talking to Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field about some pure Decoder bait: the seemingly-endless org chart changes at OpenAI, and how all of them seem to consolidate power under cofounder Greg Brockman, the company’s president.While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI’s most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession these past few months.Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can…

The memory limitations were first introduced with Android 17, appearing first on Pixel phones. It’s probably no coincidence that the base configurations of the Pixel 11 Pro and 11 Pro XL come with less RAM than last year’s models. As Android 17 rolls out to the wider ecosystem, Google warns developers that they’ll need to play nice with a much bigger range of devices: “Over the coming year, an increasing number of manufacturers will leverage the Android per-app memory limits across their portfolio of device RAM configurations from 4GB to 16GB+ devices.”Google has a pretty clear directive if apps misbehave:…

Google has warned Android app developers to slow their roll when it comes to memory consumption, as smartphone manufacturers grapple with the RAM crisis forcing the price of hardware up. In Android 17, Google introduced memory limits that prevent apps from draining resources. To build on these limits, Google is adding new performance thresholds to enable developers to keep tabs on dynamic memory usage, while ensuring their code is optimised for getting the most from the available resources. In an announcement today (via TechCrunch), Google said it will go after apps that exceed restrictions on memory usage that can slow…

After years of being the national punching bag for social media harms, Meta has reached a settlement with 47 US states and several districts and territories that gives it a rare opportunity: A chance to flex on its rivals. “We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone,” Meta says in an “Open Letter” that is also running as a full-page ad in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. “These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to…

Meta’s efforts to shed the ‘pervert glasses’ reputation earned by some less scrupulous wearers of its smart glasses are being undermined by perverts finding loopholes. No soon had the company behind the Meta Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses closed the loophole that enabled people to cover or disable the LED light and still record video, determined wearers found a way around that too – start then recording, then cover the LED light. Probably should have thought about that one, lads. Meta has now addressed this loophole, according to Alex Himel, who is the VP of Meta’s augmented reality dept..…

Google’s AI note-taking app, Gemini Notebook, can now pull information from the books you’ve purchased. The new “Expert Intelligence” feature allows you to bring titles from Google Play Books directly into Gemini Notebook, which means you can ask questions about the material, as well as generate plans, infographics, AI podcasts, and more based on their contents.During a briefing with The Verge, Google Labs editorial director Steven Johnson showed how you can use the tool to generate a recipe book using the information in Michael Pollan’s Food Rules. In another example, Gemini Notebook applied the knowledge from Kim Scott’s management-focused Radical…

Of all the smart home sectors you’d think AI would impose upon, getting the dishes clean wouldn’t be high on the list. But then again, there is that oft-repeated quote: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” So the author Joanna Maciejewska might be pleased to see there’s a new dishwasher – which also happens to be the world’s smallest countertop dishwasher – that promises to get your dinnerware clean in as…

Americans have declared war on Flock cameras. They’ve protested them, damaged them, and destroyed them. This is only the beginning.The spontaneous and decentralized nature of the vigilante protests is also what makes them difficult to suppress. There isn’t a uniform method of disruption; people have done everything from unplugging, smashing, stealing, and spray-painting the surveillance devices to taking less destructive actions like physically blocking the cameras for hours. Some of the culprits have been caught, but that clearly hasn’t dissuaded others from taking matters into their own hands.“Nonviolent direct action is a recognized and established tactic, and it’s unsurprising that…

IFA is one of the world’s biggest annual consumer technology expos and it gets underway in Berlin, Germany next week. Indeed, as it welcomes in the public too, it’s by far the biggest such show in terms of attendance, with over 215,000 people roaming the vast halls. As usual, it’s taking place at the massive Messe Berlin fairground which as usual will have 26 halls and 160,000 square metres full of new smart home tech, kitchen appliances, PC, hi-fi, headphones and home theater gear. The Stuff team will be on the ground in Berlin, covering the cream of the announcements…

On Nvidia’s earnings call Wednesday, CEO Jensen Huang casually announced the company had “achieved AGI,” one of the tech industry’s ultimate goals some of its biggest players have spent years chasing. Almost immediately, Huang dismissed the coveted milestone as “senseless.”He’s right. For the supposed finish line of the AI race, there is no consensus on what artificial general intelligence means, let alone how we’ll know when we’ve actually got there, which makes achieving it equally arbitrary.Asked about OpenAI’s pursuit of AGI, Huang said that when it comes to Nvidia, “for many tasks, we could say that we’ve already achieved AGI.”…

You’ll have to bear with me if there are typos in this piece. But I’m smashing out words while deftly avoiding airborne pink animals and listening to reports about hell freezing over. And that’s because Apple has reduced the price of a product by over 50%. Yes, you read that right. We’ve had months of wallet-punching agony as AI eats the tech world, forcing even industry giants to hike prices. And that includes Apple. But the company is now fighting against such horrors, because a product’s price has been sliced in half (more, in fact), while the product itself has not. The…

Humanoid robots have become almost ridiculously impressive over the past few years. We’ve seen them running, dancing, doing backflips, folding clothes, making drinks, and performing all sorts of tasks that would have seemed impossible not that long ago. Tesla is developing Optimus, Boston Dynamics has completely reinvented Atlas, and companies including Figure, Agility Robotics, 1X, and Unitree are all pushing ahead with their own increasingly capable machines. The humble smartphone is beyond dull, in comparison. Sorry, phone. But I’ve always wondered how much any of this really matters outside a carefully controlled demo. Watching a robot fold a T-shirt is…