On July 7, Google’s Gemini assistant will be able to send a WhatsApp message, place a call, adjust your volume, or set a timer, even if you’ve told it not to track what you’re doing. And no, it’s not something you need to opt into, nor can you opt out of it; it’s the new norm.

That’s because Google is quietly rewriting the rules of how assistant AI works on your phone. If you thought turning off Gemini Apps Activity meant turning off Gemini’s reach into your personal life, think again. Gemini is going live in your apps whether you like it or not.

This is according to a notification email seen by Android Police, where Google says that it will roll out an update that allows Gemini to “use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.”

What’s actually changing?

Here’s what matters: Before now, if you disabled Gemini Apps Activity, the setting that governs what Gemini remembers and uses to train future AI models, you were cut off from deeper integrations. Gemini couldn’t place calls or send texts because it wasn’t allowed to access that data.

That barrier is about to vanish. Starting July 7, Gemini will gain access to four key phone services: Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities (volume, flashlight, alarm, and media controls), regardless of whether you’ve turned activity tracking on.

This means Gemini will now handle everyday tasks that used to be blocked for privacy-conscious users. Want to say “text Alex on WhatsApp that I’m running late” with Apps Activity off? You’ll be able to. But it comes with a new kind of data compromise.

Google’s workaround: Access without memory

Google won’t save your assistant requests to your Gemini Activity page or use them to train its models if Apps Activity is disabled. But it will keep the data for up to 72 hours. Why? Google says this temporary window allows for “service reliability and safety checks,” which is corporate-speak for making sure things don’t break or misfire.

That data — the messages, call metadata, and voice prompts — lives in a kind of gray zone. You won’t see it in your history. You won’t be notified that it exists. And you can’t manually delete it before the 72-hour expiration.

If that feels a bit like having your privacy settings overruled, you’re not alone. What Gemini’s doing here is technically compliant with your preferences, but only because Google has quietly redefined what “off” means.

Can you stop it?

Yes and no. Gemini now has a second set of toggles buried in its settings menu. You can go to Profile → Apps inside the Gemini app and manually disable access to Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, or Utilities. But these are turned on by default, even if you’ve disabled tracking in the past.

There’s no upfront prompt. No opt-in. And unless you knew to look for them, or happened to read a very specific footnote in Google’s support pages, you’d never know those integrations were live. So, unless you go digging, Gemini now has deeper control of your device than the Assistant it’s replacing, and it’s not something you authorized.

More than an assistant

Sure, it’s easy to see this as a minor change, but it’s part of something much larger. Gemini isn’t just a voice assistant anymore. It’s being positioned as an “agent,” capable of understanding complex requests and acting across multiple apps. That’s a huge leap from the Google Assistant days of “Hey Google, set a timer.”

With cross-app prompts and generative suggestions rolling out across Android, Gemini is designed to handle multi-step tasks like “Find my next meeting and message the team I’ll be late.” The catch is that it needs deep integration into your personal apps to do that, and now it has it… even if you said no.

It’s not difficult to understand why this matters. Privacy isn’t just about what’s stored; it’s about what’s accessible. And Gemini is operating on a new model: Access-first, memory-later.

That might sound like a good compromise. After all, Google isn’t storing your requests forever or using them to train future models unless you explicitly allow it. But it also blurs the line between private and impermanent. Gemini doesn’t need to remember to function like it does. It just needs a few hours of access and your silence.

And that’s the problem. Because if you didn’t know about this, or didn’t check your app settings, you’re in a system that’s quietly opted you in, with no log, no prompt, and no accountability. Some may call that dystopian.

More from Laptop Mag

• Sony is fighting like cats and dogs against a small game developer from Hong Kong
• A second Windows 11 bug takes suspicious aim at Google Chrome — and the same Microsoft app is to blame
• The Asus ROG Strix G18 is proof that paying more for an RTX 5090 is a waste of money

I've had a pretty rocky relationship with smartwatches, but if there's one wearable that I've never had much of an issue with, it'd be smart glasses.

I've grown inseparable from my AI-enhanced frames, and own several pairs from different brands. And, while my Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses get the most love and use, there's another brand that I have a soft spot for: Solos.

With their ChatGPT integration being a particular stand-out feature, Solos' AirGo smart glasses might not have the designer clout of EssilorLuxottica behind them, but its latest AirGo V2 and AirGo A5 models make for some of the best alternatives to Meta's luxury line there is.

New AirGo smart glasses: Solos' new high

On Wednesday, Solos announced two new smart glasses models, the AirGo A5 and AirGo V2, at the Hong Kong Smartglasses summit.

These models follow previous impressive outings from the ChatGPT-enabled Solos AirGo 3 and camera-equipped Solos AirGo Vision.

The company's latest smart glasses feature the same modular SmartHinge system, making them backward compatible with previous frames, as most of the tech that makes each model so impressive is housed within its detachable temples.

The AirGo A5s are more of an ultra-light follow-up to the AirGo 3, focusing on the same audio experience prompted by voice commands in a pair of glasses that are practically indistinguishable from regular frames.

Meanwhile, the AirGo V2 stands as a direct competitor to the impressively popular Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, featuring a 16MP stabilized camera for capturing hands-free, HD pictures and video, and even offering real-time streaming alongside the usual AI copilot.

Both devices require a connection to your smartphone to use, linking with the all-new SolosChat 3.0 app, where you can monitor health metrics and continue to interact with multiple AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and now even DeepSeek.

What's next

We're entering something of a Renaissance period for smart glasses at the moment, with particular emphasis on the AI.

Whether or not you've been convinced about Copilot's presence on your laptop, having hands-free access to some of the world's most powerful AI models at the drop of a wake word ("Hey Solos," in this instance) can come in shockingly handy.

I'm not one of those people who's going to use "AI wrote me a poem on the spot" as an example either. I'm not a bard in search of inspiration, after all.

However, from being able to snap a picture to learn more about something without needing to slow down your day, or just being able to field a 3 a.m. thought to ChatGPT and hear a satisfying answer, feels like more than a simple novelty.

While there are many smart glasses options to choose from right now, if the sound of Solos' Ray-Ban Meta alternatives has tweaked your ear, then you'll be happy to know that it's not just a feature set that is competitive with Meta's glasses, but the price is too.

The Solos AirGo A5 will be available starting Q3, 2025, becoming available to preorder from August for only $249.

The 16MP camera-touting Solos AirGo V2 glasses are expected to land in Q4, 2025 for $299.

Both will be available first from the solosglasses.com homepage.

More from Laptop Mag

• Meta’s Oakley smart glasses look like a better choice than Ray-Bans for your first pair. Here’s why.
• The best smart glasses you can buy just got a lot creepier
• Looks like Apple isn't giving up on smart glasses after all

Not too long ago, legendary ex-Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman broke the internet by announcing their mysterious new collaboration. Well, try searching for it now, and you’ll mostly hit a dead end.

Interestingly, this isn’t because the deal fell apart, or that either one of them woke up and decided to bail. Instead, it’s because a federal judge told them to pull the plug… for now, at least.

The “io” reveal is gone from OpenAI, but not from X

As reported by The Verge, OpenAI quietly scrubbed all mentions of Jony Ive’s startup, the AI giant it recently acquired for $6.5 billion, called io.

Any official mention of the project, including the announcement blog post and the nine-minute video where Jony Ive and Sam Altman confirmed they’re developing a new AI device, is no longer available.

When you search “OpenAI io,” one of the top results is still “Watch the film | Sam and Jony introduce io,” but clicking on it no longer displays the content that was once there.

Instead, it now reads: “This page is temporarily down due to a court order following a trademark complaint from iyO about our use of the name ‘io.’ We don’t agree with the complaint and are reviewing our options.”

Interestingly, Sam Altman’s original post on X (formerly Twitter) announcing the project is still up, along with the nine-minute video. At the time of writing, it currently has over 5.5 million views.

Could Altman have simply forgotten to take it down, or was the post left up intentionally?

OpenAI’s spokesperson, Kayla Wood, shared the exact same notice as above with The Verge when asked for comment. OpenAI also confirmed to The Verge that the deal is still happening.

“This is an utterly baseless complaint and we’ll fight it vigorously,” said a spokesperson for Jony Ive in a statement to Bloomberg.

The project is still on, but the name is in legal trouble

Essentially, what’s happening right now is that a U.S. federal judge has issued a temporary injunction preventing OpenAI, Jony Ive, and Sam Altman from using the name “io” or anything similar.

This is due to a trademark lawsuit initiated by iyO, a startup that develops AI-powered earbuds.

What’s ironic here is that iyO also works on AI-related tech and is, in some ways, chasing the same mission as OpenAI. Though iyO is now a standalone startup, it emerged from Google’s secretive X lab, which is also known as the Moonshot Factory.

Though many were quick to believe that the project had been quietly shelved or that something had gone terribly wrong behind the scenes, the court order only affects the use of the name “io.”

Best case scenario? They win the trademark dispute and keep the “io” name as planned initially. Worst-case scenario? If the court rules against Altman and Ive, they’ll be forced to ditch the “io” branding completely and rebrand the device ahead of its official launch.

So all this really is right now is a branding roadblock — not a development halt. Altman previously hinted that the device might even ship within a year, so it seems like it’s a race of lawyers and engineers now, while the rest of us quietly spectate.

More from Laptop Mag

• Legendary Apple designer has been tasked with the impossible — what is OpenAI and Jony Ive's next move?
• Remember the year's biggest AI flop? The Humane AI pin's public failure has a silver lining
• Think Grok is bad? Microsoft made an AI so evil it had to be erased (twice)

The rumored iPhone 17 Air appears to be Apple’s sleekest and lightest phone yet — everything fans of the iPhone mini had dreamed of, minus the early retirement. But if Apple has learned anything from the mini’s short-lived run, it’s that a unique and stunning form factor won’t save a phone with underwhelming battery life.

That’s where iOS 26 steps in. Announced at WWDC 2025 on June 9, iOS 26 includes a new “adaptive power” feature that aims to stretch every bit of your battery without forcing you into the more aggressive limitations of Low Power Mode. It’s an AI-infused battery life boost that could be exactly what the iPhone 17 Air needs to avoid the mini's fate.

Whether it’s enough to future-proof Apple’s next ultra-portable iPhone remains to be seen, but it’s a promising sign that Apple isn’t about to repeat the same mistake twice.

Here's a look at which phones are getting "adaptive power" mode and a closer examination of the potential battery life for the iPhone 17 Air without this feature, which highlights why Apple may have deemed it necessary for iOS 26.

Which phones are getting "Adaptive power" mode in iOS 26?

• iPhone 15 Pro
• iPhone 15 Pro Max
• iPhone 16e
• iPhone 16
• iPhone 16 Plus
• iPhone 16 Pro
• iPhone 16 Pro Max

A MacRumors report confirmed that the feature will only run on the iPhones listed above. The reason for the limitation is presumably that this feature is powered by AI, so, like Apple Intelligence, your phone must have at least the Apple A17 Pro processor.

Think of "adaptive power" mode as a more thoughtful version of low power mode. Rather than restricting all background activities, it makes more subtle adjustments, such as lowering the screen brightness and slowing down certain activities to reduce power consumption.

That latter part is where AI comes in; it needs to monitor your battery data to see which apps it can slow down to deliver maximum impact without adversely affecting your phone usage.

