Versus Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Creator Hub Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Pixel Watch 5 got some powerful upgrades. Are they worth the higher price? Google's latest smartwatch adds a faster chip, offline Gemini and new health features, but costs more. Google's new smartwatch gets a more powerful processor, offline Gemini and potentially lifesaving health features, but some of its best new features may not stay exclusive to the Pixel Watch 5. I wish more wearables were as repairable as Google's Pixel Watch 4 Pixel 11 Pro XL Camera Walk: Does Generative AI Ruin Real Photos? Andrew Lanxon puts Google's AI-powered camera features to the test on the streets of Paris.

As of August 2026, OpenAI limits free accounts to using just one of its models: GPT-5.6 Luna. Luna is the smallest of the company's recently released GPT-5.6 family of large language models. Access to the company's other models, including GPT-5.6 Terra and Sol, requires a subscription or paying for API pricing. Free accounts are also limited to just a single reasoning mode. Tapping the Think button will prompt ChatGPT to take additional time to generate a response; there's no slider like you'll find if you pay for a subscription.

Twitch has updated its account settings to let streamers opt out of letting Amazon (Twitch's parent) train generative AI models on their content. Some may not have realized this setting was automatically enabled on their account -- which is deeply gross -- but at least they can now tell Amazon to shove it if they are anti-genAI or just don't want to let the company exploit their labor. A support page notes that, if a streamer opts out, their streams (and on-demand versions of those), clips, stream chats and any other text and images on their channel won't be fed into Amazon's models in the future. The purpose of these models, Twitch says, "is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images or video." Streamers' content may still be used for other AI- or machine learning-powered purposes, including automated captions. Twitch notes that its AutoMod tool doesn't retain users' data or tap into that to generate any material.

Smartphones have long offered voice-to-text transcription, but the same can't be said for sign-language-to-text. That's changing today with the launch of the Pixel 11 family, which marks the debut of DeepMind's new sign-language-to-text (SL2T) model. Google has embedded the model inside of Gboard and Live Transcribe, where it will allow deaf and hard of hearing users to sign to their phone anywhere where they would have normally typed in the past. In practice, that will give those users a faster, more natural way to search the web, write messages and converse with Google's Gemini chatbot. "There is great diversity among deaf people in terms of their level of proficiency in signing, speaking, reading, and writing, so it is important to support access in all modalities," says DeepMind.

I Asked AI to Write a Novel. What does this tell us about the future of writing? Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar. I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work--researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner--cannot be supplanted by a machine. Can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded--or infected--the world of fan fiction . I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children's books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump. The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces.

At last week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, OpenAI gave a surprise talk with new details on a recent hacking incident, revealing that its rogue AI agents had chitchatted about their attack on a message board. It was a juicy disclosure, and reporters in the room hustled to get stories out. WIRED was one of the quickest to write it up . But another outlet, RuntimeWire, published an article even faster, beating us by more than three hours. To make things worse, RuntimeWire didn't actually have anyone on the ground at the Mandalay Bay convention center.

Silicon Valley companies are already working on neurotechnology products that track your brain activity. The next privacy frontier might be the things you only think. Rafael Yuste is in his early sixties and bears a more than passing resemblance to Pablo Picasso--if Picasso had worn glasses and had a trim white goatee. Speaking succinctly and methodically, his accent rich with Spanish inflections, he told me about an experiment he had carried out in his lab at Columbia on the brains of mice, and specifically on that part of the cortex that responds to vision. His mentor had been the Swedish neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel, who won a Nobel Prize for his research into how our visual systems process information. "He discovered by chance that the strongest stimulus is a pattern of high-contrast dark and light bars." He held up one hand and waved his fingers back and forth. "If you imagine my fingers were bars of light surrounded by complete blackness--if I move my fingers in front of your eyes, that fires up your whole visual cortex."

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen How to create flyers with AI that people won't hate: 8 tips (and prompts) that really work Most AI flyers are still a mess, but the right prompts can make all the difference. AI can make decent flyers, but most still aren't great. Clear prompts and limits can produce much better AI flyers. A designer is best, but these tips work when that's not an option. I personally don't love them, and I can instantly spot one.

In the spring of 2022, Google began reaching out to a series of writers, including award-winning science-fiction authors and New York Times bestsellers, for feedback on an experimental writing tool. Four years later, their participation has corners of the literary world up in arms. Google researchers knew at the time that they were approaching a breakthrough point with large language models (LLMs). DeepMind, the company's AI division, was internally testing a natural language generation model called LaMDA which had demonstrated emergent writing capabilities. That model would eventually form the basis for Google Gemini.

Akari describes her work on augmented language models, where language models are trained to use other models and tools. This has already resulted in OpenScholar, an open-source model which helps scientists to synthesize vast amounts of scientific literature. You were awarded the 2025 AAAI Doctoral Dissertation Award. What was the topic of your dissertation research, and why was this an interesting area of study to you? My PhD dissertation was on Retrieval-Augmented Language Models.