Tech

Caviar is back with yet another ridiculously expensive device, and this time, it’s a Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra with 24-karat gold plating, which is expected to appear at Galaxy Unpacked next week (sans the gold). As spotted by Engadget, Caviar doesn’t list any tech specs, but notes that its device starts with 256GB of storage.

The Google Contacts app is rolling out a new “Your info” card, which shows your image, phone number, email address, and other information — similar to “My Card” on iPhones. Tap into the card, and you’ll see an option to share your details with one of your contacts.

San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters to both companies, demanding that they remove 13 apps that can be used to generate nude images of someone without their consent, according to a report from Wired. The letters ask Google and Apple to stop “aiding and abetting” the sale of sexualized AI deepfakes, which is prohibited under California law.

Following the release of Anbernic’s RG34XX handheld last December, Ayaneo has revealed its own updated take on Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance. The company didn’t share any specs for its upcoming Konkr Pocket Advance, but like Anbernic’s it will include four action buttons and potentially rely on emulation instead of a cartridge slot.

Around 40 employees received the letters, which ask for meetings with Apple’s lawyers and tell them to “preserve documents and communications,” according to a report from the Financial Times. Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week and accused two of its former employees of helping the AI giant steal its trade secrets.

Major League Baseball is cracking down on league-issued iPads provided to teams since 2016. Teams can no longer install custom apps that tap into generative AI to recommend “substitutions, pitch calling, and other in-game decisions traditionally made by players and coaches.” It seems up to “a third of the league used the dugout iPads for at least one of these purposes.”

A new report from Meta’s Oversight Board that tested popular AI models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, and OpenAI found that each LLM is significantly less likely to criticize governments and leaders known ​for restricting free speech. The reasons for the refusals are varied and often confusing.

Google has been working on beefing up the model’s skills, “particularly in coding,” Bloomberg reports.

The source code for Microsoft Comic Chat is now available, opening up the workings of a project released in 1996 that turned the walls of text from chats into comic strips, generating panels and illustrations that represent the chat and are still backward-compatible with text-only clients.

The thirteenth, and first post-IPO, flight test of SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle was supposed to occur Thursday night, but when the countdown hit zero just before 7PM ET, “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” writes Elon Musk.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a spate of new housing policies, including a provision requiring landlords to disclose when rental listings have been altered by AI or with other tools.

The petition, signed by more than 4,500 workers, calls for protections like guaranteed severance and offers of voluntary buyouts before the company does layoffs. You can read it on the Alphabet Workers Union website.

With a selfie and a voice clip, you can generate what Google calls “personal avatars” — a digital representation of you that can speak a script you type out. Vids got AI-generated avatars last year, but they were initially pre-made options.

ETA PRIME tries to answer that question (while we’re revisiting our initial rating) with some benchmarking courtesy of the Windows drivers Valve released earlier this month. As Videocardz points out, on this unit with 64GB of RAM, the results were pretty close across the three games tested, with SteamOS winning in 1080p across Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Horizon Zero Dawn, but Windows moving a couple of frames per second ahead at 4K rendering.

The notifications will show up for teens who spend “extended time” on ChatGPT, OpenAI says. The company will also notify parents if their teen’s account is banned for violating policies on “violent threats or acts of violence online.”

The idea to give their audience a central spot to see and discuss a creator’s newsletters, websites, and podcasts.

Starting this week in the US, you’ll be able to ask linked apps like Instacart, Canva, or YouTube Music to help you out right from AI Mode, Google says. Another step on Google’s path of becoming a search box that does everything.

If you’re planning another Jurassic Park rewatch this week you’ll want to keep this detailed breakdown of all the computers featured in the film on hand. Developer Fabien Sanglard identifies and shares interesting details on all the fictional park’s hardware from SGI workstations to a full-on Thinking Machines CM-5 supercomputer.

MacBooks have hard, pointy edges. But would you take a hand file or sanding block to your laptop? Software engineer Max Bretschneider did just that, and the results look pretty good. The more heavily filed MacBook Pro he cites for inspiration from designer Kent Walters? Less so. (Yikes!)

Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode pose an “unacceptable risk,” with both features failing to properly and consistently respond to kids showing signs of crisis, “reinforcing signs of psychosis and mania,” as well as “validating disordered eating.”

When teen Instagram users on accounts with parental controls have conversations about self harm or suicide with Meta AI, the platform will now proactively alert supervising guardians that the child’s safety could be at risk. This builds on a similar feature that Meta introduced for Instagram search in February.