If you are on an older iPhone, don't worry, you are still getting a lot of the iOS 26 features, support for the new OS goes all the way back to the iPhone 11. However, if you want the latest AI features, you'll need to make the leap to an iPhone 15 Pro or newer phone, or wait for the iPhone 17 this fall.

Potential iPhone 17 Air battery life

While iPhones have solid battery life, they've been outperformed by the top Android flagships for the last couple of generations, so this feature could potentially tip the scales back in their favor.

However, the biggest potential winner is the rumored iPhone 17 Air. Battery life could be a real concern for the thinnest iPhone ever.

Comparing it to the similarly slim Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, our testing revealed a loss of 4 hours and 30 minutes of battery life compared to its 6.7-inch display sibling, the Galaxy S25+. In that case, it was a drop from 16 hours and 55 minutes to 12 hours and 25 minutes. That was with a move from a 4,900 mAh battery in the S25+ to a 3,900 mAh battery in the S25 Edge.

Apple is rumored to be making an even more drastic drop; the iPhone 16 Plus features a 4,674 mAh battery, and the 17 Air may dip to just a 2,800 mAh battery. The iPhone 16 Plus delivered 16 hours and 30 minutes in our testing. If the 1,874 mAh cut to its battery yielded a similar drop in the iPhone 17 Air, it could dip below 10 hours. That's comparable to the short-lived mini iPhones, which was their biggest flaw.

"Adaptive power" could be the key to preventing the Air from befalling a similar fate.

MORE FROM LAPTOP MAG

• It takes more than money to buy this Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 rival
• 7 best early Prime Day 2025 MacBook deals to shop now
• Meta Quest 4: Everything we've heard about Meta’s upcoming VR/AR headset

President Donald Trump's spending and tax package, referred to as the "One Big Beautiful Bill," got a big win on Sunday for one provision that could change the entire tech landscape when it comes to AI.

The bill, which passed the House of Representatives in May, is currently in the U.S. Senate, where it’s undergoing a review by the Senate parliamentarian to confirm whether its provisions comply with Senate rules. This process is known as a Byrd Bath, named after Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

A provision in the bill putting a 10-year moratorium on any enforcement of state and local AI laws received the green light from the Senate parliamentarian on Saturday, according to a report from Bloomberg. This would give the AI industry a big advantage, as it wouldn’t have to worry about conflicting state laws imposing different requirements for AI. States that attempt to enforce AI regulations would be denied federal funding for broadband internet projects under the bill.

There are Senate Republicans who oppose this moratorium, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee and Sen. Josh Hawley from Missouri.

“We do not need a moratorium that would prohibit our states from stepping up and protecting citizens in their state,” Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn said last week, according to The Tennessean.

While this provision has cleared the Senate parliamentarian's review, others have not, Bloomberg reports.

Senate Republicans are looking to pass the bill this week in hopes of having it ready for Trump's signature by July 4.

What's at stake with the AI law freeze?

AI is the most important trend happening right now within the tech industry across the globe. GrandViewResearch estimates the global AI market to be worth nearly $400 billion and will approach $2 trillion by 2030. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is itself worth nearly $300 billion as of March.

Not having to worry about state regulations gives the AI industry a clear path to build AI in ways that benefit the bottom line. There's also a concern that regulations put on AI would hamper progress within the U.S., with some company executives, such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Arm CEO Rene Hauss, warning that China could surpass the U.S. if the industry is too regulated.

There is, however, some pushback against giving the AI industry free rein.

Dr Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientist and a former technology adviser to Joe Biden, says the ban on state AI laws will slow down the development of the technology, not speed it up, according to The Guardian.

“It’s up to us as scientists to communicate to government agencies, especially those right now who might be making statements about no regulation, [that] this is going to hold us back," Horvitz said at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence last Monday, The Guardian reported. “Guidance, regulation … reliability controls are part of advancing the field, making the field go faster in many ways.”

Almost all of the 50 states have AI legislation pending, with a few already being signed into law by their governors. Last September, California was set to pass an AI safety bill that included many regulations, including requiring all AI companies to have a "kill switch" in case the technology went rogue or was misused. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed that particular bill, but did sign other AI regulations last year, with more than 30 bills currently making their way through the state legislature.

Apple's record with AI hasn't been that great. What started off strong with a partnership with OpenAI has yet to really produce much for the iPhone maker.

The company introduced Apple Intelligence last year and said it was going to overhaul its digital assistant Siri by making it smarter and able to understand more tasks. Instead, the feature continues to be delayed, and AI was less of a focus for Apple at its big Worldwide Developers Conference, in contrast to Google’s annual I/O show, where it was all about AI.

It appears, however, Apple might do a workaround by buying one of the up-and-comers in AI, Perplexity AI.

Bloomberg reports on internal talks among Apple executives to potentially bid on Perplexity AI. Adrian Perica, Apple's VP of corporate development, reportedly discussed the idea with Eddy Cue, SVP of Services at the company, as well as other AI decision makers. The report claims that these are early talks, and no offer has been made to Perplexity.

"We have no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving Perplexity,” a company spokesperson said via email.

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple's AI troubles

Buying Perplexity and incorporating the company's AI search into Safari and other services would be a real boon for Apple. Last year, a Google antitrust lawsuit found that the company pays Apple approximately $20 billion to be the default search engine for Safari.

Google Search, however, has been trending downward thanks to the rise of AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's own Gemini, and Perplexity. Data suggests users are moving away from searching for answers on Google and instead using AI to save time and get answers efficiently, rather than having to review multiple pages to find them.

While iPhone users can find a workaround to have their own AI chatbot in the upcoming iOS 26, Apple still hasn't cracked the AI nut with Siri.

Apple reportedly continued to hit one snag after another when developing the smarter Siri. The pitch was for the digital assistant to have a better understanding of natural language and do more complex tasks by making use of data on the phone, such as making a calendar appointment based on a text rather than having to be told to create that appointment.

Apple's initial plan was to release the upgraded Siri in March, but that didn't happen. Instead, there was a leadership reshuffle within the company. Mike Rockwell, the creator of the Vision Pro for the company, ended up replacing John Giannandrea, who was in charge of the team handling the Siri upgrade.

The upcoming release of iOS 26 will incorporate some AI features in the Phone app, such as AI-powered call screening to automatically silence scam calls and voicemail summaries.

These AI features, however, are still far behind what Google is doing. During last month's I/O event, it laid out how Gemini will be integrated into its services, such as Gmail, Google Meet, and even be a key part of its future Android XR smart glasses.

Along with dominating the VR headset market with the Quest, Meta also has the top spot for smart glasses.

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses continue to be a big seller for the company, with more than two million pairs sold since their launch in 2023. On Friday, Meta announced it's releasing another set of glasses under a different brand.

The Oakley Meta glasses are the new smart glasses that the company plans on releasing this summer. Based on the HSTN style of Oakley glasses, the Oakley Meta version will have a few upgrades over the Meta Ray-Bans.

What's new with the Oakley Meta smart glasses?

To start, the Oakley Meta smart glasses will have improved battery life over the Meta Ray-Bans. The Oakley has eight hours of battery life with normal use and up to 19 hours of standby time, about double that of the latest generation of Ray-Bans. The newer smart glasses also have fast charging, can go up to 50% in just 20 minutes, and come with a charging case that provides 48 hours of charging.

The Oakleys record video in 3k quality, which is a significant improvement over the Ray-Bans' 1440 x 1920 video quality. Photo quality is still the same at 12MP.

Another improvement with the Oakley Meta smart glasses is the use of Prizm and Prizm Polarized lenses for impact and UV protection.

Aside from these differences in tech and, of course, the style, the Oakley Meta smart glasses have the same functionality as the Ray-Bans. There's a capture button on the frames for photos and video. When recording, the camera lens will blink, letting others know they're being recorded. Speakers are built into the frame to listen to songs from Spotify or Apple Music.

The Oakleys also have Meta AI built in. Wearers can ask the AI questions, and in its press materials, Meta focused on how the assistant can provide details related to various physical activities, such as weather conditions for a game of golf or checking out surf conditions.

The Limited-Edition Oakley Meta HSTN glasses will be available for preorder on July 11 and priced at $499. Meta plans to release the rest of the Oakley line later in the summer for $399 for the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Other countries will get access to the Oakley Meta smart glasses later this year.

In multiple interviews following the WWDC 2025 on June 9, Apple executives made it clear that the company has no intention of creating an Apple Intelligence-powered chatbot at this time to compete with ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI, and other similar platforms.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, and Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, reiterated this message in interviews with Tom's Guide, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.

While they readily admitted to the popularity and utility of these chatbots and left open the possibility of it happening someday, it's not the AI experience that Apple is currently looking to deliver to its customers.

That's fine for Apple, but an upgrade to Shortcuts in the developer beta for iOS 26 lets you ignore how Apple feels about making its own chatbot, and in seconds, you can have an Apple Intelligence chatbot up and running on your devices.

Here's a quick look at how to do it if you're running the iOS 26 developer beta. If you aren't eligible to install the developer beta, bookmark this page for when the first public beta arrives in July.

How to use Apple Intelligence as a chatbot

1. Open Shortcuts.
2. Tap the plus button in the upper-right corner.
3. Search for "Use Model" in the "Search Actions" bar
4. Select "On This iPhone" or "Private Cloud Compute" from the listed Models.
5. Add a Text element where you can ask your question or request something from the chatbot.
6. Toggle the Follow Up option if you want to be able to ask additional questions.
7. Select whether you want the Output from the chatbot to come as a notification or text saved to Notes, or to the clipboard.

That's all there is to it. Now, obviously, this isn't as smooth an experience as the standalone chatbot apps available, but it's interesting to experiment with how Apple Intelligence performs at this task.

Late but great?

Apple’s decision to skip the chatbot hype cycle may feel like a miss in the short term, especially as competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic flood the market with conversational AI personalities. But that’s not unfamiliar territory for Apple.

Historically, the company has let others go first — and often falter — while it refines its own vision for how a new technology should work.

Remember when Apple launched the iPad without a stylus, dismissing it altogether? Steve Jobs famously said, "If you see a stylus, they blew it." Years later, the Apple Pencil arrived, not as a tool critical to basic use of the iPad, but as an accessory that could augment specific use cases.

The same could be said of tablets. While Microsoft and others had early tablet PCs on the market for years, it wasn’t until Apple introduced the iPad that the category truly took off.

Even the Apple Watch came long after smartwatches from Microsoft, Pebble, Sony, Motorola, Samsung, and more. However, within a couple of years, it became the world's best-selling wearable device.

A similar pattern could be unfolding with generative AI. While competitors race to win the chatbot popularity contest, Apple is taking a quieter approach, threading AI into the fabric of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

From semantic photo search and inline writing tools to real-time translation, Apple Intelligence isn’t a destination — it’s a layer. There’s no standalone Apple chatbot because the company doesn’t want users to stop what they’re doing to engage with AI. Apple wants AI to support what its users are already doing.

Of course, the danger in this approach is that Apple risks letting others define the conversation about AI. That can shape public perception in a way that’s hard to unwind. Apple doesn’t want to be seen as behind, even if history shows that being second (or third, or fifth) can work out just fine.

