Google is all-in on AI, and based on the company’s latest quarterly earnings, AI has been good for its bottom line. In a press release for Alphabet’s Q2 2025 earnings, CEO Sundar Pichai said that “AI is positively impacting every part of the business” and that features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are “performing well.”

The company is also planning to increase its planned capital expenditures for the year up to $85 billion, according to Pichai. That’s an increase of $10 billion, and could be a sign that Alphabet wants to keep pace with massive data center buildouts from companies like OpenAI and Meta. “Our updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers, and an acceleration in the pace of datacenter construction, primarily to meet cloud customer demand,” CFO Anat Ashkenazi said during Alphabet’s Q2 earnings call.

For the quarter, Alphabet reported revenue of $96.4 billion, up 14 percent year over year, with revenues for its “Google Search” segment reaching $54.1 billion.

Pichai’s comments in the press release on AI align with recent findings from Pew, which suggested that AI Overviews appear to be successful at getting people answers but at the expense of clicks through to the websites that would otherwise offer them. 

AI Mode also has more than 100 million monthly active users in the US and India, while AI Overviews has more than 2 billion monthly users across “more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages,” Pichai said during the call. “We are also seeing that our AI features cause users to search more as they learn that Search can meet more of their needs,” which is “especially true for younger users.” Pichai also said that the Gemini app now has 450 million monthly active users, “with daily requests growing over 50 percent from Q1.”

During the second quarter, Google hosted its annual I/O developer conference, which was jam-packed with AI-focused announcements like the rollout of AI Mode for Search (which news publishers have called “theft”), upgrades to its video and image generation models, Gemini AI in Chrome, and much more powerful smart replies in Gmail. (Based on that event, Google’s future is Google googling.) And just ahead of I/O, Google hosted an Android-focused show where it revealed the youthful new design language for Android 16.

At the same time, Google is anticipating the ruling from the remedy phase of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit, which took place during the second quarter as well. Last August, a judge ruled that Google “is a monopolist” in that antitrust case, and remedies could include Google getting broken up. (A lot of companies have expressed interest in buying Chrome.)

The company also changed its “G” logo for the first time in nearly a decade.

Alphabet will be hosting its earnings webcast beginning at 4:30PM ET.

Update, July 23rd: Added details from Alphabet’s earnings webcast.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 90, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you're staying cool, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I have been watching The Bear's fourth season, preparing for the deluge of Qi2.2 wireless chargers, pondering how I'll use the upcoming Bigfoot emoji to troll my group chats, studying the relaunched EmojiTracker, reading this giant profile of NBA star Joel Embiid, enjoying Pixar's Hoppers teaser trailer way more than I expected, learning who Alex Warren is, and wondering if I should actually watch all of S …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Switch 2 technically launched with an F-Zero game, as F-Zero GX was available on Nintendo Switch Online's premium tier as part of the GameCube lineup. But if you're looking for a new F-Zero or Wipeout, the console has a spiritual successor that costs just $14.99: Shin'en's Fast Fusion.

Fast Fusion pits you in futuristic sci-fi hovercraft races where you fly forward at hundreds of miles per hour. Races are all about managing boosts by collecting coins to build your boost meter and driving over boost zones on the tracks themselves. (You can boost into opponents to make them spin out to earn some extra coins, which never gets old.)

The ga …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nintendo just announced the two leads of its live-action Legend of Zelda film, and unlike the celebrity-packed Mario movie cast, Zelda will star two young, lesser-known actors: Bo Bragason as Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Link. You may not have heard of them, but there's a good chance they're going to be a part of the franchise for a while.

Choosing stars who are in their teens (Ainsworth) and early 20s (Bragason) makes a lot of sense. In the games, even the "older" Links and Zeldas are still typically young adults, so Bragason and Ainsworth seem like they'll fit the mold. (Yes, I know Link and Zelda are technically older than 100 in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi! Welcome to Installer No. 89, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. My name is Jay Peters, and I will be taking care of Installer while David is on parental leave. All of us here at The Verge are very excited for him and his family, and he'll be back later this year.

