Volkswagen is bringing up the lights on the ID. EVERY1 show car that it says will become the promised €20,000 (about $20,800 USD) affordable EV that will hopefully turn around the automaker’s struggling business. 

As market leaders like Tesla continue to promise — but not deliver — the elusive entry-level EV, VW is hoping to shake things up with the unveiling of plans for a whole lineup of mass-market vehicles. The car will also be a crucial competitor as VW hopes to fend off a tidal wave of affordable Chinese EVs. But whether it makes it to North America, with all the uncertainty around EV policy right now, remains unknown. 

The ID. EVERY1 will slot below the ID. 2all, which was first unveiled in 2023 with the promised price of €25,000. Both vehicles are only slated for Europe for now, with production expected to begin in 2026 for the ID. 2all and 2027 for the ID. EVERY1. (It seems likely those names could change, too, when we actually get closer to production.)

The ID. EVERY1 is a small hatchback with new software and some neat tricks like a modular center console — characteristics it will share with the ID. 2all. Both models are part of the new “Electric Urban Car Family” based on front-wheel drive versions of VW’s modular electric platform. These new EVs are being developed under the umbrella of the Core brand group within the Volkswagen Group, the company said. In total, the automaker expects to unveil nine new models by 2027.

The production versions of the ID. EVERY1 and ID. 2all will be built on the second-generation version of VW’s modular “MEB” platform. The current version of MEB powers the ID.4 crossover SUV, the ID Buzz minivan, and a dozen other vehicles from Audi, Skoda, and others. 

Of course, for that price, you can’t expect much in the realm of performance or range. VW says the concept ID. EVERY1 tops out at 81mph and is powered by a newly developed electric motor with 94 horsepower (70kW). VW didn’t disclose the battery size, but based on the estimated 155 miles (250km) of range, we can assume it’s somewhere around 35kWh. 

The ID. EVERY1 won’t take up much room, at 152.8 inches in length, or around 27 inches shorter than the VW ID.4. Still, the hatchback can fit up to four passengers, with 10.8 cubic feet of storage in the trunk. 

VW says the production version of the ID. EVERY1 will be the company’s first vehicle to feature a new “powerful” software architecture that promises over-the-air updates. (Software has proven to be a bit of a pain for VW, with bugs and infrequent updates plaguing its ID family of vehicles for years.) 

Design-wise, the ID. EVERY1 looks chunky and fairly adorable, with cues from small SUVs as well as VW’s discontinued Up and Polo minicars, while also retaining stylings from the ID. Life concept from 2021. VW says the new design language that infuses the ID. EVERY1 and ID. 2all emphasizes minimalism, likability, and a “secret sauce” like the “flying roof concept,” in which the roof surface is lower in the middle without restricting headroom on the inside. 

VW is also bringing some of the modular designs from the ID Buzz to the low-cost segment. The center console can be transferred to the rear of the vehicle, and the dash features a rail on which various accessories can be affixed, including a tablet, shelf, or table. There’s also a small illuminated and removable Bluetooth speaker between the driver and front passenger, reminiscent of Rivian’s R1 vehicles.

EV prices aren’t the only place Volkswagen is trying to cut costs. Following a labor strike in Germany, it reached a union deal that will mean 35,000 fewer workers and billions per year in cost cutting.

Other automakers are increasingly piling into the affordable EV space. As competition from China heats up, Hyundai and Kia are both promising more low-cost models. Tesla swears it will have a lower-priced EV to reveal sometime this year. And even Ford says it plans on releasing its own entry-level EVs — just as soon as it figures out how to make them profitable.

All Elite Wrestling and Amazon’s Prime Video today announced a multi-year deal that will see the streaming service carry AEW’s pay-per-view events in the US, Canada, and the UK. Their partnership will start this coming weekend with AEW Revolution, which airs Sunday night.

Unlike Thursday Night Football and other sports content that comes included with a Prime subscription, you’ll still very much have to pay for each individual AEW event. (Revolution costs $49.99, if you were wondering.) This simply just gives fans another avenue for where to watch.

For AEW, the pact represents a branching out from the wrestling company’s longtime alliance with Warner Bros. Discovery. Earlier this year, WBD’s Max service began simulcasting AEW’s weekly shows Dynamite and Collision at the same time that they air on cable. Max is also now home to the vault of AEW’s past pay-per-view events, and WBD has said it’s still developing the infrastructure to offer them live.

AEW has so far refrained from allowing any streamer to offer its live, marquee events as part of a base monthly subscription. That differs substantially from WWE’s strategy, where so long as you’ve got any tier of Peacock, you can watch premium live events like WrestleMania as they happen at no extra cost. WWE also brought its flagship weekly program, Raw, to Netflix in January with much fanfare after the show spent decades as a staple of cable TV.

By contrast, AEW has streamed its pay-per-views through a hodgepodge of services including Bleacher Report, TrillerTV, YouTube, and now Prime Video in addition to traditional cable and satellite providers. Having them all on Max after the fact is convenient, but if you want to catch AEW’s biggest shows live, you’ve still got to pay for each one — at least for now.

Netflix is diving deeper into live content with a new late-night talk show hosted by comedian John Mulaney. Starting March 12th, Netflix will air Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney every Wednesday at 10PM ET.

