It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflixâs latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon StÃ¥lenhagâs much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the filmâs leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a streamer that sees its subscribers as easily impressed dolts who hunger for slop.Â
While you can kind of see where some of the money went, itâs exceedingly hard to understand why Netflix reportedly spent upward of $300 million to produce what often reads like an idealized, feature-length version of the AI-generated âmoviesâ littering social media. With a budget that large and a cast so stacked, you would think that The Electric State might, at the very least, be able to deliver a handful of inspired set pieces and characters capable of leaving an impression. But all this clunker of a movie really has to offer is nostalgic vibes and groan-inducing product placement.
Set in an alternate history where Walt Disneyâs invention of simple automatons eventually leads to a devastating war, The Electric State centers Michelle (Millie Bobby …
OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.”
The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “burdensome requirements” from impacting innovation.
In its comment, Open claims that allowing AI companies to access copyrighted content would help the US “avoid forfeiting” its lead in AI to China, while calling out the rise of DeepSeek.
“There’s little doubt that the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] AI developers will enjoy unfettered access to data — including copyrighted data — that will improve their models,” OpenAI writes. “If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.”
Google, unsurprisingly, agrees. The company’s response similarly states that copyright, privacy, and patents policies “can impede appropriate access to data necessary for training leading models.” It adds that fair use policies, along with text and data mining exceptions, have been “critical” to training AI on publicly available data.
“These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation,” Google says.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the AI chatbot Claude, also submitted a proposal – but it doesn’t mention anything about copyrights. Instead, it asks the US government to develop a system to assess an AI model’s national security risks and to strengthen export controls on AI chips. Like Google and OpenAI, Anthropic also suggests that the US bolster its energy infrastructure to support the growth of AI.
Anthropic is one of the worldâs leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAIâs ChatGPT.
According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesnât plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. âI hope Claude reaches as many people as possible,â Krieger told me onstage at the HumanX AI conference earlier this week. âBut I think, [for] our ambitions, the critical path isn’t through mass-market consumer adoption right now.â
Instead, Krieger says Anthropic is focused on two things: building the best models; and what he calls âvertical experiences that unlock agents.â The first of these is Claude Code, Anthropicâs AI coding tool that Krieger says amassed 100,000 users within its first week of availability. He says there are more of these so-called agents for specific use cases coming this year and that Anthropic is working on âsmaller, cheaper modelsâ for developers. (And, yes, there are future versions of its biggest and most capable model, Opus, coming at some point, too.)
Krieger made his name as the cofounder of Instagram and then the news aggregati …
Amazon is discontinuing a feature that allowed users of some of its Echo smart speakers to choose not to send their voice recordings to the cloud. According to an email the company sent to users that was posted on Reddit, it will disable the feature that allowed select Echos to process Alexa requests locally on the device on March 28th, 2025.
The move appears to be connected to the launch of its generative AI-powered Alexa Plus, slated for later this month (March 28th, perhaps?). The email states, “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.”
Amazon confirmed the change in an email to The Verge. Spokesperson Lauren Raemhild provided the following statement: “The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers’ privacy and keep their data secure, and that’s not changing. We’re focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of tools and controls, including the option to not save their voice recordings at all. We’ll continue learning from customer feedback and building privacy features on their behalf.”
As she states, you’ll still be able to have Amazon delete voice recordings after they’ve been sent to the cloud. If you have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” option turned on, it will default to the “Don’t save recordings” setting on March 28th. This means your recordings will be sent to and processed in the cloud and then deleted after Alexa deals with the request.
If you haven’t heard of this option, it’s not a surprise. Local processing of voice recordings was only available on three Echo devices – Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 – and only for customers in the U.S. with devices set to English.
Still, it’s a shame the option is going away, as it was a feature many would have liked to see expanded to more devices, not taken away, especially for smart home users who may only use the voice assistant to turn their lights on or adjust their thermostat. But it seems Alexa’s future, and to be fair, most of its past, is all about the cloud.
In recent weeks, Apple has been unable to escape headlines about its slow progress with everything having to do with Siri and artificial intelligence. The company has officially delayed features first promised last June intended to modernize Siri and give Apple a much-needed boost in the AI race. We still don’t know when those Apple Intelligence capabilities will arrive, and if a recent all-hands meeting is anything to go by, neither does Apple itself.