This concern isn't helped by Apple's recent demonstration of how this can go wrong with the Apple Vision Pro. While there's plenty of time for Apple to crack AR and spatial computing, it's undeniable that the current Apple Vision Pro will not be that product.

So will Apple eventually release its own systemwide chatbot? Probably. But when it does, it will likely be less about keeping up with ChatGPT and more about delivering something that makes sense within Apple’s ecosystem of privacy, design, and usability.

For now, Apple is playing its usual long game. It will deflect complaints about being slow or late and focus on being the best. Eventually.

More from Laptop Mag

• Meta Quest 4: Everything we've heard about Meta’s upcoming VR/AR headset
• I used the Switch 2 and Switch OLED side by side for a week — here’s what surprised me
• 7 best early Amazon Prime Day iPad deals you don't have to wait to get

Microsoft's branding and advertising have come under fire this week, and I can't say I'm surprised.

The Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division has published a report that feels like the latest chapter in Microsoft's history of being particularly terrible at naming its products.

But is this a case of AI washing, marketing spin, or Microsoft being terrible at naming products?

The BBB NAD has criticized Microsoft for its Copilot advertising, alleging that only some of the Copilot claims are supported by independent research. The report recommends that Microsoft modify or discontinue some AI features and performance claims.

Microsoft's Copilot AI and Copilot+ PC platforms are confusing -- even if you know the difference between the two. For the average Windows user, the difference is even more obscure.

Is it AI washing?

The National Advertising Division (NAD) is a watchdog organization that fact-checks various marketing claims to ensure products are marketed accurately.

The NAD investigated Microsoft's claims about Copilot AI features to determine if Microsoft was accurately advertising Copilot's capabilities both within the Microsoft ecosystem and with external applications.

While the NAD upheld many of Microsoft's AI claims, the advisory board recommended that Microsoft modify its advertising around the Business Chat feature, as it cannot "seamlessly" generate a document in non-Microsoft applications.

To get Business Chat to generate a document in outside apps, a user would need to take additional manual steps to produce the same results as Copilot.

The NAD also criticized Microsoft's claims that its Copilot and Business Chat AI features increase productivity. Microsoft bases its claim that AI improves productivity on a self-report statement: "67-75% of users say they are more productive" after 6-10 weeks of Copilot usage.

While Microsoft "disagrees with NAD's conclusions," the company has agreed to "follow NAD's recommendations for clarifying its claims."

Business Chat requires additional functionality in non-Microsoft applications. Microsoft's self-report style of productivity rating questions some Copilot claims; however, they don't appear to be "AI washing."

Business Chat can still generate documents in external applications, even if the AI feature requires additional steps from the user.

Instead, this appears to be a case of marketing spin.

It doesn't help that Microsoft's Copilot branding is confusing

The National Advertising Board also found that users could be confused by Microsoft's use of Copilot branding across multiple products with different features.

Microsoft's Copilot assists users in Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Copilot is also a stand-alone AI chatbot.

Microsoft's Business Chat is a chat interface for Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant.

Then there's Microsoft's Copilot+ PC program, which has expanded AI features for hardware that meets a strict 40 TOPS NPU requirement.

Even knowing all of this for the sake of reviewing hardware, I still find Microsoft's use of Copilot somewhat confusing. I can easily see how someone less informed would be blindsided by the differences between in-app Copilot features and accessing Copilot through Business Chat for external applications.

Microsoft is just bad at naming things

Look, Microsoft is notorious for being terrible at naming products. There are plenty of think pieces about its various failures, and the rankings of which have been the worst.

There are even multiple YouTube breakdowns. But here are a few quick examples:

• Microsoft was in hot water for attaching .NET to many of its products. The name came into use in 2002 and caused much initial confusion in the early days of the Internet.
• Windows 95 launched at the end of 1995, making users feel that even when it was new, it was already outdated.
• Windows also skipped from Windows 8 to Windows 10, implying Microsoft can't even count its OS iterations correctly.
• Microsoft also can't stick to a name scheme for its Xbox game consoles. The Xbox was followed by the Xbox 360, which in turn was followed by the Xbox One and Xbox One X. The current consoles are named the Xbox Series X and Series S, which doesn't reduce confusion.

So the idea that Microsoft overused the Copilot brand isn't exactly far-fetched.

All we can do is hope the NAD's intervention will make Microsoft's Copilot branding clearer in the future. But I also wouldn't hold my breath, considering Microsoft's track record with naming things.

More from Laptop Mag

• Lenovo and Intel solved a huge problem to bring you this unrolling laptop
• Amazon's first-ever 96-hour Prime Day sale starts July 8, I found 55+ early deals to shop now
• My favorite AI tool just hit Google Search, and it's actually useful — try it yourself

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says competitors, particularly Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, have been trying to poach OpenAI engineers with sky-high compensation packages.

“They started making these, like, giant offers to people on our team. You know, like $100 million signing bonuses and more than that in compensation per year,” Altman said this week on the Uncapped podcast, hosted by his brother, Jack Altman.

Altman said he was glad to see that those enticing offers haven’t worked on OpenAI’s best people. He assumes this is because they looked at the two paths, Meta and OpenAI, and concluded that the latter has a better shot at delivering on superintelligence and will eventually become the more valuable company.

Amid the digs, Altman said Meta is missing the one thing that truly matters in AI: a culture of real innovation.

Altman doesn’t think Meta’s money-first mindset will work

“There are many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don’t think they’re great at innovation,” said Altman, when discussing Meta’s attempts to lure OpenAI engineers.

He explained that by trying to recruit OpenAI staff with massive guaranteed compensation packages, Meta is essentially building a culture that prioritizes money over the work and mission. He believes that focusing on money rather than purpose and product is a recipe for the wrong kind of culture.

Altman contrasted this with OpenAI’s approach, which he said attracts and retains talent by aligning financial incentives with a shared sense of purpose and innovative work.

“The special thing about OpenAI is we’ve managed to build a culture that is good at innovation, and I think we understand a lot of things they don't know about what it takes to succeed at that,” he explained further.

Drawing a parallel to past tech rivalries, Altman recalled hearing Zuckerberg discuss how Google tried to enter the social media space in the early days of Facebook.

However, to those at Facebook, it was clear that it wasn’t going to work for Google. Altman said he now feels similarly about Meta’s approach to AI, suggesting that Meta is making an error by trying to replicate OpenAI’s success directly.

Meta sees ChatGPT as the a Facebook replacement, says Altman

He even discussed how he believes many people at Meta simply copy OpenAI. Altman explained this with an example of how many other companies' chat apps resemble ChatGPT, down to the UI mistakes.

He drew from his own experience to argue that the copy-and-paste strategy is fundamentally flawed, and that trying to go where your competitor already is, instead of building a culture around innovation, rarely works.

When asked why he thinks Meta sees OpenAI as such a competitor, Altman mentioned how an ex-Meta employee once told him that Meta views ChatGPT as a Facebook replacement. He explained that the user experience with ChatGPT felt different, like one of the few tech products that didn’t feel “somewhat adversarial.”

He contrasted this with Google, which he said has started showing worse search results, and with Meta’s products, which try to hack users' brains to keep them scrolling. Instead of doing either, ChatGPT simply tries to help users with whatever questions they may have, and even help them feel better.

Beyond discussing Meta, the Altman brothers talked about a wide range of topics related to the future of AI, OpenAI’s strategy, and even Sam’s personal reflections.

Altman made a “crazy claim” that AI will discover new science, and that humanoid robots are one of his dreams — something he thinks will be achievable within the next 5 to 10 years.

More from Laptop Mag

• An internal OpenAI doc reveals exactly how ChatGPT may become your "super-assistant" very soon
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replies to artists irate over their stolen work
• ChatGPT's Sam Altman threatened to "Uno reverse" Facebook over AI app — he might be dead serious

Gemini, Google's family of AI models, are often seen as playing second fiddle to OpenAI's GPT family, which powers ChatGPT — but they've come a long way since a bumpy launch, with Google's AI proving itself to be a great fit for those looking for anything from a speedy research aide to a solid smartphone assistant.

Unlike ChatGPT, Gemini is designed to run across a multitude of services, be it drafting messages in Gmail, transcribing calls in Google Meet, or acting as a second set of eyes and ears as the AI assistant for future Android XR smart glasses.

Now, Google has announced it is rolling out its latest upgrades to the models that make Gemini so powerful, pushing preview models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash out of preview and into general availability — and making a new Flash-Lite model open for testing.

Here's what's new, and, more importantly, what it means for you.

Gemini 2.5: What's new, minus the jargon

If you're new to Gemini, or you're just a casual AI user, then talk of models, tokens, and benchmarks is likely to cause more confusion than clarity. So let's keep it simple: Google now offers three updated Gemini 2.5 models designed to tackle different kinds of tasks; Flash, Pro, and a newly introduced Flash-Lite.

• Flash is your everyday option. Think of it like OpenAI's GPT-4o, the model that powers most ChatGPT interactions. It's good for chat, but it can also help with brainstorming, writing, and even translating. It's the all-around model that strikes a balance between brain power and speed.
  
• Pro is, as the name might imply, a much more in-depth model, suited to taking on more demanding, professional tasks like coding, problem solving, data analysis, or more complex, multi-step prompts. It's slower in output, but it is Google's most intelligent model to date.
  
• Flash-Lite is the newest model to get an upgrade, now available for testing in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, and it's best suited for developers and enterprises looking for a fast way to clear high-volume workloads that don't require too much power to solve.

For those already familiar with Google's models, the new Gemini 2.5 family is better at memory, reasoning, and responses, with improved performance and accuracy across the board.

All three models support multimodal inputs (text, images, and audio), tool use (like code execution), and have a massive 1 million token context window — ideal for handling large documents or specific and detailed prompts.

Both Gemini 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro also feature improved native audio output for more natural-sounding conversations, and enhanced reasoning with Deep Think.

For developers, Gemini 2.5 Flash now features rebalanced pricing, with slightly more expensive input tokens being met with cheaper output tokens.

Gemini 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro can now be accessed freely on the Gemini web portal and the Gemini mobile app by selecting your model of choice from the drop-down menu at the top of the conversation window.

More from Laptop Mag

• My favorite AI tool just hit Google Search, and it's actually useful — try it yourself
• A simple mistake in the Meta AI app could expose your deepest secrets
• ChatGPT may be the smartest software ever, but this Pong-era game console can do something it can't

Nvidia has had to deal with the U.S. government putting restrictions on what the company imports via tariffs, as well as what it exports. Policies put in place under the Biden administration and continued under President Donald Trump restrict the company from selling AI chips to China, which undercuts its earnings possibilities.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been outspoken on how the export ban can be harmful in the AI race among different countries, as it could lead China to put more resources into speeding up the development of more advanced AI. His sentiment is being reciprocated by the CEO of another semiconductor company.

“If you narrow access to technology and you force other ecosystems to grow up, it’s not good,” Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas told Bloomberg at the Founders Forum Global conference in Oxford. “It makes the pie smaller, if you will. And frankly, it’s not very good for consumers.”

The UK-based chipmaker is reportedly working on releasing its own AI chip sometime this year, and Meta is rumored to be one of its first customers.

Why is there a ban on exporting AI chips?