It's a huge honor to be writing this. I look forward to Installer every week to see what awesome things David is obsessed with and what you all are into. (Thanks to everyone who sent over their favorite non-famous apps to get me started. Keep reading for some of those!) I'm really excited to keep the party going. (If you're new here, welcome, and also you …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It's been an agonizing wait for more Deltarune. The first chapter of the episodic, parallel story to Toby Fox's acclaimed RPG Undertale came out nearly seven years ago. But the newly released third and fourth chapters are so good that I highly recommend playing everything that's available right now - even if there are still three more episodes to go.

In Deltarune, you play as Kris, a teenager who lives in a town inhabited by friendly animals and monsters. Kris is assigned a group project with Susie, an aloof bully, and together they stumble into a place called the Dark World (hidden in a closet at school, naturally). There, they partner up …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When I was a kid, there was a moment when it felt like everyone was obsessed with yo-yos. I never got better than just being able to make the yo-yo go up and down. But with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, I could pretend like I was halfway decent - all while playing a silly game that feels like a spiritual successor to the Game Boy Advance titles I loved growing up.

Pipistrello is a top-down adventure game, in which you use your yo-yo to attack enemies and traverse the world. You play as Pippit, a goofy bat who has dreams of yo-yo excellence but is also a freeloader who relies on financial support from his wealthy aunt, an energy magnate. In the opening minutes of the game, the aunt gets merged with your yo-yo as four big baddies steal her Mega Batteries, and your goal is to get the batteries back and help free her.

The game is quite charming. Pippit is a lovable doofus, and you'll also be tasked with ridiculous missions like rounding up people for a soccer fan club so you can get easier access to a stadium run by a corrupt boss, who wants people to gamble. The pixel art is great, too - it looks exactly like what I remember from GBA games, even though I played Pipistrello on my …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Reddit has become known as the place to go for unfiltered answers from real, human users. But as the site celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, the company is increasingly thinking about how it can augment that human work with AI.

The initial rollout of AI tools, like Reddit Answers, is "going really well," CTO Chris Slowe tells The Verge. At a time when Google and its AI tools are going to Reddit for human answers, Reddit is going to its own human answers to power AI features, hoping they're the key to letting people unlock useful information from its huge trove of posts and communities.

Reddit Answers is the first big user-facing piece of the company's AI push. Like other AI search tools, Reddit Answers will show an AI-generated summary to a query. But Reddit Answers also very prominently links to where the content came from - and as a user, you also know that the link will point you to another place on Reddit instead of some SEO-driven garbage. It also helps that the citations feel much more prominent than on tools like Google's AI Mode - a tool that news publishers have criticized as "theft."

"If you just want the short summary, it's there," Slowe says. "If you want to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Adobe has a new computational photography camera app for iPhones – and one of its creators, Marc Levoy, helped make the impressive computational photography features that made some of Google’s earlier Pixel cameras shine.

The new app, called Project Indigo, was released last week by Adobe Labs. It’s free and available for the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPhone 14 models and above. (Though Adobe recommends using an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.) It also doesn’t require logging into an Adobe account to use.

“Instead of capturing a single photo, Indigo captures a burst of photos and combines them together to produce a high-quality photo with lower noise and higher dynamic range,” according to the app’s description. Indigo tries to produce a natural, “SLR-like” look for photos, and it also offers a bunch of manual controls like focus, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance.

To really understand what’s going on under the hood of Project Indigo, though, I highly recommend reading a detailed blog post from Levoy, now an Adobe Fellow who joined the company in 2020 to build a “universal camera app,” and Florian Kainz, a senior scientist. The post covers things like why smartphone cameras are good, how its computational photography works, how it creates the natural look for its photos, and some details about its image processing pipeline.

It is here I must confess that I am not a camera expert by any means. But even I found the post pretty interesting and informative. The photos in the post do look great, and Adobe has an album of photos you can browse, too.

In the post, Levoy and Kainz say that Project Indigo will also be a testbed for technologies that might get added to other flagship products, like a button to remove reflections. And down the line, the team plans to build things like an Android version, a portrait mode, and even video recording.

