Adi Robertson

The Vision Pro, Apple’s new “spatial computing” headset, comes with a lot of limits. It’s a technically impressive $3,499 device that’s straining against the basic capabilities of screens, cameras, eye tracking, and sheer component weight. Yet as I’ve watched the Vision Pro go from announcement to release, it’s also seemed held back by something that has little to do with hardware. Apple is trying to create the computer of the future, but it’s doing so under the tech company mindset of the prese…

Looking to push through new online child safety laws, the Senate Judiciary Committee has summoned five tech CEOs to testify in front of Congress. The committee has asked Linda Yaccarino of X, Shou Zi Chew of TikTok, Evan Spiegel of Snap, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, and Jason Citron of Discord to answer questions on the topic of “Big Tech and the online child sexual exploitation crisis.” All the platforms in question have been accused of facilitating child exploitation, despite well-publicized pled…

Today’s hearing on child safety was — mostly — an unusually focused affair. The Senate Judiciary Committee called up the CEOs of X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord and grilled them for four hours on the potential dangers their services posed for children. Many of the lawmakers emphasized emotional impact, playing to an audience filled with families who’d had kids targeted by predators or otherwise harmed online. But midway through the hearing, it was dragged off course by a predictable tangent:…

A report from the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project (TTP) alleges that X has been selling premium subscriptions to subjects of US sanctions, including leaders of the US-designated terrorist organization Hezbollah. The TTP report identifies 28 accounts that were granted checkmarks under owner Elon Musk’s paid verification plan, evading rules that formally state they’re banned from using it. The allegations raise new questions about how strictly social media platforms should vet users — after th…

Shortly before The Verge published its review of the Apple Vision Pro, I put it on to sit for some photos. The review unit had been fitted for our editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, but I’d worn it a few times as a guest and had a surprisingly good experience. That afternoon, though, I foolishly decided to skip the typical guest setup, which involves about a minute of calibration for the Vision Pro’s eye-tracking cameras. I put the thing on, and it didn’t work at all. The Vision Pro’s cameras, I quic…

In 2018, a viral joke started going around the internet: scripts based on “making a bot watch 1,000 hours” of just about anything. The premise (concocted by comedian Keaton Patti) was that you could train an artificial intelligence model on vast quantities of Saw films, Hallmark specials, or Olive Garden commercials and get back a bizarre funhouse-mirror version with lines like “lasagna wings with extra Italy” or “her mouth is full of secret soup.” The scripts almost certainly weren’t actually w…

Google has apologized for what it describes as “inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” with its Gemini AI tool, saying its attempts at creating a “wide range” of results missed the mark. The statement follows criticism that it depicted specific white figures (like the US Founding Fathers) or groups like Nazi-era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to long-standing racial bias problems in AI. “We’re aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in…

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued the company behind Pornhub for not complying with state-level age verification rules. The suit, filed in Travis County District Court against Pornhub parent Aylo, accuses Aylo of failing to implement “reasonable age verification methods” on Pornhub and other adult sites that it owns. It seeks millions of dollars in damages under a law that was initially blocked as unconstitutional, then allowed to take effect last year. Texas is one of numerous states…

The owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com is in talks with AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to provide training data scraped from users’ posts, a report from 404 Media alleges. The report, based on an anonymous source inside the company, says that deals between Automattic and the two AI companies are “imminent.” It follows nebulous rumors that have spread on Tumblr over the past week, suggesting a deal with Midjourney could provide a new revenue stream for the site. --- Do you have details about…

That’s almost a year after its 2023 PC release, but good news for anyone who’d rather try the surprisingly good retro shooter revamp on Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, or PlayStation 5. [Attachment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zct6_8yhQG0]