Whenever I've switched to a Samsung phone in the past, I never gave its preinstalled apps much of a chance. I'd spend the first few minutes replacing them with Google's alternatives because I was already familiar with them, especially since I use many of them on my PC and iPhone. For instance, Samsung Browser was usually the first to go, since it was the first app I saw sitting in the dock. But recently, I wanted to give Samsung's native apps a fair shot on my Z Flip 5.

Google is making some significant AI leadership changes, including a major shift for Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis.Hassabis will become the chair of Google DeepMind and the chief scientist at Alphabet, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. Hassabis will continue to lead Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, which aims to use AI to develop drugs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's CTO, is stepping up to become Google's SVP of DeepMind and will report to Pichai. Kavukcuoglu will remain Google's chief AI architect as well."​​As you've heard me say many times, I've always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human h …Read the full story at The Verge.

And you thought we were done with this one… | Image: Fenix Flexin We were pretty sure that Fenix Flexin's "Rubberz" was made using AI, but musician Medasin was confident that it was made using Treblo specifically. Now the company and a new detection tool seem to confirm it.On Monday, the company announced the open-source Treblo AI Music Classifier, which detects when a song was generated using Treblo, though not other AI tools. According to a blog post, it has a false positive rate of less than 1 in 10,000. That's not unimpeachable, but it's notable that the company's own Classifier determined that "Rubberz" was "very likely Treblo" with "high confidence," adding more fuel to the PR nightmare for Fenix. …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sunbird Messaging is back on the Google Play Store, offering Android users blue bubble privileges in iMessage complete with reactions and high quality videos for $2.99 a month. Apple and Google have made cross platform messaging better in recent years with support for RCS, but Android users can still cause issues in iMessage group chats, like breaking reactions and replies.Android Authority reports that after Sunbird shut down nearly three years ago due to security issues, the company says its new setup addresses those, and that "Any message moving through our infrastructure is protected in transit and released once it's delivered," while …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you want to get the most value from your graphics card, you might use it for various productivity tasks when not gaming. That's one way to get more out of your flagship GPU if you're lucky enough to have one, but midrange GPUs are just as capable when you don't need lots of VRAM. But all of those require you to be actively using your PC.

Disney is introducing fan-created TikTok content to its Disney Plus app in its latest attempt to break into short-form creator videos. The Walt Disney Company announced today that it's partnering with TikTok to bring "an expansive collection of thoughtfully curated Disney-centric fan-created content" to the Verts video feed it launched on Disney Plus earlier this year, providing creators with access to assets from "hundreds" of movies and TV shows.The partnership will be piloted in the US "in the coming months," according to Disney, with plans to launch in other markets later. Videos from TikTok creators who opt-in to the program will be h …Read the full story at The Verge.

Reddit is enlisting AI to help moderate new subreddits - and eventually the rest of site. The company is introducing automated moderation tools that rely on LLMs to help mods manage their communities, and it's expanding who can use those tools today ahead of a full launch later this year.The company calls the suite of tools "Rules Hub," and the tools let mods decide what rules should be automatically enforced and what should happen when a rule is triggered. Rules Hub relies on LLMs to evaluate "whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule," which "allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while pr …Read the full story at The Verge.

Yet more rogue AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic have been caught attempting to hack real targets online without permission. The discoveries add to a growing list of previously unknown incidents that have alarmed AI safety experts and intensified pressure for greater oversight of frontier systems. According to a report from the UK's AI Security Institute, which evaluates frontier models from top AI labs before they are released, agents powered by OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol and Anthropic's Mythos 5 went "engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations." This included trying to insert malicious code i …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Trump administration's framework for assessing potential cybersecurity risks posed by advanced AI reportedly has no interest in testing open models. Axios reports that not only do the voluntary guidelines outright exclude open models - meaning anyone can download them and inspect their core components - but the framework explicitly says it can't be used to restrict open models after they've been released.The AI testing framework was created after President Trump signed an executive order in June, requesting that AI companies share their frontier models with the federal government prior to release to address cybersecurity concerns. AI c …Read the full story at The Verge.

Farewell, Google Assistant art, we hardly knew ye. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Assistant's days have been numbered ever since Gemini arrived on the scene, and its time is now up. Google has announced that it will be removing access to Assistant on Android phones and tablets, along with paired devices like smartwatches or headphones, from September 4th.The announcement came in an email apparently sent to some users, as reported by 9to5Google and shared in full on Reddit. The Verge has asked Google for confirmation that the email is accurate, and will update this story once we have it. "We will begin removing access to Google Assistant starting on 4 September," Google states in the email, "and expect that this …Read the full story at The Verge.

Privatize the profit, socialize the losses? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Once, I had some questions about why SpaceX, Elon Musk's healthiest company, acquired xAI, his sickliest one. Now I have some questions about why we're calling the whole thing SpaceX.Look, what we have here, by revenue, is primarily a telecom company and a company that rents compute, according to SpaceX's first quarterly earnings statement as a public company. The space sector of the business didn't break a billion dollars this quarter and contributed only a touch over 10 percent of the company's revenue. SpaceX remains its own biggest customer. There just aren't enough other people who want its rockets. And, I dunno, maybe if the rockets …Read the full story at The Verge.

The itch to try out Linux is universal. Almost everyone who is into technology has heard of it, and having another operating system option besides Windows and macOS sounds pretty appealing. However, there are many ways to run Linux and so many different distributions that it can be super overwhelming.