Marina Galperina is The Verge’s Senior Tech Editor and the editor of The Stepback newsletter. Previously, she edited at Popular Science, Gizmodo, Gawker, and several other sites you may or may not have heard of. She used to write about net art — before NFTs!
Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial stars Garfield as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he’s fired and rehired by the company over the course of five days in 2023. Variety announced that Artificial will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5th.
The film was dropped by Amazon MGM following Amazon’s $50 billion investment in OpenAI and acquired by Neon earlier this year.
The acclaimed documentarian who’s taken on Enron, Elizabeth Holmes, and so many more is finally showing Musk. It almost wrapped up in 2025, but then… Premiering at the 83rd Venice Film Festival in September, the “hit piece” (according to Elon Musk in 2023) clocks in at 232 minutes. There’s a lot of ground to cover. Absent from the VFF line-up: Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman, Artificial.
In May, the Office of Management and Budget proposed a budget change which would require all research grants to align with “the President’s policy priorities” and give political appointees the ability to veto grants they don’t like — with potentially catastrophic effects. While the OMB is required to review almost half a million comments submitted by the public, you can call Congress to keep up the fight.
Young people do hate AI. “Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me,” 20-year-old director of A24’s horror hit Backrooms told The Australian. “To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.” Read more about Backrooms on The Verge:
Randomized trial results of the experimental GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon drug shows that it may be too effective, while causing a whopping 11% of participants at the highest dose to drop out because of the severity of the side effects. In Optimizer, Victoria Song covered TikTok influencers pushing grey market knockoffs of “Ratatouille” and attempted to find out what was actually in them. (Please don’t buy shady “Retatrutide” from the internet.)
People seeking a mid-life career changes and work from home options flocked to a third-party, online cybersecurity course offered through NC State University. They say they were ghosted by instructors, taught “outdated information,” and laughed at by experts. The university claims the demand for non-traditional programs is “strong and growing.” Maarja Raudsepp told The News & Observer:
“There’s nothing to show for this, absolutely nothing. We got a badge at the end of it, which was basically a JPEG that was sent to us on an email that said, ‘Here’s your badge.’”
Critic Ben Davis rounds up the art words that helped him better process 2025. I think the term “delightmare” hits the spot:
A word I latched onto in an essay thinking about the prevalence of the feeling of “being terrorized by stupid shit.” This is a horror-adjacent genre of cultural stuff linked to overconsumption and brainrot. Because it’s all about stupid trivia becoming actually sinister, it spans art and the news. It was on my mind all year with the gibbering ghoulishness of the White House’s social media feeds and its yen for A.I. art.
It’s also present at this year’s most cursed art installation in Miami. For more on that specific vibe, read this.
Whether you’re still playing Hollow Knight: Silksong out of spite or not, the next patch will update cocoon locations to “prevent it spawning in inaccessible areas,” among other things. You’re still on your own with the red, bouncy flowers of anguish.
[Steam Community]
There has been some difficulty discourse around the Hollow Knight sequel. (Not getting into it!) Developer Team Cherry’s update 1.0.28470 patch includes some “slight” relief for those of us stuck battling early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter. (Thank you!)
Who could have seen this coming?
