Tootfinder

AI image generators like Nano Banana have increased realism by mimicking phone camera traits in contrast, exposure, and sharpening to avoid the uncanny valley (Allison Johnson/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/column/843883/ai-image-generators-better-worse

AI image generators are getting better by getting worse
AI image generators are getting way better at creating realistic fakes, by making image quality a little bit worse.

The Wikimedia Foundation says Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral joined Wikimedia Enterprise to get "tuned" API access; Google is already a member (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/862109/wikip

Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are paying up for ‘enterprise’ access to Wikipedia
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that Microsoft, Meta, and Perplexity are paying to gain access to the nonprofit’s projects, allowing them to use Wikipedia for AI training.

UK police say they banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from a soccer match in 2025 after Copilot hallucinated a fake West Ham-Maccabi match in an intelligence report (Tom Warren/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/861668/uk-police-microsoft-copilot-error-mistake<…

UK police blame Microsoft Copilot for intelligence mistake
A British police force is blaming Microsoft’s Copilot assistant for an intelligence report mistake. Copilot made up a football match that didn’t exist.

Google makes improvements to Veo 3.1's Ingredients to Video feature to make videos more expressive, and adds native vertical video generation and 4K upscaling (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/861257/google-veo-3-1-ai-video…

Google’s Veo now turns portrait images into vertical AI videos
Google is making its Veo 3.1 AI video model pay closer attention to the reference images you want generated clips to be based on.

Some former employees blame xAI's staff exodus on xAI's focus on NSFW Grok and disregard for safety, constantly playing catch up to OpenAI, infighting, and more (Hayden Field/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int

What’s behind the mass exodus at xAI?
Internal sources spoke with The Verge about the recent restructuring at xAI and the direction Elon Musk is taking the company.

As part of its Reality Labs cuts, Meta is closing three VR gaming studios and will stop developing new content and features for its VR fitness app Supernatural (Jay Peters/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/861420/meta-reality-la…

Meta is closing down three VR studios as part of its metaverse cuts
Meta’s Reality Labs layoffs include shutting down some of its VR studios, according to employees affected by the cuts.

YouTube now lets parents set time limits on their kids' YouTube Shorts feed, ranging from 15 minutes to two hours, with an option for zero minutes coming soon (Stevie Bonifield/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/861804/youtube-shorts-teen-time-…

Parents can put a time limit on YouTube Shorts scrolling
YouTube has announced a feature that will allow parents to manually set a time limit for their kids’ Shorts feed, along with more options for setting up child and teen accounts.

Mercedes pauses the rollout of Drive Pilot, a Level 3 "eyes off" driving feature available in Europe and the US, citing low demand and high production costs (Andrew J. Hawkins/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/860935/mercedes-dr…

Mercedes temporarily scraps its Level 3 ‘eyes-off’ driving feature
Mercedes pauses the rollout of its Level 3 Drive Pilot system that allowed eyes-off driving in certain conditions.

IDC: in Q4 2025, global PC shipments rose nearly 10% YoY to 76.4M units, helped by Windows 10 end-of-support and OEMs pulling forward inventory amid tariffs (Tom Warren/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/861124/pc-market-growth-q4-2025-idc

PC shipments just grew unexpectedly amid RAM shortages
The PC market just grew nearly 10 percent. The end of Windows 10 support and global memory shortages helped boost PC shipments over the holidays.