Roblox and Fortnite are two of the biggest games around, and a huge part of why is because they aren't just one game: instead, they're vast platforms where you can party up with your friends, dress up in ridiculous digital outfits, and quickly jump from one experience to another. Back in the day, Fortnite copied PUBG by making a battle royale, and now, PUBG is mimicking Fortnite by trying to become more of a platform than a game.
As part of a roadmap released earlier this year, PUBG developer Krafton said that it would let players create their own modes as part of an alpha, and it revealed more details about the alpha this month. This week, …
President Donald Trump and other Republicans have railed for years against foreign regulation of US tech companies, including online safety laws. As the US fights a global tariff war, it may bring those rules under fire - just as some of them are growing teeth.
Over the past weeks, Trump has touted a blitz of trade deals, seeking concessions from countries in exchange for lower tariffs. This has coincided with the rollout of new child safety measures in the European Union and United Kingdom, most recently a new phase of the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA), which effectively age-gates porn, bullying, and self-harm promotion, as well as other ca …
The 2025 TV Shootout went down over the weekend, and the results are shocking: yes, the Sony Bravia 8 II won the overall competition and my personal award for silliest name, but the LG G5 came in last place by a huge margin. I was one of the judges, and I think I have a sense of what's going on.
If you're not familiar, the TV Shootout is an annual event hosted by Value Electronics, a boutique and high-end home theater store started by Robert and Wendy Zohn in 1998. They've been holding the event for 21 years now, and Robert proudly begins the occasion by holding up his framed registered trademarks for "TV Shootout" and "King of TV," which i …
This week, I take a look at the surprisingly strong state of Google, Meta gets a new chief AI researcher, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to check out this week's Decoder episode about deepfakes and where they are headed.
Also, do you use an AI coding tool like Cursor or GitHub Copilot? I'd love to know what works and what doesn't…
"I think we are doing very well through this moment"
After spending time with Google executives during the company's I/O conference in May, it was clear that they were feeling confident. Now, I'm beginning to see why.
ChatGPT is not making Google Search obsolete. If anything, AI is making Google st …
The Nintendo Switch 2 is easier to find than ever.
Perhaps we've been thinking the same thing, you and I. That there won't be a long-standing drought of Nintendo Switch 2 availability after all. The console has been easy to buy online from several retailers this week, including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Amazon, which didn't sell the Switch 2 at launch, is currently selling it by invitation only.
The console's messy preorder process and spotty launch availability made it feel a little like late 2020 all over again, when the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs launched in extremely limited quantities due to component shortages. However, Nintendo appears to have ad …
Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and President Donald Trump during the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images
At an AI and fossil fuel lovefest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump - flanked by cabinet members and executives from major tech and energy giants like Google and ExxonMobil - said that "the most important man of the day" was Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. "He's gonna get you a permit for the largest electric producing plant in the world in about a week, would you say?" Trump said to chuckles in the audience. Later that week, the Trump administration exempted coal-fired power plants, facilities that make chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, and certain other industrial sites from Biden-era a …
On Thursday night, I toggled endlessly between a TikTok Live stream and a shopping app in anticipation of 9:30PM. For 30 minutes, I hunted for an available listing; many expletives were uttered. I exhibited bot behavior and got iced out of the app multiple times. I tapped so many times my thumbs got sore. This is Labubu drop night.
Something that's lost in the Labubu mania is that actually buying one from the source is, in one word, maddening. There are, of course, countless fake options ("Lafufus") that some collectors have come to embrace. But if you want a guaranteed real one, you have to go to the source. Pop Mart, the Chinese toy compa …
AI chatbots, assistants and agents are increasingly asking for gross levels of access to your personal data under the guise of needing your information to make them work.
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 …
Elon Musk is increasingly focusing on integrating his companies with AI.
Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Elon Musk recently announced that there will be a Tesla shareholder vote on investing in xAI.
Musk's AI focus further blurs the lines between his companies as he looks to integrate AI across his business empire.
AI development is pricey, and xAI is racing to rival tech giants like OpenAI and Google.
AI has increasingly become the connective tissue of Musk Inc.
In the last week, Elon Musk hasshed light on two potential effortsto channel funding into his AI company, xAI, through his broader business empire.
Over the weekend, Musksaid Tesla shareholders would vote on a potential investment in xAI, after responding to a Wall Street Journal report that SpaceX is looking into investing $2 billion into the AI venture. Earlier in the week, the billionaire also announced that xAI's chatbot Grok would be integrated into Tesla "next week at the latest."
It's no surprise that Musk is leaning into AI — the CEO has spoken about the idea in many of Tesla's earnings calls over the last year. What sets his approach apart, analysts say, is the way he's blending the boundaries between his companies.
