Google has added AI features to its regular Workspace accounts for business while slightly raising the baseline prices of Workspace plans.

Previously, AI tools in the Gemini Business plan were a $20 per seat add-on to existing Workspace accounts, which had a base cost of $12 per seat without. Now, the AI tools are included for all Workspace users, but the per-seat base price is increasing from $12 to $14.

That means that those who were already paying extra for Gemini are going to pay less than half of what they were—effectively $14 per seat instead of $32. But those who never used or wanted Gemini or any other newer features under the AI umbrella from Workspace are going to pay a little bit more than before.

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Making the seventh Civilization game is a tall order. With six prior entries, each with a different flavor, it's challenging to create a unique identity to get people to buy it while ensuring it’s familiar enough that it doesn’t drive longtime fans away.

This week, I spent 15 hours playing Civilization VII—which is slated for release next month—through two of its three ages: Antiquity and Exploration. That’s enough time to know that this is the most radical overhaul yet in a single new release without any expansions.

Regardless, my initial impressions are that this is also a return to form for the series. Like many others, I had gripes about Civilization VI. To be clear, VII isn’t a reset to pre-VI times; some concepts introduced in VI (like the hex-based city district system) are revisited and refined here.

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OpenAI is making ChatGPT work a little more like older digital assistants with a new feature called Tasks, as reported by TechCrunch and others.

Currently in beta, Tasks allows users to direct the chatbot to send reminders or to generate responses to specific prompts at certain times; recurring tasks are also supported.

The feature is available to Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers starting today, while free users don't have access.

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a dramatic restructuring of the company's engineering organization, which is pivoting the company's focus to developing the tools that will underpin agentic AI.

Dubbed "CoreAI - Platform and Tools," the new division rolls the existing AI platform team and the previous developer division (responsible for everything from .NET to Visual Studio) along with some other teams into one big group.

As for what this group will be doing specifically, it's basically everything that's mission-critical to Microsoft in 2025, as Nadella tells it:

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Apple plans to release a software update that is meant to help users understand better that its notification summaries are AI-generated and may contain errors, according to a recent BBC news story. The update is a response to reports that the summaries gave users misleading information about world events.

For example, one false summary suggested to at least one user that Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had committed suicide. The notification in question was meant to summarize the most important tidbits from 22 BBC news app notifications, according to a widely circulated screenshot.

Apple hasn't publicly specified exactly what will be changed to better inform users—only that it will be a software change that will "further clarify" when the notifications have been generated via the feature that resides under the Apple Intelligence umbrella.

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People have been complaining for a while that passing a CAPTCHA is too difficult, but developer and tech CEO Guillermo Rauch has made one of the hardest yet: a fully playable CAPTCHA based on the classic PC game Doom.

It's been a long-running joke that developers will make Doom run on absolutely anything, so it's not much of a surprise that it's now running inside something that resembles a CAPTCHA.

The app essentially amounts to a small Doom level that is playable with keyboard controls (arrow keys to move, space bar to shoot) within a CAPTCHA-like presentation. You must kill three enemies to pass the test.

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In theory, it ought to be as good a time as ever to be a gamer on the iPhone.

Classic console emulators have rolled out to the platform for the first time, and they work great. There are strong libraries of non-skeezy mobile games on Apple Arcade and Netflix Games, streaming via Xbox and PlayStation services is continuing apace, and there are even a few AAA console games now running natively on the platform, like Assassin's Creed and Resident Evil titles.

Some of those games need a traditional, dual-stick game controller to work well, though, and Apple bafflingly offers no first-party solution for this.

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When Sony launched the PlayStation Portable almost exactly 20 years ago, the value proposition was right there in the name: a PlayStation, but portable. But now modders have flipped that, introducing a PSP that can be played on a TV, console-style, and they've dubbed it the PS Placeable.

It's a non-destructive mod to PSP-2000 and PSP-3000 systems that allows you to play PSP games on the TV off the original UMD physical media format, with a wireless controller like the PlayStation 4's DualShock 4—all wrapped in a miniature, PlayStation 2-like enclosure.

Let's be frank: One of the main reasons this thing gets special attention here is that its look is both clever and, well, kind of adorable. The miniaturization of the retro styling of the PlayStation 2 is a nice touch.

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When Apple introduced what it currently calls MagSafe in 2020, its marketing messaging suggested that the magnetic attachment standard for the iPhone would produce a boom in innovation in accessories, making things possible that simply weren't before.

Four years later, that hasn't really happened—either from third-party accessory makers or Apple's own lineup of branded MagSafe products.

Instead, we have a lineup of accessories that matches pretty much what was available at launch in 2020: chargers, cases, and just a couple more unusual applications.

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