In late September, Automattic CEO and WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg started a public dispute with the hosting provider WP Engine, calling the company “a cancer to WordPress.” He accused WP Engine of not contributing enough to the WordPress ecosystem and profiting off of trademark confusion. As a result, WP Engine was blocked from accessing WordPress.org’s servers.
Automattic has since sent a cease and desist order to WP Engine to stop it from using its trademarks, while WP Engine has followed up with a lawsuit that accuses Automattic and Mullenweg of extortion.
The series of events set off a public battle that calls into question the boundaries between WordPress.com host Automattic, the WordPress open-source project, and the nonprofit that’s behind it.
Tons of colors are on sale, some cheaper than others.
Of the three major gaming consoles, the Xbox Series X / S may have the most diverse controller selection, but Microsoft’s basic Xbox Wireless Controller is still the best Xbox controller for most people. That’s mostly because it’s the cheapest one you can buy with native support for Xbox’s built-in wireless protocol (you can also use it with PC and mobile via Bluetooth or USB-C), but it’s also just really solid overall.
It’s hard to beat the value, especially when they’re on sale for as low as $39, just a few dollars more than their all-time low, as they are in select colors at Amazon and Walmart right now. That’ll get you the basic crop of colors such as black, white, and blue. You can spend a bit more to get the awesome translucent models, which are starting at $57.50 (about $12 off) at Amazon and Walmart.
The Xbox Wireless Controller isn’t loaded with fancy features and gimmicks like newer, more expensive controllers. You can’t easily remove or replace any of its parts, for example, nor does it have back buttons, sensitivity adjustments, or built-in means for customizing and swapping button mapping configurations. But it still sets the standard for how a controller should look, feel, and work. The ergonomic shape and button layout are still the most widely emulated of any controller, perhaps ever.
Some people still scoff that it doesn’t have a rechargeable internal battery, but that’s a point in its favor. Its versatile battery bay lets you either use standard AA batteries or slot in a rechargeable pack. Some of those batteries offer much more play time than controllers with built-in batteries. You’ll never have to plug it in or dock it if you have a charged spare handy, and you won’t have to dismantle an entire controller or shell out for a replacement once they run dry
Exposure to extreme heat could lead to faster aging, a new study published today in the journal Science Advances suggests. Older people living in hotter areas of the US showed faster aging at the molecular level than people living in cooler areas.
The study looked at measures of a person’s biological, or epigenetic, age, which is based on how a person’s body is functioning at the molecular and cellular levels and doesn’t necessarily match a person’s chronological age based on birth. Longer-term exposure to heat was associated with an increase in a person’s biological age by up to 2.48 years. The impact on the body is comparable to the effects of smoking, according to the study authors.
Extreme heat is already the deadliest type of weather disaster in the US, a threat that’s growing as climate change leads to more frequent and intense heatwaves. The new research shows how there are more subtle, insidious ways that prolonged heat exposure can affect the body beyond heat illness or stroke in the moment.
The impact on the body is comparable to the effects of smoking
“We’re kind of surprised [at] how massive this impact could be,” says Eun Young Choi, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral associate at the University of Southern California. “The effects of extreme heat might not show up right away as a diagnosable health condition, but it could be taking a silent toll at the cellular and the molecular level which could years later develop into disability and disease.“
The research included blood samples collected from 3,686 adults aged 56 or older living across the US. The study authors compared those samples with heat index data, a measure of temperature and humidity, between 2010 and 2016. They found a correlation between greater exposure to extreme heat and a bigger jump in epigenetic age. A person living in a place where the heat index is 90 degrees Fahrenheit or above for half the year experienced up to 14 more months of biological aging compared to someone living somewhere with less than 10 days a year that hot.
“The thing that is interesting here is that a lot of observational data focuses on acute impacts of extreme heat exposure – this paper underlines that there may be chronic impacts on epigenetic age that are important predictors of adverse health,” Amruta Nori-Sarma, deputy director of Harvard Chan C-CHANGE and assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences says in an email to The Verge.
