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The best power banks you can buy in 2025: Expert tested and reviewed

Almost everyone I know owns at least one power bank, and the ubiquity of these portable chargers means that you can pick up cheap units in gas stations and dollar stores. But my extensive testing suggests that these are false economy, and you're very likely buying something that at best won't last long, or at worse could even be dangerous. This is why I recommend buying power banks from reputable brands. Don't worry -- I still work to keep those brands honest by extensively testing every power

Your OnePlus 13 Will Get a Dedicated AI 'Mind Space' in Update Rolling Out Now

It's a non-negotiable right now that every phone-maker out there must have a plan for integrating AI into its devices. OnePlus is a little late to the party, but it's arrived nonetheless. Back in May, the company announced plans for bringing its own vision of personalized AI to OnePlus phones, and from this week, it's rolling out to the OnePlus 13 and 13R. At a launch event in London earlier this year I not only got to see the first AI features to land on OnePlus phones in action, but also lear

Analogue’s 4K N64 has been delayed again, but only by a month

The Analogue 3D has been hit with another delay, but should still be launching this summer. In an update on its preorder website, Analogue explained that it’s modern take on the Nintendo 64 “is now shipping in late August 2025,” after previously aiming for July. The company said in a separate statement that the decision was made due to the ever-changing situation around US tariffs. “Following last week’s sudden tariff changes, Analogue 3D will now begin shipping next month,” the company explain

North Korean XORIndex malware hidden in 67 malicious npm packages

North Korean threat actors planted 67 malicious packages in the Node Package Manager (npm) online repository to deliver a new malware loader called XORIndex to developer systems. The packages collectively count more than 17,000 downloads and were discovered by researchers at package security platform Socket, who assess them to be part of the continued Contagious Interview operation. Socket researchers say that the campaign follows threat activity detected since April. Last month, the same acto

I replaced my MacBook Pro with the M3 iPad Air - and I might never go back

ZDNET's key takeaways The 2025 iPad Air is available in an 11-inch model starting at $600 and a 13-inch model starting at $800. The latest iPad Air features Apple Intelligence, an M3 processor, and some of the best performance I've seen on an iPad to date. But the iPad Air gets expensive quickly, with the 13-inch model selling for as much as $1,300. View now at Amazon View now at Best Buy more buying choices I've grown rather attached to my work MacBook Pro. I use it every day, take it with m

Reflections on OpenAI

I left OpenAI three weeks ago. I had joined the company back in May 2024. I wanted to share my reflections because there's a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like. Nabeel Quereshi has an amazing post called Reflections on Palantir, where he ruminates on what made Palantir special. I wanted to do the same for OpenAI while it's fresh in my mind. You won't find any trade secrets here, more

Grounded 2 and These Other Games Are Coming to Xbox Game Pass Soon

The award-winning, quirky survival game Grounded is like the game version of the classic '80s comedy film, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. And on July 29, Xbox Game Pass subscribers can get early access to that game's sequel, Grounded 2. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, a CNET Editors' Choice award pick, offers hundreds of games you can play on your Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One and PC or mobile device for $20 a month. A subscription gives you access to a large library of games, with new titles, inc

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Elon Musk Is Moving Money Between His Companies in a Sketchy Way

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced over the weekend that shareholders of his EV maker Tesla will vote on whether to invest in his own artificial intelligence firm xAI. In other words, the mercurial billionaire is orchestrating a potentially massive shift in funds to prop up his cash-burning — and gas-burning — AI startup, the flagship product of which is the troubled chatbot Grok. In March, Musk merged xAI with his social media platform X, which had previously seen an advertiser exodus triggered by

Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

Shoggoth Mini July 14, 2025 Over the past year, robotics has been catching up with the LLM era. Pi’s π0.5 can clean unseen homes. Tesla’s Optimus can follow natural language cooking instructions. These systems are extremely impressive, but they feel stuck in a utilitarian mindset of robotic appliances. For these future robots to live with us, they must be expressive. Expressiveness communicates internal state such as intent, attention, and confidence. Beyond its functional utility as a communic

GOP’s pro-industry crypto bills could financially ruin millions, lawmaker warns

It's "Crypto Week" in Congress, and experts continue to warn that legislation Donald Trump wants passed quickly could give the president ample opportunities to grift while leaving Americans more vulnerable to scams and financial ruin. Perhaps most controversial of the bills is the one that's closest to reaching Trump's desk, the GENIUS Act, which creates a framework for banks and private companies to issue stablecoins. After passing in the Senate last month, the House of Representatives is hopi

