Alfred Wahlforss was running out of options. His startup, Listen Labs, needed to hire over 100 engineers, but competing against Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million offers seemed impossible. So he spent $5,000 — a fifth of his marketing budget — on a billboard in San Francisco displaying what looked like gibberish: five strings of random numbers….
Dos Equis is reviving its most iconic campaign, bringing back Jonathan Goldsmith and a familiar catchphrase. The Most Interesting Man is set to make a return to television.
It took Rebecca Yu seven days to vibe code her dining app. She was tired of the decision fatigue that comes from people in a group chat not being able to decide where to eat. Armed with determination, Claude, and ChatGPT, Yu decided to just build a dining app from scratch — one that would…
As of January 9, Grok said image generation and editing are now available only to paying subscribers.
Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down as president of Lucasfilm. Although she will continue as a producer for several Star Wars projects, including upcoming movie The Mandalorian and Grogu, the company will now be helmed by a duo in Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan. It’s a big changing of the guard for Star Wars fans, and…
This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Last month, Netflix made the surprising decision to kill off a key feature: With no prior warning, the company removed the ability to cast videos from its mobile apps to…
Agentic systems and enterprise search depend on strong data retrieval that works efficiently and accurately. Database provider MongoDB thinks its newest embeddings models help solve falling retrieval quality as more AI systems go into production. As agentic and RAG systems move into production, retrieval quality is emerging as a quiet failure point — one that…
The last time the average rate was lower was September 15, 2022, when it was at 6.02%. The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate is now down to its lowest level in more than three years.
Newsrooms have been experimenting with AI for several years now but, for the most part, those efforts have been just that: experiments. A relatively unknown startup, Symbolic.ai, wants to change that, and it just signed a major deal with News Corp, the media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch. News Corp, the major assets of which…
a16z secured US$6.8 billion for a growth fund, US$1.7 billion for an AI infrastructure fund.