Nori-Sarma and Choi say it’s important to keep in mind, however, that the study doesn’t take into consideration whether a person had access to air conditioning or other ways to stay cool. There’s room for more research into what factors might make an individual more resilient or more vulnerable to heat.
“Our finding doesn’t necessarily mean that every person living in Phoenix, Arizona, for example, has an older biological age. This is really an average impact,” Choi says. “Two people in the same neighborhood could have very different levels of personal exposure depending on whether they have air conditioning.”
That also shows that there are steps that can be taken to keep people safe in a warming world. Aside from stopping climate change, that can look like planting more trees and painting rooftops white to prevent urban areas from trapping as much heat, and opening up more public spaces where people can get access to air conditioning. Finding solutions gets easier to do when people are more aware of the potential risks.
It’s technically already Pokémon Day in Japan, and while we’re still a few hours away from this year’s big Pokémon Presents showcase, there’s a new animated short film out that right now feels like the perfect way to get pumped up for whatever surprises Nintendo has in store.
Many of the Pokémon Company’s animated projects outside of the mainline anime have been fun explorations of what people and their pokémon get up to besides battling. But director Maho Aoki’s Dragonite and the Special Delivery also feels like a reminder to thank your mail carriers for all the hard work they do. Produced by CoMix Wave Films — the studio behind Suzume, Weathering With You, and Your Name — Dragonite and the Special Delivery tells the story of Hana (Riko Fukumoto), a young Paldean postal worker who dreams of becoming an expert deliveryperson.
While most deliverypeople get the chance to venture out into the world, as a letter sorter, Hana’s days are usually spent behind a desk with her partner Fuecoco. But when Hana happens to find an unaddressed letter from a young boy who is trying to wish his traveling father a happy birthday, she recognizes it as an opportunity to prove that she has what it takes to become one of the postal system’s greats like a certain friendly Dragonite.
The short spotlights how it takes all kinds of specialized human and pokémon labor to keep the inter-regional postal system running smoothly. Unsurprisingly, CoMix Wave’s take on the pokémon world is a visual delight that makes all of the short’s creatures look downright majestic regardless of whether they’re ordinary or legendary monsters. The short also features a sweeping shot of Kalos’ Lumiose City and quite a few pokémon capable of Mega Evolution.
First-generation Echo speakers won’t get Alexa Plus.
Amazon is bringing the new AI-powered Alexa Plus to a wide range of its existing Echo devices — but the upgrade will skip many of the earliest models. The majority of the company’s first-generation Echos won’t get support, according to the Alexa Plus FAQ page, though Amazon says they will continue to work with the standard Alexa.
Alexa Plus won’t support “certain older generation Echo devices,” such as the first-generation Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Tap, Echo Spot, and Echo Show; the second-generation Echo Show won’t support it, either. Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt confirmed that is the full list of devices. If so, that still leaves many early Echo devices that will work with Alexa Plus.
That means I’ll be able to ask Alexa to book a restaurant reservation through my Echo Flex, the quirky modular Echo speaker that plugs straight into a wall outlet. And people can still get an AI-generated song piped through speakers they’ve connected their microphone-only Echo Inputs to. And if you have an ancient first- or- second-gen Echo Show 15 or newer Echo Hub, those will apparently get access to the AI-enhanced Alexa, too. Schmidt confirmed that each of those will be compatible.
Perhaps it’s a bummer that some of the older Echo devices won’t use AI to book reservations, track ticket prices, or generate fake songs. But at least they’ll still be able to do the old Alexa stuff, like turn on your lights or tell you the weather. And given rumors about the struggle Amazon has had getting Alexa Plus to work right, that might be a good thing, at least for a while.
Max announced today that it no longer intends to charge subscribers of its Standard ($16.99 / month or $169.99 / year) and Premium ($20.99 / month or $209.99 / year) tiers an extra $9.99 a month for CNN Max and Bleacher Reports Sports. The add-ons will be removed from Max’s ad-supported tier ($9.99 / month or $99.99 / year) beginning on March 30th, however, meaning that subscribers will have to move up to more expensive tiers should they want to keep watching live sports and news.
