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Apple Just Told 40 Ex-Employees at OpenAI: Don’t Delete Anything
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Imagine opening your email inbox at your new job and finding a letter from your old employer's lawyers telling you not to delete anything. That is roughly the week that about 40 former Apple engineers just had, all of them now working at OpenAI.
Apple has sent legal preservation letters to those ex-employees, ordering them to hold onto any documents and messages that might matter to a trade secret lawsuit the company filed last week. In plain terms, Apple is telling people it used to pay: whatever you have, keep it, because we may come looking.
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1Password Will Let Claude Log You In Without Ever Seeing Your Passwords
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit about turning an AI agent loose on the web: sooner or later it hits a login screen, and then what? You either hand the robot your passwords and hope for the best, or the whole errand grinds to a halt. 1Password thinks there is a third option.
This week the company rolled out 1Password for Claude, a browser integration that lets Anthropic's assistant log you into websites without the password ever touching the model. The pitch, in the words of 1Password CTO Nancy Wang, is simple: "The answer isn't handing agents your secrets, but letting a user give an agent permission to use a credential without letting the agent see it."
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Bethesda Just Dropped Big News on Fallout, Elder Scrolls 6, and Starfield All at Once
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Microsoft, Video Games,
For years, getting Bethesda to say anything concrete about its games has felt like pulling teeth. Today the studio opened up all at once, with a sprawling note about the future of Fallout, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls, and there is genuinely a lot in here worth caring about.
Start with the headline that will get Fallout fans out of their chairs: Obsidian, the studio behind the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, is officially returning to the series with its own spin-off game!
That isn't the only Fallout news, either. Bethesda confirmed Fallout 5 is now in pre-production, and that full remakes of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are on the way, though nobody is putting dates on any of it yet.
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LM Studio’s Bionic Wants to Turn Your Local AI Models into an Actual Assistant
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
For a couple of years now, the pitch for running AI models on your own machine has been mostly about principle. It's private, it's free, it's yours. All true, and all a little abstract when the thing you actually got was a chat window that answered questions. LM Studio, the app a lot of people use to run open models locally, has been that chat window. Now it wants to be something you can put to work.
The company just launched Bionic, an app for Mac and Windows that it calls "the AI agent for getting real work done with open models." The key word there is agent. Instead of just talking back, Bionic is built to go do things: dig through your code, read your documents, and take actual steps toward finishing a task. And it does it on models you control, whether those run on your own hardware or on LM Studio's cloud.
Verizon Fios Tops Out at 5Gbps Now, and the Switcher Price Is the Real Story
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Broadband, Internet,
Verizon just doubled the ceiling on its fastest home internet plan, and the honest question is whether anyone in your house can actually use it. Fios now tops out at 5Gbps, up from 2Gbps, which works out to roughly 625 megabytes per second on a good day. That is a genuinely enormous number. It is also more than most homes will ever come close to touching.
Here is where it gets interesting, though. The plan runs $105 a month in the select areas that can get it, but Verizon is dangling $90 a month for five years at anyone willing to switch, and locking upgrading customers in for three years at $105. The speed is the headline. The price lock is the part worth reading twice.
Apple Music Just Got More Expensive, and It Was Only a Matter of Time
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Music,
If you pay for Apple Music, your next bill is going up. Apple bumped the price of its music service today, and it's the first time the company has touched that number in almost four years. The last increase landed back in October 2022, so if you felt like you'd been paying the same amount forever, you basically had been.
Here's the damage. Apple Music Individual moves from $10.99 to $11.99 a month. The Family plan takes the biggest hit, jumping from $16.99 all the way to $19.99. And the student plan, the one plenty of people stretch out for as many years as they can get away with, ticks up from $5.99 to $6.99. All of it takes effect today, July 17, in the US and a handful of other countries.
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Moonshot’s Kimi K3 Is the Open Model That Just Crashed the AI Benchmark Party
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Software,
Here is the question everyone in the AI world woke up asking this week: how far ahead are American labs, really? Alibaba-backed Chinese startup Moonshot just gave a very specific answer with Kimi K3, a new open-weight model that is turning up near the top of some serious benchmarks. The weights land on July 27, and at 2.8 trillion parameters, Moonshot says it will be the largest open model anyone has released.
That size is the headline number, but it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what K3 does on the leaderboards. On Arena.ai's front-end development test, it ranks above both Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, the two strongest proprietary systems on the market. Arena's CEO did not hedge: he called it "the single biggest release of the year" and said it "marks the moment that OSS Chinese models have surpassed US models," noting that Kimi K3 had "BEATEN FABLE" just six weeks after Fable shipped.
Netflix Used AI on Roughly 300 Titles This Year, and It Wants Investors to Know
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Movies, Software,
Netflix has a number it wants you to notice: 300. That is roughly how many titles the company says have used generative AI so far this year, a figure it dropped right into its Q2 shareholder letter. This is not a quiet experiment tucked into the corner of one show. It is a company-wide habit, and Netflix shared the count because it thinks the number is good news.
Most of that work is happening in post-production, the unglamorous stretch after filming where scenes get cleaned up, stitched together, and finished. Netflix says it is "increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods." Translate that out of investor-speak and it means one thing: AI is helping the company make stuff faster and spend less doing it.
Tesla Is Selling a $225 Balance Bike for Toddlers
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Toys, Transportation,
Your two-year-old cannot legally drive. Tesla has found a workaround anyway. The company is now selling a $225 balance bike for toddlers, a pedal-free, motor-free little machine that a kid propels the old-fashioned way, with their own feet on the ground.
That is Flintstones-style locomotion at a Silicon Valley price. The bike targets kids aged 2 to 5 who weigh under 77 pounds, with a lightweight magnesium frame in white, a five-way adjustable black seat, the Tesla word mark on the side and a T logo up front. It comes with assembly tools. It is also, as of now, already sold out.
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Samsung Is Betting Titanium Can Finally Flatten the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s Crease
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Design, Displays,
Every foldable phone comes with an asterisk, and it sits right in the middle of the screen. The crease. That soft valley where the display bends has been the one thing keeping foldables from feeling like the future they keep promising to be, the little dip your thumb finds every time you scroll. Samsung has spent seven generations trying to make it go away. With the Galaxy Z Fold 8, the company says it finally has a real answer, and its name is titanium.
Ahead of its July 22 Unpacked event, Samsung revealed a new display technology it’s calling Flex Titanium, built to flatten the crease on the Z Fold 8 and the higher-end Z Fold 8 Ultra. Notice the careful wording, though: Samsung is promising “reduced crease visibility,” not a crease that’s gone for good. That gap between “better” and “invisible” is the whole story here, so it’s worth understanding what the titanium is actually doing inside the phone.