"What's different from most other companies is the relationship and interplay between his private companies and a public company (Tesla)," Garrett Nelson, senior VP and equity analyst at CFRA Research, told Business Insider. "Most other companies are doing everything under one corporate umbrella."
These aren't the first examples of Musk blurring the lines between his companies, but they're the latest indication that Musk Inc., the constellation of companies under his leadership, is becoming increasingly centered on AI.
Tesla is an 'AI robotics company'
Musk has long pushed for Tesla's focus on AI and robotics by prioritizing projects like autonomous driving, humanoid robots, and building out its Dojo supercomputer, his ambitious bid to rival Nvidia.
In a 2024 earnings call, the Tesla CEO said, "We should be thought of as an AI robotics company," and those who think of Tesla merely as an auto company are holding "the wrong framework."
With the recent launch of Tesla's robotaxi service in Austin, that push is appearing more prominent, especially as Tesla's auto business, in contrast, grapples with a loss in sales momentum.
Musk has promoted the advantages of buying into the "Muskonomy," pitching it as a way for shareholders to tap into his business empire, which includes SpaceX, X, xAI, and The Boring Company. Musk has even said he would prioritize "longtime shareholders" of his other companies if any of his businesses were to go public.
Nelson told BI that Musk leveraging his other companies and resources could help Tesla meet its AI demands for autonomous driving.
"Tesla's data needs are massive if its approach to autonomous driving is going to be successful (and scalable), as its approach will require the development of a global neural network," Nelson said.
While exploring ways to pool resources across companies might benefit the broader Musk ecosystem, it could carry risk.
Last week, Grok sparked backlash with antisemitic outbursts on X, potentially putting investors on edge about integrating the chatbot into Tesla's EVs. xAI apologized for the incidents and said that new instructions to prioritize engagement could have reflected "extremist views" from user posts on X.
Last year, Musk also sparked concern among investors when he diverted a $500 million shipment of Nvidia chips intended for Tesla to X and xAI instead. When asked about the move in a Tesla earnings call, he said it was beneficial to Tesla because the carmaker lacked the infrastructure at the time to use the chips.
Gadjo Sevilla, an analyst at EMARKETER, a sister company to Business Insider, said that Musk may be leaning on SpaceX and Tesla to fund xAI because he views them as more "mature businesses." However, he said that shifting GPUs from Tesla to xAI in the past showed where Musk's priorities were, and that could delay innovation at the automaker.
"The strategy of cannibalizing one business to prop up another one could take its toll," Sevilla said. "Especially since competing carmakers are focused on developing one type of product, EVs."
Musk seems to be ruling out the idea of a merger between Tesla and his AI startup for now. In response to an X user asking Tesla shareholders to weigh in on whether Tesla and xAI should be combined, Musk replied with a flat "No."
Staying in the AI race is a costly venture
Investing in AI efforts might make sense from a strategy perspective, but it comes with a hefty price tag.
The development, training, and implementation of foundational AI systems, like xAI's Grok 4, costs many, many billions.
In March, Musk announced that xAI had acquired X in an all-stock deal, valuing the AI startup between $33 billion and $80 billion. Since founding the company two years ago, he's raised major funding, including around $12 billion in Series A, B, and C funding rounds last year. The company is expected to spend about $13 billion this year, however, and is rapidly burning through its cash reserves, Bloomberg reported.
Musk's challenges keeping up with AI costs aren't unique. In a May letter to California's attorney general, OpenAI revealed concerns about competitors who are "far better funded, conventional for-profit businesses."
Larger tech giants, like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, aren't showing any signs of backing down from their AI spending spree. Earnings reports from earlier this year indicate that their combined capital expenditures are set to exceed $320 billion in 2025, a notable rise from the roughly $246 billion the four companies spent in 2024.
Amazon plans to allocate over $100 billion this year toward expanding AWS and scaling AI infrastructure. Meta specifically has said it plans to spend $60 billion to $65 billion in capex on its strategy this year.
Zuckerberg certainly isn't slowing down.
On Monday, he announced Meta would spend "hundreds of billions" on compute to build superintelligence. Wall Street seemed to approve, with Meta's stock rising 1.3% following the news, suggesting that its concern isn't about overspending on the AI race — but rather underspending and falling behind.
Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer twice made references to an early work featuring a Germanic mythological character named Wade. Only three lines survive, discovered buried in a sermon by a late 19th century scholar. There has been much debate over how to translate those fragments ever since, and whether the long-lost work was a monster-filled epic or a chivalric romance. Two Cambridge University scholars now say those lines have been "radically misunderstood" for 130 years, supplying their own translation—and argument in favor of a romance—in a new paper published in the Review of English Studies.