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, Max’s decision reads very much like a sign of the streamer prioritizing live sports as part of its bundling strategy and responding to competitors like Peacock and Netflix getting more serious about live sports programming of their own. In a statement about the pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery’s head of global streaming and games, JB Perrette, said that Max’s new plan of action came after a year of assessing how users were engaging with sports content on the platform.
“We believe that the best place for that content for now is within the Standard and Premium tiers,” Perrette said. “This update ensures that subscribers can continue to enjoy that coveted access within Max, while also enabling ongoing investment in our premium sports and news portfolio.”
Jeff Bezos attends President Donald Trump’s inauguration, joined by fellow free speech and free market supporters Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. | Image: Getty Images
In a move promoted as supporting freedom of speech, The Washington Post will no longer publish opinion columns that oppose the core views of Post owner and Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, Bezos has reportedly told staff. New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin and Semafor reporter Max Tani published details about the move on Wednesday, noting that changes also include the departure of current opinion editor David Shipley. The memo from Bezos and another from Washington Post CEO Will Lewis were leaked during an Amazon event announcing new features for its Alexa assistant.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in an email, according to a screenshot from Mullin. “A big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.” Opinion articles that oppose these two pillars, Bezos says, “will be left to be published by others.” He concludes that “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” saying he is excited to fill a “void” of coverage supporting them.
Lewis’ email praises Bezos for his email’s “clarity and transparency,” saying a replacement for Shipley will be “announced in due course.”
“Freedom is ethical”
Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013, but he began shaping it more visibly shortly before the 2024 presidential election, when he reportedly nixed a planned endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. (The Postissued a denial that did not actually deny the reports.) While this was commercially detrimental to the paper, it avoided a move that could have incensed victorious Republican candidate and current President Donald Trump, who holds significant power over the fate of Bezos’ e-commerce and aerospace endeavors, as well as its potential acquisition of TikTok. Lewis’ email tells employees that the new shift is “not about siding with any political party.”
Neither Lewis nor Bezos indicated there would be changes to the Post’s news coverage, which is distinct from its opinion section. Bezos also says the opinion section will continue to cover topics unrelated to his two pillars.
All news outlets, of course, have implicit or explicit boundaries for their opinion coverage — and free speech is a central value for many journalists. It’s not even uncommon for opinion writers to publish stories that significantly conflict with their news reporting. But newspaper owners have traditionally allowed their editorial staff to make those decisions, in part to clearly establish their independence. Bezos’ direct involvement raises questions about how independent the Post is from an owner with many other financial interests. In current cultural parlance, terms like “free speech” can also be defined in ways that include direct government regulation of speech.
Fortunately, America is facing numerous urgent and timely questions that fit Bezos’ new, personally issued directive. Are major tech companies like Amazon monopolies that distort fair market competition, and should the US government pursue sweeping antitrust cases that could break them up? Will the administration led by Trump, whose inauguration received a $1 million Amazon donation and was attended prominently by Bezos, continue attempts to censor media outlets by leveraging its regulatory power and access to information? The possibilities are nearly endless.
Amazon’s Panos Panay on stage introducing Alexa Plus. | Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge
Amazon announced a new version of its smart assistant today. Alexa Plus comes with expanded capabilities, the company appeared to demonstrate, like finding concert tickets on your behalf or ordering an Uber to pick up someone at the airport. The upgraded smart assistant will also make it easier to have more natural conversations with it, but Amazon will be charging users for those new abilities for the first time.
Free early access to Alexa Plus will begin in late March 2025 in the United States for customers with eligible Echo Show devices. They’ll be notified through email and device notifications once access to Alexa Plus has been granted, but they will have to opt in to using it.
Subscriptions for Alexa Plus start at $19.99 per month once early access ends, but it’s free for Prime users. Given that Prime costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year, it’s hard to imagine anyone opting to pay for Alexa Plus on its own. Many of the smart assistant’s new capabilities, such as jumping to the part of a movie where a specific song is playing, will also be dependent on services like Amazon Music and Amazon Prime Video. So to fully take advantage of Alexa Plus, a Prime membership almost seems mandatory.