The late-night show, which Netflix will stream live for 12 weeks, will feature chats with celebrity guests. It marks the second live series that Netflix now streams regularly, in addition to WWE’s Monday Night Raw.

Up until this year, Netflix had only used live streams for one-time events, like the Love is Blind reunion, the fight with Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, live NFL games, and various comedy specials. Not all of these events went smoothly, and Netflix has been under pressure to make sure its streams are buffer-free now that it’s airing the WWE’s flagship show.

Netflix is bound to expand on its library of live content in the future. The company previously expressed interest in airing live episodes of Hot Ones, though BuzzFeed has since sold the show.

The AI-ification of Google Search continues to accelerate: the company announced on Wednesday that it will start showing AI Overviews for even more kinds of queries, and that users around the world, even those who are logged out of Google, will start seeing them too.

There’s an even more ambitious AI search tool coming to Google, too. It’s called AI Mode, and it brings a search-centric chatbot right to the core Google experience. It is, more or less, Google’s take on Perplexity or ChatGPT Search. For now, AI Mode is just a test — it’s only available to users paying for Google One AI Premium, and even they will have to enable it in the Labs section of Search.

The idea behind AI Mode is that a lot of people searching Google would actually prefer to have their results be primarily AI-generated. If you switch to AI Mode (it’s a tab in the search page or the Google app, like Images or News) and enter a query, you’ll get back a generated answer, based on everything in Google’s search index, with a few supporting links interspersed throughout. The user experience feels a little like Gemini or any other chatbot, but you’re interacting with a Search-specific model, which means it’s more able to tap real-time data and interact directly with the web.

AI Mode is just the latest signal of just how important AI-generated content has become to Google Search, and how confident the company is becoming in what its models can deliver despite its well-documented issues with rock eating and glue pizza. “What we’re finding from people who are using AI Overviews is that they’re really bringing different kinds of questions to Google,” says Robby Stein, a VP of product on the Search team. “They’re more complex questions, that may have been a little bit harder before.” Google is bringing the Gemini 2.0 model to AI Overviews, and Stein says that will make Google more useful for questions about math, coding, and anything that requires more sophisticated reasoning.

As Google moves ever deeper into AI search, it seems to be running away from linking to websites — and the fundamental value trade it made with the internet. Stein is adamant that’s not the case. “We see that with AI Overviews, people will get the context, and they’ll click in. And when they click in and go to websites, they’ll stay longer on those websites. They’re probably better customers of those websites because they already have context coming in.” He says he hopes AI Overviews and AI Mode bring new people to Google for new things, rather than cannibalizing their existing behavior.

Stein says that AI Mode isn’t a Trojan horse for a complete search overhaul, because people use Google for too many things to replace it all with a chatbot. But there’s no denying that Google’s AI efforts are starting to completely surround, and quickly change, everything about what happens when you Google.

Delta Air Lines is backing a startup that wants to design more fuel-efficient, blended-wing-body aircraft in the hopes of reducing its carbon footprint and making air travel more sustainable. 

The airline said today that it will help support the development of startup JetZero’s blended-wing-body (BWB) demonstrator aircraft that aims to cut fuel consumption, emissions, and noise. Delta isn’t providing any capital investment in the company but, rather, operational support to help make its dream of a blended-wing aircraft a reality. 

JetZero will join Delta’s Sustainable Skies Lab incubator, where it will receive “operational expertise” from the airline’s engineers in the design and construction of a BWB demonstrator aircraft, with the aim to test it in 2027. In 2020, Delta pledged to spend $1 billion on sustainability efforts, including the Sustainable Skies Lab, with the aim of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. 

In a BWB aircraft, there’s no clear dividing line between the wings and the main body of the craft, as they are smoothly blended together. The main advantage of blended-wing designs is to reduce drag associated with conventional tube-and-wing airframes. 

But more than that, JetZero says BWB designs can help reduce emissions by up to 50 percent, while keeping the same engine technology and fueling infrastructure. By reducing drag, providing more lifting surface area and even load and lift distribution, and reducing the overall weight, the company said it can slash the emissions from a conventional airframe in half.

The Long Beach Airport-based startup was founded in 2021 with the goal of developing next-gen sustainable aircraft on the way to zero-emission aviation. The startup says its BWB aircraft can carry up to 250 passengers, the equivalent of a midrange international aircraft. And with engines mounted on top of the aircraft, the noise profile is expected to be much quieter. 

Delta’s support for JetZero comes on top of a $235 million grant from the US Air Force that was awarded in 2023 for the development of a full-scale demonstrator aircraft to validate the blended-wing concept. The company is also collaborating with Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites to build and test the aircraft.

Delta also believes that JetZero’s BWB design will be compatible with sustainable aviation fuel, which the airline hopes will comprise at least 95 percent of its fuel consumption by 2050.

There are some challenges to designing a blended-wing aircraft, such as developing a safe evacuation process in the case of an emergency landing. Also, the seating would be theater-style, as opposed to rows in a tube-shaped airframe, which could present limitations to the number of exit doors. 

Boeing, Airbus, and even NASA have all worked on BWB designs, but none of their concepts have ever made it into production. FAA certification is also unknown, and until someone actually tries, we may not know what kind of safety challenges will arise.

But Delta believes that JetZero’s design presents a solution “within reach.” 

