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AI Summary

  • Elon Musk's xAI faces significant legal challenges, including a $134 billion lawsuit from Musk himself and a cease-and-desist order from the California AG over the generation of explicit deepfake images, raising ethical questions in the AI domain.
  • Runpod, an AI cloud startup that originated from a Reddit post, recently celebrated hitting $120 million in annual recurring revenue, showcasing the potential for innovative startups in the tech industry.
  • The AI healthcare sector is witnessing a surge as major companies like OpenAI and Anthropic make strategic acquisitions and developments, prompting concerns about accuracy and reliability in the field, particularly concerning medical information.
  • OpenAI plans to introduce targeted ads to users of ChatGPT, with assurances that user data won't be sold to advertisers, indicating a shift towards monetization in the AI realm.
  • Regulatory scrutiny remains high in the industry, as the Italian Competition Authority investigates Activision Blizzard for aggressive sales practices in mobile games and Google appeals a ruling on its monopoly in online search, demonstrating the tension between innovation and compliance.

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Engadget

  • California AG sends cease and desist to xAI over Grok's explicit deepfakes 2 hours ago by Mariella Moon
    Society & Culture, site|engadget, provider_name|Engadget, region|US, language|en-US, author_name|Mariella Moon

    California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sent a cease and desist letter to xAI, days after his office launched an official investigation into the company over reports that Grok was generating nonconsensual If you’ll recall, xAI and Grok have been under fire for taking images of real individuals and putting them in revealing clothing like bikinis upon random users’ requests. Bonta’s office demands that xAI immediately cease and desist from creating “digitized sexually explicit material” when the depicted individual didn’t consent to it or if the individual is a minor. It also demanded that xAI stop “facilitating or aiding and abetting the

  • How to pair AirPods with any device 2 hours ago by Rob Webb
    Technology & Electronics, Handheld & Connected Devices, site|engadget, provider_name|Engadget, region|US, language|en-US, author_name|Rob Webb

    AirPods work most smoothly with Apple hardware, but they also connect reliably to Android phones, Windows laptops and other Bluetooth devices. The pairing process depends on the platform in use although the basics remain the same. Once the AirPods are placed in pairing mode, most devices detect them quickly and handle the remaining steps in the background. The guide below explains how to pair AirPods with Apple products, how the process differs on newer iPhones that support H2 features and how to connect them to non-Apple devices. HOW TO PAIR AIRPODS WITH APPLE DEVICES Apple builds AirPods to pair almost instantly with

  • How to cancel CyberGhost and get a refund 3 hours ago by Sam Chapman
    Software, site|engadget, provider_name|Engadget, region|US, language|en-US, author_name|Sam Chapman

    I came out of my CyberGhost review with a positive opinion, feeling it had earned its spot in my best VPN roundup. However, even an expert review is subjective, and there's a chance CyberGhost will not work for you. If that’s the case, here's how to cancel your subscription. HOW TO STOP YOUR CYBERGHOST SUBSCRIPTION RENEWING Cancelling your CyberGhost subscription won't end it right away, unless you delete your account or get the refund (I'll explain how to do both of those later). Instead, the way to cancel CyberGhost is to stop your subscription from renewing at the end of each billing

  • Papers Please but with zombies, a farming-based shoot-'em-up and other new indie games worth checking out 4 hours ago by Kris Holt
    Media, Video Games, Arts & Entertainment, site|engadget, provider_name|Engadget, region|US, language|en-US, author_name|Kris Holt

    Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. Several neat-looking games arrived this week, we got release dates for several others that I'm really looking forward to and a brand-new Steam festival was announced.  The Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball is said to be the first Valentine's Day-themed Steam festival. It'll run from February 13 to 20 and feature more than 100 games, including discounts and demos. A showcase will take place on February 13 at 1PM ET on the Sunny Demeanor Games YouTube channel too. Organizers say the festival includes a wide variety of

  • The best VPN service for 2026 18 hours ago by Sam Chapman
    Technology & Electronics, site|engadget, provider_name|Engadget, region|US, language|en-US, author_name|Sam Chapman

    As frustrating as it is that governments and businesses are running roughshod over our online freedoms, at least we have plenty of good VPNs to choose from to keep us protected online. There are so many fast, intelligently designed, full-featured and affordable services on the market that the biggest problem is picking one. For any use case, you can bet at least two providers will be neck-and-neck for first place. On the other hand, the VPN world is still the Wild West in some ways. It's easy enough to slap a cheap VPN together that the market is flooded with low-quality


The Verge

  • The LG C5 and Apple’s M4 Mac Mini are both steeply discounted this weekend 43 minutes ago by Brandon Widder
    Apple, Deals, Desktops, Gadgets, Tech, Verge Shopping

    Small footprint. Speedy performance. | Image: The Verge Happy Saturday, folks! This week, Best Buy kicked off its so-called “Winter Sale,” introducing a whole host of price cuts that range from not-so-good to legitimately great, at least for this time of year. We’ll be publishing many of the highlights in a dedicated news post tomorrow, though, per usual, not all of this week’s best deals revolve around Best Buy. Apple’s M4 Mac Mini, for instance, is receiving a $100 discount at Amazon and B&H Photo, while LG’s 65-inch C5 OLED TV is on sale at eBay for a little over a

  • All You Need Is Kill is a dazzling movie with the soul of a video game an hour ago by Charles Pulliam-Moore
    Entertainment, Film, Movie Review

    While Hollywood has repeatedly tried adapting stories from Japanese manga, vanishingly few of them have been as good as Edge of Tomorrow - Warner Bros.' 2014 live-action film based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka's sci-fi light novel All You Need Is Kill. Edge of Tomorrow wasn't a one-to-one translation of All You Need Is Kill's original story or its manga adaptation by Takeshi Obata, Ryosuke Takeuchi, and Yoshitoshi Abe. The movie was more militaristic and focused on humanity rallying against an alien invasion. But Edge of Tomorrow understood that what made its source material so powerful was its imaginative exploration of what it

  • A cute frog game that remixes Nintendo’s best 2 hours ago by Jay Peters
    Entertainment, Games Review, Gaming

    While playing Big Hops, a new 3D platformer starring an adorable frog, I kept feeling like I was breaking the game - and, like with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, breaking it is kind of the point. In Big Hops, you play as a frog named Hop. Early on, Hop is taken away from his home, and he works to get back by collecting airship parts from a few different areas, each with its own cute animal characters and storylines. Because he's a frog, the primary way you interact with things is by slinging his tongue. You can

  • Minnesota wants to win a war of attrition 2 hours ago by Sarah Jeong
    Analysis, Law, Policy, Report

    As masked and armed men in combat armor swarmed throughout the Twin Cities, Gov. Tim Walz took to primetime television to ask Minnesotans to film ICE. The videos, he said, would "create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans - not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution." While the feds besieged hospitals and school bus stops and Targets, Walz imagined a future with something akin to the Nuremberg trials. His speech emphasized the legal system and the ballot box, a promise of peaceful regime change and a process of accountability. And it was

  • Fear and blogging (and prerelease laptop testing) in Las Vegas 3 hours ago by Antonio G. Di Benedetto
    CES, Gadgets, Hands-on, Laptop Reviews, Laptops, Reviews, Tech

    During a chaotic multiday event, I found myself working anywhere. And always in a rush. At CES, I did what you're not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It's a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster. But to my surprise, aside from pre-production hardware glitches, I


Wired


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