There were no hardware announcements made at today’s Amazon event, but the company has confirmed that Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far, including the Alexa mobile app, as well as Fire TVs and tablets. However, the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21, which all feature touchscreen interfaces, will be prioritized during early access. The company has also confirmed that certain older generation Echo devices, including the Echo Tap and first-generation versions of the Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, and Echo Show, won’t support Alexa Plus. Amazon’s Astro robot will also only be compatible with the original Alexa.
Update, February 26th: Added additional details on device compatibility and availability.
The Victrola Stream Onyx lets you play vinyl records via your Sonos speakers without the need for additional equipment.
It’s shaping up to be a good week to be a Sonos fan. First, Sonos launched a sale for existing customers that includes steep discounts on soundbars, speakers, and headphones, and now the Sonos-ready Victrola Stream Onyx is more than 50 percent off. Now through February 28th, you can buy the two-speed, belt-driven turntable at Woot for just $249.99 ($350 off), which is a new low price.
The Onyx is the entry-level model in Victrola’s Works with Sonos turntable lineup. Like its pricier siblings — specifically the $799.99 Stream Carbon, $799.99 Stream Pearl, and $1,299.99 Stream Sapphire — it lets you play your vinyl records over your Sonos speaker without requiring you to install any extra equipment. It looks nearly as sleek as the more premium models, too, thanks to a relatively compact design, a metal platter, and a charming illuminated knob found on the front that allows you to control the volume while playing vinyl.
To keep costs down, Victrola made the Onyx from cheaper, thick molded plastic as opposed to higher-quality materials such as metal or wood. The Onyx also comes with a less expensive Audio-Technica VM95E cartridge and, unlike the Sapphire, won’t let you stream records to non-Sonos devices via Wi-Fi. But if you just want a simple, cheap(ish) way to listen to your favorite vinyl records via your Sonos speakers, you probably won’t miss the extra perks.
More ways to save today
Anker’s Soundcore Sport X20 earbuds are on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart for $63.99 ($16 off), which is their second-best price to date. The fitness-friendly buds are a lot like the Sport X10 — which were once our favorite budget earbuds for the gym — only they offer longer battery life, a more robust IP68 water resistance rating, and multipoint support. They also supposedly offer better noise cancellation and continue to sport an adjustable ear hook, which is a boon if you’re someone who struggles with keeping traditional earbuds in during intense gym sessions.
The OnePlus 12R is available at Best Buy with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $399.99 ($100 off) as a result of a recent price cut. The 12R remains one of the better midrange phones on the market, with an impressive 6.78-inch OLED display, great build quality, and superfast 80W wired charging. It uses an older chipset than the $599.99 OnePlus 13R and lacks the updated 50-megapixel main shooter, but it’s still snappy enough and comes with a decent camera array. Read our review.
As we noted yesterday, Apple’s AirTags are down to their lowest price to date. If you’re embedded in Samsung’s ecosystem, however, the Galaxy SmartTag2 is a better bet. Luckily, Samsung’s handy item tracker is on sale at Amazon and Chewy starting at $15.96 ($14 off), an all-time low. The UWB-equipped tracker works with Samsung’s Galaxy Find network, allowing Galaxy device owners to locate their misplaced valuables. Each tracker also includes a battery that can last up to 700 days and a robust IP67 rating for water and dust resistance.
Loss of Pulse Detection is already available in the EU, but needed FDA clearance to launch in the US.
Google just announced it’s received FDA clearance for the Pixel Watch 3’s Loss of Pulse Detection feature. It will start rolling out to US devices sometime at the end of March.
The Loss of Pulse Detection feature is exactly what it sounds like: if the Pixel Watch 3 senses that you’ve lost your pulse through an event like a heart attack or an overdose, it’ll send you a prompt. If you don’t respond, it’ll automatically call emergency services on your behalf. Back in August, Sandeep Waraich, Google’s senior director of product manager for Pixel wearables, told The Verge that the Pixel Watch 3 is capable of differentiating between a genuine loss-of-pulse event and a person simply taking the watch off.
