China’s Z.ai claims it can match Mythos on cybersecurity
China's Zhipu AI (Z.ai) released its open-weight GLM-5.2, and some researchers have claimed that it matches Mythos in certain bug-finding and cybersecurity scenarios. While GLM lags behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI in other, more general tasks, it seems that China has dramatically reduced the gap in the capabilities between its models and those of the US.
This level of advancement is particularly concerning to the US government, which has worked to restrict China's access to powerful models like Anthropic's Mythos and Fable, as well as the hardware necessary to train and run them. The Trump administration views Mythos and other advan …
Suno launches Spark incubator program to feed independent artists to its AI machine
Suno has ambitions to be more than just a toy to churn out AI slop, it also wants to be a streaming destination and to break new artists. Spark is their new incubator program for independent artists that provides grants, mentorship, and marketing support.
To apply, artists need to be an unsigned singer, songwriter, or producer releasing music under their own name. They also need to agree to some terms and conditions that have raised some eyebrows over on the Suno subreddit. For one, you need to agree to make your songs available on Suno for remixing. That's not necessarily super concerning, but the broad license it grants Suno to your works …
China claims the world’s fastest supercomputer
Despite trade restrictions, China has reclaimed the title of the world's fastest supercomputer for the first time since 2018. LineShine has pushed El Capitan out of number one on the TOP500 ranking. That's despite strict limits on what high-powered computing components can be sold to China by US firms, which dominate the list, with America holding three of the top five spots. LineShine doesn't even use any GPUs, which are typically the backbone of modern supercomputers.
While reaching the peak of the Top500 carries obvious bragging rights, it also serves as a message from the Chinese government to the US. The Trump administration has sought …
The Cube is Jim Henson’s little-known proto-Black Mirror masterpiece
I'm sure we're all familiar with Dark Crystal, so we know that Jim Henson can be weird and tackle slightly more mature subject matter. But there is little in his oeuvre that is quite as mind-bending as the Muppetless The Cube. This 1969 teleplay was produced for an NBC anthology series called Experiment in Television, which featured, appropriately enough, various experimental films, plays, and documentaries. One episode even featured Marshall McLuhan explaining his oft-cited theory that "the medium is the message."
Even among all these oddities, however, Jim Henson's The Cube stands out. It's a 53-minute bottle film - taking place almost e …
Prosecutors used ChatGPT logs as evidence in the Palisades fire trial
Jonathan Rinderknecht was facing arson charges for setting a fire on New Year's Day in 2025, which became one of the deadliest wildfires in LA history. To make their case, prosecutors turned to location data from his iPhone, security camera footage, and witness testimony. But they also turned to his ChatGPT logs.
Prosecutors said that Rinderknecht had ChatGPT generate images of fire, asked the chatbot, "Why am I so angry all the time?", and ranted to it about how the wealthy were destroying the world. They also pointed to a screen recording in which Rinderknecht asked ChatGPT whether someone could be blamed for a fire if it was lit by their …
Nest’s quest to fix your thermostat
The founding story of Nest is pretty much a perfect tech myth. A legendary product maker (in this case, Tony Fadell) helps create one of the most successful products ever (the iPhone) and then rides off into the sunset to enjoy the rest of his life, only to have an experience that drags him back for one last job. For Fadell, that job was to try and reinvent the thermostat. And maybe change the way our homes work forever.
On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the early days of Nest. The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy describe Fadell's frustration with outdated, expensive temperature controls …
Ad-free streaming is a luxury now
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more news about the streaming industry, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
How it started
Streaming was once a reprieve from cable. Not only could you watch whatever you wanted at any given time, but you didn't have to sit through five-minute-long commercial breaks. And the best part was the price: Netflix, for example, cost just $7.99 / month when it launched its standalone streaming service in 2010. Amazon's Prime Video was the same, offering ad-free streaming as a p …
TMD’s keyless bike lock is a $280 solution to a $60 problem
I've seen lots of so-called "smart" bike locks over the years, but none so far could justify the added cost. A newcomer that got its start securing ATMs for banks is trying to change that. There's nothing wholly unique about the TMD Chain Lock, but the combination of materials, performance, and insurance-friendly ART-2 certification makes it worth considering.
TMD's first bicycle lock combines a Bluetooth proximity sensor and motion alarm with a slender core of hardened steel chain wrapped in a soft and lightweight sleeve of high performance Dyneema and Kevlar fibers. That makes this lock tough, yet flexible enough to conveniently wrap arou …
Teenage Engineering adds lo-fi mode, USB audio, and more to its KO II sampler
Teenage Engineering has already issued multiple substantial updates for its surprisingly capable $329 EP-133 KO II sampler. Its latest is one of the biggest yet. OS 2.5 adds audio over USB, selectable sample rates for lo-fi fun, sample reverse, an arpeggiator, equal-length autochopping, and it extends the maximum length of a sample from 20 seconds to 40 seconds by capturing mono, instead of stereo, audio.
Sample reverse is such a simple feature that it's shocking it wasn't implemented earlier. An arpeggiator doesn't always make a ton of sense on a sampler, but the KO II sounds so incredible repitching samples (like the SK-1 successor I've a …
Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’
Maraget Atwood, the storied author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin, was interviewed as part of the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As it usually does at these things, the issue of AI came up, and Atwood didn't mince words.
According to Deadline's recap, Atwood said she'd used an AI chatbot exactly once, Anthropic's Claude, and came away unimpressed. She was looking for information about the British detective series Father Brown and, well:
"Claude gave me the wrong answer, or it lied. Of course, it didn't know it was lying because it's not a human being; it's a large language model… It had skimmed a …