“This is the beginning of a journey for Adobe – towards an integrated mobile camera and editing experience that takes advantage of the latest advances in computational photography and AI,” according to Levoy and Kainz. “Our hope is that Indigo will appeal to casual mobile photographers who want a natural SLR-like look for their photos, including when viewed on large screens; to advanced photographers who want manual control and the highest possible image quality; and to anyone – casual or serious – who enjoys playing with new photographic experiences.”

We’ve been waiting for Spotify’s lossless streaming for more than four years, but there are some new and promising hints that the feature might finally arrive sometime soon.

The X account for Spicetify, a command-line tool that lets you customize the Spotify client, says that a new version of Spotify includes some hidden mentions of lossless. In a screenshot the account shared, for example, lossless appears in the sidebar to connect a device. Another screenshot shows lossless as an option for streaming quality in the app’s settings. The Spicetify account also says it has seen code that lossless will be available on Spotify Connect and in the web player.

To be clear: Spotify’s lossless streaming still isn’t available yet. But these small lossless mentions and recent reporting indicate that the company may be ready to add lossless at long last.

Spotify initially announced a “Spotify HiFi” tier in 2021 that it intended to launch that year, but that didn’t happen. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in 2024 that the company was working on a “deluxe” version of Spotify. And in February, Bloomberg reported that Spotify was aiming to roll out a new “Music Pro” tier with features like higher-quality streaming by the end of this year. The tier could cost as much as $5.99 per month more than its current subscriptions, Bloomberg says.

Services like Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal already offer lossless streaming.

The bosses in Elden Ring Nightreign are already pretty tough. But if you’ve gotten good and need a harder challenge, you’ll be able to take on “Everdark Sovereigns,” which are more difficult versions of the game’s Nightlord foes you face to conclude a run.

“These limited-time versions of the Nightlords are extremely challenging and pose an even greater threat to the Nightfarers with new moves and increased power,” according to a blog post from Bandai Namco.

The first Everdark Sovereign you can fight is a new version of Adel, Baron of the Night, aka Gaping Jaw. If you’ve beaten the normal version of that boss, you’ll be able to take on the new form. When you beat an Everdark Sovereign, you’ll get “Sovereign Sigils,” which you can exchange for “special Relics and other items.”

There are a couple caveats to be aware of. You can only fight Everdark Sovereigns while playing online. And Everdark Sovereigns will only be available for a limited time — the upgraded Gaping Jaw, for example, will stick around until June 25th at 8:59 PM ET.

Bandai Namco says a new Everdark Sovereign will be added every week, and over the “next few weeks,” Everdark versions of Sentient Pest and Darkdrift Knight will be added to the game. Other Everdark bosses will be added “at a later date.” Based on the blog post, it seems like Everdark variations will eventually return after they’ve disappeared.

At some point, the game will also get DLC that adds new playable characters and bosses. An Elden Ring movie is in the works, too.

23andMe co-founder and former CEO Anne Wojcicki is set to buy back the company after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year. On Friday, 23andMe and TTAM Research Institute, a nonprofit public benefit corporation run by Wojcicki, announced in a press release that TTAM would be buying “substantially all of the Company’s assets” for $305 million. 

As of last month, New York-based biotech company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was set to buy 23andMe for $256 million. But the new purchase agreement with TTAM is “the result of a final round of bidding that occurred earlier today between TTAM and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals,” according to the release. Wojcicki made the “unsolicited offer” earlier this month, according to The Wall Street Journal.

23andMe is well-known for its at-home genome testing kits, and at one point the company was worth about $6 billion, according to CNBC. But it so far has been unable to turn a profit and dealt with a massive data breach in 2023. The company paid $30 million to settle a lawsuit over the breach last year. When 23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March, Wojcicki resigned as CEO.

TTAM will comply with 23andMe’s “privacy policies and applicable law” and has made “binding commitments to adopt additional consumer protections and privacy safeguards,” including establishing a consumer privacy advisory board within 90 days of the close of the deal. The release says the transaction is still subject to court approval but is expected to close “in the coming weeks.”

Spaceballs, which was first released nearly 40 years ago, is getting a sequel in 2027 from Amazon MGM Studios.