This feature has been available in the European Union since September 2024. However, high-stakes health features like Loss of Pulse Detection require regulatory clearance, and each country has its own governing bodies and procedures. Whether it rolls out to other regions will depend on the relevant local regulatory agency.
Here’s what Amazon’s alexa.com website will look like.
Amazon is refreshing the alexa.com website and the Alexa mobile app so that Alexa Plus subscribers will be able to use the revamped, AI-powered voice assistant. We don’t have many details beyond that, but the website and the app could be handy new ways to interact with the revamped Alexa, which was announced at an event this morning.
At the event, Amazon showed how you’ll be able to have conversations with Alexa Plus for things like ordering groceries, controlling smart home devices, and even telling you if someone in your house has recently walked the dog by looking at your home camera footage. Amazon also demoed how Alexa Plus could analyze and summarize documents, and perhaps the new website and app will be used to upload that information.
You’ll access Alexa Plus from the current Alexa app — there won’t be a new app to download, spokesperson Devon Corvasce confirms to The Verge. And when we first published this story, alexa.com just took you to a page to learn more about Alexa and to access the Alexa mobile apps, but now it redirects to a page about Alexa Plus.
It seems like we’ll have to wait a little bit for the new website and app to be available widely, though. Amazon says that Alexa Plus will initially roll out in the US “in the next few weeks,” and then “subsequently in waves in the coming months.” Alexa Plus will cost $19.99 per month or will also be available as part of a Prime membership.
Update, February 26th: Amazon confirmed that Alexa Plus won’t require a separate appand has changed the current page you see when you visit alexa.com.
While showing up at a protest can demonstrate your opinion to the world, you may not want your face â or the faces of other protesters â to be included, especially when there is the possibility that authorities will collect and use that information (as they did for tracking movements during COVID-19 social distancing). As a result, many consider it vital to obscure the faces of people in any photos you may post on social media and other online sources.
What follows are some strategies for removing facial features from your photos. Of course, you can open up your images on a desktop or laptop using Photoshop or Preview to blur or scrub, but weâre going to assume you arenât carrying around a laptop with you. So with mobile in mind, you still have some solid options.
What needs to be done
When removing faces, you want to use a method that canât be reversed. It is possible to de-blur a photo, especially using neural networks. Itâs not possible to completely reverse the blurring, since it is lossy (in other words, some data will be permanently lost), but a lot can be ârestored.â So why take the risk? Painting over faces, or using mosaic blur techniques, will prevent …
Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa — Alexa Plus — that, if all goes well, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly.
Some of the new abilities coming to Alexa Plus include the ability to do things for you — you’ll be able to ask it to order groceries for you or send event invites to your friends. Amazon says it will also be able to memorize personal details like your diet and movie preferences.
Alexa Plus is $19.99 per month on its own or free for Amazon Prime members — a better deal, considering Prime costs just $14.99 per month or $139 per year. That comes with access to the Alexa website, where the company said you can do “longform work.” Amazon also said it created a new Alexa app to go with the new assistant. Alexa Plus will work on “almost every” Alexa device released so far, starting with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. Early access will start rolling out next month.
Alexa Plus will also be able to carry on conversations from uttering its wake word, which is still just “Alexa.” It also has vision capabilities and can take pictures and analyze images. Amazon demoed other abilities, such as Alexa prompting you to tell you about concert ticket availability and being able to tell you about local businesses (referencing Yelp to do so) and book dinner reservations. The company says it can read a study guide and test you on the answers, as well as research trips and create itineraries.
Like before, you can still control smart home devices, with Amazon calling out things like smart home cameras and lights, but the company says it can create routines on your behalf as well. You’ll also be able to use Alexa Plus for music, with the ability to find songs based on relatively vague descriptions. The company also said you can ask Alexa to jump to a specific scene in a movie, though that took a couple of tries.
A lot of what Amazon showed off was clearly well beyond what you can do with the older version of Alexa. In one part of the demo, Amazon SVP of devices and services Panos Panay asked Alexa if anyone had walked the dog recently, and it referenced smart home cameras to respond that, yes, someone had.
