Illustration: The Verge Plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit alleging OpenAI violated privacy rights for training data dropped their case against the company. Court documents showed the case was dismissed without prejudice, and the plaintiffs can choose to refile. The lawsuit, first filed in June this year in the Northern District of California, alleged OpenAI’s web scraper “violated property rights and privacy rights of all individuals whose personal information was scraped and then incorporated through misappropriation into [OpenAI’s] products.” The lawsuit did not name the plaintiffs, who were identified with initials. The Clarkson Law Firm filed the class action suit on their behalf. OpenAI, like other generative AI companies, scrapes publicly available... Continue reading…

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge If you’d rather format your Google Docs document using text shortcuts than keyboard ones, you can — Google Docs offers Markdown support. Back in March 2022, in a blog post announcing the feature, Google explained it was doing this through its autocorrect feature so that Docs will automatically format the text for you after you type it in Markdown format. For example, if you type “# Google Docs is getting more Markdown support,” it’ll automatically get converted to a level one heading. Before you can use Markdown, you have to activate the feature. The feature is off by default — probably a good choice, as it’s easy to imagine a lot of people getting confused if typing a pound sign in front of something automatically... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s big fall product event comes from a smaller company and with big AI expectations. Continue reading…

There are a lot of great wireless router options available, but if you're looking to cover a lot of space, eliminate dead zones, and get excellent speeds — a good mesh router system can't be beat. Now there are a lot of excellent mesh systems available, but if you're looking for some of the best, you're going to want to go with an Eero.

The new Apple Watch Ultra 2 is arguably the most advanced smartwatch among current premium smartwatches. It retains many of the features in last year's model, including the ruggedness and 36-hour battery life. However, the Watch Ultra 2 also has newer features, such as the new S9 chip, the double-tap feature, a brighter display, and carbon-neutral watch bands.

US President Joe Biden addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York City on September 19th, 2023. | Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP via Getty Images The Biden administration launched new climate funding and jobs programs today as world leaders — minus Joe Biden — gather for the Climate Ambition Summit in New York. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $4.6 billion in new funding for state, local, and tribal clean energy programs. Plus, details have finally emerged for a long-awaited American Climate Corps.But Biden is expected to skip the United Nations climate summit today, a conspicuous absence since UN Secretary-General António Guterres stipulated that leaders present “credible, serious and new climate action” in order to participate. Biden, who came to New York this week for the UN General Assembly, is reportedly sending climate envoy John Kerry to attend the... Continue reading…

The Bambu A1 Mini. Hands-on: Bambu’s first mini might show the future of consumer 3D printing. Continue reading…

Smugglers. | Image: TIFF From the uncomfortably comedic horror of Dream Scenario to the outlandish heist / revenge movie Smugglers, there was a lot to love in Toronto this year. Continue reading…

When I reviewed the Apple Watch Ultra last year, I concluded that even though it was designed for people who are far more active and adventurous than I am, I wanted one anyway because of the larger screen, more premium build, and longer battery life. In the year since I realized there are apparently many others like me, because I have seen a lot of Apple Watch Ultras out in the wild, on the arms of people who are clearly not mountaineers, extreme sports athletes or deep sea divers. I concede the cities I frequent — Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hong Kong — are privileged wealthy cities that can't be used as a reflection of the world, but I've heard enough anecdotes from colleagues and industry peers from other states that I think it's safe to say the Apple Watch Ultra has wide appeal in the states, and that with Apple products, consumers always gravitate towards the priciest/best model.

Image: Google This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.Today let’s talk about an advance in Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, and how it addresses one of the most pressing problems with today’s chatbots: their tendency to make things up.From the day that the chatbots arrived last year, their makers warned us not to trust them. The text generated by tools like ChatGPT does not draw on a database of established facts. Instead, chatbots are predictive — making probabilistic guesses about which words seem right based on the massive corpus of text that their underlying large language models were trained on.As a result, chatbots are often “confidently wrong,” to... Continue reading…

Following three months of beta testing with developers and enthusiasts, iOS 17 is now available to anybody with a recent iPhone model. And while iOS 17.0 introduces most of the features and changes Apple previewed during WWDC23, this version's lifecycle is only starting. Beyond StandBy mode and communication upgrades, future iOS 17.x builds are expected to bring some handy additions to the table, and there are three, in particular, I'm keeping an eye on.

If you're planning to elevate your console gaming experience with a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X, then you should also consider getting a good TV for gaming that can handle all the high-end gaming features. Yes, that ideally means buying the best TVs out there, but some features and qualities often go missing and unnoticed in even the best options. It would help if you considered things like input lag, variable refresh rate (VRR), and Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), among other things, for the best gaming experience. Don't worry, though, because you've come to the right place if you're in the market to buy the best 4K 120Hz TV to pair with your gaming consoles.