Uber is close to completing its quest to become the ultimate robotaxi app

is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State. Uber just announced a deal today with the company that runs one of the largest robotaxi fleets in China, as the ridehail giant nears its goal of becoming the world’s ultimate autonomous vehicle clearinghouse. Uber and Baidu said they are teaming up to deploy robotaxis in countries outside the US and China, with an initial

Venture gets a rare Native American-led fund in Betsy Fore’s Velveteen Ventures

When Betsy Fore was five, her grandmother got her a gift she has never forgotten: A Velveteen Rabbit from Goodwill that Fore believed, with enough love, could spring alive. Decades later, that rabbit has lent its name to Fore’s venture firm, Velveteen Ventures, which came to life on Tuesday. “I realized after building companies for nearly two decades that I could make the greatest ripple in this one precious life by being on the other side of the table,” she told TechCrunch. Her companies inclu

Research leaders urge tech industry to monitor AI’s ‘thoughts’

AI researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, as well as a broad coalition of companies and nonprofit groups, are calling for deeper investigation into techniques for monitoring the so-called thoughts of AI reasoning models in a position paper published Tuesday. A key feature of AI reasoning models, such as OpenAI’s o3 and DeepSeek’s R1, are their chains-of-thought or CoTs — an externalized process in which AI models work through problems, similar to how humans use a scratch pad to wo

Grok's AI chatbot now includes companions for you to 'romance'

Grok, xAi's chatbot most famous for going on an antisemitic spree last week, has now added the ability to perform as a synthetic companion for your enjoyment. Elon Musk announced the new feature, available to paid subscribers, which will take the form of animated characters Ani and Rudy. Both are distinctly not safe for work, with the former operating as a digital waifu for you to, uh, romance. Rudy, on the other hand, is a red panda with a smart mouth who likes to get rude with the people he's

Uber’s latest robotaxi partner is China’s Baidu

Uber has struck another deal with a robotaxi provider, and this time it’s with Chinese tech giant Baidu. The two companies announced Tuesday that they have agreed to a “multi-year strategic partnership to deploy thousands of Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the Uber platform” in multiple markets outside the U.S. and mainland China. Those deployments will start in Asia and the Middle East later this year, the companies said. Uber has been on a tear of AV partnerships lately as it

Mistral releases Voxtral, its first open source AI audio model

As AI systems become more capable, speech is fast becoming the default way we communicate with machines. French AI startup Mistral has jumped into the audio race with its first open model, aiming to challenge the dominance of walled-off corporate systems with open-weight alternatives. On Tuesday, Mistral announced the release of Voxtral, its first family of audio models aimed at businesses. The company is pitching Voxtral as the first open model that’s capable of deploying “truly usable speech

‘Not that into peace doves’: The Apollo-Soyuz patch NASA rejected

Fifty years ago, on July 15, 1975, three NASA astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts lifted off to meet up in orbit for the first time. Representing the joint Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP, or Soyuz-Apollo in the Soviet Union), both crews wore a cloth patch that featured the artwork of an accomplished space artist. The design that flew, however, was not the astronauts' first pick. That patch idea was rejected because Paul Calle opted to highlight the détente nature of the international handsha

Mark Zuckerberg Interview Derailed After His Audio Doesn’t Work

The debut episode of The Information’s video podcast suffered a serious setback this week after an interview with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to be paused because the podcasters couldn’t get the interviewee’s audio to work. The Information, which routinely publishes scoops involving the tech industry, launched TITV this week—an Amazon-sponsored live video program that the outlet describes as “first in tech news and analysis from the people that break and shape the story.” A key part of the fi

Praise and Addiction Fears: Musk’s AI Girlfriend Sparks Fierce Debate

How do you bury a controversy? If you’re Elon Musk, you drop an anime waifu into the middle of a scandal and watch the internet do the rest. Just days after xAI’s chatbot Grok sparked outrage for spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric and praising Adolf Hitler, the billionaire shifted the narrative by unveiling a new feature called Companions, which lets users interact with flirty, customizable AI avatars like Ani, a goth anime girl, and Rudy, a red panda. The feature went instantly viral. While xAI ha

Student Loan Update: Here's What SAVE Borrowers Should Do Before Aug. 1

Interest will restart for SAVE borrowers whose loans remain in a general forbearance on Aug. 1. Viva Tung/CNET Starting on Aug. 1, borrowers who are enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education plan will begin accruing interest charges on their loan balances. The Department of Education is encouraging borrowers to pick a new payment plan, but you also have the option to leave your loans where they are. The Department of Education "urges all borrowers in the SAVE plan to quickly transition to