“Working with JetZero to realize an entirely new airframe and experience for customers and employees is bold and important work to advance the airline industry’s fuel saving initiatives and innovation goals,” said Amelia DeLuca, Delta’s chief sustainability officer, in a statement.

Nintendo has won its legal battle against Dstorage, the French company it accused of hosting pirated games on its file-sharing site 1fichier.com. In a press release sent to outlets like Eurogamer and GBATemp, Nintendo says a French Court agreed that 1fichier.com is “liable for failing to remove or block access to unauthorised copies of Nintendo games stored on this platform.”

In 2021, a Paris court ordered Dstorage to pay Nintendo $1.13 million for failing to remove pirated games despite warnings from Nintendo. Though Dstorage appealed this decision, the court ultimately sided with Nintendo. The company later brought the case before the highest French judiciary court, which has now ruled against Dstorage as well.

“Nintendo is pleased with the Court’s finding of liability against DSTORAGE and believes that it is significant not only for Nintendo, but for the entire games industry,” Nintendo said in its press release. It adds that the decision “will prevent sharehosters like 1fichier.com” from claiming they need a court order to follow through on requests to remove copyrighted content.

Nintendo has only stepped up its legal fights over the past year. In 2024, the company sued Yuzu, the developers behind a Nintendo Switch emulator, resulting in it shutting down completely, and also went after the Switch emulator Ryujinx. It also sued the developers of Palworld for allegedly infringing on its patents.

YouTube is expanding its pilot of a new Premium Lite subscription plan to the United States, the company announced today. Priced at $7.99 per month compared to the $13.99 charge for regular YouTube Premium, the cheaper tier offers “most” videos without ads — including “gaming, fashion, beauty, news, and more.” The major exception is music. For ad-free music videos, you’ll still need to step up to the standard Premium plan, which also gives you offline downloads and background playback.

Premium Lite doesn’t include those perks: it’s really just about removing ads from your YouTube experience. And as someone who let his YouTube Premium subscription lapse a few months ago, let me tell you: there are a ton of ad breaks these days.

“In the coming weeks, we’ll also make Premium Lite available to all users in our current pilot countries — Thailand, Germany, and Australia,” the company added in its blog post, noting that YouTube Music and Premium reach over 125 million subscribers globally (when you include trial users). Premium Lite will expand to additional countries later this year.

YouTube has been testing the plan off and on in select markets for several years now, with the earliest reports dating back to 2021. In more recent tests, the company clarified that subscribers may still see “non-interruptive ads when you search and browse” in addition to the video ads attached to music and shorts. It continues to boggle my mind that there’s still no YouTube TV and YouTube Premium bundle. Surely that can’t be far off.

Victoria Song is a senior reviewer at The Verge who mostly focuses on health tech and wearables and who, she says, occasionally has “existential crises over silly gadgets I bought on TikTok against my better judgment.” One of her favorite gadgets is the Logitech MX Vertical wireless mouse.

When did you get the Logitech MX Vertical?

I got this mouse in March 2022, so just about three years ago now. But I’ve been a vertical mouse enthusiast since I reviewed the Evoluent VerticalMouse C for PCMag in 2016. 

Why did you get it?

I’d been using Anker’s wireless vertical mouse for about three and a half years. It finally crapped out on me after my cat batted it from my desk. RIP. I didn’t love that it required a USB dongle for connectivity, and I had only heard good things about Logitech’s version from other vertical mouse fans, so I opted to shell out a bit more.

What do you like about it?

You can use it wired or wirelessly, and the battery lasts months on a single charge. Switching cursor speed is easy, and it’s got two customizable buttons right over the thumb. I mostly use it for forward and back, but it’s super convenient. I used to get wrist pain from using regular mice, and now I have zero wrist pain. 

Is there anything about it that you wish were different or that would improve it?

This is kinda gross, but it’s a dead skin magnet. Every once in a while, you have to take a cleaning wipe and really scrub that textured grippy area down, or you’ll have crusty, dusty imprints of your hand, bordered by dead skin. And I do mean a cleaning wipe. At first, I was wiping this thing down with a teeny bit of soap and a damp paper towel — nope. That same area also gets worn down by finger oil, so even if you regularly clean it, it can end up looking a bit greasy after a few weeks. The bottom is also a dust and cat hair magnet. Basically, I clean this mouse more than I should have to.

Otherwise, I wish it came in more colors like the cheaper Logitech Lift, which comes in white and pink. I was tempted to switch, but unfortunately, I have piano fingers and the Lift’s smaller size doesn’t work for me. Even on the MX Vertical, my index and middle fingers extend beyond the mouse’s edge.

Who would you recommend it to?

Anyone who has hobbies that depend on a healthy, pain-free wrist. Before switching to vertical mice, I had a lot of wrist and hand cramping from using trackpads, regular mice, and all my handwriting. I’ve been working on all of that, but it was so much harder for me to adjust my natural pen grip than it was to adopt a vertical mouse. And I’m not kidding when I said my wrist pain disappeared almost overnight — and comes back whenever I have to use my laptop’s trackpad on a work trip.

Anything else?

I’ve been using vertical mice for close to a decade now, but I distinctly remember that it took a few days before I felt really comfortable. 