A Spaceballs 2 announcement trailer posted Thursday doesn’t have any solid details besides the date, though it does poke fun at the entertainment industry’s obsession with franchises and spinoffs by listing many of them out. (I particularly liked “DCU attempt Number 1” and “DCU attempt Number 2.”)

Mel Brooks, who played Yogurt (a Yoda parody) in the original film, also makes an appearance. “After 40 years, we asked, ‘what do the fans want?’” he says. “But instead, we’re making this movie.” The film’s logline, according to Variety, is “A Non-Prequel Non-Reboot Sequel Part Two but with Reboot Elements Franchise Expansion Film.”

Brooks will be reprising the role of Yogurt, and Bill Pullman and Rick Moranis will be back as Lone Starr and Dark Helmet, Deadline reports. Lewis Pullman (Bill Pullman’s son), Josh Gad, and Keke Palmer are also set to star in the film.

In March, Apple delayed its upgraded Siri, saying that “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver” the promised features. At WWDC this week, Apple’s SVP of software Craig Federighi and SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak shared more details about the decision to delay in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern.

As part of its initial Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 2024, Apple said that the improved Siri would have awareness of your personal context and the ability to take actions for you in apps. While Apple was showing real software at that show, Siri “didn’t converge in the way, quality-wise, that we needed it to,” Federighi said. Apple wanted it to be “really, really reliable. And we weren’t able to achieve the reliability in the time we thought.”

“Look, we don’t want to disappoint customers,” Joswiak said. “We never do. But it would’ve been more disappointing to ship something that didn’t hit our quality standard, that had an error rate that we felt was unacceptable. So we made what we thought was the best decision. I’d make it again.”

Stern asked why Apple, with all of its resources, couldn’t make it work. “When it comes to automating capabilities on devices in a reliable way, no one’s doing it really well right now,” Federighi said. “We wanted to be the first. We wanted to do it best.” While the company had “very promising early results and working initial versions,” the team came to feel that “this just doesn’t work reliably enough to be an Apple product,” he said.

At WWDC, Federighi also spoke to YouTuber iJustine, and both Federighi and Joswiak were interviewed by Tom’s Guide’s Mark Spoonauer and TechRadar’s Lance Ulanoff. In Apple’s March statement, it said that anticipated rolling out the Siri upgrades “in the coming year,” which, to Spoonauer, Joswiak clarified to mean 2026.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a blog post published Tuesday, says an average ChatGPT query uses about 0.000085 gallons of water, or “roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.” He made the claim as part of a broader post on his predictions about how AI will change the world. 

“People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes,” he says. He also argues that “the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity.” OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on how Altman came to those figures.

AI companies have come under scrutiny for energy costs of their technology. This year, for example, researchers forecast that AI could consume more power than Bitcoin mining by the end of the year. In an article last year, The Washington Post worked with researchers to determine that a 100-word email “generated by an AI chatbot using GPT-4” required “a little more than 1 bottle.” The publication also found that water usage can depend on where a datacenter is located.

Psychonauts developer Double Fine just announced a new game — and you’ll be able to play it soon. Keeper, a game where you play as a walking lighthouse with a seabird as a buddy, is launching on October 17th, 2025 on Xbox and PC.

Here’s a description from an Xbox Wire post about what you can expect from the game:

It has stood alone for countless years, but now the Lighthouse finds companionship in a curious and spirited seabird, who encounters the Lighthouse while seeking refuge from a creeping malevolent presence spreading throughout the isle. The Lighthouse discovers that its bright beam of light is able to affect the flora and fauna, and even seems to ward off the withering tendrils spreading throughout the world around it.  

Meanwhile the bird proves to be a useful and dextrous ally, able to interact with strange and ancient mechanisms. Together, these two unlikely friends set off together on an epic adventure, an odyssey of mystifying metamorphosis, and a journey that will take them into realms beyond understanding. 

The art in the trailer is absolutely gorgeous, and it looks like the world will be a beautiful one to explore. The game will be a “story told without words” and is a “strange, otherworldly tale,” according to the post. I’m looking forward to it.