Amazon’s director of Alexa, Mara Segal, demonstrated that you’ll be able to share documents with Alexa — such as handwritten notes and recipes, emails, instruction manuals, and pictures — that it can reference later. For instance, Segal asked Alexa to read a housing association document and analyze its rules regarding solar panels. She also asked it for a readout of a SXSW schedule.
Segal also demonstrated how Alexa Plus can take action when prompted, like telling her about a kids’ soccer schedule and adding calendar details and reminders based on it, all using fairly casual, natural language in an ongoing conversation.
A lot of the demonstrated Alexa Plus features were visual, meaning that the dashboard and UI on touchscreen Echo devices have had a facelift. There are new customizable widgets on the homescreen that can be moved to a second page and a whole new widget specifically for controlling connected smart home devices.
When you speak with the new Alexa Plus on Echo devices with a display, you’ll also see a fluctuating blue bar at the bottom of the interface. Panay said this “is Alexa” and that the little animations and icons it displays are called “Alexicons,” which are used to visually express a sense of personality.
The company also showed off some familiar LLM greatest hits — you can get Alexa Plus to make up stories for you, and it seems to be able to generate AI art as well.
Amazon said Alexa Plus is a model-agnostic system, using its own Amazon Nova model, as well as those from companies like Anthropic. It will choose the best model for the task at hand, according to the company.
Amazon also listed a number of partners from which Alexa Plus draws data to understand and analyze financial markets, sports, and more. Some of the partners include The Associated Press, Politico, The Washington Post, and Reuters.
The company demonstrated that by having Alexa answer questions about the Boston Red Sox and asking Alexa to track ticket availability over time. Alexa Plus will apparently also be able to buy those tickets for you. The company says these are day-one capabilities powered by hundreds of models it calls “experts.”
Amazon said its LLM experts can also do things for services from firms like Uber Eats, Sonos, Wyze, Zoom, Xbox, Plex, Dyson, Bose, Grubhub, Levoit, and Ticketmaster. It also noted some of the Alexa Plus features will be available on the web through Alexa.com.
The company is also partnering with AI song generator Suno to allow Alexa Plus to create songs on the fly from a prompt, with the company demonstrating an AI-made country song about a bodega cat.
Amazon first announced it was going to “supercharge” Alexa with AI in September 2023. Back then, the company made a lot of big claims, saying that Alexa would understand context or build automated routines for you — you needed only ask. But by the following June, around when Apple announced its own Siri AI upgrade, reports emerged that the company was struggling to realize its efforts and that some employees were leaving because they didn’t think this version of Alexa would ever work.
The devices team at Amazon also saw a major executive shakeup in the interim, with longtime leader Dave Limp being replaced by Panay, who’d come over from running Microsoft’s Surface lineup.
Now that its AI Alexa is here, Amazon is entering a world very different from the one Alexa was born into back in 2014. It will compete with a crowded field of AI-powered digital assistants like the way-ahead Google Gemini, the category-defining ChatGPT, and Apple’s reportedly also-struggling upgraded Siri. But with some very limited exceptions, those chatbots aren’t on smart speakers yet, and that may be Amazon’s opportunity. Its speakers could bring an AI chatbot to a lot of people a lot faster than competitors. Amazon just needs to finish getting it out the door.
Peter Rawlinson will stay on as a “strategic technical advisor.”
Lucid Motors founder and CEO Peter Rawlinson will step down, as the luxury EV company sets its sights on doubling production over the next year.
Rawlinson won’t be leaving the company. Instead, he’ll be assuming the role of “Strategic Technical Advisor to the Chairman of the Board,” the company said. Chief operating officer Marc Winterhoff will serve as interim CEO while the board initiates a search for a new chief executive.
“Now that we have successfully launched the Lucid Gravity, I have decided it is finally the right time for me to step aside from my roles at Lucid,” Rawlinson said in a statement. “I am incredibly proud of the accomplishments the Lucid team have achieved together through my tenure of these past twelve years. We grew from a tiny company with a big ambition, to a widely recognized technological world leader in sustainable mobility. It has been my honor to have led and grown this remarkable, truly world-class organization, because Lucid has always been first and foremost about a team effort.”