Also, the MX Vertical doesn’t have a left-handed version. So if you’re a southpaw, you might want to look for a vertical mouse model that has both versions. (It’s baffling, but the Logitech Lift has both left- and right-handed versions, even if the MX Vertical doesn’t…) 

What else are you doing these days?

These days, I’ve been exploring gadgets that aren’t smartwatches — smart glasses, smart rings, AI wearables, CGMs, and even an NFC nail chip. I’m also trying to get back into another training block after I got derailed by a cold and some bad weather. (Training blocks are periods of structured workouts where you focus on a specific goal. My next one is going to be a 12-week block where I try to improve my 5K running speed.) Lately, I’ve also been trying to get back into my non-work hobbies, like calligraphy and scrapbooking. 

Since its launch just over a year ago, Dyson’s upgraded Supersonic r hairdryer has only been available for purchase by salons and professional stylists. But today the company announced the styling tool will be available to everyone in the US starting tomorrow, and in April for those in Europe, according to a report by Yahoo.

The consumer version of the Supersonic r will be available in two new color options — ceramic pink and jasper plum — and will sell for $569.99, the same price as the original, according to Yahoo. Dyson will also continue to offer a professional version of the hair dryer with a longer power cable and a new copper and violet color option coming in the summer.

Dyson originally launched its Supersonic hairdryer in 2016, and aside from new color options, it went largely unchanged until the Supersonic r debuted in 2024. Featuring a design that’s 30 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter than the original, the Supersonic r — so named because it looks like a lowercase letter r — offers better visibility and more flexibility in how it can be positioned and maneuvered.

The Supersonic r also features a smaller motor (spinning at 130,000RPM) squeezed into the handle of the hairdryer for improved weight distribution, and three disc-shaped heating elements designed to produce more even heat without cold spots. Its styling accessories attach to the hairdryer magnetically and are recognized through RFID which automatically switches the Supersonic r to specific heat and power settings, or whatever setting was last used with the attachment.

Apple just updated the MacBook Air with an M4 processor, a new sky blue color option, and — most surprising of all — a lower price. The 13-inch starts at $999, while the 15-inch begins at $1,199. They’re available to order now and launch on March 12th.

Both 13- and 15-inch models of the MacBook Air will ship with the newer chips, aligning them with the recent Mac Mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro and adding support for two external displays with the lid still open. The design is the same, though Apple added the 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam that’s available on the current MacBook Pros.

The entry-level model has an M4 chip with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and 256GB of storage. It can be further configured with a 10-core GPU (matching the base 14-inch MacBook Pro) with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage.

I briefly played with the new M4 Airs but haven’t tested them yet. It’s… still a MacBook Air. Just with a more powerful chip. The sky blue color is pleasant, but I think Apple could have more fun with its hues like it does on the iMac. (Where’s the bondi blue, Apple?)

The M4 upgrade and the Center Stage camera are measured, expected upgrades that I’ll test in my full review. It doesn’t seem like a big upgrade, but the price drop is impressive, especially against increasing tariffs.

After over a year and a half, Apple is updating the Mac Studio with a curious new quirk: it straddles two generations, with an M4 Max for the base model and an M3 Ultra for the upgraded model. You can preorder both versions at Apple’s site for $1,999 (M4 Max) and $3,999 (M3 Ultra), and they’ll be available to buy on March 12th.

Apple says the M4 Max Mac Studio is “up to 3.5x faster” than the original M1 Max version, with a 14- to 16-core CPU and 32- to 40-core GPU. Like the M4 Max MacBook Pro, this version of the Studio starts with 36GB of RAM (up from 32GB in the M2 model) and can be had with as much as 128GB, a bump from the 96GB ceiling of the M2 Max Studio. Like its outgoing predecessor, it starts with 512GB of SSD storage but can go as high as 8TB.

Meanwhile, the Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra chip sounds like it’s going to scream. It gets up to 32 cores, 24 of which are performance cores — something Apple notes is “50 percent more than any previous Ultra chip.” The GPU has a base 60-core configuration that maxes out at 80 cores, and Apple says it has a 32-core Neural Engine for machine learning and AI applications.

The M3 Ultra version of the Studio has 96GB of RAM to start, but it can go up to a gobsmacking 512GB of RAM — enough to run some very hefty AI models locally. Finally, you can bump the base 1TB internal storage to as high as 16 terabytes.

Apple says the Mac Studios’ GPUs will feature dynamic caching — that is, it will store frequently accessed data in cache to drop latency — and hardware-accelerated mesh shading, both firsts for the company’s graphics chips. It will also have “a second-generation ray-tracing engine for more seamless content creation and gaming.”

On the outside, the new Mac Studio is the same squat, square-ish silver box as before, with two USB-C ports and an SD Card slot on the front. Around the back, you’ll find four more USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, and one port each for ethernet, power, and audio, as well as an audio jack and the power button. Both CPU configurations come with Thunderbolt 5 connections, but as with older-generation Studios, only the four rear USB-C ports are Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Max — you’ll need an M3 Ultra Mac Studio to get it on all six.

It was a cold Thursday afternoon in Las Vegas, and I was running late for my last appointment of the show. There was no telling how long an Uber might take, now that thousands upon thousands of CES 2025 attendees were leaving town and competing for space on the roads.

“No problem,” I told myself. “I’m wearing my exoskeleton.”

