How Long Do Vacuums Last? Here are the signs to look for, and how to help your vacuum live longer. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Be honest: how long have you been lugging around your current vacuum?

Tesla might be an electric auto maker, but CEO Elon Musk has made clear that he thinks of it as much more: an innovator in artificial intelligence and software, a builder of world-shaking robots. He's also argued that Tesla should be worth a lot more than it is today: up to $20 trillion, he posted in July, more than five times the current worth of Nvidia. Musk has also made it clear that he wants to get paid, a lot. In November, Tesla shareholders will vote on the board's proposal to pay the CEO a remarkable $1 trillion over the next decade . The deal would also increase Musk's stake in Tesla from 13 percent to a quarter.

Face Check will scan new members' faces to ensure they don't match existing profiles. The move comes as romance scams continue to proliferate, with billions lost over the last decade. On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it was rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out "bad actors." Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature, called Face Check, is a first for a major dating app. During the sign up process, new members complete a "liveness check" by taking a short video selfie within the app.

We found two outstanding camera deals, including one on Sony's A7R V at the lowest price it's ever been. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. If you want to step up your photography game, and graduate from your phone, why not go all the way to highest resolution camera on the market? Normally, we suggest that a more affordable camera might be the best pick for most people in our guide to mirrorless cameras, but at this price--why not go big?

JBL's Rad Clip-On Bluetooth Speaker Is $20 Off Take this unique speaker on your next adventure, and save some cash in the process. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. The JBL Clip 5, named for its built-in latching hook, is currently marked down to just $60 at Amazon and Walmart in a variety of colors and finishes. That's a healthy 25% discount, and makes this compact Bluetooth speaker an appealing option for anyone who loves a little adventure.

A new study shows that feeding large language models low-quality, high-engagement content from social media lowers their cognitive abilities. AI models may be a bit like humans, after all. A new study from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue University shows that large language models fed a diet of popular but low-quality social media content experience a kind of "brain rot" that may be familiar to anyone who has spent too long doomscrolling on X or TikTok. We live in an age where information grows faster than attention spans--and much of it is engineered to capture clicks, not convey truth or depth," says Junyuan Hong, an incoming assistant professor at the National University of Singapore who worked on the study as a graduate student at UT Austin. "We wondered: What happens when AIs are trained on the same stuff?"

General Motors' 'Eyes-Off' System Begs the Question: What Happens When Cars Go AI? General Motors' new self-driving system will let the driver speed down the highway without looking at the road. It's one of several features enabled by the adoption of machine intelligence in cars. A new self-driving system coming to Cadillac Escalades will handle the driving on approved highways, enabling the driver to do basically anything they want behind the wheel. General Motors is launching another salvo in the self-driving wars. In 2028, the automaker announced today, it will roll out what it's calling an "eyes-off" driving system on the electric Cadillac Escalade IQ.

This week in tech: General Motors says goodbye to robotaxis but not self-driving cars; one woman's fight to keep AI out of applications for housing; Salt Typhoon; and tech's donations to Donald Trump. Thank you for joining me. When God shuts down one robotaxi business, he resurrects another. Last week, General Motors announced it would stop funding its subsidiary Cruise, which made self-driving car software and operated a robotaxi service. The unit had been a leader in autonomous vehicles until a near-fatal crash in late 2023, when a Cruise car hit a pedestrian and dragged her along the road underneath its chassis.

Nissan is planning an autonomous vehicle ride-share service for Japan in three years to address a dearth of taxi drivers amid the nation's aging population. The company, which will begin a trial service in Yokohama using a Serena-based vehicle, aims to have the program running nationwide by fiscal year 2027, Kazuhiro Doi, vice president of Nissan Research and Advanced Engineering, said during a briefing at the company's Yokohama headquarters. The trial will involve 20 vehicles with a safety monitor in each driver's seat in Yokohama's Minato Mirai area. Passengers will be able to make reservations for the service. Nissan will hold safety-related discussions with the government and proceed gradually, Doi said.

A law firm hired by the General Motors' self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company's response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said today in a blog post. The incident in October led California regulators to suspend Cruise's license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco. The new report by law firm Quinn Emanuel says that Cruise failed to tell California's Department of Motor Vehicles that after striking a pedestrian knocked into its path by a human-driven vehicle, the autonomous car pulled out of traffic--dragging her some 20 feet. Cruise said it had accepted the firm, Quinn Emanuel's, version of events, as well as its recommendations. The investigators found that when Cruise played a video of the crash taken from its autonomous vehicle for government officials, it did not "verbally point out" the vehicle's pullover maneuver.