TikTok is launching a $500,000 live trivia contest

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge TikTok is taking a page out of HQ’s playbook and launching a series of live trivia games, the company announced today. Like the doomed trivia startup, TikTok’s trivia rounds will happen via livestream each day, and users can log in to play between February 22nd and February 26th. To … Read more

Quantum Field Theory Pries Open Mathematical Puzzle

Last month, Karen Vogtmann and Michael Borinsky posted a proof that there is a truckload of mathematical structure within a hitherto inaccessible mathematical world called the moduli space of graphs, which Vogtmann and a collaborator first described in the mid-1980s. “That’s a super hard problem. It’s amazing they were able to,” said Dan Margalit, a … Read more

You can buy Tovala’s new smart oven for just $99

The new Tovala Smart Oven Air Fryer costs just $99 when you sign up for six weeks of meals. | Image: Tovala My first experience with smart ovens was the $1,500 June Oven, a high-tech cooking machine powered by computer vision algorithms. And while I loved the ease its vast array of connected features added … Read more

AI search engines are not your friends

Bing, before you make it mad. | Image: Microsoft A while back, there was a little debate over whether to say “please” and “thank you” to smart speakers. Amazon Alexa added a mode that rewarded children who were polite to their devices, attempting to avoid, as the BBC put it, a generation of children who … Read more

The Supreme Court could be about to decide the legal fate of AI search

Image: The Verge The Supreme Court is about to reconsider Section 230, a law that’s been foundational to the internet for decades. But whatever the court decides might end up changing the rules for a technology that’s just getting started: artificial intelligence-powered search engines like Google Bard and Microsoft’s new Bing. Next week, the Supreme … Read more