I reached down to its single button, switched it to hyper mode, and began taking the longest strides possible. I power walked a mile without breaking a sweat — and made it with time to spare.

Exoskeletons — robotic external attachments for your body that help it do work — have been a fixture of CES for well over a decade, usually in the context of prepping the world for an aging, less physically capable population. They’ve made it possible for paralyzed individuals to walk again, shown younger people what it’s like to grow old, and helped medical orderlies lift patients who can’t lift themselves. 

But we’ve never worn one on the CES show floor for more than a handful of minutes. This year, I saw my chance.

A new category of lightweight leisure ex …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nvidia’s dominance over the latest generation of graphics cards ends today. AMD might have surrendered the high end of the GPU market, but its new $549 Radeon RX 9070 and $599 RX 9070 XT look set to bring Nvidia back to reality, at least in the midrange. 

After a disappointing $549 RTX 5070, a $749 RTX 5070 Ti that’s near impossible to buy for anything less than $899, and a $1,999 RTX 5090 whose only competition is other Nvidia cards, AMD’s next-gen GPUs look perfectly timed and deliver on performance and price. 

The RX 9070 is around 17 percent faster than Nvidia’s RTX 5070 in 4K without upscaling enabled, cruising past Nvidia’s card for the same price. The RX 9070 XT is as fast as the RTX 5070 Ti for $150 less.

Pricing is key with these cards, particularly as only 10 percent of GPU sales right now are from AMD. The company needs a big win with its latest generation of cards if it wants to regain ground from Nvidia, and the RX 9070 series might be just what the GPU market needs.

Hardware

AMD hasn’t created reference cards for the RX 9070 series, so the end result is designs from add-in board partners that look very similar to the ones used for previous generations …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It was just a year ago that I had my first demo of the Humane AI pin — which was also my last, as it turned out. But another AI gadget at this year’s MWC is trying to take off where Humane crashed and burned, and in ways it’s even weirder than the AI pin. It’s a phone that captures tons of information about you, both past and present, and uses it to create your own AI avatar to act as a virtual assistant. It’s part Rabbit R1, part Gemini Assistant, part science fiction. And oh yeah; there’s some blockchain stuff too. I told you, it’s wild.

The team behind Newnal AI is based in Korea and established itself by creating a blockchain-based vaccine verification method used widely in the country. Early in my meeting with the company’s founder YT Kim, he stressed one thing to me: “We never sold cryptocurrency.” They’re clearly aware of the bad vibes around blockchain right now.

Newnal’s AI phone trains an AI model on you, so it needs lots of your information. The idea is that you go around downloading your personal data history from websites like Meta and Google, and also stuff like your medical records and financial data, then feed it to Newnal’s AI. Kim says the company encrypts this “personal knowledge graph” and breaks it up into pieces stored across multiple third-party cloud servers. In theory, only the owner of the data can access it.

Are there massive privacy implications in all of the above? Absolutely. To its credit, Newnal has published an unusual amount of supporting documentation and technical descriptions on its website in an effort to be transparent about what it’s doing. I can’t verify that the company’s methods are secure as it says, this is just a first look.

But the rabbit hole keeps going: all of this information, plus your appearance and voice, are used to create a moving, talking version of yourself that sits in a little screen above the phone’s main screen. You summon it by pressing a square button on the side of the phone, then you ask it to do things. There’s all the usual stuff we’re used to seeing in these demos: it can help you shop for a new pair of earrings or draft an email. Kim and his team showed me some of these demos and they all went about as expected — and then we got to car insurance.

The request was simple: help me buy a car insurance policy. I could see on screen as it appeared to comparison shop policies. At each of these steps, icons appear to indicate where the model is getting certain information. A policy was decided on, and the next request was to fill out the necessary forms to go ahead and purchase the policy. And it did; I saw it go through pages of forms on the Geico website and fill them in. 

Kim says that they actually bought a used car so they could go through with this demo, which is bananas. And it sure seems like it worked; I watched the model complete each step, showing its sources for the information along the way, and at the end it paid for the policy. It was one of the wildest tech demos I’ve ever seen, and I’m still not even sure I believe my own eyes that it worked.

This is all wrapped up in a simple yet futuristic-looking little phone that Kim says was inspired by the iPhone 5S. It’s a little black-and-silver rectangle with a separate upper screen where your AI sits. Newnal says it runs a “hybrid” of its own OS and Android. The versions I saw were still prototypes, but Kim says the company plans to launch the phone globally on May 1st for $375 each. It’ll ship to customers two months after it goes up for pre-order.

The timing might remind me of the Humane AI pin, but the whole thing gives major Rabbit R1 vibes. It’s an attractive little gadget with a surprisingly low price tag that makes huge promises. We all know how that went with the R1’s launch, and I’m sure the experience contributes to the skepticism I feel about what Newnal is doing. But unlike when the R1 was first unveiled, the demos I saw were convincing and the device completed all of the requests. But “Can AI fill out car insurance forms?” and “Do I feel like I can trust AI to fill out car insurance forms?” are two different questions. The same goes for “Can I train an AI model on all of my private data?” and “Should I train an AI model on all my private data?” So on and so forth.

