Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different
Arc Search browses the web for you, and then builds you the webpage you wanted. That’s the idea, anyway. | Image: The Browser Company / David Pierce
A few minutes ago, I opened the new Arc Search app and typed, “What happened in the Chiefs game.” That game, the AFC Championship, had just wrapped up. Normally, I’d Google it, click on a few links, and read about the game that way. But in Arc Search, I typed the query and tapped the “Browse for me” button instead.
Arc Search, the new iOS app from The Browser Company, which has been working on a browser called Arc for the last few years, went to work. It scoured the web — reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today — and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later. I got the headline: Chiefs win. I got the final score, the key play, a “notable event” that also just said the Chiefs won, a note about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, a bunch of related links, and some more bullet points about the game.
Basically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company’s big idea about the future of web browsers — that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren’t different things. They’re all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app.
Arc Search is part of a bigger shift for the Arc browser, too. The company’s mobile app has until now been mostly a companion app to the desktop, a way to access your open tabs and not much else. With Arc starting to roll out to Windows users, The Browser Company is also getting ready to roll out its own cross-platform syncing system, called Arc Anywhere, and to bring some of these AI-powered features to Arc on other platforms. (Eventually, CEO Josh Miller says, Arc Search will just be called Arc and will be the company’s only mobile app.)
The “Browse for me” feature isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty impressive. When I search “What’s Pete Davidson up to,” for instance, it gives me some broad-strokes information about his recent film and breakup news (very useful!), links to his Wikipedia page, and a couple of news sites’ tag pages for Pete Davidson (meh), and then a bunch of information about his recent personal and professional goings-on. Like many AI tools, Arc Search isn’t great at citing its source, so I can’t completely trust that Davidson and Chase Sui Wonders actually broke up, but there is a “Dive Deeper” section at the bottom with a bunch of links. Most of those links are the same generic stuff, like a “Pete Davidson’s net worth” webpage that I’m confident isn’t right, but there’s good stuff here too.
The system has improved a lot even in the time I’ve been testing the app, and Miller says there’s plenty more room for Arc Search to get smarter. (The underlying AI models come from a mix of OpenAI and others.) Arc has been deeply invested in AI for a while, and some of its Arc Max features have been a hit with users. As the whole industry of generative AI tools improves, so will Arc.
I like Arc Search as a browser, too — it’s simple and fast and always opens to an empty search box, which feels right on mobile. But it does put The Browser Company in the middle of a lot of complicated AI discussions. Will the company work with the publishers whose information it’s using to populate these answers? How will Arc’s AI cite its sources? How personalized should these things be? How personalized can they be? A search like this is bound to be expensive; will Arc Search be a paid product over time? The company hasn’t shared much about its plans on these fronts yet, but there are a lot of questions to be answered.
But from a pure product perspective, this feels closer to the way AI search should work than anything I’ve tried. Products like Copilot and Perplexity.AI are cool, but they’re fundamentally just chatbots with web access. Arc Search imagines something else entirely: an AI that explores websites by building you a new one every time you ask.
Next week, millions of people will start typing the internet’s favorite phrase: “What time does the Super Bowl start.” I already know, because I clicked “Browse for me,” and I also now know where the game is, how to watch it, and to be sure and clear my schedule for Usher at halftime. That’s a pretty good search result.
Ring to Stop Allowing Police to Request Videos From Security Cameras Ring, a maker of internet-connected cameras that is owned by Amazon, said the police could no longer ask people to share video recordings using the company’s app, Neighbors.
Netflix is different now — and there’s no going back
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
The past two years have been a whirlwind of changes at Netflix — and it’s all to transform the company into a revenue-driving machine that outlives other streamers.
For about a decade, it seemed like Netflix wouldn’t stop growing. The company became synonymous with the idea of streaming itself: cozy nights in and binge-watching, setting a high standard for the rest of the industry. The company released a mountain of original content as its subscriber count only continued to soar, bringing its market cap to a peak of more than $300 billion in 2021.
But executives made some complete reversals when the company started shedding subscribers in 2022, and nothing’s been the same since. Netflix had to make changes — and fast — if it wanted to keep investors happy. That year, Netflix did something co-founder Reed Hastings continuously rejected: it launched a cheaper, ad-supported tier with the goal of attracting a new pool of subscribers, while cashing in on the money earned from advertisers.
Despite a slow start, Netflix’s ad-supported tier garnered 5 million subscribers in just six months. The plan is now one of Netflix’s most popular tiers, as its latest earnings report revealed that 40 percent of new subscribers are choosing the cheaper option. Netflix has only continued building out the plan, adding 1080p video and the ability to watch two streams simultaneously. But the company’s plan to reverse a dwindling subscriber base didn’t end there.
The streamer took things a step further by cracking down on password sharing, something Netflix is now notoriously known for embracing in a 2017 tweet. The move didn’t do much to improve morale in a subscriber base hit with frequent price hikes, and yet, it still seems like it’s working in Netflix’s favor. Shortly after the start of the crackdown, Netflix said paid sharing resulted in more signups than cancellations and also led to higher revenue.
Netflix has only continued to push the envelope with another price hike last fall (its third in three years). It also stopped letting subscribers sign up for its cheapest, $11.99 per month ad-free plan. It’s now moving to get rid of the plan completely for those who already signed up as part of its attempt to push users toward its $6.99 per month ad-supported plan or its $15.49 per month standard tier.
While that might seem counterintuitive to point users to the least expensive tier, ads are a big part of Netflix’s business now.