We know such a medieval work once existed because it's referenced in other texts, most notably by Chaucer. He alludes to the "tale of Wade" in his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde and mentions "Wade's boat [boot]" in The Merchant's Tale—part of his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. A late 16th century editor of Chaucer's works, Thomas Speght, made a passing remark that Wade's boat was named "Guingelot," and that Wade's "strange exploits" were "long and fabulous," but didn't elaborate any further, no doubt assuming the tale was common knowledge and hence not worth retelling. Speght's truncated comment "has often been called the most exasperating note ever written on Chaucer," F.N. Robinson wrote in 1933.
So, the full story has been lost to history, although some remnant details have survived. For instance, there are mentions of Wade in an Old English poem, describing him as the son of a king and a "serpent-legged mermaid." The Poetic Edda mentions Wade's son, Wayland, as well as Wayland's brothers Egil and Slagfin. Wade is also briefly referenced in Malory's Morte D'Arthur and a handful of other texts from around the same period. Fun fact: J.R.R. Tolkien based his Middle-earth character Earendil on Wade; Earendil sails across the sky in a magical ship called Wingelot (or Vingilot).
The insights are more repackaging data you already know with common sense advice than deductive analysis.
After nearly a decade of wearables testing, I've amassed a truly terrifying amount of health and fitness data. And while I enjoy poring over my daily data, there's one part I've come to loathe: AI summaries.
Over the last two years, a deluge of AI-generated summaries has been sprinkled into every fitness, wellness, and wearable app. Strava introduced a feature called Athlete Intelligence, pitched as AI taking your raw workout data and relaying it to you in "plain English." Whoop has Whoop Coach, an AI chatbot that gives you a "Daily Outlook" report summarizing the weather, your recent activity and recovery metrics, and workout suggestions. Oura added Oura Advisor, another chatbot that summarizes data and pulls out long-term trends. Even my bed greets me with summaries every morning of how its AI helped keep me asleep every night.
Each platform's AI has its nuances, but the typical morning summary goes a bit like this:
Good morning! You slept 7 hours last night with a resting heart rate of 60 bpm. That's in line with your weekly average, but your slightly elevated heart rate suggests you may not be fully recovered. If you feel tired, try going to bed earlier tonight. Health is …
Polling shows Elon Musk has yet to recover after feuding with President Donald Trump.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Recent polls show Elon Musk's favorability declined with Republicans after feuding with Donald Trump.
Musk's overall favorability already had sustained significant hits during his time in the White House.
The billionaire's struggles come during a critical time for Tesla.
Elon Musk's image isn't what it used to be.
The Tesla CEO's feud with President Donald Trump risked worsening his already underwater popularity, and new polling shows that even the apparent peace between the once-friends hasn't repaired Musk's standing with Republicans.
A new Morning Consult poll found that Musk's net favorability is at -14 percentage points. The good news for the billionaire is that his overall standing as of June 20 is up four points since June 15, the week after the peak of his feud with Trump.
It's still lower than where he stood when he left the White House in late May. Among Republicans, Musk is down roughly 12 points; he'd dropped 10 points immediately after he criticized Trump in early June.
"In the US, Musk managed to alienate both those on the left (due to his support for DOGE, the Trump administration, and the election) and those on the right (as seen in his statements on X following his fallout with the President over the "big beautiful bill")," Frank T. Rothaermel, a regents' professor at the Scheller College of Business at Georgia Tech, told Business Insider in an email.
"The good thing in the US is that people's memories are short and a ton of stuff is happening every day," he added.
Voters began to become increasingly polarized toward Musk after his takeover of Twitter, Morning Consult US Politics Analyst Eli Yokley told Business Insider. Musk's closeness to Trump "poured fuel on the fire," which left his image in a much different state than some of his fellow tech moguls, who also sought to curry favor with the White House.
"It weighs on him in a very unique way that other CEOs who have tried to kiss the ring a bit just haven't experienced to the same extent," Yokley told Business Insider.
Musk's favorability isn't polled as frequently as someone like Trump. YouGov, which has sporadic data on Musk going back to 2018, found that immediately after the feud, Musk recorded his lowest net favorability in its records.
The handful of post-feud polls that have been released show similar warning signs. Namely, many Republicans, who were once the bulwark for Musk's sagging numbers, no longer have such rosy views of the billionaire.
An Economist-YouGov poll taken in the week after the feud found that Musk's net favorability among Republicans dropped 20 points. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that he dropped 13 points in net favorability in a roughly one-month span.
Musk is the face of Tesla, a close association that comes with some risk. Some analysts downgraded the company during his feud with Trump.
"The recent incident between Musk and President Trump exemplifies key-person risk associated with Musk's political activities," Baird senior research analyst Ben Kallo wrote in a note earlier this month.