In 2022, the Biden administration implemented export controls on AI chips. The rules halted shipments of the chips to China due to national security concerns. For Nvidia, this includes its A100 and H100 chips. This was then modified the next year to include the company's A800 and H800 chips as well.

Before the Biden administration ended, another set of restrictions was implemented, splitting countries into groups. The first group included allies such as Japan, Taiwan, and Germany, which were largely exempt from restrictions. The second group consisted of only Russia and China, and both countries were prohibited from receiving any AI chips from U.S. companies. Then a third group was created for other countries, such as India and Singapore, that had caps on how many chips were allowed to be shipped.

Last month, the Trump administration removed these guidelines, and it reportedly plans on negotiating deals with the different countries. China, however, was still restricted from receiving the AI chips.

While the Trump administration dropped the guidelines, it also warned of the Chinese tech company Huawei's development of its Ascend AI chips and how the use of those chips would violate U.S. trade policy.

Huawei's jump into AI chip production is a concern for both Haas and Huang.

Haas told Bloomberg that Huawei has become “quite formidable," and Huang says the U.S. is a generation ahead of China, although that won't last long.

“If the United States doesn’t want to partake, participate in China, Huawei has got China covered, and Huawei has got everybody else covered," Huang told CNBC at the Viva Technology conference in Paris.

There's a strange phenomenon happening on what appear to be legitimate websites from major companies like Nvidia and federal agencies such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that are hosting AI slop.

It appears that a spam marketing operation hijacked abandoned subdomains from companies and organizations, including Nvidia, the CDC, American Council on Education, Stanford, and NPR, according to a report from 404 Media. The AI slop found on these sites ranged from a hub for vaccines explaining what jets were flown in the movie Top Gun to Brazilian fart games on an Nvidia event page and just a lot of porn.

The subdomains, such as events.nsv.nvidia.com, which were archived by 404 Media, have long since been abandoned by the respective organizations. However, as these domains were connected to legitimate entities, having content about “adult video games” on the site could make it a top result on Google, leading to traffic. It's likely this traffic was somehow monetized by the organization behind this hijacking.

These sites have since been taken down by the respective entities or reverted back to their original form. As of the writing of this article, the website these domains were redirecting to, stocks.wowlazy.com, is no longer up. A summary at URLScan shows the site is seemingly still active and provides a screenshot, which appears to be AI-generated content.

What is AI slop?

AI slop is low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence. Not that long ago, this was mainly written articles filled with certain keywords that would ideally rank high in certain Google searches. Thanks to more advanced AI models such as Midjourney and Sora, now this slop can include AI images and video.

Just this past week, editors at Wikipedia revolted over the site's plan to test AI content. The idea was to test AI-generated summaries, called "simple summaries," that would be machine-generated to take existing Wikipedia articles and simplify them for readers. The human editors for the site claimed these AI summaries would ruin the site's reputation. While the Wikimedia Foundation says the rollout of this test is not happening, it does appear that it's not completely canceled and could be tried again with more input from the human editors.

Social media is a breeding ground for AI slop. Last year, Facebook was seemingly taken over by this content, with the most prominent example being the Jesus Christ shrimp image.

AI slop has made its way to all other platforms, and it will continue to become harder to distinguish the real content from AI-generated content. At its I/O event last month, Google released its AI-media tool, Veo 3, which was able to produce completely realistic video from text prompts. What followed soon after was a viral clip showcasing the completely realistic content generated by Veo 3, which was hard to identify as fake, except for the fake people in the video saying it was.

Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this week and shared a lot of new features coming with the release of the next big updates for all of its devices.

One feature that wasn't shown off during the event was the overhauled Siri. Last year, when Apple unveiled its Apple Intelligence, the company planned to have a new, smarter version of Siri out around this time. Instead, it looks like the AI assistant needs some more time to smarten up.

Apple's overhauled Siri could come out in spring 2026, according to a report from Bloomberg. The team handling the project reportedly plans to release the smarter assistant in the iOS 26.4 update.

During WWDC, Apple said it was changing the numbering scheme for all of its device operating systems to “26” rather than using different numbers based on their release year.

The ".4" of the iOS version would also indicate a spring release. Apple typically releases these updates in March, such as with iOS 18.4, following when the new OS makes its debut, which is usually the September before that.

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The company told Bloomberg it stood by its previous statements, saying the upgraded Siri will be set for the "coming year."

Apple's AI headaches

When Apple showed off its Apple Intelligence at last year's WWDC and launched it officially later in the year, it was seemingly going to put Apple into the AI race.

That, however, has not been the case. Apple reportedly continued to hit one snag after another when developing the smart Siri. The pitch was for the digital assistant to have a better understanding of natural language and do more complex tasks by making use of data on the phone, such as making a calendar appointment based on a text rather than having to be told to create that appointment.

Apple's initial plan was to release the upgraded Siri in March, but that didn't happen. Instead, there was a leadership reshuffle within the company. Mike Rockwell, the creator of the Vision Pro for the company, ended up replacing John Giannandrea, who was in charge of the team handling the Siri upgrade.

Even though Siri wasn't shown at WWDC, Apple did have a few AI features to show off. With iOS 26, the Phone app will have AI-powered call screening to automatically silence scam calls. Apple Intelligence will also provide voicemail summaries. WatchOS 26 will also have a bit of AI with a new Workout Buddy on the Workout app. The AI will keep tabs on your performance, provide some motivation during workouts, and analyze the routine to see how it compares to previous workouts.

More from Laptop Mag

• My 10 best laptop picks for 2025: Tested, reviewed, and ready to buy
• Jony Ive built the iPhone, now he's building something new to save you from it
• I found the best Apple deals available right now: Save up to $500 on MacBook, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, and more

In one of the clearest examples of how everyday users of technology sometimes don’t understand it – and the developers of that technology haven't fixed it – the Meta AI app is allowing deeply personal, private, and altogether embarrassing content to be shared to its “Discover” tab. And those personal questions can spread to Facebook and Instagram.

This is precisely the worst place for questions like “Tips for asking an Asian girl about dating older men” and “Can my wife see [the questions I ask]?"

Let’s briefly back up: The Meta AI app launched in April. It uses Meta’s own large language model, Llama, which acts as a chatbot for users. In that way, it’s like ChatGPT or the Google Gemini app. You ask it a question, and it provides answers.

But the truly cursed part of this app is that those questions can somehow become public to other users, and clearly, not enough users realize it.

Why the Meta AI app is confusing users so much that they put their private questions into a public feed

The Meta AI app looks a lot like the Instagram app. There’s a Home tab, a Notifications tab, a History tab, and a Discover tab. The Discover tab is a lot like the Explore tab on Instagram – it’s a stream of content produced by other users of the Meta AI app. A lot of it is "AI slop" -- low-quality, AI-generated images of like, Cookie Monster in handcuffs or Pennywise the evil clown as a baby. And between the slop are questions the users very likely didn't intend for anyone else to see.

Why does this happen? There’s a confusing button in the top right of your chats with the Meta AI app called “Share.” Do not press if you are asking a private question.

That “Share” button essentially turns your question into a piece of content -- a "public prompt" -- posted to the Discover feed. The instructions are vague, and you might think hitting “post” wouldn’t result in your content appearing in the Discover feed. There's a one-time warning, but that's it.

You might also have just made a mistake. After being notified that hitting the “post” button would put your content in the Discover feed one time, you are no longer met with the warning on subsequent shares.

Even worse, these public prompts could show up on Facebook and Instagram as "suggested" prompts for other users.

How to stop the Meta AI app from posting your questions to the Discover feed or on Instagram or Facebook

Thankfully, you can delete public prompts in the Meta AI app. You click on your user icon in the upper right corner, click “view profile,” and you’ll see those prompts. You can long-press on each and be met with the option to delete it.

You can also adjust the settings to avoid this sort of thing, which we can't stress enough, shouldn't have happened in the first place, given the history of digital design innovation and research in the last few decades.

We digress: Go to "Data and privacy," click "Manage your Information," and then select "Make all public prompts visible to only you." Click "Apply to all."

Next, go back to the "Data and privacy" menu, click on "Suggesting your prompts on other apps," and uncheck Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook has more than 3 billion users, and the Meta AI app is available in 22 countries. When designing content for oceans of people, especially when your app clearly states that any questions you ask are private, why add a “social” element?

The answer is obvious if you’re Meta, a publicly traded company that relies on engagement and growth numbers to continually move up.

The Meta AI app: Bad design or bad thinking?

A thriving Discover section of the app – and which pieces of content a user clicks on in that app – is another data source about user interests, which Facebook can bundle and sell to advertisers. It’s just like Instagram’s Explore tab.

Is Meta AI's obtuse UI to blame, or is the vagueness intentional to get more content in the Discover feed? It could be both. It feels like a situation where Hanlon's razor could be applied: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

More from Laptop Mag

• "Buckle up": Meta's Mark Zuckerberg warns of "intense" year filled with A
• In OpenAI, Google, and Meta's AI arms race, the real loser in 2024 was privacy
• Meta looks to bring a much-desired ChatGPT feature to Meta AI

Technology. The ever-advancing pinnacle of the processor. It's a modern-day blessing to most, but dreaded by those convinced it's five minutes away from flipping society onto its head like an egg served sunny-side down.

The word alone can strike fear into the hearts of man. Especially if you shout it loud enough into their ears as you pass them on the street.

And, if you were to take a small break from harassing the general public and ask one of them to name today's most advanced piece of technology, they'd likely say ChatGPT — OpenAI's super-brainy chatbot, packed with enough artificial intelligence to seemingly make regular intelligence look like its eating glue from a pot in a sandbox.

But if ChatGPT, the poster child for cutting-edge technology, is so smart, how did it just get absolutely bodied by a video game console released in 1977?

ChatGPT vs. Atari 2600: All hail the golden oldie?

When we think of competitors to ChatGPT, there's a usual list of suspects to choose from: Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity AI, and maybe even newcomer DeepSeek.

What you wouldn't expect to appear in that list is the Atari 2600, a 48-year-old home video game console best known for bringing Pac-Man into the living rooms of millions of first-generation gamers.

However, thanks to Citrix Engineer Robert Jr. Caruso, Atari's retro console can now be counted among ChatGPT's truest rivals, after it was used to repeatedly best OpenAI's GPT-4o model at a simple game of chess.

In a now-viral post shared to LinkedIn, Caruso details his 90-minute experiment in pitting the computing might of tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs against the singular 1.19 MHz 8-bit MOS Technology 6507 processor of the Atari 2600, claiming ChatGPT "made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd grade chess club."

A short lived victory for retro tech

Clearly, they don't make them like they used to. The prevalence of the 2600 over ChatGPT is a true David vs. Goliath battle on a checkerboard stage, and a surprising outcome to most.

However, there's a chasm of difference between chatbot and a chess engine, meaning the Atari 2600, which ran not as hardware but through the Stella emulator, likely had ChatGPT's number from the start. While OpenAI has made great strides in improving its model's memory capabilities, it's still primarily a language prediction machine, and not the next Deep Blue.

Still, given the 2600's ability to only predict two moves in advance, it does highlight ChatGPT's shortcomings, and provide a thumb to the virtual eye for OpenAI's world's most intelligent chatbot.

At least it would do if OpenAI had ever claimed as much. In fact, it's more often than not proclaiming the opposite.