Last year, the company said it already saw a higher revenue per customer on its ad-supported plan, as opposed to its $15.49 ad-free plan, which means its $11.99 per month basic plan likely isn’t doing much for Netflix’s bottom line. During an earnings call this week, co-CEO Greg Peters said the company’s top priority in its advertising business is “scale.” To Netflix, that means “making the ads plan more attractive” and “shifting our plans and pricing structure and other places where we think it’s appropriate.”
Then there’s Netflix’s $5 billion deal for WWE Monday Night Raw. Sources tell CNBC that Netflix won’t show ads during Raw for subscribers to its ad-free tier. If true, users on Netflix’s $6.99 plan would still have commercials during the three-hour-long show, creating yet another revenue driver for the streamer.
“WWE content is used to a younger demographic that allows Netflix to reach perhaps portions of the greater audience that it will not be able to reach through lower price alone,” Paul Erickson, the founder and principal of Erickson Strategy & Insights, tells The Verge. “When viewed against their other recent move to eliminate the lowest priced ads-free tier, I would say that they are looking to, much like the rest of the industry… improve their bottom lines.”
And Monday Night Raw isn’t your traditional type of sports broadcast — it’s “sports entertainment,” as Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos put it on the company’s last earnings call. That’s a plus for Netflix, according to Erickson, because it increases engagement, meaning “people who watch it tend to keep watching.” Erickson also points out that, unlike traditional sports, WWE isn’t seasonal, so Netflix can keep streaming it throughout the entirety of the 10 years it signed up for — and users interested in watching will stay subscribed without offseason breaks that can prompt cancellations.
All of these changes add up to a very different Netflix than the one we saw a few years ago. Netflix isn’t being shy about what it’s doing, either, in part because it can’t be. After years of vying for subscribers, streaming services now need to prove that they’re actually profitable. That has led streamers — not just Netflix — to issue price hikes and combine their services into a singular app, like Max and Disney Plus with Hulu. “Netflix is very aware of the fact that they’re one of the very few must-have streaming brands for a lot of households,” Erickson says. “They need to keep that title as a must-subscribe service even in the face of aggressive competition.”
Netflix is no longer synonymous with streaming partly because it’s not the only game in town anymore. But even the Netflix that exists today is a far cry from what it once was, and it’s bound to keep pushing further away from that original vision. That ideal of a streamer was buoyed by an ever-rising stock price, which has since come back down to reality. As for what that future means for streaming — whether it will soon become a mixture of live and on-demand content with ads — one thing is clear: Netflix’s rapid evolution is allowing the company to stay ahead in a more competitive industry than ever, and there’s no turning back from here.
A star creator’s go-to travel gear
Image: William Joel / The Verge
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 23, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I also have for you a new show from the Silicon Valley creator, a(nother) new calendar app, the hottest new game on the market, a camera worth lusting over, and much more. Let’s get to it.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, forward it to them, and tell them to subscribe here.)
The Drop
Masters of the Air. Okay, so, I need you to clear your weekend schedule. Because first, you’re going to rewatch Band of Brothers, which is exactly as good as you remember. Then, you’re going to watch The Pacific, finally, which you kind of forgot about until recently. Then, you’re going to fire up Apple TV Plus and watch this show, the newest in the kinda-series. Sound good? Good. See you Monday.
Lumiere. Google Research just kind of quietly dropped a new image-to-video AI model, which it calls “a space-time diffusion model for video generation,” which is an extremely cool thing to call it. As far as I can tell, you can’t actually use it yet, but its results look pretty impressive.
The Hasselblad 907X & CFV 100C. Quite the name, and quite the price — $8,200! — but also quite the camera. As smartphone cameras continue to eat everything, I love watching high-end cameras get even more beautiful, even more impressive, and even more… real? Non-AI-y? Whatever you call it, it’s all camera and no shenanigans, and I love it. (Also, my colleague Becca Farsace made a super fun video about this thing.)
The mint Pixel 8. I own a black iPhone, and it’s boring and lame and I wish it looked a lot more like this. Bring back phones with cool, vibrant, unusual colors! I don’t know that I’d buy this one — I mean, Pixel 9 leaks are already happening — but I dig the look.
Palworld. Technically, I should have mentioned this last week, but it became such a phenomenon this week that we just have to talk about it. Pokemon! With guns! And dubious legal standing! This game is on a historic popularity run, has a weird road ahead of it, and you better believe I will be putting in some hours this weekend.
In the Know. About once a day, I wish Silicon Valley would come back to HBO. This is the closest I’m gonna get, I think: Mike Judge and Zach Woods made another satire show, only this time, it’s animated and about NPR. I’ve only seen the first episode, which feels extremely “internet in 2024”-y. In a good way. Mostly.
Transcripts for Apple Podcasts. I’ve been a very happy Pocket Casts user for a long time, and this feature — which generates transcripts for every episode you listen to and scrolls them live like they’re song lyrics — is the first thing I’ve ever been jealous of. Every podcast app should do this.
Setups
Last week, I asked you to share what you use to read the news. Or not even news, really, just where you go when you want to know what’s new, what’s going on, what’s the haps. (Sorry for saying “what’s the haps.”) I’ve gotten some great answers and thoughts, and next week, we’re going to dive into that — keep ’em coming to installer@theverge.com. Tell me everything.
This week, I want to do something a little different. On The Vergecast this week, I talked to Ali Abdaal, a creator and author (and doctor!), all about his new book, Feel Good Productivity, and what it means to be a productive and happy and fulfilled person on the internet. Or if it’s even possible.
