Venti iced coffee, light skim milk. That’s what I get at Starbucks. It is what I have gotten at Starbucks every time I’ve been to Starbucks for as long as I can remember, other than a brief love affair with the caffe misto a few years ago. In person, my brain barely needs to activate […]
We get a lot of questions about how The Verge works. And how The Vergecast works. And how we make money. And whether some of that money helps Nilay buy more jackets, several yachts, or something else entirely. So, every once in a while, we spend an episode of the podcast answering as many questions […]
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 124, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, send me your Coachella fits, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about restaurant bread and GLP-1s and Lenny Rachitsky and […]
In the latest sign of AI silly season, Allbirds, the shoe company, told the world it was now an AI company and briefly managed to septuple its stock price. The Newbird AI story is really just one of a bunch of things this week that made us wonder: have we reached the peak of AI, […]
It was at about 36 miles per hour that I decided the Infinite Machine Olto is not a bike. Sure, it has pedals, you don’t need a license to ride it in most (but not all!) places in the US, and the folks at Infinite Machine assured me it is allowed in the bike lane. […]
A few years ago, during the absolute peak of the cryptocurrency craze, a somewhat surprising skeptic emerged. Most people know Ben McKenzie from his acting work on Southland or Gotham, or would recognize him instantly as Ryan Atwood from The O.C. While seemingly everyone else was buying Bitcoin, McKenzie decided to figure out what Bitcoin […]
For years, even decades, virtually everyone in the United States had the same phone. Nobody really thought about it, it didn’t even matter what it was called – it was just The Phone. Well, The Phone was called the Western Electric 500, and when landline phones ruled the world, the Western Electric 500 ruled the […]
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the AI coding and vibe-coding booms, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Writing code was a killer app for AI […]
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 123, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, which Artemis photo did you make your wallpaper, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about Sam Altman and Satoshi Nakamoto […]
Sam Altman’s tenure at OpenAI has been… messy. Messy to the point where Altman was briefly fired from his role as CEO, only to be reinstated days later, at which point he began reshaping the organization permanently. This week, The New Yorker published a deep look at Altman, his time at OpenAI, and the questions […]