Stretching back to 2023, in an episode of the Lex Friedman podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was quick to label GPT-4 as "a very early AI. It's slow, it is buggy, and it does not do a lot of things very well." Then, in 2024, during a Q&A at Stanford University, Altman claimed that ChatGPT was running on "the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again by a lot."

In fact, only recently has Altman pushed the message that AI is living up to its supposed smarts. In a blog post published on Tuesday, titled The Gentle Singularity, Altman predicts: "We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out."

So yes, Atari's classic console may have bested ChatGPT this time, but if Altman's words are anything to go by, it could be a very short-lived victory.

More from Laptop Mag

• Sam Altman's vision is the stuff of my nightmares: "A significant fraction of the power on Earth should be spent running AI"
• Wikipedia editors revolt over "truly ghastly" plan for AI slop — they're winning (for now)
• Microsoft has created an after-the-fact AI gaffer -- but is your laptop up to snuff?

AMD held its Advancing AI 2025 summit in San Jose, California, on Thursday, headlined by CEO Lisa Su's lengthy keynote address. However, it was not what Su said that alarmed me.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Su on stage to wrap up the two-hour keynote, and their back-and-forth included one short exchange toward the end that now lives rent-free in my brain.

Referencing the recent ChatGPT outages, Su asked Altman, "Are there ever enough GPUs?"

Altman, whose OpenAI is an AMD customer, replied, "Theoretically, at some points, you can see that a significant fraction of the power on Earth should be spent running AI compute. And maybe we're going to get there."

Which sounds great for the AI industry. But what about the rest of us?

Just because we can, doesn't mean we should

Okay, look. I'm not the biggest fan of AI usage. One of the few types of AI that I find myself interested in is Intel's on-device custom RAG AI Assistant Builder. It's a small language model that runs locally and is mostly useful for the kind of busywork no one has time for.

Cloud-based AI data centers fuel my nightmares. The current pace of Artificial Intelligence growth is unsustainable. While Altman claims that users shouldn't be worried about ChatGPT's energy cost, adding AI usage on top of other sources of environmental pollution puts more pressure on a planet that was in dire straits before OpenAI programmed its first chatbot.

AI is not just an industry built on destroying the foundations of its own existence, though that is certainly an economic crisis in the making. It's also incredibly damaging to the environment and to the education of future generations.

AI-generated deepfakes are getting so good that most people can't tell real footage from AI video, leading us into a "future of AI control."

Without guardrails, unchecked artificial intelligence growth is very much an ouroboros.

AI has already negatively impacted most industries. Even if you accept that AI will eventually replace human workers in most roles, then who will buy the products? AI won't be selling laptops, phones, or software to itself. Throw in the ecological and educational damage AI systems can cause, and it's a bleak future we're looking at.

Thankfully, large language model (LLM) AI systems like ChatGPT are becoming increasingly efficient over time. So they might hit critical mass soon, and we won't need to reopen Three Mile Island to run virtual assistants. There are also plenty of companies looking into sustainability solutions for AI systems.

But is it worth it?

We still haven't gotten the "better Siri" we were promised. Agentic AI just sounds like a new way to commit to total social isolation. There may never be a "killer app" for AI.

Are knock-off Studio Ghibli profile photos really worth the cost? Then again, we've still not learned from Microsoft's notorious Tay.ai blunder from 2015.

So perhaps it's time to make like a dolphin and leave.

More from Laptop Mag

• I used the Asus ROG Strix G16 for a week, and it may be the best value in gaming laptops right now
• Nvidia's N1X Geekbench scores are impressive, but can they top AMD and Intel? We compared the results.
• AMD’s Ryzen Z2 Extreme just brought AI to handhelds — should the competition be worried?

Though every digital organization seems to be rushing to hop onto the AI bandwagon, Wikipedia is one of the few that’s putting on the brakes… at least for now.

As reported this week by 404 Media, the site has paused a planned two-week trial of AI-generated article summaries after receiving intense backlash from its editor community.

The experiment, which was initially scheduled to begin on June 2 and announced on Wikipedia’s Village Pump -- a gathering place for editors -- received hundreds of comments, nearly all of them saying the same thing: Don’t do it.

Wikipedia’s Simple summaries were meant to make articles easier to understand

Wikipedia’s AI-generated summaries, called “simple summaries,” were explained as “machine-generated, but editor-moderated, simple summaries for readers.” The idea behind it was simple and something we’ve all seen before: take existing Wikipedia text and simplify it for readers.

Though Wikipedia wasn’t launching the feature widely, it planned to run a two-week experiment on the mobile website, where 10% of readers would be given the option to see pre-generated summaries on a set of articles.

Wikipedia’s initial plan was to turn the feature off after two weeks and then use the data it collected to see if users were interested in it.

As shared by 404 Media, the simple summaries would show up at the top of an article, and users would need to click to expand and read them.

Wikipedia’s human editors weren’t exactly thrilled

Like many AI features, it wasn’t exactly well-received. Within hours of the announcement, Wikipedia's human volunteer editors flooded the thread with comments.

One simply wrote, “Yuck,” while another said they were “grinning with horror,” adding, “Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them.”

And the comparison isn’t exactly off. Though Google seems to have no plans to hit pause on its AI features, its AI Overviews have gone viral multiple times (for all the wrong reasons). Just a couple of weeks ago, an AI Overview told people it’s still 2024 with complete confidence when asked what year it is. AI Overviews have advised people to eat glue and rocks, add glue to pizza, and have even previously given explanations for made-up idioms.

The same Wikipedia editor further added that AI summaries “would do immediate and irreversible harm” to Wikipedia readers and the site’s overall reputation as “a decently trustworthy and serious source.” Wikipedia's plan to roll out AI summaries wasn’t the only thing editors had gripes about, though.

The announcement, which was made by someone on behalf of Wikipedia’s Web Team, mentioned that "simple summaries" is one of the ideas they’ve been discussing. It included a link to the “discussion,” where the team behind Wikipedia explained that the idea was to cater to its audience’s needs, and that “many readers need some simplified text in addition to the main content.”

An editor pointed out how “laughable” it was in the comments, saying “the ‘discussion’ you link to has exactly one participant, the original poster, who is another WMF employee.”

Like it or not, "simple summaries" will probably be back soon

In an email sent by a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson to 404 Media, the spokesperson stated, “Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March.”

They further explained, “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement,” suggesting that though the feature has been paused, it hasn’t been scrapped entirely.

So while they’ve been paused for now, the AI-generated summaries will likely return, but with a bit more input from the people who actually write Wikipedia.

More from Laptop Mag

• Google quietly gave Gemini a big upgrade that could change everything
• The Microsoft-OpenAI "rivalry": the beginning of a split, or is the relationship evolving?
• Make AI videos for free with OpenAI's Sora in Microsoft Bing

Get ready to always have an AI lighting technician at the ready -- even if you have already shot the photo and it's a decade old.

Microsoft announced earlier this month that a jaw-dropping feature is rolling out to Windows 11 users across all Insider Channels. That's the good news.

The not-so-good news takes a bit of the shine off this announcement.

The Relight feature in the Photos app is only available to Windows 11 users who have a Qualcomm Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ PC. However, Microsoft points out in its announcement that AMD and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs will get the Relight feature in the Photos app "in the next few months."

Relight gives Photos app users more control over the lighting in their images and adds “dynamic lighting controls to pictures.” Essentially, it's an after-the-fact AI gaffer on your laptop, assuming your laptop meets the requirements.

As announced on the Windows Insider Blog, the tool lets you position a maximum of three light sources and customize their color, intensity, and the focus point where all the lights automatically aim. You can also adjust the brightness and softness using a slider.

If editing isn’t exactly your strong suit, Microsoft is also adding built-in presets with “ready-made lighting styles” that you can apply to your image with just one click. Based on the example image Microsoft shared in its blog, the presets include options like Softbox, Classic Portrait, Dramatic, Golden Hour, and Cyberpunk. These presets are much faster, if you'd prefer not to twiddle the knobs.

Microsoft also announced a massive Windows 11 update in May during Build 2025, showing off a redesigned Start menu and new capabilities in Photos and the Snipping Tool.

The Snipping Tool got a color picker and a Perfect Screenshot feature that can intelligently resize a screenshot you’re capturing, along with an AI-powered Relight tool in the Photos app.

Though the Snipping Tool features started rolling out toward the end of May, Microsoft announced on June 6 that the Photos app updates are now going live.

The Microsoft Photos app is getting a new AI-powered Relight tool

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Relight is yet another AI-powered feature Microsoft’s added to its apps. Like a lot of them, Relight is restricted to Copilot+ PCs. For now, Microsoft’s only rolling out Relight to Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs, with support for AMD and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs coming in the next few months.

Relight isn’t the only new AI feature coming to Microsoft Photos

Microsoft has been testing Improved Windows Search for a few months now and finally rolled it out widely with the May Patch Tuesday update. In the same Windows Insider Blog post, Microsoft announced that it’s now enabling the “improved semantically-based Windows search” in the Photos app.

The feature works just like it does in File Explorer, only now within Photos. This means you can search for images with a description rather than typing in the exact file name or filtering by properties like date, file type, or tags.

For example, if you saw a bunch of camels in the desert on vacation, instead of scrolling through all your vacation images or trying to remember what the file was called, you could just search something like “camels in the desert,” and the app will pull up the most relevant photos automatically.

Microsoft mentions that this improved photo search works on images in your Photo Library that are saved locally and have been indexed. Similar to Relight, you must have a Copilot+ PC to try out the improved search in the Photos app.

Is this just another push for Copilot+ PCs?

It is ironic how Microsoft continues introducing more features exclusive to Copilot+ PCs. Though Microsoft hasn't admitted it, it's easy for even the non-cynics among us to wonder if the Copilot+ requirements are only there to nudge more users to upgrade to these AI-powered machines, even as some still aren’t sold on Copilot+ AI.

Besides, finding alternatives to at least some of the features Microsoft is locking behind Copilot+ PCs isn’t all that difficult. For instance, Clipdrop is a web-based AI tool powered by Stability AI and has a Relight tool.

Once you upload an image, you can choose from different presets, add multiple light sources, and customize their color, power, distance, and radius.

It matches much of what Microsoft’s Relight tool offers and works on almost any device with a browser. And of course, no Copilot+ PC required.

Both AI-powered Relight and Search in Microsoft Photos are currently being tested for Windows 11 across all Insider channels. They’re rolling out gradually, so you might not see them immediately, even if you’re a part of the Windows Insider program.

More from Laptop Mag

• Microsoft Copilot just helped me pirate Windows 11
• Microsoft's next 50 years are all about making AI feel useful
• Windows users call Microsoft's latest update blunder "The greatest bug in living memory" — here's why

On Monday, day one of WWDC, Apple finally gave developers the keys to its local AI engine. Dubbed Foundation Models, this on-device framework lets third-party apps tap into Apple Intelligence’s generative muscle without cloud access, API fees, or permission slips. Just three lines of Swift code, and you’re off to the races.

On paper, it's a gift. But look closer, and it might be a white flag.

Rather than chase Google and OpenAI with its own killer apps, Apple is throwing open the App Store doors and crossing its fingers. If that sounds a little too generous from Apple, there’s a reason: This might be less about Apple flexing its AI dominance and more about admitting that it’s behind. It's also a move that would've been hard to predict just a year ago.

