News

Meta has paused work with the company, Mercor (which The Verge has profiled), while OpenAI is investigating the security incident, Wired reports.

Luke Dicken posted about the changes on LinkedIn, as reported by Game Developer, saying that the team’s time “has come to an end.” Before becoming Take-Two’s head of AI, he held the role of senior director of applied AI at Zynga, which is owned by Take-Two, for two years.

Microsoft is testing a Windows 11 feature that would let users “feel haptic feedback effects on compatible input devices while performing certain actions, such as aligning objects in PowerPoint, window snapping, resizing, or hovering over the Close button,” according to the Windows Insider Blog. This could be really cool on a good trackpad.

Xbox’s Undead Labs will be hosting alpha playtests for the zombie apocalypse game starting next month, according to a video. You can sign up for the waitlist now.

The New York Times reports that Elon Musk is demanding that “banks, law firms, auditors and other advisers” working on the SpaceX IPO buy subscriptions to Grok, which is technically now under the SpaceX umbrella.

Forget business class. I want the seat a lucky Threads user got on a Southwest flight on Wednesday, with a front-row view of NASA’s Artemis II rocket taking off from the Kennedy Space Center on its journey toward the Moon.

After scoring $575 million in funding earlier this week, Whoop is suing Bevel — a startup that has marketed itself as “Whoop, but for the Apple Watch.” The complaint centers on whether Bevel copied Whoop’s app, a claim the former denies. Can’t lie… I feel like I’ve seen 10,000 versions of this app design over the last decade.

A proposed class action lawsuit claims Perplexity “effectively planted a bug” on users’ computers by embedding trackers from Meta and Google inside its AI search engine, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. It also alleges that Perplexity’s incognito mode “does nothing” to protect user privacy:

The Wall Street Journal got to see a bunch of prototypes of Apple products and talk with CEO Tim Cook about them. The prototypes are so dang cool. I wish I could go see them for myself!

The latest addition to My Play Watch’s collection of gaming wearables is a $79.99 Mega Man version, available for preorder soon, with themed watch faces, sounds, and matching straps. Instead of distracting you with notifications it includes a custom version of the NES’ Mega Man 2 playable on the watch’s small touchscreen.

Check out these incredible photos of our planet taken by Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman. Amazing.

The company has given the all-aluminum NES 40th edition of its Retro 68 Keyboard an Apple II-inspired makeover. The new AP50th Limited Edition features a shell, keycaps, and buttons all made from aluminum alloy, and for $499.99 it will ship in June 2026 with a pair of matching wireless programmable buttons.

The Orion spacecraft is now on a course to take four astronauts around the moon in four days time.

The company has already reduced funding to the Oversight Board this year and “has signaled that it will do so again in 2027 and 2028,” according to Platformer’s Casey Newton. The two sides are still in talks.

Lawsuits against Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois accuse the states of violating the CFTC’s “exclusive regulatory authority” over predicting betting markets operated by companies like Kalshi and Polymarket. The CFTC claims the three states have attempted to “outlaw, regulate, or otherwise restrain” prediction betting as concerns grow over potential insider trading.

Previous versions used a custom license that has been criticized as too restrictive. With Gemma 4, Google is moving to the Apache 2.0 license, which is much more permissive and widely used by developers, including for other Google products like Android. The new model also offers performance improvements, as detailed in the video below.

Calls will be audio only, though — no video (which makes sense). An Android Auto version of Meet is set to launch “soon,” Google says.

In addition to adding support for Veo 3.1 and Lyria 3 models, Google Vids now allows you to direct and customize the AI-generated avatars you can put in your videos. You can also record your screen with a new Google Vids extension in Chrome, as well as upload videos directly to YouTube.

Via Amazon Luna, that is; EA Sports FC 26 is now be playable for Amazon Prime subscribers at no extra cost on recently-revamped Amazon’s cloud gaming service.

Sony says the team at Cinemersive Labs will join Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Visual Computing Group and “contribute to our broader efforts in advancing state of the art visual computing within games.”

Jay Blahnik, the creator behind the three-ring fitness tracking feature on Apple Watches, is stepping down after a 13-year tenure at the company, following allegations that he sexually harassed an employee and fostered a “toxic work environment.” A lawsuit claiming Blahnik bullied an employee is set to go to trial next year.