Google is reportedly nearing the launch of its long awaited Gemini 4 model, after dawdling behind rival developers on flagship AI releases. Speaking with The Information during his first media appearance as the leader of Google's DeepMind division, Koray Kavukcuoglu said that Gemini 4 is currently in its refinement stage, and that the company is aiming to launch the model "much earlier" than the end of the year."Our intention is to, like - as soon as possible - to release an early post-training output because we see the results and we are excited," Kavukcuoglu told the publication, adding that Google would "continue the fast-paced iteratio …Read the full story at The Verge.

Control Resonant isn't an easy game. At any given moment while exploring vast open areas where you're sometimes leaping from wall to wall to ceiling, you may be surrounded by swarms of otherworldly enemies trying to crush you into the ground. It can be a lot, especially when enemies sometimes take a long time to take down. I died often. But whenever I got to a point where I was starting to feel frustrated, I didn't have to suffer for too long; thanks to Resonant's generous assist mode, I often tweaked the game's settings to give me an edge so that I could keep on trucking through the game's weird world.The assist mode is accessible from Co …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is building a dedicated hardware device for its new Muse AI agent. The product, called Muse Charm, was briefly shown off by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the end of tonight's Meta Connect presentation. It looks almost like a chunky smartwatch without the strap - just a big screen, plus a little lanyard for carrying the device around.The Muse Charm has a fingerprint sensor on the top right corner that you can press to activate and begin speaking to the agent. There appears to be a small camera on the device as well, plus what looks like at least three holes for microphones on the front. Zuckerberg said you don't have to unlock a phone or …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sam Altman attends a UN Security Council meeting on AI. | Getty Images OpenAI's artificial intelligence agents hacked an Australian government website and attempted to breach numerous other government and university websites. The attack appears to be the first confirmed instance of a rogue AI agent breaching a government website, adding fuel to rapidly intensifying concerns about the safety of advanced AI systems and the responsibility of the companies building them. Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an agent from the American AI lab "infiltrated" Australia's Medicare statistics portal and "accessed both public and non-public file …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whether or not LLMs belong in an open-source project, whether they're used for content generation or for finding bugs, is an ongoing debate within the FOSS scene right now. Some communities have banned it, while others have adopted the new tech, although they've had to adapt to a new way of doing things. Such is the case with Canonical, which has announced a new two-week unified patch cycle for Ubuntu because LLMs can't stop finding bugs in the kernel.

Saving tabs, articles, and web pages is a big part of my daily research cycle. Be it articles, tutorials, or GitHub projects for interesting software pieces that I want to highlight. This is a daily hassle for me because I don't want to keep tabs open all day, and bookmarks, as good as they are, don't ensure these important bits of information are still available when I reach for them a couple of days or months later.

Ever since I used my aged GTX 1080 to build a local AI hosting workstation last year, I’ve benchmarked LLM inference tasks across all sorts of hardware, ranging from gaming systems to tiny single-board computers and outdated mobile phones. As you’d expect, devices with NPUs and VRAM-laden graphics cards work best with my local LLMs, and with the right tweaks, can even drive bulky MoE models.

VPNs are a lot more useful than skirting around pesky geoblocking checks on websites. In fact, if you're only using it to watch TV shows and movies in another country, you're actually sitting on a valuable privacy tool without realising it. Fortunately, Opera's new feature is here to help people stay safe without having to lift a finger.

We seem to be entering into an AI agent renaissance. Meta's new consumer-facing AI agent, Muse, topped the App Store charts soon after its release and has 600,000 daily active users in the US, by an Apptopia estimate. And AI agent platform Instinct, whose eponymous creator is fundraising at a $2.5 billion valuation, has been making the rounds in the tech industry. Under the hood, though, there are some obvious similarities to the platform that started it all: OpenClaw. For the past week or so, some social media users have alleged that Muse is directly built on OpenClaw. The two platforms use the same names for core files (SOUL.md, memory, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Whenever your motherboard reads a temperature sensor or reports a fan speed, the underlying computation is happening not on your CPU but on a chip that came about back in the 1980s. The Super I/O chip is a dedicated microchip on your motherboard managing low-bandwidth I/O devices. Back then, this meant serial and parallel ports, PS/2 controllers, and floppy disk controllers.

My biggest fear isn’t spiders, heights, cockroaches, or even the faintest sight of blood. It’s needing to log into an account while someone watches me cycle through every password I’ve ever used, hoping one of them magically works.

Google is rolling out some new Chrome browser features that are designed to make it easier to research and study complicated topics. The cross-device tab switching feature is getting a memory upgrade, alongside new capabilities for Gemini in Chrome that can analyze more types of media and generate interactive study quizzes.Chrome has an existing feature that allows you to send a tab from your mobile to a computer (or vice versa) so you can quickly access the same webpage when switching devices. Now, this feature will also remember exactly where you had scrolled to on that tab when you switch, sparing you from having to manually find where …Read the full story at The Verge.