Letting developers build the next ChatGPT alternative or journal-coaching wizard is both strategic and convenient. And some may even consider it necessary.

A shortcut through Apple’s AI shortcomings

Rather than try to outmaneuver an increasingly smart Google Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT-5 with a headline-stealing chatbot, Apple is outsourcing the hard part.

The Foundation of Foundation Models isn’t about competing feature-for-feature but rather enabling a wave of third-party AI apps and praying the best ones rise to the top.

That means Apple can skip the messiness of building one perfect assistant (Siri) and instead position itself as the AI foundation that everyone else can build on.

It’s no secret that Siri has struggled to evolve, and Apple’s cloud-scale LLMs still lag competitors in size and polish. So instead of outbuilding them, Apple is out-delegating them.

This strategy plays to Apple’s strengths: hardware optimization, privacy-first design, and a locked-in App Store ecosystem that still shapes what “mobile software” looks like.

If someone builds the next breakout AI experience on iOS, Apple wins, whether it wrote the code or not. There’s no licensing, no throttling, and no user data leaving the device. Developers are already embracing this offer.

Journal app Day One is rolling out smart journaling suggestions, and AllTrails will soon auto-generate hiking routes. But those are just early ripples.

The real wave will be niche apps, side projects, and indie utilities that flood the store with personalized, privacy-first AI helpers. With zero cloud overhead and no per-query costs, even small indie teams can afford to get weird with it.

Apple’s Intel Inside moment?

We’ve seen this before. Apple didn’t make the most popular fitness app; it built the Apple Watch. It didn’t build the App Store’s most iconic games; it gave developers the tools to build them. The difference this time is that Apple needs developers to carry the load.

You can think of this as Apple taking the Intel Inside approach, but with AI. Much like Intel once did, Apple’s AI will quietly power thousands of experiences, even if it never becomes the household name.

By embedding itself as invisible infrastructure, Apple gains reach and resilience. Don’t have a killer AI app? No problem. Let the App Store figure it out. Eventually, someone will.

Here’s the gamble for Apple

There’s no way to sugarcoat the fact that while Apple’s AI rollout was elegant in presentation, it’s arguably light on the finished features.

Once again, Siri was sidelined at WWDC. The flashy demos — writing replies in Messages or summarizing Notes — rely on a combination of on-device and cloud processing, and many will not arrive in beta form until the fall.

So what’s Apple doing instead? It’s hedging its bets.

Apple is flooding the space by letting developers plug into Foundation Models. Don’t have a killer first-party AI experience? No problem. Let the App Store build five hundred.

With no API fees or usage caps, Apple is effectively inviting devs to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks, hoping that at least a few do.

This approach isn’t without risk. For one, Apple can’t guarantee results. A decentralized AI push means wildly inconsistent UX. Some apps will handle context and prompts gracefully. Others might deliver clunky, confusing, or outright inaccurate outputs.

Unlike Siri, which Apple can directly improve, these experiences will be fragmented and difficult to course-correct without heavy-handed store moderation.

There’s also the discoverability problem. If Apple Intelligence–powered apps flood the store, users won’t necessarily know which ones are useful.

Without tight integration or prominent editorial guidance, Apple risks unleashing a thousand half-baked AI clones, each with a slightly different idea of what “smart” means.

And then there’s hardware load. Running a 3-billion parameter language model on an iPhone may sound cool on stage, but developers will have to wrangle with battery drain, thermal throttling, and limited RAM, especially on older devices.

Apple’s own engineers were quick to highlight quantization and token efficiency, but this still isn’t free. The user pays in performance, even if they’re not paying in dollars.

AI, the Apple way

Still, there’s brilliance in the chaos.

By sidestepping the cloud arms race, Apple is leaning into what makes its ecosystem unique: Privacy, silicon, and a developer community that (usually) figures things out. This is Apple AI as infrastructure, not as identity. That might just work.

Apple will still win if the next great AI assistant comes from a developer in Portland or Tokyo. And if not? Well, at least it didn’t spend another five years trying to make Siri cool again.

More from Laptop Mag

• WWDC 2025 LIVE: The latest updates from Apple on iPhone, Mac, iPad and Apps
• MacOS 26 Tahoe: The big reasons to update — or to not update
• Apple is finally giving iPadOS the update it desperately needs — but is it enough to compete with macOS?

This particular outage has since been resolved, any further issues may be the cause of an unrelated fault. Visit the OpenAI status page to check for any problems.

This morning, millions of users are facing the cold shoulder from ChatGPT as OpenAI's chatbot has gone silent worldwide. However, don't panic, it's not just you.

The world's most popular AI is seemingly facing a large outage as prompts are either taking a much longer time to be answered, or being met with an error claiming: "Hmm... something seems to have gone wrong."

It's not the first time ChatGPT has encountered outages like this, but it's sure to prove disruptive to those who lean on the AI tool for work purposes as the issue carries on across the morning hours.

Thankfully, users can still access older chats, but new messages all appear to be firing back with the same error. At the time of writing, Sora, ChatGPT, and API calls are all affected.

While we wait for comments or fixes from OpenAI, we'll keep you up to date on the chatbot's status, live.

OpenAI System Status: Problems across the board

Currently, OpenAI's official system status tracker is showing errors across the board for ChatGPT, Sora, and its APIs.

Affected ChatGPT components include the web portal, iOS and Android apps, and desktop apps for Windows and macOS.

OpenAI is aware of the issue and working on a fix

Thankfully, for those affected, OpenAI is aware of the issue, which has now been ongoing for 6 hours, and it working on a fix.

The most commonly encountered issues include high latency, resulting in ChatGPT taking longer to respond to user prompts, and errors when forming those replies.

With a fix now being worked on, it's possible that ChatGPT will be back up and running as normal sooner rather than later, but we'll keep you posted on any changes.

Meanwhile: User reports of issues at OpenAI remains high

Taking a look at outage tracking website Down Detector, it's clear to see a large spike in user reports of issues at OpenAI over the last few hours in the U.K. (time shown in GMT.)

While the number of these reports has dropped, there are still a large number of user reports being submitted to the site, with ChatGPT being the most widely reported tool of OpenAI's encountering issues.

Are ChatGPT outages normal?

At the moment, there's no reason to suspect that OpenAI's issues are anything out of the ordinary.

Seasoned ChatGPT users will be able to tell you that the chatbot can suffer outages up to a few times per month, with these disruptions lasting anywhere from minutes to several hours at a time.

Sometimes these issues will be related to updates, server overload, network issues, or internal errors.

OpenAI has identified the root cause of today's disruption, citing it as a partial outage. While there has been no confirmation of the outage's cause, a fix is in the works.

"Big problem": Users react to ChatGPT disruptions

Typically, when a service or tool has an outage, it's something we can put to one side for a few hours and check in on later. However, ChatGPT has become an invaluable tool for some, who rely on the chatbot for educational or workplace support.

For those people, this will be something of a Black Tuesday, with intermittent service disruptions likely to impact their workflows heavily.

Outage reports spike in the U.S.

In the U.S., Down Detector is tracking an uptick in users reports of issues at OpenAI, but don't worry. Things aren't getting worse, it's just that more users are waking to find ChatGPT acting strangely.

We'll be keeping an eye on user reports from across the internet to see how things fare over the coming hours. Stay tuned!

Errors persist for ChatGPT

Users are reporting various errors from ChatGPT during this disruption, with the above example shared by Laptop Mag's EIC Nick Lucchesi, whose morning study of the United States' 16th president has been impacted greatly.

We'll ignore the typo here. Clearly, the coffee has yet to take effect.

OpenAI employees respond on X

While OpenAI's status page states that the issue has been identified with ChatGPT and Sora, and that a fix is in the works, it's nice to see OpenAI employees spread the word on X, even if it is using the same vague language. At least we have a human response.

Or do we...?

Some of us are lost without ChatGPT

Far and wide across the internet, people are sharing similar sentiments. With ChatGPT down, what do I do now?

While the tool has only been around since 2022, it's become a staple of many people's daily lives. Perhaps too much of a staple in X user Pratham Kalan's case. Don't worry, Pratham. We'll get through this. Well, I will. Fingers crossed for you. 🤞

OpenAI: We are still working on implementing the mitigation for this issue

OpenAI has updated its status page to indicate that it's still currently applying any fixes required to resolve ongoing issues with ChatGPT, Sora, and API calls.

In the meantime, expect errors and latency issues to continue.

Some users report ChatGPT is back, but no luck on our end

While some users are reporting that ChatGPT is back up and running on social media, we can't say the same (as seen in the error above).

OpenAI is yet to report if its fix has been implemented fully, and, while user reports dip on Down Detector, the problem clearly persists for most users.

ChatGPT is down, what do we do now?

So, ChatGPT is down. In the meantime, what can we do?

Well, there's always a return to Googling. I'm sure Stack Overflow will appreciate the influx in traffic as people scour ten-year-old threads to understand which array should go where in their code.

However, if you need your fix of AI chatbot for the day, there's always Google's Gemini, which is online and ready to assist.

• https://gemini.google.com/

Things are looking up! (But it could take a while longer)

A fresh update from OpenAI suggests that its fix is working, at least for API calls which are in the process of recovering.

However, OpenAI also states that full access to other affected services (including ChatGPT) could take "another few hours."

Meanwhile, user reports on Down Detector are dipping. That said, previous dips have been followed by even larger spikes, so fingers crossed that this is a sign of today's outage ramping down, and not amping up.

Welcome back, ChatGPT

OpenAI's service status has finally switched from red to yellow as today's outage clears. The company is reporting ChatGPT and API calls are slowly recovering, with Sora now back to full operation.

Mirroring OpenAI's claims, outage reports have substantially dropped according to Down Detector, and users are reporting near-normal working of ChatGPT in various regions.

AMD’s new Ryzen Z2 Extreme lineup has expanded with a game-changing twist: A built-in AI engine capable of 50 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of on-device AI compute.

The AI power in the new chip, the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, is well above Microsoft’s 40 TOPS Copilot+ PC requirement, and ahead of Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake platform and Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon X Elite.

The AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme and another chip, the AMD Ryzen Z2A, designed to extend battery life, were announced on Sunday at the Xbox Games Showcase, which also saw the unveiling of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally and Asus ROG Xbox Ally X.

What sets the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme apart is its AI credentials and the fact that it delivers this power in a 35-watt envelope, making it suitable for compact handheld devices and ultra-portable laptops.

Built for handhelds, ready for Copilot+

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme is built on AMD’s new Zen 5 CPU architecture, paired with RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics and support for LPDDR5X-8000 memory.

It features 8 cores and 16 threads with up to 24MB of cache and a Radeon GPU with 16 compute units. The NPU is based on AMD’s second-generation XDNA architecture, which handles AI inference without drawing heavily on CPU or GPU resources.

This chip is a direct successor to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, which powered high-end handhelds like the original ROG Ally. It significantly upgrades efficiency, graphics performance, and AI capabilities.

The dedicated NPU is capable of offloading Windows Studio Effects, AI-driven upscaling, noise suppression, and even real-time virtual assistant features, all of which run locally.

A confusing collection of chips?