At the end of our chat, we talked a bit about Ali’s new life as a digital nomad and the gear he’s using to make everything work while he’s on the road. That bit didn’t make it into The Vergecast, but I figured I’d share here. So here’s Ali Abdaal’s setup for life as a creator on the road:
In one cube: a Sony A7S III camera. “My main filming angle.”
In the other cube: a Sony A7C. “With a 50mm lens, with an extra lens. That’s my photo camera, and it means if I want to do a podcast, I have double cameras, double angles.”
A Falcon Eyes Rollflex light. “It’s a rollable LED panel with a softbox that folds down into like a third of a half of a suitcase. People are always like, ‘Whoa, how does your camera look so good?’ And it’s because of the light. That light is incredible.”
A Manfrotto Nano light stand. “Which weighs almost nothing.”
Along with all of that, there’s also the requisite set of cables and dongles and an extension cord. Ali says the whole thing just manages to get underneath the 50-pound limit for checked luggage. He’s also carrying a 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro in a Peak Design Everyday Sling. And in the course of our chat, I convinced him not to throw it all away and buy a giant gaming laptop, which he seems to desperately want to do. I told him to just get a Switch instead.
Screen share
One of my favorite new apps in a while officially launched this week. It’s called Amie, and it’s this delightfully designed, slightly bonkers take on managing your time. And after talking to Dennis Müller, Amie’s founder and CEO, I learned he’s up to some really interesting stuff in the calendar space.
I also learned Dennis has strong feelings about software design and how we ought to interact with all our digital stuff. So I asked him to share his homescreen, guessing it would be carefully curated and nicely designed. Other than one outrageously long folder name that makes me itchy to look at, I was right.
Here’s Dennis’ homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:
The phone: iPhone 15 Pro, titanium.
The wallpaper: Apple’s weather one, I LOVE the ambience it provides. I think that design will move a lot more into this direction (and also align with what Brian Chesky said about bringing more depth into design that is unequal to skeuomorphism).
The apps: Photos, Health, Google Maps, Safari, Dennis, Spotify, Chrome, Apple Maps, Amie.
Especially notable is probably my JOY folder. As the name says, they’re there because they create a feeling of joy for me. Often not functionally, but more through their design, interactions, etc. Some of the apps inside are:
Noto is a lovely indie note-taking app built by a Pinterest engineer. Very interesting scroll interactions and overall interesting information hierarchy.
Haptic is a small app designed by my friend Alexey Sekachov. He is one of the best designers I know.
Ice Rage is a random old game I love. Hasn’t been updated for many years and is still GOATed.
Honk and Family. Benji Taylor (and team) are setting the bar on design, especially UI and interaction.
Otherwise:
Dennis, an app I built for myself. I believe modern artists use software, not paint. It’s an app with the simplest interface ever. It uses your camera, and there are no buttons. You can press anywhere on the screen, and that will record a 0.2-second clip. You keep doing that until you have ⇐10s collected. You can export it into a jump-cut video, auto-underlaid with music (so the cuts happen on beat). I want to build two apps as artwork with no other aspiration: one called Dennis, the other will be a game called Müller. I think it’s a bit sad people don’t put their name on their creations anymore. This may have actually lowered the bar for quality.
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Emailinstaller@theverge.comor message +1 203-570-8663 with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week.
“Loved the first episode of Delicious in Dungeon on Netflix — beautifully drawn, delightfully unhinged, absolutely earnest.” – Jordan
“Something dead simple but so helpful — a shared Reminders Smart List on iOS. My gf and I moved in last fall and wanted an easy way to keep track of groceries as we alternate who goes. Nice use of AI without trying to be more than a shopping list.” – Connor
“I was looking for a new comfort show, so I have started watching Superstore. It’s an incredibly funny and heartwarming show. And it’s very addictive.” – Tirth
“Luck be a Landlord. I’ve been spending too much time playing this silly game. It’s a perfect 10-minute break game.” – Tara
“Started back my (however-many-I-lost-count) rewatch of Psych, with the added benefit of increased playback speed on my iPad.” – Sean
“I’m really enjoying the memoir Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs! Steve Jobs’ daughter shares a personal, more down-to-earth experience with the person the world idolizes. I think it humanizes him, which doesn’t necessarily detract from his impact on the world but makes it more well-rounded. It’s been very compelling!” – Ben
“If your jam is videos of experts showing you their process, I strongly recommend Baumgartner Restoration on YouTube.” – Gaetan
“The iOS game QSWaterMelon : Monkey Land has been taking over my life for the past couple of weeks — it’s very intuitive but has more strategy than first appears and is insanely addictive. My mom, who has never played a video game in her life, is hooked!” – Mohsin
“I am currently reading SuperBetter, which is a book about the power of games and how a gameful approach to life would do us good. Also, I have been watching Citizen Khan, a British comedy show about a British Pakistani named Mr. Khan.” – Clive
“Really been enjoying building and rebuilding my Neo70s, in-stock FRL TKL keyboards.” – Noah
“For anyone else that is dropping Castro in the wake of its recent troubles, I’d like to recommend Airshow. While not a direct replacement for Castro’s Inbox, I’ve been able to approximate that feature with Airshow’s playlists. It took some work, but I’m happy with it!” – Mike
Signing off
This week is the 40th anniversary of the original Macintosh launch, which is a pretty cool milestone for a pretty cool computer. I’ve been watching Mac stuff all week: the launch event itself, the epic 1984 ad, MKBHD’s fun “Retro Tech” episode on the Macintosh, a two-hour retrospective with some of the people who helped build the thing, and more. There is so much tech history inside this one little computer, it’s wild.