Bloomberg has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He called the delay an “ugly” situation and sympathized with employees who might be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple’s decisions and Siri’s still-lackluster reputation. He also said it’s not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that’s the company’s current target, but “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” he told employees.
“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, according to Bloomberg’s report. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.”
The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple’s Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what’s currently on a user’s screen — even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they’ve all been punted to a TBD date.
Apple has not publicly commented on the situation beyond last week’s statement, when it said the advanced Siri capabilities were “taking longer than expected.” But Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking “intense personal accountability” for a predicament that’s drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation.
“Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” Walker said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.” He praised the team for its “incredibly impressive” work so far. “These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse,” he said of the delayed features.
So soon after Specter Divide, a multiplayer shooter developed by Mountaintop Studios, announced its pending shut down which will take its studio with it, is yet another live-service game going offline. Today, Star Wars: Hunters developer Zynga announced the game will be sunset on October 1st.
Hunters is a class-based arena shooter featuring original characters (or at least they seem original, who knows with folks named Babu Frik running around) from throughout the Star Wars universe. It had a soft launch in select countries in 2021, but didn’t get a global launch on mobile and the Nintendo Switch until June 2024. This means that the game officially lived a scant 16 months before it inevitably goes offline. That short time though is downright luxurious considering Specter Divide lasted roughly six months before it will shut down sometime in the next 30 days.
The developers do have some parting gifts for players before the galaxy winks out on Star Wars: Hunters, though. The current season will be extended an additional three weeks and the game will still release a new hero April 15th. Then the developers will keep the ranked leaderboards running until the game shuts down in October.
On Friday, Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, upped his investigations into Big Tech by sending subpoenas to 16 major tech companies, asking whether the federal government had pressured them into using artificial intelligence to “censor lawful speech” – a new front in his long-running quest to prove the tech industry is out to silence conservatives.
In letters accompanying the subpoenas, Jordan asked the companies – Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI – to preserve all documents between them and the Biden-Harris administration that showed “how and to what extent the executive branch coerced or colluded with artificial intelligence (AI) companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech.” The core of their claim: algorithms could be used to discriminate against right wingers not just online, but in any everyday use case for AI, from hiring practices to generative content.
Citing a report filed last December, in which the committee found several alleged examples of Biden officials “pressuring private companies to ‘advance equity,’ stop ‘algorithmic discrimination,’ and ‘mitigate the production of harmful and biased outputs,’” Jordan demanded they produce any and all emails with a third party, government or otherwise, between January 2020 and January 2025, “referring or relating to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation of the content, input, or output of an AI model, training dataset, algorithm, system, or product.”
The subpoenas are the latest move in the GOP’s long-running and innumerable investigations into whether tech companies were suppressing right-wing ideology on their platforms, and narrowed in on potential interference from the Biden administration over the past several years. But this inquiry is particularly vast: its broad request for any document that ever discussed AI content restrictions over the past five years, as well as its targeting of software companies that are not media platforms, such as Adobe, Nvidia and Palantir, represents the party’s escalation against the industry.
The new M4-powered MacBook Air only hit stores on March 12, but it’s already on sale. You can pick up the 13-inch entry-level configuration with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $949 ($50 off) at Amazon (at checkout) and Best Buy if you’re a My Best Buy Plus and My Best Buy Total member. The 15-inch base model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is also on sale for $1,049 ($50 off) at Amazon and Best Buy for My Best Buy Plus or Total members.
Even at full price, Apple’s new entry-level laptop offers a lot of value. It’s cheaper yet more capable than its predecessor, offering faster performance courtesy of Apple’s latest M4 chip. It also boasts double the base RAM at 16GB along with the MacBook Pro’s 12MP Center Stage webcam, which is sharper and offers a wider field of view. The M4 chip also allows you to connect two external monitors with the lid still open.
There’s a new skylight blue option, but otherwise the new Air shares the same thin and sleek design as its predecessor, along with all-day battery life and Wi-Fi 6E support. There are some tiny differences if you move up to the larger display, but not much. The 15-inch model continues to offer a six-speaker system over the 13-inch model’s four speakers, for example.
Google is finally moving on from Google Assistant.