Not everyone is thrilled by AMD’s approach. Critics point out that the Z2 lineup actually comprises four different generations of silicon under a single name.

PC Gamer emphasizes how Ryzen Z2 A appears to be nothing more than a rebranded Steam Deck’s Van Gogh APU, with old Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 GPU, despite AMD pretending it’s fresh silicon.

Similarly, the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme is simply the existing Strix Point Z2 Extreme chip with the NPU enabled; there are no changes to core or GPU configurations beyond flipping on the AI engine. Critics argue that this muddied naming strategy makes it harder for consumers to understand what they’re buying.

Others also question the NPU's real-world impact. While the presence of AI hardware brings potential for on-device features such as adaptive gameplay and upscaling, some argue that RDNA 3.5 still lags behind AMD's desktop RDNA 4 and far behind Nvidia’s Tensor core-equipped GPUs.

At best, the benefit is currently theoretical.

Pressure on Intel and Qualcomm

AMD’s new chips are arriving just in time for a wave of next-generation handhelds. Asus has already confirmed that it’s building new devices around the Z2 series. The Asus ROG Ally X is expected to feature the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, while Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 and Go S are set to include both high-end and lower-tier options.

Lenovo and MSI have also confirmed new devices around the Z2 series. MSI is adding a Z2 Extreme configuration to its Claw handheld, while Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 and Go S are set to include both high-end and lower-tier options.

AMD's move into AI-capable handheld chips puts pressure on Intel and Qualcomm. The Core Ultra 7 155H includes an integrated NPU rated at about 11 TOPS, while Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite offers up to 45 TOPS. Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake platform is also expected to reach 45 TOPS.

By delivering 50 TOPS in a power envelope that works in handheld devices, AMD currently holds the edge in AI performance per watt. Unlike Snapdragon chips, AMD’s processors are x86-based, meaning they offer full compatibility with the existing Windows game library. That remains a major advantage for handheld PCs.

A big win for AI and gaming

Combining high-end gaming performance with serious AI power, AMD is clearly looking to take the lead in bringing AI into the gaming handheld space.

And with strong OEM support and a lineup that covers both premium and entry-level use cases, the Ryzen Z2 series may well power the next wave of portable PCs.

If you're waiting for a handheld that can handle both AAA games and AI workflows, AMD just gave you 50 trillion reasons to pay attention.

More from Laptop Mag

• Xbox Ally X aims high, but there’s one thing holding it back
• Nintendo seems ready for a problem the Switch 2 might face
• Intel Nova Lake: Everything we know so far

Google made it clear that AI is a big part of its business at the company's I/O event last month. Its Gemini AI model was the star of the show, and the tech giant plans to inject the AI into all of its devices and services, including its upcoming smart glasses, Google Search results, and Gmail.

In the big AI race, Google is usually in second place behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, but a new update for Gemini could give it a big lead over the competition.

With its latest update, Google Gemini can now act more as an AI assistant, a common goal for the different tech companies. Gemini Pro and Ultra users can now have the AI do scheduled actions by asking it to perform a task at a certain time or make a recurring action.

"Now you can wake up with a summary of your calendar and unread emails, or get a creative boost by having Gemini write five ideas for your blog every Monday," Dave Citron, senior director, product management for the Gemini app, said in a blog post. "Stay informed by getting updates on your favorite sports team, or schedule a one-off task like asking Gemini to give you a summary of an award show the day after it happens. Just tell Gemini what you need and when, and it will take care of the rest."

The Gemini update is already live for those with Gemini Pro and Ultra subscriptions, along with individuals using qualifying Google Workspace business and education plans.

The race for an AI agent

All the big tech companies are trying to get their AI model to be the

The company that is still behind with its AI agent is Apple. It could be said that Siri was the first agent out of the gate when it came out in 2011, but its usefulness continues to lag behind when compared to the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Apple did plan to release an overhauled Siri this year. The company announced this change last year when it revealed its Apple Intelligence feature, but turmoil within the company has been setting back the reveal of the new Siri. Apple reportedly changed leadership of the team handling the new Siri, but it's unlikely to make its debut this year.

AI, in general, has been a sore spot for Apple. Although it has a partnership with OpenAI and makes use of ChatGPT for its AI services, it has been rumored that Apple won't have much AI to talk about at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference that starts on Monday.

When Microsoft quietly listed OpenAI as a competitor in its August 2024 annual report, the headlines wrote themselves: The tech bromance was over. After all, how can you pump $13 billion into a start-up and then publicly call it a threat in search and AI products?

But fast-forward a few months, and that narrative already feels more complicated. Despite a swirl of strategic tensions and overlapping ambitions, Microsoft and OpenAI remain deeply intertwined — financially, technically, and even philosophically.

So, is this rivalry the beginning of a split or just a sign that the relationship is evolving?

When partners double as competitors

Yes, it’s true that OpenAI now builds tools that compete with Microsoft’s. Its new enterprise offerings go toe-to-toe with Microsoft 365 Copilot, and its SearchGPT prototype challenges the Bing-GPT combo Microsoft once hoped would take market share from Google.

And yes, Microsoft is diversifying. It’s growing its own AI division under DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, rolling out compact in-house models like Phi, and making Copilot more model-agnostic by the day.

But it’s not as messy as it sounds. If anything, both companies are adjusting to a new reality: They’re no longer co-dependent but rather complementary.

Nadella and Altman are still in sync

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hasn’t flinched, either. “Any company that’s gone from research lab to product giant will change — and we’ll change too,” he told Bloomberg, reiterating that Microsoft is still OpenAI’s largest infrastructure partner.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed the sentiment. He described the relationship as anything but antagonistic, saying the companies are “super aligned” in wanting widespread model adoption while speaking to the Wall Street Journal. And despite being free to explore other cloud providers, Altman affirmed OpenAI would still do “a lot, a lot” of compute on Azure.

Even Microsoft’s “right of first refusal” clause on OpenAI workloads shows the partnership still carries serious legal weight. If OpenAI wants to go elsewhere, Microsoft gets the first bid. They also get a shot at future OpenAI workloads before other providers do.

Competition doesn’t mean collapse

The biggest takeaway here is that this isn’t a falling out between the two companies. Indeed, it’s quite the opposite; it’s two giants adjusting to their respective successes in the burgeoning AI space..

Ultimately, Microsoft appears to be planning for flexibility. It doesn’t want to be boxed into OpenAI’s roadmap, and it’s building a Plan B. But it still profits from every ChatGPT interaction and holds valuable licensing rights through 2030.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is scaling fast and needs more than one cloud partner. Projects like Stargate — its $500 billion infrastructure push with Oracle and others, which Microsoft is a partner of — reflect ambition, not rebellion.

What happens next?

OpenAI wants to renegotiate Microsoft’s revenue share (reportedly looking to cut it in half by 2030), and Microsoft has already pulled back some planned infrastructure expansion. That’s just business. It doesn’t mean that the relationship has soured.

At the end of the day, both OpenAI and Microsoft are running the same race. Don’t think of them as rivals but as relay partners who sometimes pass the baton and sprint side by side. Rivalry? Sure, there’s naturally going to be elements of that. But it’s not enterprise warfare. If anything, it’s a pragmatic and entirely predictable evolution of one of tech’s most productive alliances.

The bottom line: It’s not a breakup. It’s just two behemoths figuring out how to stay friends while also growing up. The partnership dynamics might have changed, but it’s not over, and they’re still making money from each other’s wins.

That’s a rivalry both sides can undoubtedly live with.

More from Laptop Mag

• Switch 2 reviews: What the critics love — and don't love — about it
• Sony Project Defiant is coming: What it means for competitive fighting fans
• Samsung claims the S25 Edge is a "flagship" device, and it might have a point

Qualcomm is in yet another legal standoff, this time on the smartphone side of the Snapdragon brand.

Qualcomm recently won most of its defense case against Arm over the Snapdragon X Elite chipsets, with a second suit (this time brought by Qualcomm) slated to hit the courts next year.

Per PhoneArena, this new suit against Qualcomm was brought by Collabo Innovations. Collabo is a wholly-owned subsidiary of WiLan, a company that states it is "critical to protect innovative technology by creating patents that describe and claim the innovative concepts." A Google search of Collabo Innovations primarily results in information about lawsuits it has filed for patent infringement.

This suit by Collabo against Qualcomm pertains to patented technology that Collabo acquired from Panasonic.

Whether you're invested in the Snapdragon name on laptops or phones, there's reason to watch for legal news involving Qualcomm.

But, before you get too concerned, here's what you need to know:

Qualcomm's new legal battle

Collabo's suit against Qualcomm hinges on a microcontroller on Snapdragon chips that handles the system's shutdown process. The lawsuit's outcome could affect how Qualcomm makes all of its phone and tablet chipsets in the future.

The vast majority — estimates range between 95-97% — of patent suits are settled, often with the defendant paying royalties or a sum of damages to the aggrieved party. Or those cases are settled before they go to trial with a monetary agreement between both companies.

However, that's not been Qualcomm's style as of late. Qualcomm recently requested that the judge dismiss Collabo's suit, but this request was deemed premature for this particular case.

A representative for Qualcomm clarified to PhoneArena, stating, "The court’s order is an early procedural step that doesn’t address the ultimate merits of the case. We look forward to briefing the issues again at a later time, as suggested by the court."

It appears Qualcomm intends to see the suit thrown out, even with extra steps involved in the process.

Qualcomm's ongoing suit with Arm

Qualcomm and Arm went to trial in December 2024, with Arm alleging Qualcomm had violated its licensing agreement by using the Oryon CPU cores in the Snapdragon X Series of PC chipsets, and that Qualcomm violated its agreement with Arm by puchasing a tech startup called Nuvia in 2021.

The jury ruled in favor of Qualcomm on these two points of contention.

Arm also alleged that Nuvia also violated its licensing agreement with Arm by providing those CPU designs to Qualcomm after Qualcomm acquired the startup in 2021. This was the question that left the jury hung and would likely not be resolved as Nuvia no longer exists as a separate entity.

Qualcomm is bringing a countersuit against Arm that will go to trial in early 2026, alleging Arm launched a campaign against Qualcomm to stifle competition and impede innovation.

That filing was recently amended to accuse Arm of misrepresenting itself, as Arm confirmed under oath that it is merely a chipset design firm, and not a "chipmaker." However, recent rumors of Arm launching its own chips have brought that claim under scrutiny.

The state of Snapdragon

Qualcomm's legal battle against Collabo Innovations is still in its early days, but it seems unlikely the outcome would prevent Qualcomm from continuing to manufacture the Snapdragon 8 chipsets that power flagship Android phones and tablets like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Worst case, Snapdragon phones and tablets could become a bit more expensive. But that's more likely to be caused by the US foreign manufacturing tariffs rather than a legal standoff.

The state of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Series of laptop and miniPC chipsets is protected by the outcome of the first trial with Arm. Which means Qualcomm can go ahead with the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2 launch currently slated for early next year.

Qualcomm is expected to announce the second generation of Snapdragon X computer chips at Snapdragon Summit this fall. While this does leave Qualcomm with an almost two-year gap in generations, the company is "not worried about competitors."

More from Laptop Mag

• Qualcomm gambled on repeating its own ads at Computex, but did it pay off?
• Qualcomm's Computex event is all about AI. Is that a mistake?
• Microsoft may give Copilot a literal face with Live Portraits in its push for personal AI

Copilot might get a face.