Also, everyone’s been sharing stories about their first Macs, so here’s mine. I grew up on Windows, and when I decided I wanted a Mac, I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so I went on Craigslist and bought a Power Mac G4 Cube. I think I paid like $150 for it. This was in 2009, when the Cube was already seven years old. It barely worked, looked so cool, and I loved it to bits. I’ve always had a Mac around ever since — but none are cooler than the Cube.
X plans to create a content moderation ‘headquarters’ in Austin
Image: The Verge
X says it will hire 100 full-time employees for a new trust and safety office in Austin, Texas, according to a Saturday report by Bloomberg. The plan comes, as the article notes, just a few days before CEO Linda Yaccarino’s scheduled January 31st hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding X’s handling of child sexual exploitation moderation.
The team would reportedly focus mainly on CSE and would be the first proper trust and safety team since Elon Musk gutted it shortly after purchasing the platform formerly known as Twitter. X updated a blog post about its CSE moderation approach to mention the new office yesterday, as well, though it doesn’t reveal what the new team will be doing, nor when the office will open.
The company’s business operations head, Joe Benarroch, told Bloomberg that the team will also help with other moderation enforcement, such as those forbidding hate speech. A content moderation job posting for X in Austin says moderators will investigate issues like “spam and fraud” and provide customer support.
Satya Nadella says the explicit Taylor Swift AI fakes are ‘alarming and terrible’
Laura Normand / The Verge
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has responded to a controversy over sexually explicit AI-made fake images of Taylor Swift. In an interview with NBC Nightly News that will air next Tuesday, Nadella calls the proliferation of nonconsensual simulated nudes “alarming and terrible,” telling interviewer Lester Holt that “I think it behooves us to move fast on this.”
In a transcript distributed by NBC ahead of the January 30th show, Holt asks Nadella to react to the internet “exploding with fake, and I emphasize fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift.” Nadella’s response manages to crack open several cans of tech policy worms while saying remarkably little about them — which isn’t surprising when there’s no surefire fix in sight.
I would say two things: One, is again I go back to what I think’s our responsibility, which is all of the guardrails that we need to place around the technology so that there’s more safe content that’s being produced. And there’s a lot to be done and a lot being done there. But it is about global, societal — you know, I’ll say, convergence on certain norms. And we can do — especially when you have law and law enforcement and tech platforms that can come together — I think we can govern a lot more than we think— we give ourselves credit for.
Microsoft might have a connection to the faked Swift pictures. A 404 Media report indicates they came from a Telegram-based nonconsensual porn-making community that recommends using the Microsoft Designer image generator. Designer theoretically refuses to produce images of famous people, but AI generators are easy to bamboozle, and 404 found you could break its rules with small tweaks to prompts. While that doesn’t prove Designer was used for the Swift pictures, it’s the kind of technical shortcoming Microsoft can tackle.
But AI tools have massively simplified the process of creating fake nudes of real people, causing turmoil for women who have far less power and celebrity than Swift. And controlling their production isn’t as simple as making huge companies bolster their guardrails. Even if major “Big Tech” platforms like Microsoft’s are locked down, people can retrain open tools like Stable Diffusion to produce NSFW pictures despite attempts to make that harder. Far fewer users might access these generators, but the Swift incident demonstrates how widely a small community’s work can spread.
There are other stopgap options — like social networks limiting the reach of nonconsensual imagery or, apparently, Swiftie-imposed vigilante justice against people who spread them. (Does that count as “convergence on certain norms”?) For now, though, Nadella’s only clear plan is putting Microsoft’s own AI house in order.
Fossil is quitting smartwatches
The Fossil Gen 6 Wellness Edition. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Fossil Group has decided to call it quits on smartwatches.
The company announced this afternoon that it would leave the smartwatch business and redirect resources to its less-smart goods instead. The company has been one of the most prolific makers of Wear OS smartwatches over the years, and its absence will leave a large gap in the market.
“As the smartwatch landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years, we have made the strategic decision to exit the smartwatch business,” Fossil spokesperson Amanda Castelli tells The Verge. “Fossil Group is redirecting resources to support our core strength and the core segments of our business that continue to provide strong growth opportunities for us: designing and distributing exciting traditional watches, jewelry, and leather goods under our own as well as licensed brand names.”
This means that the Gen 6, which first launched in 2021, will be the last Fossil smartwatch. Castelli says the company will continue to keep existing Wear OS watches updated “for the next few years.”
This shouldn’t come as a huge shock if you’ve been paying attention to Fossil the past few months. Some Reddit users had been reporting Fossil retail employees as saying Fossil was pulling out of the business, while others on the platform claiming “insider” knowledge said the company was waiting for a new chipset. The company regularly put out smartwatches through Wear OS’s toughest years and was often a permanent fixture at CES. However, the company was notably absent from the show earlier this month. What’s more, Fossil was expected to announce news of a new Gen 7 featuring the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Plus platform in 2023 — however, it was nothing but crickets the entire year. Well, now we know why.
Fake Explicit Taylor Swift Images Swamp Social Media Fans of the star and lawmakers condemned the images, probably generated by artificial intelligence, after they were shared with millions of social media users.
OpenAI cures GPT-4 ‘laziness’ with new updates
Illustration: The Verge
In a blog post, OpenAI said the updated GPT-4 Turbo “completes tasks like code generation more thoroughly than the previous preview model and is intended to reduce cases of ‘laziness’ where the model doesn’t complete a task.”
The company, however, did not explain what it updated.
Some ChatGPT users recently complained about the chatbot frequently refusing to complete prompted tasks and blamed the lack of updates to GPT-4. However, OpenAI’s update is for GPT-4 Turbo, a version of the more widely available GPT-4 that was trained on information as recent as April 2023 and is only available in a preview. Those using GPT-4, which learned from data available prior to September 2021, may still experience the same laziness issues.
