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All the evidence revealed so far in Musk v. Altman

2026-05-01T17:22:26-04:00

The Musk v. Altman trial is underway, and that means exhibits, or the evidence to be presented in court, are being revealed piece by piece. So far, email exchanges, photos, and corporate documents are circulating from the earliest days of OpenAI - and from before the AI lab even had a name. Some high-level takeaways: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave OpenAI an in-demand supercomputer, Musk largely drafted OpenAI's mission and heavily influenced its early structure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared to want to lean heavily on Y Combinator for early support for OpenAI, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever worried about Musk's level of con …

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Your guide to sci-fi streaming season

2026-05-01T08:25:59-04:00

I haven't quite figured out the reason why, but for the last few years, summer has become the moment for new science fiction shows on streaming services. And 2026 isn't any different - aside from the fact that premiere dates seem to be moving up a little.

This year, the release schedule is nearly as full in the spring as it is in the summer, which should make it easier to check out everything you want to without having storylines overlap in your brain. In fact, a number of these shows are already streaming now: The alternate future of For All Mankind is currently in the midst of its penultimate season, as is the horror mystery box From. But …

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Christian content creators are outsourcing AI slop to gig workers on Fiverr

2026-05-01T15:23:22-04:00

In the beginning, platforms like Fiverr were places where people could hire freelancers to do specialized creative labor using skills that took years to develop. In the age of generative AI, though, many of these gig workers have embraced the technology in order to meet clients' demands. These workers' profiles emphasize that they can quickly (and cheaply) whip up images and videos of just about anything. But often, what their clients are looking for are dramatic animations inspired by the Christian Bible.

On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook it is very easy to stumble across AI-generated clips that retell stories from the Bible. Lik …

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Congress keeps kicking surveillance reform down the road

2026-04-30T16:59:58-04:00

Congress has reauthorized Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - but only for another 45 days. The extension is meant to give legislators more time to negotiate reforms to the controversial wiretapping bill. If the past few weeks are any indication of how future debates will go, however, we're in for a bumpy ride.

The House renewed Section 702 with minor reforms on Wednesday evening. The bill didn't include the hotly debated warrant requirement, but it did feature a provision prohibiting the Federal Reserve from issuing Central Bank Digital Currencies, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) described as a nonstar …

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With Saros, Housemarque makes a case for doing next-gen games differently

2026-04-30T15:00:45-04:00

It is generally frowned upon to care too much about appearances. We have a lot of little aphorisms discouraging this - books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. Vanity is a risk. Should one put a disproportionate effort into how a thing looks, then said work may very well be considered shallow. But in the world of big-budget video games? That's how you win.

Visual fidelity is video game shorthand for progress: how meticulously rendered a mountain is, how dynamically the snow behaves, how a player character raises their hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it just so. This pursuit …

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Meta is running get-rich-quick ads for its AI tools

2026-04-30T12:48:13-04:00

Manus, an AI company Meta acquired for $2 billion last year is running ads promising quick, easy money with AI: Find local businesses without websites or with bad websites, have AI build them one, then call them up and sell it to them.

As part of the campaign, Manus was paying content creators to build out Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts that promote its AI product as an easy, lucrative gig. (The creators' TikTok accounts were taken down after The Verge inquired about them.) Some of these videos would also appear as official ads for Manus, but the posts on the paid creator accounts themselves often obscured their ties to the company …

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How Adam Scott became an accidental horror movie star

2026-04-30T08:56:20-04:00

Adam Scott grew up watching horror movies at, as he describes it, "probably too young" an age. But he never set out to work specifically in the genre. Even still, horror seemed to follow him around from the very beginning. His first major film role was in Hellraiser IV in 1996. "It wasn't because I was a Hellraiser fan," he says. "It was because it was the job I got." Later, he took a starring role in Krampus not because it was horror, but because it evoked the kinds of '80s movies he grew up with, like Poltergeist and E.T. It may not have been intentional, but he's steadily built up a solid body of work in the genre, including leading the o …

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Elon Musk’s worst enemy in court is Elon Musk

2026-04-30T19:41:32-04:00

Just a simple country CEO who was being tricked by that sophisticated lawyer. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

About five hours into Elon Musk's testimony, I typed the following sentence into my notes: "I have never been more sympathetic to Sam Altman in my life."

Musk's direct testimony was an improvement over yesterday - even if his lawyer kept asking leading questions to cue him in how to answer. But that memory was immediately obliterated by an absolutely miserable cross-examination. For hours, Musk refused to answer yes or no questions with yes or no, occasionally "forgot" things he'd testified to in the morning, and scolded defense lawyer William Savitt. I watched a few jury members glance at each other. During one testy exchange, one woman wa …

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Microsoft is giving its Xbox employees an Xbox email address

2026-04-29T11:46:20-04:00

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wants everyone to know: "We are Xbox." Just last week, she scrapped Microsoft Gaming as the name of Microsoft's gaming division in favor of simply Xbox. Now, to reinforce that message, sources at Xbox tell me that all Xbox employees are getting an @xbox.com email address next month.

The new Xbox email address will replace an existing @microsoft.com address as the default way to send new emails, and employees will be able to opt-out and keep their Microsoft email address as the default send-from address instead. Mojang employees will also be given an @mojang.com email address, and both Xbox and Mojang employees will stil …

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Larry’s risky business

2026-04-30T08:09:40-04:00

Oracular spectacular? | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

If you want to know whether the AI bubble is bursting, there's only one publicly traded company that will tell you: Oracle.

That's right, the database company. Oracle has burned its boats and pivoted to AI, but not in any kind of usual way. It is not a foundation model builder like OpenAI or Anthropic, obviously. It's not quite a neocloud, though it has entered the same bare-metal business as CoreWeave. It is a software-as-a-service company that has made an audacious bet on a very specific future version of AI as Oracle's traditional business has gracefully declined. It is significantly older than any of its AI competitors, save Microsoft, …

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