ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones — landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon. “[Our mission at] OpenAI is to make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that is making it as accessible as possible to as many people as we can,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said during a livestream. Today, we’re taking the next step and bringing ChatGPT to your telephone.” The experience is more or less identical to Advanced Voice Mode, OpenAI’s real-time conversational feature for ChatGPT — minus the multimodality. ChatGPT responds to the…
Author: Olsi
Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access. GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023. “My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told…
Alphabet’s Wing announced on Wednesday that it’s expanding its partnership with DoorDash to bring drone delivery to customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Customers in the area will now be able to order food from 50 merchants located in Stonebriar Centre in Frisco and Hulen Mall in Fort Worth. Wing says its drones can “deliver items and meals to doorsteps in as little as 15 minutes.” The drones can navigate to the customer’s residence at a speed of 65 mph and a cruising height of about 150 feet. When customers with an eligible address in Dallas-Fort Worth place an order…
The global app economy continued to recover in 2024, after an earlier slowdown in 2022 — at least in terms of consumer spending. In 2024, global consumer spending in mobile apps and games reached $127 billion across the App Store and Google Play, up 15.7% from the prior year. However, those increases were driven by Apple’s App Store as Google Play spending declined, according to new data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. Though spending was up, there was another worrying sign about the overall health of the app ecosystem. This year, global app downloads were down by 2.3%, compared with…
Odyssey, a startup founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is developing an AI-powered tool that can transform text or an image into a 3D rendering. The tool, dubbed Explorer, is similar in some ways to the so-called world models recently demoed by DeepMind, World Labs, and Israeli upstart Decart. Given a caption like “A Japanese garden, with rich, green foliage,” Explorer can generate an interactive, real-time scene. Odyssey claims its tool is “particularly tuned” for creating photorealistic scenes. That’s largely a consequence of the startup’s technical approach; the AI powering Explorer was trained on real-world landscapes captured by the…
Regulators have given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch Starship for the seventh time, although the company has not yet announced when that mission may take place. While the exact launch date is unclear, SpaceX engineers have been as busy as ever at the company’s massive launch site near Boca Chica, Texas. In recent days, the company performed test fires of the Super Heavy booster and the upper stage (which is also called Starship), though the two stages have yet to be stacked at the launch tower. The most recent Starship test took place on November 19 with president-elect Donald Trump as…
After weeks of beta testing, Nothing is the latest name to join the stable Android 15 rollout bandwagon. In a community update today, the company announced the wide release of Nothing OS 3.0 based on Android 15 for its relatively slim smartphone portfolio. The first devices to get the update are the Nothing Phone 2 and Nothing Phone 2a, both of which are slated to get the over-the-air (OTA) update in a phased format throughout December. Next in line are the Nothing Phone 1, Nothing Phone 2a Plus, and CMF Phone 1, which are scheduled to receive the OS upgrade…
Helldivers 2 has been nothing short of a runaway success. Fans have wanted more options for character customization, including crossover events. A thread on the Helldivers subreddit from nine months ago asks: “Do you think Helldivers 2 will get crossover content?” Well, the answer is now yes, courtesy of a new DLC pack featuring Killzone 2 items. Arrowhead, the development team behind Helldivers 2, announced the collaboration in a Steam post. The team wrote: “We decided a long time ago to do crossovers only if and when they make perfect sense for the game. So in that spirit, we’re hyped…
Two Chinese astronauts have completed the longest-ever spacewalk, spending nine hours working on the exterior of the Tiangong space station. Astronauts Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong performed the mammoth walk yesterday, December 17, as reported by China’s Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO). With a total duration of nine hours and six minutes, this spacewalk is longer than the previous record for a single spacewalk, which was set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms in 2001, and which lasted for eight hours and 56 minutes. At 21:57 on December 17, 2024, Beijing time, after 9 hours of extravehicular activities,…
While we know that The Last of Us Part 3 is at least being worked on in some capacity at Naughty Dog, we have no idea how far along it is or when we can expect to see it. At The Game Awards in December 2024, Naughty Dog announced a brand new sci-fi title Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, suggesting that The Last of Us Part 3 is going to launch even later than we initially thought. Based on the incredible level of polish and attention to detail the studio likes to put into its games, it is possible we won’t…
