Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini Our top pick for the best premium VPN is fast and easy to use. ExpressVPN is back on sale again, and its two-year plans are up to 78 percent off right now. You can get the Advanced tier for $101 for 28 months. This is marked down from the $392 that this time frame normally costs. On a per-month basis, it works out to roughly $3.59 for the promo period.

Elon Musk has been promoting Grok's popularity as if it were a piece of productivity software. Elon Musk has been promoting Grok's popularity as if it were a piece of productivity software. Today, we discuss Elon Musk's rosy depiction of Grok's image generation controversy; the seven-figure panic among Silicon Valley billionaires over a proposed wealth tax in California, though with one notable exception; and how AI and robotics have revitalized the Consumer Electronics Showcase. The firestorm over the Grok AI tool has been raging for more than a week now, and it shows no signs of dying down. Last week, I wrote about the rising backlash against Elon Musk's Grok AI tool, which in recent weeks has allowed users to generate thousands of sexualized images of women.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says she has lost confidence in West Midlands Police's chief constable after Israeli football fans were banned from a match against Aston Villa. Mahmood told MPs a damning review from the policing watchdog over the intelligence that led to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being banned showed a failure of leadership. The force has apologised saying it did not deliberately distort evidence that was used by Birmingham's Safety Advisory Group for the 6 November game . Chief Constable Craig Guildford remains in post, but faces a meeting on 27 January to be questioned by Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster who has the authority to sack him. Mahmood told the Commons on Wednesday she intended to restore the power for home secretaries to dismiss chief constables who fail their communities.

When a police force is supposed to seek the truth and uphold the law, what happens when the evidence they present to officials and the public is, as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood put it, exaggerated or untrue? The police inspectorate has concluded the leaders of West Midlands Police fell foul of confirmation bias. In simple terms, that means senior officers had already reached a decision and were looking for intelligence to justify it. The list of errors and inaccuracies set out in an independent review of the decision-making that led to fans of Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv being banned from attending a fixture at Villa Park in November have been described by Mahmood as damning. They include: A report of a football match in an intelligence report produced using AI which never happened; a twice-repeated denial by senior police leaders to MPs that AI had not been relied on to produce the inaccurate report; the claim that local Jewish groups had been consulted on the move when they had not been; inaccurately presenting evidence from Dutch police reports from a previous fixture involving the club.

Google launches Personal Intelligence for Gemini, allowing the AI to access data from Photos, YouTube, and Gmail to provide personalized recommendations and answers. PCWorld reports the feature initially requires Google AI Pro or Ultra subscriptions in the US, with broader availability planned for later. While offering enhanced convenience through data synthesis, Google warns users about potential inaccuracies and privacy considerations when enabling this opt-in feature. If you use Google apps like Gmail or Photos, Google already knows certain aspects of your life. The company is offering to make that knowledge more accessible via what it calls Personal Intelligence, which will synthesize that knowledge into Gemini.

AI's Hacking Skills Are Approaching an'Inflection Point' AI models are getting so good at finding vulnerabilities that some experts say the tech industry might need to rethink how software is built. Vlad Ionescu and Ariel Herbert-Voss, cofounders of the cybersecurity startup RunSybil, were momentarily confused when their AI tool, Sybil, alerted them to a weakness in a customer's systems last November. Sybil uses a mix of different AI models --as well as a few proprietary technical tricks--to scan computer systems for issues that hackers might exploit, like an unpatched server or a misconfigured database. In this case, Sybil flagged a problem with the customer's deployment of federated GraphQL, a language used to specify how data is accessed over the web through application programming interfaces (APIs). The issue meant that the customer was inadvertently exposing confidential information.

A major Verizon outage appeared to impact customers across the United States starting around noon ET on Wednesday. Calls to Verizon customers from other carriers may also be impacted. Customers of the telecom giant Verizon began reporting cellular outages around the United States beginning around noon ET on Wednesday, saying they could not complete calls and did not have access to mobile data. Verizon broadband internet customers are also reporting issues. AT&T and T-Mobile customers also began reporting service outages in the same timeframe, however these reports may be linked to the Verizon outage.

"We're going to get into a period of potentially unprecedented I.P.O. "But we are confident they're executable given the scale of these companies and the investor interest." These listings could create an enormous bonanza for Wall Street and Silicon Valley after years of lackluster offerings. They could set off a feeding frenzy among public market investors who have been waiting to get a piece of the A.I. boom, and Wall Street banks stand to make hundreds of millions facilitating the listings. That is stoking more excitement for the A.I. boom as it enters its fourth year, even as the question of a bubble intensifies.

Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini Issues appear to be concentrated in the eastern United States. Verizon's network appears to be having technical issues that are impacting calls and wireless data. Users on X have reported seeing "SOS" rather than the traditional network bars on their smartphones, and even Verizon's own network status page is struggling to load. Based on the experience of Verizon users on Engadget's staff, the services that are impacted appear to be calls and wireless data. Text messages continue to be delivered normally.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. California launches investigation into child porn on Elon Musk's AI site This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . California opened an investigation into Elon Musk's xAI company, alleging its Grok chatbot creates sexually explicit deepfakes of real people and child pornography. The AI tool allows users to morph photos into explicit images and post them publicly on X.