Amid a barrage of Amazon-branded tablets and Alexa-powered tech, Dave Limp, SVP of Amazon Devices and Services, announced the company’s digital assistant will soon tap into a purpose-built large language model (LLM) for almost every new Echo device.Amazon set out to design the LLM based on five foundational capabilities. One of these is ensuring interactions are “conversational,” and the company claimed it “studied what it takes to make a great conversation. It’s not just words; it’s body language, it’s understanding who you’re addressing, it’s eye contact and gestures...

With the big switch to USB-C on the iPhone 15, Apple also made the same change to its latest AirPods Pro wireless ANC headphones, with a USB-C charging case. They only just came out over a week ago, but you can already grab them on sale for $200 at Amazon — a very solid 20 percent discount. The switch to a USB-C charging case for the AirPods Pro was telegraphed well in advance thanks to various leaks, and we even saw a homemade version from the same guy who adapted an older iPhone to USB-C. The change should (eventually) eliminate a lot of cable clutter, and you can even charge the...

OpenAI is gearing up to roll out the third version of DALL-E, its text-to-image AI system, which reportedly improves its predecessor's capabilities and can generate results within the ChatGPT app. The company demonstrated how the new iteration integrates with ChatGPT to The Verge, and it showed the publication how users can ask the chatbot to write a lengthy and detailed prompt the image AI can use. OpenAI told Axios that DALL-E 3 is "significantly better" at being able to grasp a user's intention, especially if the prompt is long and detailed. If a user can't articulate what they want in...

It's the day after the largest document leak in Xbox's history, and now that the important news is on the record, we can all take a step back and process the ridiculousness of the whole situation. One facet that made the debacle so delicious was the insight into Xbox's corporate communications, from executive emails simmering with ill-concealed annoyance to internal slide decks filled with imaginary quotes from fictional, diehard Xbox fans.Here we've collected a handful of email messages and slides from the Xbox leak that made us giggle, raise our eyebrows, or enact some strange...

In 2020, Kauffman Fellows (KF), a prominent venture education program renowned for its extensive and well-established network of VCs, made a concerted effort to enhance the diversity within its board. The program, a well-established resource for startup founders and the venture capital sector, expressed the importance of using this strategy to sustain diversity growth within […]

OpenAI is facing another investigation into whether its generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, complies with European Union privacy laws. Last month a complaint was filed against ChatGPT and OpenAI in Poland, accusing the company of a string of breaches of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Yesterday the Polish authority took the unusual step of […]

Indian health and wellness startup HealthifyMe has introduced an AI-powered feature that recognizes Indian food from images for calorie intake logging, allowing users to track their meal intake more efficiently. Tracking Indian foods through images is challenging given there is a vast variety of cuisines. Also, a number of people eat on a plate called […]

Image: Fujifilm Polaroid recently tried pushing the envelope with the new Polaroid I-2 instant camera, and now Fujifilm’s taking a stab at it, too. On Wednesday, the company announced it’s releasing a new kind of instant film product geared for kids, the Instax Pal digital camera bundle, for $199.95 in late October. The Instax Pal is essentially a palm-sized, round digital camera that doesn’t print any photos and lacks a built-in viewfinder. Instead, it outputs images using the companion app, and you can then print these photos via the included Instax Mini Link 2 smartphone printer. The...

Concerns while building Libra weren't limited to China, though.

Several years ago, Aleksander Caban, the co-founder of Carbon Studio, a Polish VR game developer, observed a major problem in modern game design. He had to create rocks, hills, paths and other basic elements of video game environments manually, which often turned out to be a time-consuming — and laborious — process. So Caban decided […]

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has officially halted its plans to extract a two percent fee from Prime sellers who don’t use its in-house fulfillment. The company reportedly planned to start collecting the fee on October 1st, on top of the 8-to-15-percent commission it already gathers from merchants.Amazon PR manager Jonathan Hillson told The Verge in an email that “the 2% Seller Fulfilled Prime fee was intended to cover our costs,” but added that the company decided not to move forward because it was afraid “seller sentiment related to the fee” could affect...