Whether or not any of it really works outside of controlled demos, and whether or not these are good ideas, I’ve gotta give Kim and Newnal credit for trying something bold. Elsewhere at Mobile World Congress we’re putting DSLR camera lenses on phones, adding more hinges to screens that already fold, and trying to make already thin phones even thinner. Not exactly setting the world on fire. But if nothing else, Newnal is an idea — whether it’s a good one or not is something the company will have to prove outside of a conference demo. And if Rabbit and Humane have shown us anything, it’s that drumming up interest at a tech conference is no substitute for shipping a product that works.

Hyundai is teaming up with Yandex spinoff Avride to jointly develop fully driverless cars for autonomous ridehailing, the companies announced today. The partnership will enable Avride to deploy 100 Hyundai Ioniq 5 SUVs retrofitted with autonomous driving technology this year. 

Avride currently operates fleets of sidewalk delivery robots in several cities and aims to launch a commercial robotaxi service in the near future. The company has been using the Ioniq 5 and the Hyundai Sonata as its test vehicles in Austin and Seoul for the past year. In today’s announcement, Avride said it plans for a “significant expansion” of its fleet ahead of the launch of a commercial service.

The Ioniq 5 vehicles destined for Avride’s fleet will be assembled at the new Hyundai Metaplant America factory in Georgia and then integrated with Avride’s autonomous technology.  

The first vehicles will arrive in Dallas later this year, as part of Avride’s deal with Uber to deploy autonomous vehicles exclusively on the ridehailing company’s app. In addition to the autonomous vehicles, Avride and Hyundai say they plan to explore other opportunities, such as delivery robots and other smart mobility applications. 

Avride spun out of Yandex, which is one of Russia’s biggest tech companies. Yandex had been testing its vehicles in the US up until the Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which forced most Western businesses to cut ties with the company. Last year, Yandex self-driving group rebranded as Avride after its parent company (now called Nebius) divested itself in a $5.2 billion sale of all of its Russian holdings and severed ties to its original country. Avride is now headquartered in Austin.

This won’t be the Ioniq 5’s first self-driving rodeo. Waymo recently announced plans to buy an unspecified number of Hyundai EVs for its robotaxi business. The vehicle also serves as a platform for Motional, which is Hyundai’s robotaxi subsidiary.

Chatbots can’t think, and increasingly I am wondering whether their makers are capable of thought as well.

In mid-February OpenAI released a document called a model spec laying out how ChatGPT is supposed to “think,” particularly about ethics. A couple of weeks later, people discovered xAI’s Grok suggesting its owner Elon Musk and titular President Donald Trump deserved the death penalty. xAI’s head of engineering had to step in and fix it, substituting a response that it’s “not allowed to make that choice.” It was unusual, in that someone working on AI made the right call for a change. I doubt it has set precedent.

The fundamental question of ethics — and arguably of all philosophy — is about how to live before you die. What is a good life? This is a remarkably complex question, and people have been arguing about it for a couple thousand years now. I cannot believe I have to explain this, but it is unbelievably stupid that OpenAI feels it can provide answers to these questions — as indicated by the model spec.

ChatGPT’s ethics framework, which is probably the most extensive outline of a commercial chatb …

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Two trailblazing scientists who today received this year’s Turing Award for creating fundamental artificial intelligence training techniques are using the spotlight to shine concern on the dangers of rushing AI models out for public consumption. 

University of Massachusetts researcher Andrew Barto and former DeepMind research scientist Richard Sutton warned that AI companies are not thoroughly testing products before releasing them, likening the development to “building a bridge and testing it by having people use it,” according to The Financial Times. 

The Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize and was jointly awarded to Barto and Sutton for developing “reinforcement learning” — a machine learning method that trains AI systems to make optimized decisions through trial and error. Google’s senior vice president Jeff Dean describes the technique as “a lynchpin of progress in AI” and has remained “a central pillar of the AI boom” that led to breakthrough models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AlphaGo before that.

“Releasing software to millions of people without safeguards is not good engineering practice,” Barto told The Financial Times. “Engineering practice has evolved to try to mitigate the negative consequences of technology, and I don’t see that being practised by the companies that are developing.”

Unsafe AI development has been notably criticized by Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton — two of the “godfathers of AI” who are also previous Turing Award recipients. A statement was also issued by a group of top AI researchers, engineers, and CEOs in 2023, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, warning that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.”

Barto called out AI companies for being “motivated by business incentives” instead of focusing on advancing AI research. OpenAI, which has made repeated promises to improve AI safety and briefly ousted Altman, in part, for “over commercializing advances before understanding the consequences,” announced plans in December to transform itself into a for-profit company.

Sometime last fall, Kevin Rose started thinking seriously about Digg again. A smidge over two decades ago, he’d launched a social and link sharing website that, for years, was known as “the homepage of the internet.” Since then, Digg had been through several owners and many pivots, Rose had gone on to several other careers, and the internet had moved on. Rose had thought about building something like Digg again, and had even been approached to buy back the domain and website a few times, but the timing had never been right.

This time, though, things started to click. Rose and a group of what he calls “brainstorming partners,” which included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, design and product exec Justin Mezzell, and even folks like Blogger and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, started to talk about whether AI might be able to help them build a better social platform. “I would call Alexis up and we would chat,” Rose says, “and we’d be like, ‘hey, what if, what if, what if?’ And a lot of those things started giving us both that butterflies-in-the-stomach situation, where you’re like, ‘oh, this could be cool. This could be really cool.’”

