Gemini AI can now turn photos into videos

The feature is available to Google AI Ultra and Pro subscribers. Google just launched a new Gemini AI feature that lets you transform photos into video clips. The new photo-to-video capability is powered by Google’s Veo 3 video model, and it can transform reference images into eight-second videos complete with AI-generated audio, including background noises, … Read more

Dissident Hunters

On a balmy night in October 2019, the defector rode his bike home. He’d just finished a long shift helping waiters serve yogurt-smothered kabobs at a restaurant in Yalova, a seaside town an hour from Istanbul, Turkey. By this time of night, many of the shops had closed. Most of Yalova was home watching TV; … Read more

Lego’s first buildable Decepticon Transformer is a talking Soundwave

Soundwave is Lego’s first transforming Decepticon set. | Image: Lego Following buildable versions of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee, Lego’s latest collaboration with Hasbro is also its first Decepticon. The 1,505-piece Soundwave, which is three pieces smaller than Lego’s 1,508-piece Optimus Prime, stands just shy of 13 inches tall and is Lego’s first Transformers set to … Read more

Nintendo created Donkey Kong’s biggest adventure by breaking everything

The creation of Donkey Kong Bananza started with destruction. “What we were really going for was this gameplay experience that comes from destruction,” Bananza director Kazuya Takahashi says in an interview with The Verge. From that simple premise, Bananza‘s creators have built an entire game about breaking stuff. Bananza is the second major Switch 2 … Read more

The brutal realities of ICE Air

In Donald Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has escalated its enforcement operations in extremely public ways, conducting surprise raids, arresting lawmakers, and launching a new Florida detention center with an alt-right media blitz. But ICE is growing in less obvious ways, too. Since January, it has expanded the shadowy network of charter … Read more

X’s CEO is out after failing at basically everything she claimed she wanted

Linda Yaccarino is stepping down as X’s CEO – and leaving the platform once known as Twitter in a worse place than when she started. A day after X users circulated viral screenshots of the company’s Grok chatbot denigrating Jews and declaring itself “MechaHitler,” Yaccarino thanked Elon Musk for “entrusting me with the responsibility of … Read more

YouTube ‘clarifies’ its plan to demonetize spammy AI slop

YouTube is trying to soothe concerns about an incoming update to its monetization policies following backlash from online creators. An announcement that YouTube would be updating restrictions around “inauthentic” content under the YouTube Partner Program guidelines was interpreted by some to mean the platform was planning to demonetize a wider variety of videos, including those … Read more

The best Prime Day 2025 deals you can still get

⠀ Amazon Prime Day is usually a sprint — two hectic days of lightning deals, overflowing shopping carts, and enough browser tabs to crash a laptop. But this year, Amazon is treating it more like a marathon. Instead of wrapping things up after 48 hours, the retailer is giving Prime members two additional days to … Read more

The 35 best Prime Day deals you can get for under $25

Day one of Amazon Prime Day is in the books. The good news? You have three more days to save before the event wraps up on July 11th. We’ve already highlighted hundreds of deals, ranging from Verge-approved laptops to various smart home products we use daily. You can even see what Verge readers are buying. However, if you’re sticking to … Read more

The Columbia hack is a much bigger deal than Mamdani’s college application

On June 24th, Columbia University experienced an hourslong system-wide outage. Its internal email service went down. Students couldn’t log in to the platform where professors post assignments and course materials. Library catalogs went offline. Zoom was unavailable. Every single service that required Columbia’s official authentication service was affected, but maybe most eerily, images of President … Read more

The Bezos-funded climate satellite is lost in space

MethaneSat was built to track methane pollution around the world. A satellite tracking global methane pollution has gone dark, imperiling  a mission that garnered enormous support from Jeff Bezos and other big names in tech. Methane is the primary ingredient of so-called “natural gas” that is even more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes … Read more

OpenAI closes its deal to buy Jony Ive’s io and build AI hardware

OpenAI has officially closed its nearly $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famed former Apple designer Jony Ive, the company announced Wednesday. But it was careful to only refer to the startup as io Products Inc. The blog post initially announcing the acquisition was also scrubbed from OpenAI’s website due to a trademark lawsuit from … Read more

Perplexity just launched an AI web browser

Comet’s AI assistant can answer questions about what’s on your screen. | Image: Perplexity Perplexity, the startup behind the AI “answer” engine, has just launched its own web browser. The browser, called Comet, incorporates Perplexity’s AI search tools and assistant in a way that CEO Aravind Srinivas says “transforms entire browsing sessions into single, seamless … Read more

OpenAI’s open language model is imminent

Microsoft’s complicated relationship with OpenAI is about to take an interesting turn. As the pair continue to renegotiate a contract to allow OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit company, OpenAI is preparing to release an open language AI model that could drive even more of a wedge between the two companies. Sources familiar with OpenAI’s … Read more