OpenAI said in the post that more than 70 percent of those using GPT-4 via its API have moved to GPT-4 Turbo because of its more updated knowledge base.
The company said more updates to GPT-4 Turbo are coming in the next few months, including the general availability of GPT-4 Turbo with vision. This will allow users to do more multimodal prompts like text-to-image generation.
OpenAI also launched smaller AI models called embeddings. OpenAI defines Embeddings as a “sequence of numbers that represents the concepts within content such as natural language or codes.” This helps applications using retrieval-augmented generation — a type of AI that takes information from a database instead of generating its answer — figure out the relationship of different contents it’s accessing.
These new models, text-embedding-3-small and a more powerful version called text-embedding-3-large, are available now.
Launching improved GPT models in the API, as well better and cheaper embedding models (e.g. one model is 5x cheaper than our previous embedding models with stronger performance): https://t.co/rFlFLFFJ4e
L.A. County to Pay $5 Million to Election Executive Wrongly Charged With Data Breach Eugene Yu, the owner of an election software company, was arrested in 2022 on charges of breaching election data. Those charges were dropped weeks later.
Google’s Pixel 8 phones now come in a new mint color
Google wasn’t exactly subtle with its teases earlier this week, and now the company has confirmed that it’s launching both the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro in a new mint green color. The latest color option is a bit muted compared to the “bay” blue 8 Pro. But if you’re a fan of the smaller regular Pixel 8, this is your first chance at a color beyond the very safe black, hazel, and rose gold options that have been available since the phone shipped back in October.
For both phones, mint is only available with the base 128GB of storage. If you need more than that, you’ve gotta stick with the original colors. Google sent a sample of the 8 Pro over to me, and a pamphlet included in the package describes mint as “inspired by the vibrant hue you’d find in nature” and “a luminous color that invites the mind into a state of energizing calmness.” Yes, there’s more. It’s “a color that’s equal parts daring, focused, and optimistic for a fresh new year, and a fresher version of you.” Right. Whatever you say, Google design team.
Seeing it in person, daring isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind. In most indoor light, mint can look almost white. Hit it with some natural light, and the color comes out a bit more. It’s tasteful, but if you were hoping for a saturated seafoam green-type finish, this isn’t that. At the very least, it’s giving buyers more choice, with both Pixel 8 models now available in four different colors. I’d be curious to see whether the glossy glass on the smaller standard 8 makes mint pop a bit more than it does on the matte 8 Pro.
Personally, the blue is still far and away my favorite because it’s the most colorful of the lot — and that’s something sorely lacking from a lot of “pro” smartphones these days. But if you prefer a less in-your-face option, maybe mint’s just the thing. Most phones inevitably find their way into cases, anyway. (Google’s already got mint covered there.)
Google’s porcelain Pixel 8 Pro (left), with the new mint color (right).
The mint Pixel 8 and 8 Pro will be exclusively available from the Google Store — carriers and retailers won’t be getting them — and you can also purchase either phone through Google Fi. US customers will be able to buy the new color starting on January 25th. In addition to releasing the new color, Google is also detailing the latest feature drop for its Pixel devices, which you can read more about here. Meanwhile, the leaks for this year’s Google phones have already begun.
That Spotify Daylist That Really ‘Gets’ You? It Was Written by A.I. The music-streaming platform’s new “daylist” feature serves users three personalized playlists a day, with titles ranging from quirky to bewildering.
Rivian’s R2 vehicle launch date appears to leak in town council minutes
Photo by Daniel Golson for The Verge
City council members in Laguna Beach, California met last night prepared to approve a request (PDF) from Rivian to park six vehicles on the grass in a city park for a March 7th “R2 launch.” The company appears to be planning to officially announce its forthcoming electric SUV, the R2, which is supposed to be smaller and more affordable than its current lineup of EVs.
A local community publication called Stu News Lagunareported yesterday that a small item on the city council’s consent calendar showed that it was planning to approve the event in a single motion along with many other agenda items. The six vehicles Rivian wants to park are “for informational purposes only,” Stu News writes.
Although the filing itself doesn’t mention specifically what the “worldwide launch event” is for, a diagram at the bottom of the planned layout for the cars reads “RIVIAN R2 LAUNCH v11.pln,” which is... pretty straightforward.
Rivian doesn’t seem to have made any official announcement around that date just yet, but the company recently took over a building called South Coast Theater near the spot where the vehicles would be parked. Now named Rivian South Coast Theater, it serves as the company’s “first flagship retail location.” A spokesperson for the company declined to comment.
The company’s R2 platform will undergird its next vehicle, which is expected to go into production as soon as 2026. Rivian has said one of the first vehicles will be a smaller SUV priced between $40,000 and $60,000. The current lineup of R1 vehicles each start at around $80,000.
Rivian has also said it aims to slash the carbon footprint of its next-gen vehicles by increasing the amount of recycled materials and by using more renewable energy in its manufacturing process.
For now, passkeys are only available in the US, and X hasn’t revealed when it’s rolling out the login technology on Android, for desktop operating systems, or in other countries. Also, X’s rollout of passkeys doesn’t seem to be complete yet (some users reported still not having access as of Tuesday night on the East Coast), so don’t fret if the feature hasn’t popped up yet.
Today we’re excited to launch Passkeys as a login option for our US-based users on iOS!