Auriga Space raises $6M to shoot rockets off an electromagnetic launch track

While U.S.-based companies are launching more payloads into orbit than ever before, they’re still limited by the inefficiency of conventional rockets. With rockets, most of the weight is in the propellant, not the payload, and a huge portion of it is burned simply battling Earth’s gravity and atmosphere. Auriga Space is aiming to change the launch game. Instead of a first-stage booster, the California-based startup is developing a launch track that will use electricity to power powerful magnets

xAI says it has fixed Grok 4’s problematic responses

When xAI launched Grok 4 last week, the company claimed the large language model outperformed several competitors on different benchmarks. But the Grok account on X that runs off the model immediately showed there were some major issues: it started saying its surname was “Hitler”, tweeted antisemitic messages, and seemed to reference Elon Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, siding with the xAI owner’s views as a result. xAI soon afterwards apologized for Grok’s behavior. On Tue

ParadeDB takes on Elasticsearch as interest in Postgres explodes amid AI boom

Open source database management system Postgres is nearly 40 years old, but has recently started seeing explosive demand due to being very well-suited for AI applications. Despite this rise in popularity, search and analytics functionality remain limited. ParadeDB is changing that. ParadeDB is an open source Postgres extension that facilitates full-text search and analytics directly in Postgres without users needing to transfer data to a separate source. The platform integrates with other data

The Download: combating audio deepfakes, and AI in the classroom

The news: A new technique known as “machine unlearning” could be used to teach AI models to forget specific voices. How it works: Currently, companies tend to deal with this issue by checking whether the prompts or the AI’s responses contain disallowed material. Machine unlearning instead asks whether an AI can be made to forget a piece of information that the company doesn’t want it to know. It works by taking a model and the specific data to be redacted then using them to create a new model—e

NVIDIA says it can resume selling key AI chips to China

NVIDIA will be able to start selling its H20 AI GPU to China again soon after gaining approval to do so from the US government, the company announced in a blog post. Earlier this year, the company was blocked from selling the H20 to China over concerns it could aid the nation's military. "NVIDIA is filing applications to sell the H20 GPU again. The US government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon," the article states. The company also anno

The Commodore 64 Is Back—and More Gamer-Fueled Than Ever With a Transparent RGB Case

The Commodore 64 deserves to have a happy ending it never got in life. You’ve likely seen at least one of those rounded beige rectangles sitting prone and forlorn in some office or forgotten attic. For those who loved their age-old home computer, the big blocky keyboard is back, and for $300 you can get what may be the most accurate recreation of the classic computer, no software emulation required. At least, it will be when the company manages to finalize the operating system and produce all th

AI’s giants want to take over the classroom

The companies could face an uphill battle. Right now, most of the public perceives AI’s use in the classroom as nothing short of ruinous—a surefire way to dampen critical thinking and hasten the decline of our collective attention span (a viral story from New York magazine, for example, described how easy it now is to coast through college thanks to constant access to ChatGPT). Amid that onslaught, AI companies insist that AI promises more individualized learning, faster and more creative lesso

Gemini Space needs to fix a Pixel home screen issue we’ve had for years

Joe Maring / Android Authority Thanks to a recent APK teardown, we discovered that Google’s At a Glance feature on Pixel phones is getting a major overhaul. What we know as At a Glance will be rebranded as “Gemini Space,” and with that, Google is also adding more contextual cards to the longstanding widget — including sports scores, birthday reminders, finance updates, and more. From what we’ve seen, Gemini Space aims to show a lot more contextual info than At a Glance currently does, bringing

Is Nano-Hydroxyapatite Toothpaste an Effective Fluoride Alternative? Dentists Weigh In

Picking the best toothpaste can be a challenge, especially with newer ingredients being added to the market. Nano-hydroxyapatite is a timely example and the star ingredient for popular brands like Boka and Davids. Amidst health concerns around fluoride and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Secretary of Health and Human Services, proposing to remove it from public water, nano-hydroxyapatite has been promoted as an effective alternative to fluoride in toothpaste. Many claim that it can repair enamel, prev

Interest Restarts for SAVE Student Loans on Aug. 1. Should You Switch to Another Payment Plan by Then?

Interest will restart for SAVE borrowers whose loans remain in a general forbearance on Aug. 1. Viva Tung/CNET Starting on Aug. 1, borrowers who are enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education plan will begin accruing interest charges on their loan balances. The Department of Education is encouraging borrowers to pick a new payment plan, but you also have the option to leave your loans where they are. The Department of Education "urges all borrowers in the SAVE plan to quickly transition to