The company will be upgrading “more” users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months,” according to a blog post. The classic Google Assistant “will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new downloads on mobile app stores” at some point “later this year.” (9to5Googlereports that phones running Android 9 or earlier and without at least 2GB of RAM will still be able to use the classic Assistant.)
“Additionally, we’ll be upgrading tablets, cars and devices that connect to your phone, such as headphones and watches, to Gemini,” Google says. “We’re also bringing a new experience, powered by Gemini, to home devices like speakers, displays and TVs.”
The company says it will share more details “in the next few months.” (I would guess that Google will announce information around that new experience at Google I/O in May.) In the meantime, “Google Assistant will continue to operate on these devices,” according to Google.
Google initially launched Google Assistant in 2016. Now, though, Gemini has become the catch-all branding for many of Google’s AI and assistant-like efforts, so it’s not too surprising that the company is officially retiring Google Assistant.
Update, March 14th: Added details from 9to5Google.
Google releases a lot of products, but it shuts down a lot of them, too. Some didn’t deserve to be discontinued (we pine for the days of Reader and Inbox), and some probably weren’t long for this world from the start. (What was Google Wave supposed to be, anyway?) The company actually used to shut down products with quarterly “spring cleanings,” but now, it just does so whenever it’s time for another product to be put out to pasture.
Follow along here for all our coverage of everything Google sends to the graveyard.
Reddit is going rolling out a feature that lets you hide an ad from your feed for “at least a year,” the company says in a post spotted by Ars Technica.
When the update is available to you, you’ll be able to see the “Hide” option for “any ads that appear in feeds, such as your home or subreddit feed,” Reddit says.
The option looks like an eye with a line through it, as shown in a screenshot. When an ad becomes visible again after you hide it, you can re-hide it if you’d like, according to the company.
Reddit says it’s rolling out the update this week that ads the feature and that it will “gradually become available across iOS, Android, and www.reddit.com over the next several weeks.”
Last year, Reddit added filters that let users limit ads from “sensitive” categories like alcohol, dating, gambling, and politics and activism.
A federal judge has once again blocked California’s landmark online child safety law from taking effect. In a ruling on Thursday, US District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a preliminary injunction in favor of NetChoice, saying the technology trade group’s claims that the law violates the First Amendment would likely succeed.
The law, called the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022 and covered online platforms “likely” to be accessed by children. Along with restricting the use of dark patterns, the law would require these platforms to estimate the age of users and apply specific privacy settings for children. NetChoice argued that its requirements are too vague, as it asked platforms to make “subjective” decisions about content and could have a chilling effect on free speech.
Judge Labson Freeman previously blocked CAADCA in 2023, a ruling the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals partially upheld last year. As noted by Courthouse News, the ruling later returned to Judge Labson Freeman to make a decision on the remaining parts of the law. NetChoice said this decision will block the “entirety” of CAADCA.
“Even if the Court were to accept that the Act advances a compelling State interest in protecting the privacy and well-being of children, the State has not shown that the CAADCA is narrowly tailored to serve that interest,” Judge Labson Freeman writes. “The Act applies to all online content likely to be accessed by consumers under the age of 18, and imposes significant burdens on the providers of that content.”
NetChoice, which represents companies like Meta, Netflix, X, and Amazon, has won severalrequests to block child safety laws in states across the US. It recently sued to block Maryland’s Kids Code law, which would prevent kids from accessing inappropriate content online.
“While protecting children online is a goal we all share, California’s Speech Code is a trojan horse for censoring constitutionally protected but politically disfavored speech,” Chris Marchese, NetChoice’s director of litigation, said in a press release. “This decision puts other states on notice that censorship regimes masquerading as ‘privacy protections’ will not survive judicial review.”
When I saw iRobotâs latest robot vacuums announced this week, my first thought was, âThese donât look like Roombas; they look like midrange models from Roborock, Ecovacs, and Dreame.â Of course, as the original robot vacuum manufacturer, iRobotâs products likely inspired the design of most of its competitors. But Roombas have always had a uniqueness that sets them apart from the crowd.
With these new models, the company is capitulating to the homogeneity of the current crop of vacuums, sacrificing many of its signature features and moving from high-end to middle-of-the-road in a quest to recapture a bigger slice of the market.
Long known for its innovation in home robotics, iRobot is marketing its new line as âbreakthrough new products.â But the only notable innovation Iâve seen so far is an onboard dust compacting bin. The rest is largely a reheat of every midrange robot vacuum on the market today.