A passkey is a new, easy to use, and secure way to log in to your account - all from your device. Passkeys are more secure than traditional passwords since they’re individually generated by…
Passkeys tie your account’s security to the security of your device by generating two cryptographic keys, with one stored on X and another one locally, like a very secure “remember this device” system. X is the latest major tech company to enable passkey technology, joining the company of Google, PayPal, Microsoft, Nintendo, and others in allowing passwordless logins.
eBay will lay off 1,000 employees — 9 percent of the company
The Verge
eBay is following in the footsteps of Google, Discord, Twitch, Unity, and more — by laying off loads of workers this January instead of right before the holidays. The company writes it’s laying off around 1,000 workers, or 9 percent of the company’s full-time employees, and that’s just the start: eBay will also lay off an unspecified number of contractors “over the coming months.”
Despite reporting profit of $1.3 billion last quarter, which it described as “another quarter of solid results,” eBay today suggests that there is a “Need for Change.” Company president and CEO Jamie Iannone writes that “there is more we can do to ensure our success,” and argues that eBay should be a “more nimble” company that “makes decisions more quickly” to position itself for “long-term, sustainable growth.”
Never mind that last quarter, eBay CFO Steve Priest already said he was “extremely proud of our teams for delivering on their quarterly financial commitments, maintaining prudent cost discipline, and executing key deliverables in support of our strategy.”
eBay also argues that it hired too quickly, an excuse tech companies have been trotting out for over a year: “While we are making progress against our strategy, our overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business,” writes Iannone today.
eBay says the memo, which you can read in full below, was also sent to employees internally. It asks that all US employees work from home tomorrow while the company processes this news.
Team,
We are on a path to building a stronger eBay for the future — one that is growing, and resilient in the face of any challenge. Over the past three years, we made fundamental changes in our experiences across categories and accelerated the pace of innovation at eBay. In areas where we’re investing, we are seeing consistent increases in customer satisfaction and a meaningful improvement in our growth relative to the market.
Our strategy is the right one, but there is more we can do to ensure our success. We need to better organize our teams for speed — allowing us to be more nimble, bring like-work together, and help us make decisions more quickly. Today, I am sharing news about changes we are implementing to better position eBay for long-term, sustainable growth.
The most significant and toughest of these decisions is to reduce our current workforce by approximately 1,000 roles or an estimated 9% of full-time employees. Additionally, we plan to scale back the number of contracts we have within our alternate workforce over the coming months. These are not actions we take lightly — and we recognize the impact they will have on all eBayers. We have to say goodbye to people who have made so many important contributions to the eBay community and culture, and this isn’t easy.
The Need for Change
Despite facing external pressures, like the challenging macroeconomic environment, we know we can be better with the factors we control. While we are making progress against our strategy, our overall headcount and expenses have outpaced the growth of our business. To address this, we’re implementing organizational changes that align and consolidate certain teams to improve the end-to-end experience, and better meet the needs of our customers around the world.
Next Steps
Shortly, we will begin notifying those employees whose roles have been eliminated and entering into a consultation process in areas where required. Leaders will communicate the news directly via Zoom, and your VP or eLT member will send an email once the notifications in their group have been completed.
We request that all U.S. employees work from home on January 24th to provide some space and privacy for these conversations. We’re committed to treating everyone with respect and empathy through this transition and providing impacted employees with support and resources.
Looking Ahead
These changes are difficult, but I’m confident that by working together we will become stronger than ever. In the months ahead, you will see a more focused, agile, and responsive eBay — one that is better positioned to advance our purpose of creating economic opportunity for all.
Google cancels contract with an AI data firm that’s helped train Bard
Image: Google
Google ended its contract with Appen, an Australian data company involved in training its large language model AI tools used in Bard, Search, and other products, even as the competition to develop generative AI tools increases. “Our decision to end the contract was made as part of our ongoing effort to evaluate and adjust many of our supplier partnerships across Alphabet to ensure our vendor operations are as efficient as possible,” Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said in a statement sent to The Verge.
Appen notified the Australian Securities Exchange in a filing, saying it “had no prior knowledge of Google’s decision to terminate the contract.”
Human workers at companies like Appen often handle many of the more distasteful parts of training AI and are often the lower-paid, often ignored backbone of the entire industry. At Appen, contractors help rate data quality and answers from AI models. Fast Company wrote last year that some Appen employees who are members of the Alphabet Workers Union had been petitioning Appen to increase wages from $10 an hour to $15. While the union won wage increases, the final number fell short of its goal. Many of these workers were then laid off, with Appen citing business conditions.
CNBC reported that Appen has also helped train AI models for Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. The company said in its ASX filing that its work with Google has had a significant impact on its revenue. Appen’s revenue from Google alone in the fiscal year 2023 amounted to $82.8 million. It made $273 million last year.
Mencini added that Google is working closely with Appen to make the transition “as smooth as possible.”
Employees at another Google contractor, Accenture, overwhelmingly voted to join the Alphabet Workers Union — which represents Google contractors — after refusing to handle “obscene, graphic, and offensive prompts” for the then-unreleased Bard chatbot in November last year.
And it isn’t just an issue for Google. Content moderators working in Kenya for data-labeling firm Sama sued the company and its client Meta for paying people $2.20 an hour to view disturbing images and videos.
Here’s more proof ADT is about to launch a new smart home security system
ADT has a new smart home security on the works that looks like it will launch next month. | Screenshot: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
All signs are pointing to an imminent launch of ADT’s new Smart Home Security System, a DIY security system born of a collaboration between Google and ADT. This could be a better home security option for those of us who loved and lost the excellent but expensive Google Nest Secure system, which Google is sunsetting for good on April 8th, 2024.
However, shortly after the article was published, the pages on ADT’s site disappeared, and we've heard nothing official from ADT about the new system since.
