Google offers ‘voluntary exit’ to all US platforms and devices employees A year ago, Google started off 2024 with some layoffs. It hasn’t taken similar steps (yet) in 2025, but employees are fearing the worst. And if the Platforms and Devices team is anything to go by, there’s ample reason for concern. Google has distributed a memo to all US employees working on Android, Pixel hardware,

Google’s ‘Ask for Me’ uses AI to call local businesses for you Google is trying out a new tool that lets AI call businesses to ask questions for you. The feature, called Ask for Me, collects information about the pricing and availability of a service, but it’s only available for nail salons and auto shops for now. Once you enable the experiment on Google Search Labs, you

Nvidia’s latest AI trick made our mediocre webcam mic sound practically professional Nvidia mildly blew our minds in 2020 when its graphics cards gained the ability to delete practically all the background noise from our audio calls with a free app, and now the company’s doing it again. My colleague and Verge senior news editor Richard Lawler just fired up Nvidia’s just-announced “Studio Voice” feature on his

Sundance 2025: all the latest movie reviews and updates from the festival A new year means a new Sundance Film Festival, and a fresh crop of promising original features that could go on to become awards season darlings in a few months. It might be hard to top last year’s festival where Dìdi, A Different Man, and I Saw the TV Glow all made strong showings. But

Elon Musk admits Teslas will need new hardware for FSD In 2016, Tesla published a blog that said all EVs it produces have the hardware necessary to achieve “Full Self-Driving,” meaning owners of those Teslas could look forward to autonomous rides and could eventually send their cars out as money-making robotaxis when not in use. Tesla later deleted that post, and now we can see

Is Tesla still a car company? On an earnings call last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk spent a lot of time talking up his company’s plans to “go ballistic” on artificial intelligence, and very little time on Tesla’s core business, which is making and selling electric cars. There was so little attention paid to Tesla’s automotive business, that even a bunch

The best TV deals to upgrade your setup ahead of the Super Bowl Missed out on all the terrific TV deals we saw during Black Friday and Cyber Monday? That’s okay, because the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl have historically been one of the better times of the year to snag a discounted set. In fact, Amazon, Best Buy, Woot, and a number of retailers are

DeepSeek database left user data, chat histories exposed for anyone to see DeepSeek has secured a “completely open” database that exposed user chat histories, API authentication keys, system logs, and other sensitive information, according to cloud security firm Wiz. The security researchers said they found the Chinese AI startup’s publicly accessible database in “minutes,” with no authentication required. The exposed …

Now you can check out this video game history museum online The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) has launched a digital library with more than 30,000 files of “industry ephemera” from the VGHF’s physical collection. The library, which is launching in early access, includes things like “more than 1,500 full-text searchable out-of-print video game magazines, never-before-seen game development assets, a…

Forza Horizon 5 is coming to the PS5 this spring Forza Horizon 5 is the next Xbox Game Studios title making the jump to PlayStation. The open-world racing game is launching on PS5 this spring and will include the same content as what’s available in its Xbox and PC versions, according to a blog post. If you want to play the game online with your

The FAA is facing a major crisis without a leader because Elon Musk pushed him out The Federal Aviation Administration is facing its first major aviation disaster in 16 years without a leader because Elon Musk helped push him out. Michael Whitaker stepped down as FAA administrator on January 20th, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, after clashing with Elon Musk, who’s company SpaceX is regulated by the agency. Musk public…

Microsoft makes OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model free for all Copilot users Microsoft is bringing OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model to all Copilot users this week. You won’t need to subscribe to a $20 monthly Copilot Pro or ChatGPT Plus plan to get it either, as Microsoft is making it free for all users of Copilot. Think Deeper, as Microsoft calls its integration of o1, works by allowing

Purely AI-generated art can’t get copyright protection, says Copyright Office Generative artificial intelligence output based purely on text prompts — even detailed ones — isn’t protected by current copyright law, according to the US Copyright Office. The department issued this guidance in a broad report on policy issues regarding AI, focused on the copyrightability of various AI outputs. The document concludes that while…

The Verge’s 2025 Valentine’s Day gift guide Valentine’s Day might seem like any other commercial holiday given the abundance of candy and the sheer number of cards lining store shelves, but if you put in a little effort and a lot of heart, it can be about so much more. After all, at its core, February 14th is about celebrating love in

Microsoft announces Intel-powered Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7 The rumors are true. Microsoft is launching Intel-powered versions of its Surface Pro 11 and Surface Laptop 7. Available on February 18th, both of these new Surface devices are Copilot Plus PCs, but instead of using Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X series of chips, they’ll use Intel’s Lunar Lake processors. Microsoft is targeting these models a…

Three months with Apple Intelligence At Apple’s September 2024 hardware event, the company announced its iPhone 16 lineup, which was “built for Apple intelligence” — but Apple’s leap into AI has had a soft landing. The phones arrived without Apple Intelligence and, over the course of four months, Apple has been slowly rolling out some of the promised features through

DeepSeek, Stargate, and the new AI arms race On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about the only thing the AI industry — and pretty much the entire tech world — has been able to talk about for the last week: that is, of course, DeepSeek, and how the open-source AI model built by a Chinese startup has completely upended the conventional wisdom

The Verge’s favorite tech for babies and kids We’ve got several parents on our staff, and as members of The Verge, they are also into gadgets. Put the two together, and you’ve got some really interesting stuff that can be used to keep your infant, toddler, or child safe, happy, educated, and / or out of trouble.  Here are some of the devices

Poshmark is introducing AI-generated product listings Resale platform Poshmark is launching Smart List AI, an automated product listing tool for sellers, the company announced today. The tool has been in beta testing since last fall and uses sellers’ photos to generate details like the type of product, the size and brand, the style and color, and other details, as well as

Squid Game’s third and final season streams in June It was a long three-year wait between the first seasons of Squid Game, but luckily, the finale is coming much faster. Netflix announced today that season 3 of Squid Game — which will also be the show’s last — will start streaming on June 27th. That’s around six months after the long-awaited season 2 premiered