“I have decided it is finally the right time for me to step aside from my roles at Lucid.”
The leadership shuffle comes as Lucid eyes major growth for the next year. The company says it expects to sell 20,000 vehicles in 2025, nearly double the 10,241 EVs it delivered in 2024. The updated guidance was announced as part of the company’s fourth quarter earnings. Lucid reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $636.9 million for the three month period ending December 31st.
Lucid said it earned $234.4 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, on top of $807.8 million for the entire year. The company lost $3.06 billion attributable to common stockholders in 2024, and ended the year with $6.13 billion in total liquidity.
Doubling production will be a tough feat for Lucid, with most analysts predicting that EV share of the retail market to remain flat this year. Its especially tough for a luxury EV company like Lucid, with most of the growth taking place in the mass-market segment. But Lucid has high hopes for its Gravity SUV, which just started its first customer deliveries late last year. The company says it plans on gradually ramping up production during the year.
Lucid said the SUV would get up to 440 miles of range, offer 800 horsepower, and accelerate 0–60 mph in under 3.5 seconds. The Gravity will also be the first vehicle from Lucid to come with a native NACS charging port that’s compatible with Tesla’s Supercharger network.
Amazon is set to announce new Alexa features beginning at 10AM ET this morning — and we hope a few devices accompany them. There isn’t a way to watch the event remotely, but our team is here in person to bring you all of the updates as they happen.
We’re expecting Amazon to announce its new AI-powered Alexa, which, according to earlier reports, could cost as much as $5 to $10 per month on top of a Prime membership. Reuters said in June that Amazon has considered the subscription pricing for a complete Alexa overhaul that could allow people to order dinner from services like Uber Eats or help write an email.
The Washington Post said earlier this month that Amazon won’t release the new version of Alexa for at least a month after this event because the company has reportedly encountered issues with inaccurate answers to test questions.
It seems like it would be a good time for Amazon to announce new products that use the latest version of Alexa, too, so we’re hoping to see new Echos or updates to Amazon’s glasses, Fire TV platform, and other devices and services. But who knows? Follow along below for the updates.
Ncuti Gatwa’s version of the Doctor will be back pretty soon. Disney Plus and the BBC announced that the next season of Doctor Who will start streaming on April 12th, with new episodes dropping weekly. The season will span eight episodes total. Perhaps more interesting than the date, though, is a pair of new characters that will be joining the cast.
First up is Belinda Chandra (played by Andor’s Varada Sethu), who will be a new companion for the Doctor. (That said, the official announcement does that that Millie Gibson will be returning as Ruby Sunday.) According to the plot synopsis, the new season follows the Doctor on “an epic quest to get her back to Earth. But a mysterious force is stopping their return and the time-traveling TARDIS team must face great dangers, bigger enemies, and wider terrors than ever before.”
Those wider terrors, it seems, include a cartoon character ripped out of an evil version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Alan Cumming will play Mr Ring-a-Ding, who is described as:
a happy, funny, singalong cartoon, who lives in Sunny Town with his friend Sunshine Sally. However, in 1952, after years of repeats in cinemas across the land, Mr Ring-a-Ding suddenly looks beyond the screen and sees the real world outside — and the consequences are terrifying.
Amazon has finally taken the wraps off its AI-enhanced version of Alexa, called Alexa Plus.
The new version of Alexa is powered by a mixture of LLMs and integrations that reach across news partners and all kinds of apps and ordering services. You’ll be able to use Alexa to add events to your calendar, buy concert tickets, and ask questions about the news.
Amazon is making some big promises here, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. The service won’t start rolling out until March, and it sounds like availability will be limited even then.
You can find all of our coverage in the stream below.
Frameworkâs mission is to âfix consumer electronics, one category at a timeâ by making them modular, repairable, and upgradable. Itâs the only laptop maker to ever truly succeed at that âupgradableâ part. But desktop PCs are already modular, so why is Framework making one?