Now, Digg is making a comeback. Rose will be its chair, Mezzell its CEO, and Ohanian an adviser. (Both Rose and Ohanian are also venture capitalists now, and their firms are investing in the new venture.) They bought the domain and other assets from Money Group for a price they wouldn’t disclose and are bringing it back. The site is relaunching today, but only in a limited form. Its ultimate ambitions, however, are enormous: Digg aims to build the kind of community-first social platform that basically no longer exists on the internet. And its new founding team thinks AI could be the secret to pulling it off.

If you’ve been on the internet long enough to remember the old Digg, you already have a rough idea of how the new Digg will work. Everything is based on content and links: someone shares a link, and people can comment and vote on the links. (If you like something, you “Digg” it; the old “Bury” downvote option is now gone.) The most popular stuff ends up on the homepage — which Rose and Mezzell tell me they hope will once again be the homepage of the internet — but there will also be countless smaller communities surfacing and sharing stuff in their own niche.  

There are, of course, plenty of ways to talk about links on the internet. One of them, Reddit, continues to be very popular! The team isn’t shy about the comparison but thinks that by better engaging with the community, and without the growth-at-all-costs requirements of being a public company, they can build something that takes better care of its users. If Digg does this right, the homepage will feel like Old Digg, and everything else might feel like Better Reddit.

Rose says he and Ohanian are both convinced — and both learned the hard way — that the real trick, the thing nobody has yet done properly, is to give the communities the tools they actually need to operate. This is where AI comes in. So much of a moderator’s job, Rose says, is just grunt work: fighting spam, reviewing obvious policy violations, litigating pointless fights. “How can we remove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers,” he says, “and convert what they do every day into more of a kind of ‘director of vibes, culture and community’ than someone that is just sitting there doing the laborious crappy stuff that comes in through the front door?” 

The new Digg, Rose says, will include lots of AI-forward ways to sort through and make decisions on content. He also hopes AI can be used for fun. “I’m just making stuff up here, but there’s everything from an AI agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon, to another one where you don’t allow a certain type of profanity and that’s automatically auto-moderated.” Users will be able to tap AI models to build stuff right in their communities, too. “If we can create more of a dynamic canvas where agents are layered on top to assist, to help, to do wild things, to create games, to do whatever that community wants them to do, then we have something,” Rose says. 

The new Digg, if the team does it right, should feel more like a community-driven art project than an old-school internet forum. But Rose and Mezzell both say the whole thing depends on doing what users want — and nothing else. “One of the things that I believe that made Digg, and makes Reddit, a special place on the internet,” Rose says, “is that there are humans behind the scenes with real opinions, real conversation, real stories that they find interesting. The second you start to sterilize that, you’re just an aggregator of information. You’re a fancy RSS reader with some voting on it.”

One big challenge, Mezzell says, is figuring out how to reward and promote users for doing good work. Digg won’t show how many followers you have because that creates bad incentives; same with competing to be the most-“Dugg” person on the platform. “There are all these very simple systems that we already have, for commenting systems and branching and all that stuff. But even if we start there, we cannot stop asking the question about how to give people the respect for being really insightful, for being really encouraging, for being really funny.” He doesn’t have a perfect answer for it yet, but he knows that’s key to making it work.

There’s a lot more that the new Digg team doesn’t have a perfect answer for yet. Rose and Mezzell both say, a few times each, that what’s launching today is essentially a prototype. It’ll have a homepage, a few sub-communities, some links, some comments, and that’s about it. The goal is to get people excited that Digg is back, and then both introduce them to the new platform and build it alongside them. “If you come on day one,” Rose says, it’s 99.9 percent nostalgia and you’re like, damn, this is like a slightly updated version of Digg that looks really cool.” Give it some time — maybe even just a few weeks, if the new team ships as fast as Mezzell promises — and it’ll be something different.

Volvo has pulled back the curtain on its upcoming ES90 electric sedan with 434 miles of range and a tech stack that includes Nvidia’s powerful Drive AGX Orin computer in a dual setup.

Volvo has been trickling news out about the ES90 over the past several weeks, but today’s announcement includes our first full look at the sedan and a full rundown on its specs, including an 800-volt architecture for fast charging and the aforementioned Nvidia system-on-a-chip.

The ES90 boasts Volvo’s longest range, fastest charging speed, and most advanced computing system of all its vehicles. The sedan will arrive with 700km of range (434.9 miles) based on the generous WLTP standard. (The EPA rating is likely to be less.)

The ES90 will come in three different variants. There’s the base model with a single motor mounted on the rear axle, with 245kW (329 horsepower) of power output and 354 lb-ft of torque. The dual-motor all-wheel drive version can put out 330kW (442hp) of power and 494 lb-ft of torque. And the dual-motor Performance ES90 can churn out 500kW (670hp) of power and 635 lb-ft of torque.

The single-motor trim sports a 92kWh battery, 88kWh of which is usable, and can accept up to 300kW of DC fast charging. Both dual-motor setups include 106kWh batteries (102kWh usable) and can draw in 350kW of fast charging.

The ES90 tops out at 112mph, as per Volvo’s policy of speed-limiting its vehicles. But the acceleration specs sound impressive, with a zero to 60mph time of 3.9 seconds for the Performance trim and 6.7 and 5.3 seconds, respectively, on the single- and dual-motor setups. 

