This is the fastest AM4 processor you can upgrade to if you’re not ready to buy into AM5. AMD made bank on its Ryzen chipsets on the strength of bored pandemic-era gamers who spent their stimulus checks on new PC builds. Ryzen CPUs offered arguably the best price-to-performance value back then, causing many to go all in on AM4-based systems. AMD has since switched to the next-generation AM5 platform, but there’s still plenty of room on the upgrade path for those not interested in shelling out hundreds or thousands on newer hardware. Take the top-line Ryzen 9 5950X, for instance, which has never been cheaper than the $364.99 price currently showing at Amazon (18 percent off). The Ryzen 9 5950X is admittedly overkill for most people. It has 16 physical cores with 32 threads, 3.4GHz base and 4.9GHz boost clock speeds, a very... Continue reading…

Connectivity stole the show at CES 2024 this year more than any other in recent memory. Wi-Fi 7 is the new standard that crept up in the industry with fast speeds and lower latency. There's also Thunderbolt 5, the latest connectivity standard from Intel that promises double the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4. Although Wi-Fi 7 is a significant achievement, Thunderbolt 5 is truly an exciting standard that opens up new possibilities for what you can do with external hardware.

Image: Pocketpair The multiplayer survival game has become 2024’s biggest surprise. Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Tesla reported earnings of $7.9 billion in net income on $25.2 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2023. The figures represent an increase in revenue, up from $24.3 billion the same time last year. The company added that its vehicle volume growth rate in 2024 “may be notably lower” than it was in 2023 as it works to launch Tesla’s next-gen vehicle.Responding to a question about its next-gen vehicles during the earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company is targeting production “towards the end of 2025” but warned of delays due to the complexities of the manufacturing process. “We are focused on bringing the next generation platform to market as quickly as we can, with the plan to start production at Gigafactory... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, has a lot to say about the changes Apple made to its App Store in the European Union. In a lengthy post on X (formerly Twitter), Sweeney calls the update “a new instance of Malicious Compliance” — or, in layman’s terms, “hot garbage.”This afternoon, Apple announced it would allow sideloading, alternative app stores, and third-party browser engines on the iPhone with the rollout of iOS 17.4 this March. The company will also open up the App Store to game streaming services, and will finally allow developers to use alternative in-app payment options. Apple made the changes to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires large tech companies to follow a strict set of rules aimed at... Continue reading…

Fortnite in 2020, when it was banned on the App Store. | Screenshot: Fortnite Epic plans to launch the Epic Games Store on the iPhone this year in the European Union — and it’s bringing Fortnite back to the platform along with it.The announcement comes after Apple shared how it will open up iOS in response to the EU’s crackdown on Big Tech. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney described Apple’s rules as “hot garbage,” but they are clearly not so hot as to keep Epic away altogether.Epic doesn’t have a lot to share about its plans just yet. It says the store will launch “later this year,” and Fortnite will be available through it. Both will only be available in parts of Europe covered by the Digital Markets Act. “Stay tuned for details as we figure out the regulatory timeline,” it said in a post on X (formerly Twitter), adding... Continue reading…

Image: Pocketpair You can all stop calling now — The Pokémon Company’s lawyers are on the case. In a statement posted on the company’s website, The Pokémon Company says it’s aware of a “game released in January 2024” and plans to “take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon.”It’s no secret that the game referred to is Palworld, a surprise hit juggernaut that’s slowly climbing up the Steam charts, well on its way to beating PUBG’s all-time peak player count of 3.2 million. It’s sold 8 million copies on Steam as of today, and its developer, Pocketpair, just released a roadmap laying out plans for the game’s future.#Palworld has sold over 8 million copies in less than 6 days!Thank you... Continue reading…

Photo by Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of General Motors, tried to send a 90-second video to regulators of an incident in which one of its driverless cars dragged a pedestrian 20 feet but was hampered by “internet connectivity issues,” according to a report compiled by a law firm investigating the incident. The law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, was hired by Cruise to determine whether its executives misled regulators in the aftermath of the October 2nd incident in which a hit-and-run driver struck a pedestrian, knocking her into the path of a driverless Cruise vehicle. Its conclusions were detailed in a nearly 200-page report that was released today. In response to the crash, the California Department of Motor Vehicles s... Continue reading…

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an inquiry into the investments of Big Tech companies that provide cloud services to smaller AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.The FTC sent letters to Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, requiring the companies to explain the impact these investments have on the competitive landscape of generative AI. The commission wants to “scrutinize corporate partnerships and investments with AI providers to build a better internal understanding of these relationships and their impact on the competitive landscape.” Google and Amazon invested in Anthropic, while Microsoft has a close financial relationship with OpenAI.The FTC wants information on the specific investment agreements... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Cloud’s new partnership with AI model repository Hugging Face is letting developers build, train, and deploy AI models without needing to pay for a Google Cloud subscription. Now, outside developers using Hugging Face’s platform will have “cost-effective” access to Google’s tensor processing units (TPU) and GPU supercomputers, which will include thousands of Nvidia’s in-demand and export-restricted H100s.Hugging Face is one of the more popular AI model repositories, storing open-sourced foundation models like Meta’s Llama 2 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion. It also has many databases for model training. There are over 350,000 models hosted on the platform for developers to work with or upload their own models to Hugging... Continue reading…

What makes iPhones so great isn't just the durable hardware. The software that fuels these devices is what enables users to make the most out of them. Thanks to iOS, users can utilize a wide range of features and tools that help them maximize their iPhones' usability. One of these lesser known features available on iOS 17 and earlier versions is Guided Access. In this guide, we will be breaking it down by explaining how to set it up and use it.

Illustration: The Verge In a blog post, OpenAI said the updated GPT-4 Turbo “completes tasks like code generation more thoroughly than the previous preview model and is intended to reduce cases of ‘laziness’ where the model doesn’t complete a task.” The company, however, did not explain what it updated. Some ChatGPT users recently complained about the chatbot frequently refusing to complete prompted tasks and blamed the lack of updates to GPT-4. However, OpenAI’s update is for GPT-4 Turbo, a version of the more widely available GPT-4 that was trained on information as recent as April 2023 and is only available in a preview. Those using GPT-4, which learned from data available prior to September 2021, may still experience the same laziness issues. OpenAI said... Continue reading…