At first, I thought it saw a unique opportunity to make a cute yet badass tiny gaming PC with AMDâs unusual Strix Halo processor and decided to shoot its shot. As youâll read below, Iâm excited by the result. But I also have another idea Iâll share with you afterward.
Letâs start with the gadget part: yes, the tiny 4.5-liter gaming desktop that Framework announced yesterday is just as cool in person as it was in Frameworkâs photos, and yes, it can game.
At first, I wasnât sure weâd be able to meaningfully try that last part. Almost all the Framework Desktops at the companyâs live event in San Francisco yesterday were either running games that donât offer a great sense of performance (Counter-Strike and Street Fighter) or were unplugged so we could take photos from every angle. But partway through the event, someone had fired up Cyberpunk 2077, and I saw my chance.
You can now request removals directly on the offending Search results.
Google is making it easier to remove and update Search results that contain your personal information. The company’s “Results about you” tool for detecting personal information like addresses and phone numbers that appear in Search has been updated to make it “easier than ever” for users to sign up and for removals to be requested directly on the Search page.
The Results about you tool can help people proactively monitor what sensitive information is appearing in Search results for anyone to find. You register by giving Google the name, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses that you want it to scan for. (Google says your contact data “is not shared or used to personalize your experience across other Google products.”) You’ll then be notified when your data is detected so you can request removal.
The tool was previously hidden away unless you were using the Google app — on mobile web and desktop it was buried deep within the History settings under Google user accounts. It’s also only currently available to users in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, France, Sweden, Thailand, India, and Indonesia, but will be expanded to more countries in the future.
Clicking on the three-dot menu next to results in Google Search will now display a “remove this result” option that users can click on to more quickly request removal, and understand what kind of information is eligible for deletion. Three request options will appear once opened: personal information, which includes the doxxing content outlined on Google’s help page; legal removals to flag illegal content like copyright infringement and child abuse; and requests to refresh outdated Search results.
The latter is a new feature for situations where users have had their information updated, corrected, or removed from a website but Search results haven’t reflected those changes. Upon selection, Google will be prompted to recrawl the website linking to the Search result and update its information.
YouTube isn’t a podcast app, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming the number one place people who want to consume online radio shows now turn to. According to the company, a staggering 1 billion people are tuning into podcasts every month on YouTube. That’s not just more than either Apple or Spotify can claim — it utterly lays them to waste.
In 2023, Spotify reported it had 100 million regular podcast listeners, and touted that half a billion people had listened to a podcast on its platform since 2019 when it started its push into the world of online radio shows. Apple tends to come out behind Spotify in third-party measurements. If a full eighth of the world’s population uses YouTube for podcasts, it seems like that’s probably where the action is.
Reaching that big chunk of audience takes extra work for podcasters, though. Listeners can’t turn just off their phone’s screen to listen unless they’re paying for YouTube Premium, and people may not want to stare at a static image for an hour straight. That means doing video to really make it count.
Making video for YouTube is far more expensive than it used to be. In a newsletter earlier this month, cooking creator Carla Lalli Music, formerly of Bon Apetit, said it cost her $3,500 to shoot a single video for the platform. Those were more complicated than a podcast video, but it still speaks to the platform’s demand for quality in order to get off the ground. YouTube says that more than 400 million hours of podcasts were watched on TVs alone last year. Video clearly matters; creators can’t just turn on their webcams and get results.
Reaching YouTube’s audience also means playing by YouTube’s rules. The platform doesn’t work with RSS feeds in the same way that most other podcast platforms do — every podcast has to become a native YouTube video. That requires them to play by YouTube’s ad rules, too, and use YouTube’s ad systems. Podcasters can’t serve ads the same way they do everywhere else, and they can’t get the same metrics they’d normally use to sell advertisers on their reach and success.
Still, that tradeoff has clearly been worth it to a great many creators, and YouTube’s stats today show why. It may not be a traditional podcast platform, but it’s a big one that podcasters can’t ignore.
