Xbox’s first chief operating officer is out after just a few months
Xbox’s first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief […]
OpenAI now trains its frontier AI models with no internet access
OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday, OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content “without risk of affecting external systems.” OpenAI paused training its frontier […]
Abandoned Popcorn Time apps had to be disabled to prevent a zombie army
Remember Popcorn Time, the app that served as an easy-to-use front end for streaming torrents of movies and TV shows? Development of the MPAA’s least-favorite app of the 2010s has been abandoned for years, but the “Netflix of Piracy” software is still installed on millions of devices that are just waiting to join a bot […]
Jack Dorsey’s Block made an AI model that talks to you like an awkward new friend
Jack Dorsey’s Block announced an AI model called Dessa that’s trained “from scratch on nothing but human conversation,” and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one, for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between […]
Soundcore’s latest noise-crushing headphones are on sale for a new low price
The Space 2 comes in multiple colors, including an attractive seafoam green. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge My colleague John Higgins considered Soundcore’s Space One some of the best budget noise-canceling headphones you could buy when they launched in 2023 — and their successor has only improved upon their winning formula, albeit […]
Spotify says yes, it is busting people for using Family Plan sharing too widely
Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on this week’s earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don’t actually live together with a new QR code verification method that requires scanning the plan manager’s phone. TechCrunch reports that in response to a question about the “crackdown,” he called it a […]
The next-gen Xbox won’t cost you $1,800. It can’t. Can it?
An Xbox Elite controller. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Fortune dropped a bombshell report on the future of gaming this week. According to the publication’s Microsoft insiders, the next Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028. My first reaction: The next Xbox is […]
Canva’s first AI image model plans designs before generating them
Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for “greater precision, consistency and control,” according to an […]
PC shipments dropped over 20 percent in Q3 due to RAM price hikes
Demand for new PCs took a hit after months of price hikes, with Counterpoint Research reporting global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026. That’s in line with earlier reports from IDC and Omdia. It’s not just PCs, either – that same quarter, smartphone shipments also hit a 14-year low. Counterpoint linked the […]
Fall 2026 earnings watch
Every company is suddenly an AI company. Compute is an asset. Cars are flying. We’ve been promised robots — again. It’s time again to dig through earnings reports, listen to investor calls, and call out the latest wins and losses from around the tech sector and what it means for where the companies go next. […]