Then, a day after launching eight new robot vacuums â the biggest product launch in its history â iRobot warned that it was in such dire financial straits that it could shut down in 12 months. Suddenly, it all became clear.
Vampire Survivors isn’t just a bullet hell survival game where you maneuver around simple 8-bit stages and kill thousands of monstrous enemies — it’s also a juggernaut of an indie title that blew up in popularity enough to even get the green light on a TV show spinoff.
First launched on Steam in December 2021 under Early Access, the game had a meteoric rise in 2022, becoming one of the consistently most played games on Valve’s Steam Deck and winning the BAFTA Award for Best Game (yes, it beat Elden Ring).
Several of us here at The Verge are fully Vampire-pilled, obsessively playing it each time a new content update or DLC drops. There’s just something so satisfying about those gem pickup sounds.
Check out our ongoing coverage of the unstoppable indie.
Zombies, Run! maker Six to Start has laid off nearly its entire staff. | Image: Six to Start
Six to Start, the company behind Zombies, Run! and Marvel Move, has laid off all but two of its staff, TheVerge has learned. The news was delivered last week to staffers in a Zoom call, in which they were told that parent company OliveX could no longer afford to keep Six to Start afloat and would shut down the company if they can’t find a buyer. Laid-off staffers were also served redundancy notices, which The Verge has confirmed.
The ZRX: Zombies, Run! app is an immersive fitness game that plops walkers and runners into audio-based storytelling. When enemies, be they the undead or Marvel villains, “chase” you, you’re encouraged to pick up speed. At the end of an episode, you can also collect items to trade for badges or in-game buildings. First founded in 2012, the app says it has about 10 million users worldwide.
Such immersive storytelling games, especially Marvel Move, are expensive to produce. They involve writing storylines, hiring voice actors to perform the material, and artists to create graphics. One source with knowledge on the matter noted that it’s unlikely the app will completely shut down for now, as there are plenty of loyal Zombies, Run! players and subscribers. Instead, it’s likely OliveX is trying to massively lower costs by slashing or completely pausing new content, relying on the hundreds of episodes still in the archive. OliveX is apparently actively looking for buyers, and there may already be interested parties, the source says.
OliveX first acquired Six to Start in 2021, but another source, speaking on condition of anonymity, claims Six to Start staffers clashed with both OliveX and its owner, Animoca Brands. The games’ anti-capitalist themes were at odds with the parent companies’ aims to create crypto and NFT projects. The source claims that working under OliveX was “agony.” To date, there have been no NFTs within any of Six to Start games.
It’s unclear what will happen for ZRX: Zombies, Run! subscribers in the short-term. While there is an extensive library of content, part of the draw was regular releases of new episodes. The Verge reached out to OliveX and Six to Start for comment, but did not immediately receive responses.
Briefly, here’s what’s up with Tesla over the past few weeks: its stock is down more than 50 percent since December; Tesla sales in California are plummeting; Cybertruck deliveries are reportedly paused because the vehicles are falling apart; protesters are demonstrating outside Tesla showrooms across the country; and Tesla owners are selling their cars to avoid getting called Nazis.
But that’s not all. According to data from YouGov, a market research firm, the public’s impression of the company has never been worse, reaching its lowest point since YouGov began tracking Tesla in 2016. YouGov asks members of the public daily questions about Tesla to gauge overall sentiment. (Sherwood first reported the data.)
As of March 12th, the net impression for respondents across the political spectrum is -12.8. “Impression” measures whether consumers have a positive or negative impression of a given brand. The company fares even worse with liberals, with a -35.5 net impression. Moderates sit at a -9.2 net impression. Conservatives are the only group with a positive net impression of Tesla, measured at 7.5.
YouGov also asks whether respondents would consider purchasing a Tesla. According to YouGov data, around 8 percent of liberals indicated they would consider purchasing a Tesla, down from 12 percent at the beginning of 2022. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the percentage of conservatives who say they would consider buying a Tesla has increased from 6.7 percent to 8.4 percent. Even those numbers are lagging: when looking at the average response rate for all carmakers, 10 percent of the general population say they would consider buying a vehicle.