Screenshot by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
A screenshot of the ADT YouTube video that has since been made private.
This week, the company posted a short setup video to its YouTube page explaining how to set up your new ADT Base, which is “the heart of the ADT Smart Home Security system,” according to the video.
A Verge reader tipped us to the video and also said an ADT rep told him it would be available to buy in February. We’ve contacted ADT for confirmation but had not heard back by the time of publication. However, the YouTube video has since been made private.
The video didn’t provide any more details about the new system, but it did contain images of all the products we reported on, including the backlit keypad on the base station and images of the door and window sensor that look a lot like the excellent Nest Detect sensors.
The new system includes a central base station, door and window sensors and motion sensors that appear to be nicer than the more basic hardware for which ADT is known. That’s alongside devices such as leak and smoke detectors.
The leaked pages indicated the system could be self or professionally monitored and would work with Z-Wave products to round out the smart home offerings. Products could include lights, locks, and thermostats, and the system could integrate with Google Nest cameras, doorbells, thermostats, Wi-Fi products, smart speakers, and smart displays.
ADT is known for its professional installation and monitoring services. In early 2020, it launched a DIY smart home security solution with ADT Blue but, following the investment from Google, quietly shut the service down and announced that Google Nest products would become the cornerstone of its smart home offerings.
Today, ADT offers Google Nest products with all its security solutions, including ADT's second attempt at the DIY space — ADT Self Setup. This was the option Google offered to its Google Nest Secure customers, but it’s a more basic system that lacks the innovative features the Nest Secure platform offered. And according to several Reddit posts, it doesn't integrate as well with Google’s products, leaving Google Nest users searching for better alternatives.
The ADT offer for Google Nest Secure customers goes through May 7th, 2024. So, if you’ve been hanging on to your voucher, it might be worth waiting a few more weeks to see if this new system materializes, if it’s any good, and if ADT will offer it to former Nest Secure users.
LG’s new 32-inch 4K smart monitor has Netflix and Google Calendar built in
LG’s MyView smart monitor | LG Electronics
You can now purchase the entire slate of LG’s webOS-powered MyView monitors, which debuted at CES earlier this month, including one with a 31.5-inch 4K IPS panel (model 32SR85U) that starts at $599.99. Sure, gamers can find better value for their money than a monitor that maxes out with 5ms response times and a 60Hz refresh rate, but visual creatives might appreciate a 95 percent DCI-P3 color gamut. And when your office work is done, you can fire up a full suite of entertainment apps or stream directly from another device with AirPlay 2 and Miracast support.
It could be an ideal monitor for movie watching at your desk without loud fans (or Slack notifications) ruining the immersion, and it’s easier to fit into your home office than Samsung’s Ark.
Image: LG Electronics
The webOS app support does enable work, too, with Microsoft 365 and Google Calendar integration, plus video calling with a detachable 1080p webcam. There’s a voice-activated Magic Remote to navigate the user interface, in addition to a mouse and keyboard.
It’s sleek, with thin bezels on three sides, while the display sits on a removable height- and tilt-adjustable stand. It’s equipped with three USB-C Power Delivery ports that deliver up to 90W, has WiFi and Bluetooth for wireless connectivity, two HDMI ports, and 5W stereo speakers.
Exactly how much money can you make by uploading a video to X? The going assumption has been that X — like Twitter before it — is a poor platform for video creators that can’t compete with YouTube and TikTok in terms of monetization and reach. So there’s been a lot riding on the results of a recent test by MrBeast, who aimed to see whether he could actually make money on Elon Musk’s platform.
Last week, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, posted a video to Musk’s platform with the explicit goal of seeing “how much ad revenue a video on X would make.” Musk had previously encouraged MrBeast to post to X, and he sent out an excited message shortly after the test went up. “First MrBeast video posted directly on !” Musk wrote. Now, a week later, Donaldson has shared data on how his first video performed: it made around $260,000 across more than 150 million views.
On the surface, the results sound promising. That same video has been up for four months on YouTube, and it’s only notched 215 million views over there. That revenue also compares favorably to a recent YouTube video that MrBeast shared analytics for — that one made $167,000 over a five-day period with 99 million views. So it’s at least plausible that X can keep pace with YouTube.
MY FIRST X VIDEO MADE OVER $250,000!
But it’s a bit of a facade. Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience pic.twitter.com/nViVpZbWBb
But Donaldson was quick to note that his performance on X comes with some real caveats. “It’s a bit of a facade,” he wrote. For one, he has the advantage of being MrBeast, and there was increased attention on this video given that it was his first on the platform. Advertisers bought ads to run specifically on his video, earning him a higher rate. Shopify’s president, Harley Finkelstein, bragged shortly after the video went up that his company was “the first commerce brand to partner in the ad pre-roll” for MrBeast.
That suggests a typical video from another creator won’t earn as much. “Advertisers saw the attention it was getting and bought ads on my video (I think) and thus my revenue per view is prob higher than what you’d experience,” Donaldson wrote.
There are other reasons to think MrBeast’s test video did better than a typical upload would. Multiplereportshave indicated that X was quietly boosting MrBeast’s video to viewers, artificially inflating the view count. Musk has denied that this happened, but there’s enough evidence to suggest that someone was putting the post in front of more eyes than it naturally would have achieved. MrBeast’s entire account was getting an artificial boost from X, too, as of last year.
My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it :/
I’m down though to test stuff once monetization is really cranking!