Cruise is planning to build a winterized version of the Origin, the company’s autonomous vehicle model that is purpose-built without a steering wheel or pedals. “A couple of years from now, we’ll have a new version of our vehicles coming out that is adapted for cold weather,” said Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt onstage at TechCrunch […]

The old logo (left) vs. the new one (right). You might be able to guess the meme I’m linking to before you click it. | Logos: Meta; Image by Jay Peters / The Verge Meta is updating Facebook’s “identity system,” and that includes a dramatically refreshed logo.Just kidding! It’s basically exactly the same as the last one, except the blue is a darker blue, and the lowercase “f” has a few subtle tweaks. You can see the new logo next to the most recent one in the image at the top of this post.Here’s Meta’s explanation for the changes from a Wednesday blog post:Our intention was to...

Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge Elon Musk said earlier this month that “no monkey has died as a result of a Neuralink implant,” but an alarming new report from Wired seems to contradict Musk’s statement. Public documents obtained by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and seen by Wired indicate that Neuralink’s macaque subjects were euthanized after suffering various complications, including “bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema.”Wired writes that the documents show a male monkey was euthanized in March 2020 “after his cranial implant...

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke considers AI and software development to now be inextricably linked, powered by assistive tools such as Copilot and its associated Copilot Chat, which the Microsoft-owned company expanded to individual GitHub subscribers today. But speaking on stage at TC Disrupt today, Dohmke maintained that the snowballing AI revolution won’t be the death knell […]

The UN estimates that about one third of all food produced goes to waste before it even gets the chance to decompose in your fridge. That abysmal stat explains is one key reason why leading VCs and celebrities have poured cash into companies that aim to prevent supply-chain food loss. There’s Apeel, which makes a […]

Keeping kids off social media is idealistic at best, and giving them access to it opens a Pandora’s box of privacy concerns.

MakersHub's WiseVision technology extracts and contextualizes all data on bills and receipts, including every line item and data field.

J.B. Straubel has worn many hats in his career: co-founder of Tesla, Tesla Board Member, and more recently, founder and CEO of battery materials and recycling startup Redwood Materials. But in his heart, he’s a engineer, he said during a fireside interview at TechCrunch Disrupt. “I think of myself first and foremost as an engineer. […]

Lab-grown meat is buzzy for a reason. The ick factor is palpable, and the benefits of scaling alternatives to factory farming are enormous. Yet, plenty of other crucial corners of agriculture often go overlooked— at least as far as headlines are concerned. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, we asked two leading investors and one founder to […]

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon executives were “okay” with people being secretly signed up for its Amazon Prime membership program, the FTC said in an amended lawsuit on Wednesday (as reported by The Wall Street Journal). The original lawsuit, filed in June, claimed that Amazon had tricked millions into unwittingly subscribing to Prime through buttons that were presented prominently during checkout. The FTC added new details to back up its claims on Wednesday, including internal messages and the names of three senior Amazon leaders who allegedly “played a key role” in...

Meet Agri-Trak, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to help farms digitize, track and analyze their labor and production. The Pultneyville, New York-based startup presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield to detail how its labor tracking and H2-A compliance software is helping farms replace pen and paper with easy-to-use digital tools. The platform features a […]

Y Combinator has been on the defense as of late. This past weekend, leaders from the popular accelerator were vocal on X (formerly known as Twitter) in their reaction to a comment made by the CEO of another accelerator at an event. Ali Partovi, who founded Neo in 2017, was the keynote speaker at HackMIT […]

Technical debt is often the unsung villain of the enterprise, crippling companies seeking to modernize as they realize just how much “legacy” lives in their stack. And as with most kinds of debt, there is usually interest to pay, too. This is something that fledgling U.K. startup AppFactor is setting out to solve, with a […]