As his company is in free fall, billionaire owner Elon Musk is attempting to cash in on his close relationship with the White House. On Tuesday, in what can only be described as an advertising event, President Donald Trump turned the White House driveway into a pop-up Tesla showroom, reading from a Tesla sales pitch and vowing to purchase a vehicle. Musk’s proximity to the Trump administration follows the hundreds of millions of dollars he poured into getting Trump elected. On the same day as the Tesla stunt, The New York Timesreported that Musk has indicated he wants to throw in another $100 million into other Trump groups.
Ford has hired a former Twitch, PlayStation, and Lululemon executive to lead the automaker’s digital services business. Mike Aragon, who previously led as CEO of Lululemon’s defunct Mirror home workout machine, is joining Ford as president of “integrated services.”
The company says Aragon will lead a team “responsible for building out and marketing a suite of services and experiences” across Ford Pro (business and fleet), Ford Blue (core passenger vehicles), and Ford Model e (electric vehicles). The company says it has more than 800,000 paid subscriptions across its lineup, including for services like its BlueCruise hands-free driving system and fleet management software.
In a press release, Ford CEO Jim Farley says Aragon will help build the company’s early success with integrated services and has “a proven track record of helping great hardware companies create valuable digital ecosystems.” That track record includes the PlayStation Network service and leading Twitch’s content teams.
Aragon is filling a role previously held by Peter Stern, a former Apple services vice president, who helped build Apple’s paid subscription offerings including Apple TV Plus, Fitness Plus, News Plus, and more. Farley had hyped Stern’s hiring in 2023 and mentioned that the industry’s “biggest change” is getting into “digital product and physical services.” Paid subscriptions have become the biggest revenue drivers for companies such as Apple. Stern is now CEO of Peloton, whose key product is a bike with a subscription service.
Newsmax has paid $20 million to Smartmatic so far, with plans to pay off the remainder by July. The settlement also includes the option to buy shares in Newsmax, which plans to list on the NYSE on March 31. Smartmatic sued Newsmax in 2021 after the network aired false allegations that its voting machines helped Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election. It claimed Newsmax “deliberately disseminated a continuous stream of falsehoods,” harming Smartmatic’s business.
Newsmax still faces another lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion. “While Newsmax Media is vigorously defending the Dominion suit, an unfavorable outcome in the matter could have a material adverse effect on the Company’s financial position, results of operations and cash flows,” Newmax’s filing reads.
After a season 3 finale that left open plenty of possibilities for a return, it’s now confirmed: Ted Lasso is coming back. The Apple TV Plus sitcom is getting a fourth season, though it appears to be still fairly early in development.
In an interview on the New Heights podcast, star Jason Sudeikis confirmed that season 4 is being written now, and that it will follow the eponymous coach as he leads a new women’s soccer team. Aside from Sudeikis, there’s no other word on what characters might be returning, although much of the creative team will be back, including writer (and Roy Kent actor) Brett Goldstein.
“As we all continue to live in a world where so many factors have conditioned us to ‘look before we leap,” Sudeikis said in a statement. “In season 4, the folks at AFC Richmond learn to ‘leap before they look,’ discovering that wherever they land, it’s exactly where they’re meant to be.”
Ted Lasso remains one of the biggest hits for Apple TV Plus, so the return isn’t too surprising. And the news comes as Apple is on a steady run of returning series, including the second seasons of both Silo and Severance, alongside the fourth season of Mythic Quest.
There’s a lot to explore in Google Maps, but you may not always know where to look. Itâs great if you’re trying to drive through a crowded city or find out which local coffee shop has the best-rated bagels, but there are also other, lesser-known features worth investigating. These include historical imagery on Google Street View.
Google Maps actually makes it easy to switch between different time periods. On either desktop or mobile, you can go back to when Google’s Street View cars first started patrolling the streets â in some areas, you can go back as far as 2007 â and see how roads and places looked years ago.
So whether you have a practical purpose or just want to take a nostalgia trip, here’s how to go about it. These instructions apply to the latest versions of Google Maps for the web, Android, and iOS.
Street View on desktop
If you’re using Google Maps in a desktop browser, you can get to Street View by clicking anywhere on the map where Street View is available (which is most roads and famous landmarks), then clicking the Street View panel at the bottom. (It will look like a small square photo with a curved arrow.)
Alternatively, select a specific destination …
