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A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, US, on Sunday, June 22, 2025. Tesla finally did the damn thing. The company launched its hotly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd — and we’re now starting to see some of the first reactions roll in. But first, we have to get a few important caveats out of the way. Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised. The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger…

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware. OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory. The announcement blog post and a nine-minute video featuring Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are no longer available. The blog post from Ive and Altman…

Andru Marino is an audio and video producer at The Verge. “I make videos on our YouTube / TikTok / Instagram channels, and have produced our podcasts like Vergecast, Decoder, and Why’d You Push That Button?” He also keeps a lot of notes, and his latest favorite places to keep them are the Triangle and Sidekick notebooks. I asked him about them. Where did you first hear about these notebooks? I don’t really remember when I first saw the Triangle Notebook. It was probably an Instagram ad. I had kept a link to the notebook’s website in a browser tab…

Monotype is keen for you to know what AI might do in typography. As one of the largest type design companies in the world, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans - among 250,000 other fonts. In the typography giant's 2025 Re:Vision trends report, published in February, Monotype devotes an entire chapter to how AI will result in a reactive typography that will "leverage emotional and psychological data" to tailor itself to the reader. It might bring text into focus when you look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It could shift typefaces depending on the time of…

Image: The Verge I jumped on the smartwatch bandwagon a bit late, but now I can’t go a day without mine. Beyond delivering helpful notifications, it’s perfect for setting timers, tracking workouts, and monitoring my sleeping habits (which are terrible). If you haven’t yet joined the smartwatch party or you’re looking to upgrade, Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7 is down to $199.99 ($100 off) in the 40mm / Bluetooth configuration at Amazon and Walmart. If you prefer a larger display, the 44mm model is on sale at Amazon starting at $229.99 ($100 off). While the Galaxy Watch 7 isn’t as flashy…

The Final Fantasy Magic: The Gathering set is here, and there's never been a more perfect assemblage of Magic cards. The set features cards taken from every mainline Final Fantasy title, including the two MMOs, so there's something for every generation of Final Fantasy lovers. And while Magic has featured other video game crossovers in the past (hello, Assassin's Creed and Fallout!), with the way this set is constructed, from card mechanics to art, you can tell this one is a developer favorite, sure to appeal to the massive chunk of people who love both games. But what if you…

Amazon’s mega sale is nearly upon us. This year, Prime Day will kick off on July 8th and run through July 11th, which, for those counting, is twice as long as previous years. Most everything else will likely be the same — well, aside from Amazon’s so-called “Today’s Big Deals” feature — making it a great time to stock up on essentials and save ahead of tentpole shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As usual, we’ll be here to highlight all the discounts, limited-time promos, and Prime-exclusive deals worth picking up. We’ll also be pulling together any early…

I wouldn't have preordered a Nintendo Switch 2 just for myself. The price is high, there's no new Smash Bros. or Metroid Prime (yet), and I've got a perfectly good original Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck that keep me plenty busy. At first, I could only justify the $450 because I write about gaming tech for The Verge. But two weeks in, I can almost justify the cost one additional way: the Switch 2 is turning out to be an upgrade for my whole family. I'm not primarily talking about hand-me-downs, though yes, you could absolutely hand your original Switch…

The music industry's nightmare came true in 2023, and it sounded a lot like Drake. "Heart on My Sleeve," a convincingly fake duet between Drake and The Weeknd, racked up millions of streams before anyone could explain who made it or where it came from. The track didn't just go viral - it broke the illusion that anyone was in control. In the scramble to respond, a new category of infrastructure is quietly taking shape that's built not to stop generative music outright, but to make it traceable. Detection systems are being embedded across the entire music pipeline: in the…

At this point, it's becoming easier to say which AI startups Mark Zuckerberg hasn't looked at acquiring. In addition to Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI), sources tell me the Meta CEO recently discussed buying ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab and Perplexity, the AI-native Google rival. None of these talks progressed to the formal offer stage for various reasons, including disagreements over deal prices and strategy, but together they illustrate how aggressively Zuckerberg has been canvassing the industry to reboot his AI efforts. Now, details about the team Zuckerberg is assembling are starting to come into view: SSI co-founder…