X’s view count doesn’t seem to be a particularly reliable metric of performance, either. Musk didn’t respond to a question from Donaldson on how much of a video needs to be watched for it to be counted as a view, meaning it’s possible that every flicker of the video across a user’s feed helps add to that 150 million view count. YouTube is quick to count playback as a view, too, but it’s generally understood that there needs to be at least some amount of actual viewership. Ads, for example, require a full 30 seconds of watch time to be counted.
Of course, MrBeast was always going to make far more money from a video and have far higher viewership than the typical user. But all signs point toward his performance on X struggling to keep pace with one of his poorer performances on YouTube. Donaldson previously wrote to Musk, “My videos cost millions to make and even if they got a billion views on X it wouldn’t fund a fraction of it.” As of this writing, there are no longer preroll ads playing on the test video, so it seems like Donaldson’s prediction was right — even if X’s ad revenue were high enough, the platform doesn’t even seem to have enough available ads to run on the video for him to keep making money.
Donaldson didn’t indicate one way or the other as to whether he’ll continue to post videos to X, but it’s very clear that Musk is hoping he will. Among Musk’s many, many new business pillars for X is transforming it into a robust creator platform and a rival to YouTube. If YouTube’s biggest star doesn’t think his platform is worth the time, it’s going to be hard to convince anyone else to bother.
How to cut, copy, and paste on Android phones
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
Cutting, copying, and pasting are actions that are regularly performed in apps and between apps: getting an address from a message into a map, moving an image from an email to a document, or just transferring text from one end of a note to another. But while I’ve known how to cut, copy, and paste on a laptop or desktop computer for, well, forever, I wasn’t quite as sure at first how to do it on my Android phone.
In fact, cutting, copying, sharing, or pasting on Android is pretty straightforward — no matter which app you’re in or what you’re trying to move around. Here’s how to do it.
Note: I’ve tested these techniques on a Google Pixel 8 running Android 14 and a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 running Android 14 and One UI 6.0.
Selecting, copying, and sharing text
When you highlight a section of text, a small bar of options will pop up above your selection.
When you copy or cut text, you’ll see it above your Gboard keyboard.
The process for selecting text on the screen, whether it’s editable text (as in a form) or non-editable text (like on a webpage), is the same in most scenarios:
Press and hold on a word until it’s selected.
Drag the handles at each end of the selection if you want to include more words.
Tap Select all on the pop-up bar above the selection to select all the text in the section.
In some apps (such as Google Keep), you can also double-tap on a word to select it, rather than tapping and holding. You might find this easier if the app you’re using supports it. (Gmail, for example, does not.)
However you do it, once you select your text, you’ll get a list of options that appear above the selection.
Tap Copy to copy the text to the keyboard, leaving the original text in place.
Tap Cut to move the text to the clipboard, removing the original text. (You can only do this in a field or form where text is editable.)
Android actually has a neat trick where if there’s text on the clipboard when you pull up the on-screen keyboard, you’ll see that text ready to paste just above the keys — just tap the text to paste it at the current cursor position. (This works on Google’s default Gboard keyboard, the Samsung Keyboard, and it might work on other keyboard apps as well.)
To paste the text, press and hold your finger on the spot you want to drop the text in, then choose Paste from the pop-up menu when it appears.
Tap Share to send the text directly into another app — for example, to copy an address from a website and paste it into a message to someone on WhatsApp.
There is another option if you’re moving text within a document: with the text selected, long-press somewhere in the selection, then drag it to its new location. This works in the same way as going via the clipboard and the Cut and Paste options.
You will notice some variations in different apps — for example, in Chrome, where if you press on the current site URL, you’ll get a copy icon that you can select, not a pop-up bar. In general, though, use a long press to select and copy and a long press to paste.
Selecting, copying, and pasting images
Image copying is simple in Chrome — just press and hold to get a pop-up menu.
In Google Photos, there’s no copy option; you have to share the photo.
Working with images is a lot more dependent on the app you’re using, in my experience, but a long press is a good place to start. In Google Chrome, for example, press and hold on an image, and you’ll see a pop-up dialog with a Copy image option on it.
It’s not quite this simple in every other app. If you’re looking at an image in Google Keep, you need to tap on it to make it full screen, then tap the three dots (top right), then choose Copy. In Google Docs, you just need a single short tap to bring up the Copy option.
Pasting is very simple, no matter which app you’re in.
As with text, long-press on the spot where you want the image to be inserted.
Pick Paste from the pop-up bar that appears.
This is assuming you can paste at all. In Google Photos, which may well be where you’re sharing most images from, there’s no copy feature at all, strangely enough. In this app:
Tap on a photo to make it full screen.
Tap Share to bring up the sharing options.
You can now send the image directly to any other app on your phone by selecting the app, but you can’t copy and paste it.
It’s the same story in quite a few other apps, including WhatsApp and Google Messages. You can’t access copy and cut options there, only the standard share option.
While the image copying and pasting process is rather inconsistent between apps — and at times not available at all — you should be able to get your pictures from one place to another without too much difficulty.
The show stars Noomi Rapace as an astronaut who “returns to Earth after a disaster in space — only to discover that key pieces of her life seem to be missing.” In the trailer, this appears to manifest itself as a series of mysteries — a strange piano, an unknown voice on a tape recorder — along with plenty of unsettling hallucinations. The rest of the cast includes Jonathan Banks, James D’Arcy, Julian Looman, William Catlett, and Barbara Sukowa, and the series is being helmed by creator and writer Peter Harness (Doctor Who).
Constellation premieres with three episodes on February 21st, and new episodes stream on Wednesdays after that. (Between this and Netflix’s Spaceman, it’s looking to be a fun few weeks for fans of haunted astronauts.)
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Image: LG Electronics
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