This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Big hero images highlighting select TV shows and movies, a row of app icons, a bunch of additional content recommendations: At first glance, Meta’s new Horizon TV app looks a…
AI-powered app development is really taking off, and smartphone maker Nothing seems intent on capitalizing on the bandwagon: the company on Monday revealed Playground, an AI tool that lets users create apps with simple text prompts and deploy them to a platform of sorts known as Essential Apps. Currently all Playground lets you build are…
Microsoft has temporarily locked down a building at its headquarters after protesters managed to get inside the office of the company’s president. Current and former Microsoft workers held a sit-in protest inside Brad Smith’s office in Building 34, demanding that the company cut ties with the Israeli government. The protesters live streamed themselves on Twitch…
As human-spaceflight missions grow longer and travel farther from Earth, keeping crews healthy gets more challenging. Astronauts on the International Space Station can depend on real-time calls to Houston, regular cargo deliveries of medicines, and a quick ride home after six months. All of that may soon change as NASA and its commercial partners, like…
For the past couple of years, the virtual FediForum conference has offered a glimpse at what’s new in the open social web, with last year’s big news being Threads’ foray into the fediverse. This year’s presentation was no different, with several developers showing off new apps that will help to expand the ecosystem of decentralized…
The rebooted version of social site Digg aims to bring back the spirit of the old web at a time when AI-generated content is threatening to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people. This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where the people who…
On Monday, Google announced the launch of its AI Futures Fund, a new initiative that seeks to invest in startups that are building with the latest AI tools from Google DeepMind, the company’s AI R&D lab. The fund will back startups from seed to late stage and will offer varying degrees of support, including allowing…
With just a few words, AI models can be prompted to create a story, an image, or even a short film. But according to Weber Wong, these models are all “made by non-creatives for other non-creatives to feel creative.” In other words, they’re not built for actual creative professionals. That’s something Wong is hoping to…
“It has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM. We have come a long way in that time with many efforts we should feel very proud of. At the same time competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot. I think we have all the ingredients to win this…
Graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips on which most AI models run, are energy-hungry beasts. As a consequence of the accelerating incorporation of GPUs in data centers, AI will drive a 160% uptick in electricity demand by 2030, Goldman Sachs estimates. The trend isn’t sustainable, argues Vishal Sarin, an analog and memory circuit designer. After…