Google announced a new SynthID Detector tool at Google I/O that lets you check if content has been made with the assistance of Google’s AI tools.

In a blog post, Google DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli describes SynthID Detector as “a verification portal” that can “quickly and efficiently identify AI-generated content made with Google AI.” It’s also able to “highlight which parts of the content are more likely to have been watermarked with SynthID.”

SynthID watermarks are applied to AI-generated images, text, audio, and videos, including content generated by Google’s Gemini, Imagen, Lyria, and Veo models, Kohli says.

Here’s how the tool works, according to Kohli:

When you upload an image, audio track, video or piece of text created using Google’s AI tools, the portal will scan the media for a SynthID watermark. If a watermark is detected, the portal will highlight specific portions of the content most likely to be watermarked.

For audio, the portal pinpoints specific segments where a SynthID watermark is detected, and for images, it indicates areas where a watermark is most likely.

Google is starting to roll out the tool to “early testers,” Kohli says in the post. 

“Following the initial testing phase, the portal will gradually be rolled out to users who sign up to the waitlist to gain access to the SynthID Detector,” Kohli tells The Verge. “We will take learnings from this cohort of professionals and work to implement content transparency more broadly.”

I’m on the waitlist, but I haven’t tested the tool myself, so I can’t vouch for how well it might work. And will people actually use it when it’s widely available? I hope so, but we’ll have to wait and see.

GameStop will have additional Switch 2 stock available in-store and online when the console launches next month, according to a post on X.

In-store launch events will begin at 3PM local time on June 4th, according to the company. Pickups start on June 5th at 12AM EST / June 4th at 9PM PST.

Online orders will also begin on June 5th at 12AM EST/ June 4th at 9PM PST, spokesperson Nicolle Robles tells The Verge.

GameStop opened up its preorders on April 24th, and like with other retailers, the online preorders started poorly. Within a couple hours, the company confirmed that online preorders sold out, but many people, including The Verge’s Ash Parrish, had luck preordering in-store.

Best Buy said this week that “most” stores will have extra Switch 2 consoles available in-store at launch, too. The Verge has contacted Walmart and Target to see if they can share their plans for launch day availability.

And if you requested the chance to buy a console through Nintendo’s direct sales, check your email; invitations started going out on May 8th, and I got my own invite on Wednesday.

Update, May 16th: GameStop confirmed when online orders will begin.

Activision is starting to wind down Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile just over a year after its global launch. The game “has not met our expectations with mobile-first players like it has with PC and console audiences,” according to a post on X. The company will be pulling the game from the App Store and Google Play after Sunday, May 18th.

Players who have installed the game before Monday, May 19th will “still have access to the game with continued cross-progression of shared inventories using existing content, and servers with matchmaking for online play,” Activision says.

However, there will be no new seasonal content or gameplay updates, social features across platforms will not be available, and you won’t be able to buy content with real-world currency, Activision says on a support page. Activision will not be offering refunds for previously purchased content or for unspent COD Points.

Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile launched worldwide on March 21st, 2024, and it shared progression with Call of Duty: Warzone on console and PC. But it apparently wasn’t as successful as Activision and Microsoft, which became a huge force in mobile gaming as a result of the acquisition, would have liked.

Nintendo announced last month that it would be updating a handful of Switch games to run better on the Switch 2, and now some details about the planned improvements are available on its website. The improvements vary per game, but they include things like optimizing visuals for the Switch 2’s larger screen, better frame rates, HDR support, and GameShare support.

The full list of games getting free updates is below, and you can see the specific updates on Nintendo’s website. The updates will all be available on June 5th, the same day the Switch 2 launches:

• ARMS
• Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain
• Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
• Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics
• Game Builder Garage
• New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe
• Pokémon Scarlet
• Pokémon Violet
• Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury
• Super Mario Odyssey
• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

These updates aren’t quite as big as the paid Nintendo Switch 2 Edition upgrades for games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Party Jamboree. But if you’re looking to revisit some older Switch games on the Switch 2, even the smaller improvements could feel welcome — especially for games like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and the Link’s Awakening remake that sometimes struggled on the original Switch hardware.