Musk has signaled a retreat from politics, though whether he sticks by that commitment remains to be seen.
Tesla is facing other challenges. In China, the newly announced Xiaomi YU7 is priced to compete with Tesla's popular Model Y, and Tesla's sales have fallen in key markets like Europe in recent months.
The automaker is set to announce its second-quarter delivery numbers on Wednesday, and many analysts are expecting a year-over-year decrease.
John Helveston, an assistant professor at George Washington University, told BI that Musk's "political unpopularity is very unhelpful" as the CEO looks to navigate Tesla through the challenges it's currently facing.
"Elon Musk is strongest [indeed, world-class, second to none] when he focuses on his core competencies: solving 'impossible' engineering problems," Rothaermel said. "If I were on the board of directors at Tesla, that is what I would want him to focus on."
The Morning Consult poll is based on data collected during the firm's tracking poll from June 20 to 22nd, based on a representative sample of 2,205 registered U.S. voters. The margin of error is +/- 2 percentage points. Smaller subsamples have a larger margin of error. Full results are available here.
Age verification is perhaps the hottest battleground for online speech, and the Supreme Court just settled a pivotal question: does using it to gate adult content violate the First Amendment in the US? For roughly the past 20 years the answer has been "yes" - now, as of Friday, it's an unambiguous "no."
Justice Clarence Thomas' opinion in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is relatively straightforward as Supreme Court rulings go. To summarize, its conclusion is that:
States have a valid interest in keeping kids away from pornography
Making people prove their ages is a valid strategy to enforce that
Internet age verification only "incidentally" affects how adults can access protected speech
The risks aren't meaningfully different from showing your ID at a liquor store
Yes, the Supreme Court threw out age verification rules repeatedly in the early 2000s, but the internet of 2025 is so different the old reasoning no longer applies.
In the past week, big AI companies have - in theory - chalked up two big legal wins. But things are not quite as straightforward as they may seem, and copyright law hasn't been this exciting since last month's showdown at the Library of Congress.
First, Judge William Alsup ruled it was fair use for Anthropic to train on a series of authors' books. Then, Judge Vince Chhabria dismissed another group of authors' complaint against Meta for training on their books. Yet far from settling the legal conundrums around modern AI, these rulings might have just made things even more complicated.
Both cases are indeed qualified victories for Meta and Anthropic. And at least one judge - Alsup - seems sympathetic to some of the AI industry's core arguments about copyright. But that same ruling railed against the startup's use of pirated media, leaving it potentially on the hook for massive financial damage. (Anthropic even admitted it did not initially purchase a copy of every book it used.) Meanwhile, the Meta ruling asserted that because a flood of AI content could crowd out human artists, the entire field of AI system training might be fundamentally at odds with fair use. And neither case a …
One of the biggest surprises of the Nintendo Switch 2's reveal was its proposed accessibility. For years, Nintendo has been known for accidentally stumbling on accessibility solutions while stubbornly refusing to engage with the broader subject. Yet, in the Switch 2, there appeared a more holistic approach to accessibility for which disabled players have been crying out. This was supported by a webpage dedicated to the Switch 2's hardware accessibility.
However, specifics were thin and no further information emerged ahead of the Switch 2's debut. Now, having spent the last week with the Switch 2, I've found that this limited information hid, aside from a few missteps, an impressive suite of system-level accessibility considerations and advances that somewhat offset the otherwise gradual update the Switch 2 represents. But as we finally answer lingering accessibility questions over the Switch 2, there's a nagging sense that this information should have been readily available ahead of launch.
How intuitive is the setup? Very, but blind players may need assistance
I tend to find setup procedures dense and unapproachable thanks to cognitive disability. Yet I was pleasantly surpris …
Spotlight and themes are in the limelight. | Screenshot: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
At WWDC, Apple announced its new Liquid Glass design language, which is coming to all of its devices, including Macs. I've been tinkering with the macOS Tahoe 26 developer beta on the M4 MacBook Air for about a day. So far, the aesthetic changes range from slick to slightly overwrought, but the new Spotlight search features are nifty and useful.
There are new touches of glassy transparency all over macOS 26, including the Dock, Finder, widgets, and built-in apps. It's more subtle than on the iPhone, mostly because the Mac's much larger screen real estate makes the Liquid Glass elements more like accents than whatever this mess is supposed to be. I'm not very fond of it just yet, but maybe it will grow on me, like UI changes tend to.
The Dock now has a frosted background that's more translucent than Sequoia's flatter design. The hazy, frozen glass aesthetic also extends to widgets, like the calendar and weather, and drop-down menus - though the latter have much higher opacity. The pop-ups for volume and brightness now use this distorted glass look as well, though they've moved to the top-right corner of the screen instead of being centered above the dock. Frankly, they're ugly, …
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