In addition, the ES90 will showcase new battery management software, allowing it to gain 300km (186 miles) of range in just 10 minutes of charging, while a 10–80 percent charge will be completed in 20 minutes. The 800-volt system is unique in Volvo’s lineup, but it’s comparable to other fast-charging EVs, like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6.

The overall profile is tall and slightly boxy. Volvo said it wanted to purposefully blur the line between sedan and SUV, which is probably why the ES90 seems so reminiscent of the Polestar 2 fastback. (Polestar and Volvo are essentially cousins, both operating under the umbrella of parent company Geely.) Distinctively, it’s a high-riding sedan, with a height of 60.9 inches, placing it alongside other tall-ish sedans like the Toyota Crown (60.6 inches).

The ES90’s roofline is sleek, its door handles flush, and it has a lidar sensor mounted on the roof. The front end resembles the EX90, featuring Volvo’s signature “Thor’s hammer” LED headlights, with new C-shaped LED lights in the rear. There’s ample cargo space, with 424 liters of room that can grow to 733 liters with the rear seats folded down. The ES90 also features a 22-liter frunk (front trunk) for charging cable storage. The panoramic roof is electrochromic for adjustable transparency on sunny days, too. 

Like other Volvo EVs, the ES90 features Google’s built-in infotainment system, which includes native apps like Google Maps, Google Assistant, and Google Play. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Cockpit Platform powers the 5G system. And the five-inch instrument cluster resides alongside a larger 14.5-inch center screen display. 

Like the EX90 SUV, the ES90 is built on Volvo’s new Superset tech stack, which includes dual Nvidia computers with the ability to perform 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS). This will come in handy when managing functionalities such as “AI-based, state-of-the-art active safety features, car sensors and efficient battery management.” 

The ES90 is built on Volvo’s SPA2 architecture and will be the second vehicle, after the EX90, to be based on the Superset tech stack. Superset is a modular engineering platform that the company says will be used to make safer cars more efficiently and to improve them over time through over-the-air software updates.

This is Volvo’s sixth all-electric vehicle, joining the EX90 SUV, EM90 van (China only), EX40 SUV, EC40 crossover, and EX30 compact SUV. The Swedish automaker had said it would be 100 percent EV sales by 2030, but it recently updated that timeline to reflect the global slowdown in EV sales. Volvo is now saying that it will rely on a mix of hybrids and battery-electric vehicles to reach its new goal of selling “90 to 100 percent… electrified models” by 2030. 

The ES90 is an interesting addition, especially considering most US automakers have dropped sedans from their lineups in favor of trucks and SUVs. Volvo is hoping its electric sedan can fill a gap in the market, though it could prove difficult. Volkswagen recently canceled plans to sell its own electric sedan, the ID.7, in the US.

The ES90 will join the recently facelifted gas-powered S90 sedan, which starts in the US at around $59,000. Starting today, the EV version is available to order in most European countries, though Volvo has yet to announce when it will be available in the US.  The automaker also did not disclose the price.

“We will share additional details on the US ES90 offer at a later date, closer to customer deliveries,” Volvo spokesperson Sophia Durr said.

Cadillac is taking its large and can-charge electric Escalade IQ and making it just a bit longer to accommodate some more luggage and leg room for third-row passengers. The new version, called the Escalade IQL, now surpasses the length of the longest gas-powered Escalade, while also adopting the ICE version’s boxier silhouette. When it goes into production in mid-2025, it will be the longest SUV ever made — gas or electric. 

The Escalade IQL has an overall length of 228.5 inches, an inch-and-a-half longer than the gas-powered ESV. It’s also about 4.2 inches longer than the regular IQ, while keeping the rest of the dimensions the same. Compared to other three-row EVs, the electric Escalade IQL is longer than the 206.7-inch GMC Hummer EV SUV, the 200.8-inch Rivian R1S, the 197.2-inch Kia EV9, and the 195-inch Volkswagen ID Buzz.

You can tell the subtle difference between the IQ and IQL by looking at them from the sides: the IQ has small rear quarter windows bordering the rear passenger windows, while the IQL adds a body panel that separates the glass, which then is stretched across to the boxier rear hatch.

The new rear can accommodate slightly bigger suitcases and more stackable space. For third-row passengers, Cadillac says you get 4 inches of additional legroom (from 32.3 inches to 36.7) and an additional inch of headroom (from 37.2 inches to 38.2).

The IQL has a total of 24.2 cu.ft. of cargo space behind the third row and 75.4 cu.ft. with the third-row folded flat. That compares to 23.7 cu.ft. behind the third row of the standard IQ, and 69.1 cu.ft. with it folded. And don’t forget about the extra 12.2 cu.ft. of frunk (front trunk) cargo space you get with the Escalade’s “eTrunk” under the hood.

Cadillac revealed the original Escalade IQ electric SUV in 2023, introducing features such as a 55-inch pillar-to-pillar infotainment screen running Android Automotive OS. The IQL has a 205kWh battery pack with the same advertised 460 miles of range as the regular IQ, and can gain up to 116 miles of range in a 10-minute charge on 350kW DC fast chargers.

The Escalade IQL starts at $132,695 including destination charges and will go into production at GM’s Factory Zero plant in Detroit starting mid-2025.