According to TestingCatalog, Microsoft is quietly giving Copilot a customizable face (quite literally) through a new feature called Live Portraits, alongside updates to Copilot Pages and memories.

Though Live Portraits isn’t publicly available yet, TestingCatalog notes that Microsoft is working on a dedicated interface for the feature where users can pick from different visual styles of male and female avatars. The site also mentions that when they attempted to select a portrait, they were redirected to a placeholder voice conversation view.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has dabbled with Characters for Copilot. A couple of months ago, TestingCatalog spotted Microsoft working on two characters, Mika and Hiraki, and four background images. From what they described, it was essentially Microsoft’s attempt to “gamify” its assistant. They explained that characters would emerge from the background to the front once a chat began, and would start to wave to the user.

The end goal of both features seems to be the same — to make Copilot more personalized and interactive. However, with Live Portraits, Microsoft aims for a more polished, human-like presence rather than playful, animated characters.

With Live Portraits, Microsoft appears to be aiming for a more polished, human-like presence rather than playful, animated characters.

While there’s no telling if Microsoft will ever launch this or Copilot Characters widely as stand-alone features, the company might merge both. If that’s how it pans out, it could offer a variety of assistants, ranging from lighthearted characters like Mika and Hiraki to more professional avatars.

TestingCatalog also spotted internal references to “3D generations,” suggesting that the tech giant might want to extend this feature beyond simple avatars and create more dynamic, animated 3D characters instead.

What’s next

Whether Microsoft Copilot has quickly become your go-to AI assistant or you simply can’t stand it and are trying to uninstall it altogether, Microsoft’s made up its mind and is doubling down on its assistant ambitions. The Live Portraits feature seems to prove that commitment.

TestingCatalog notes that these features would likely first appear in the Copilot web interface. As with most experimental features, there’s no telling when Microsoft will release Live Portraits — if at all.

Given that the characters were first spotted in January, and they’re yet to roll out widely, it could take a while before either feature sees an official launch, if they do at all.

However, since it aligns perfectly with Microsoft’s vision of turning Copilot into more than just a chat window, and considering the company’s overall push in AI, it’s unlikely the tech giant will shelve the idea altogether.

More from Laptop Mag

• Microsoft Copilot: Everything you need to know about Windows’ AI companion
• Microsoft Copilot just helped me pirate Windows 11
• Microsoft hopes Clippy will make you like Copilot more

Jony Ive helped design the iPhone. Now he's trying to undo one of its most toxic legacies: the doomscroll.

The legendary Apple designer recently revealed he's working on a new AI-powered device with Sam Altman of OpenAI — one that potentially looks to overturn the spiraling relationship we have with our smartphone screens.

"Even though there was no intention, I think there still needs to be responsibility and that weighs on me, as you know, heavily," Ive said in early May, regarding any potential harm, however unintended, the products he helped design may have caused.

Doomscrolling, for those routinely capable of falling asleep before 11 p.m., is the act of endlessly (and sometimes mindlessly) consuming negative or meaningless content, long after it becomes informative, entertaining, or altogether good for you.

The word gained official recognition in 2023, finding its way into dictionaries around the same time that humanity collectively decided that despair is now a "vibe," and life, like any good song, is infinitely better when slowed and reverbed into the kind of wistful lullaby that turns mood-meddling social media feeds into siren calls.

You feel it in the mental hangover that only those who trade Bud Light for blue light will recognize, after spending hour after hour of reading too many scathing, no-source opinions on social media, or scrolling your evening away on TikTok or Instagram.

Ive helped build the device that would make all of this possible. Looking ahead, he's turning to the man helming the world's most popular AI to help unmake it.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Ive and longtime friend Laurene Powell Jobs — founder of the Emerson Collective and widow to Steve Jobs — each opened up about their views on AI, and the new device Ive is designing at OpenAI. Powell Jobs has been a backer of Ive’s various projects since he left Apple in 2019.

When asked what AI device he wanted to design, Ive told the FT, “We deserve better. Humanity deserves better.”

Powell Jobs had a front-row seat in the development of this device, telling the FT that she witnessed how ideas turn into sketches that transform into prototypes.

“Just watching something brand new be manifested, it’s a wondrous thing to behold,” she told the publication.

Via a $3 million video — watch it above — Altman and Ive announced last month that OpenAI had acquired "io", Ive’s design startup.

Ive's collaboration with OpenAI goes back to 2023, and in 2024, Ive said of his work with OpenAI: "You somehow have to make friends with uncertainty."

At Apple, the success of the iPhone was anything but uncertain. That first model gave way to multiple generations of iPhone clones, faster cell speeds, better streaming technology, and social media.

Smartphones and addictive notifications eventually got us to a point where, in January of this year, The Atlantic opined, "The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine."

And that is likely just a sliver of what Ive must be thinking about when he says, "Many of us would say we have an uneasy relationship with technology at the moment."

It only makes the questions about what kind of device he will create bigger. No web browser? A voice companion? An earpiece?

While the cute Rabbit R1 and Humane AI pin — both AI devices that flopped for different reasons — came and went in 2024, whatever device Ive and OpenAI debut will seek a different outcome when it makes its appearance in 2026.

Though Ive’s design record is attracting much of the attention, what’s inside this device is arguably just as intriguing. Altman has big plans for ChatGPT; a document released last week proves it.

According to an internal OpenAI document released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, OpenAI expects ChatGPT to become a “super assistant” this year.

“In the first half of next year, we’ll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do,” reads the strategy document from late 2024.

It goes on to say that “the timing is right” for ChatGPT to evolve.

With Ive now working closely with OpenAI to design the hardware evolution of the company's powerful tech, next year may be the moment AI takes us beyond the iPhone — and all of its harmful traits.

More from Laptop Mag

• An internal OpenAI doc reveals exactly how ChatGPT may become your "super-assistant" very soon.
• Legendary Apple designer has been tasked with the impossible — what is OpenAI and Jony Ive's next move?
• 'You somehow have to make friends with uncertainty': Apple's Jony Ive hints at mysterious new AI device and OpenAI collaboration

If you're searching for a budget-friendly Windows 11 laptop, you're in luck. Best Buy is having a sale on Copilot+ PCs right now that slashes some of the best AI laptops to less than $1,000.

There's something for everyone in this sale, including some of the best student laptops, best business laptops, and great laptops for creatives. For instance, you can snag the Acer Swift 14 AI for just $799, a whopping $400 discount off the regular price. At this price, the Swift 14 AI is a great pick for students thanks to its sleek, compact design and speedy Snapdragon X Elite processor.

Business users won't want to miss out on the Asus ExpertBook P5 for just $972, a $227 discount on an Editor's Choice pick. The Microsoft Surface Pro (11th Edition) is also at a huge discount, along with the Asus ProArt PZ13. Both are versatile 2-in-1s with detachable keyboards, making them perfect for anyone who frequently uses their laptop in tablet mode.

See also: Best laptop deals in June 2025

Top 7 Copilot+ PC deals from Best Buy this week

More from Laptop Mag

• The best laptop deals right now in June 2025: From as low as $139
• Skip the Dell 16 Plus 2-in-1 — here are 3 budget-friendly 2-in-1 laptops with great battery life
• Microsoft's next Windows update isn't at all what users were searching for

Not all laptop chips are created equal, and that's as true of AMD's innovative Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" APU as any.

AMD unveiled the Strix Halo APU in January as the Ryzen AI Max 300 series, debuting three consumer chipset variants and four variants made for workstation-class machines.

While we normally expect a large performance gap in between, say, a Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 9. But, with a name like Ryzen AI Max, you may not be expecting such a performance gap between the three APUs in the AI Max series.

An APU, or accelerated processing unit, is a chipset that combines the CPU and an integrated graphics tile. AMD coined the term back in 2011. AMD uses APU for all of its mobile chipsets, from the Ryzen AI Max to the Ryzen AI 300 series.

So far, we've seen only systems powered by the 16-core Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip, including the Asus ROG Flow Z 13 gaming laptop.

However, the Ryzen AI Max family offers more budget-friendly options, too, from the 12-core Ryzen AI Max 390 down to the 8-core Ryzen AI Max 385.

Last week, we finally saw the 8-core Strix Halo chipset's performance. An HP ZBook Ultra 14 G1a featuring this budget-friendly APU has been benchmarked on Geekbench 6, and the results were uploaded to the Geekbench archives.

So, how does the 8-core Ryzen AI Max PRO 385 stack up against the 16-core 395? Let's take a look.

AMD Ryzen AI Max 385: Geekbench scores

According to results uploaded to Geekbench on May 27, the HP ZBook Ultra 14 G1a with an AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 385 APU scored a Geekbench single-core score of 2,489 and a multicore score of 14,136.

We expected these scores to be higher. However, a few factors may explain the larger-than-expected performance gap.

First, there's the hardware matchup (8 cores vs. 16). The Ryzen AI Max PRO 385 also has a lower max frequency than the flagship, which could explain the dip in single-core performance.

The difference in RAM between the HP ZBook Ultra configuration Laptop reviewed and the ZBook scores uploaded to Geekbench could also be behind the score differences, as RAM affects how Geekbench scores are calculated.

AMD Ryzen AI Max: Full specs

What does this mean for the Ryzen AI Max 385?

While the Ryzen AI Max 385 and its professional variant will still be interesting chipsets — as both still feature the larger Radeon 8060S integrated graphics tile — these early benchmarks clarify a few things.

• The Ryzen AI Max 300 series starts at 385 and tops out at 395.
• The Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point series starts with the Ryzen AI 9 365 and tops out with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 375.
• The Ryzen AI 7 350 and Ryzen AI 5 340 are both technically on AMD's Krackan Point architecture.

Based on AMD's naming convention, the Ryzen AI Max 300 is designed to sit directly atop the Ryzen AI 300 series. So, as the entry-level Ryzen AI Max chip, the 385's Geekbench scores are just above what we've seen from the top end of the Ryzen AI 300 series.

We're not certain yet how expensive the Ryzen AI Max 385 will be compared to its slightly less powerful Ryzen AI 300 series counterparts, as only two Ryzen AI Max systems are on the market so far.

The HP ZBook Ultra with the Ryzen AI Max 385 starts at $2,599. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG Flow Z13 doesn't have a Ryzen AI Max 385 variant but costs $2,099 for the slightly more powerful Ryzen AI Max 390 chipset.

But based on those prices, you are paying quite a bit more for the Ryzen AI Max chipset and its more powerful Radeon 8060S iGPU.

The real question is, is the Ryzen AI Max worth its high price tag? Right now, that's still up for debate.

More from Laptop Mag

• Why Apple’s next macOS might signal a shift. Here's why
• A 1mm fan inside your laptop's hard drive? Here's how the micro xMEMS fan works
• Don't buy an Nvidia RTX 5060 laptop, wait for the RTX 5050

Google was all about AI at its annual I/O event last week. The tech giant wants its Gemini AI model everywhere and plans to put it in all of its devices.

It also plans on bringing its AI into more of its services. One of those services getting the AI upgrade is Gmail.

Over the course of the upcoming weeks, Gmail users will begin seeing AI summaries of their email, according to a blog post from Google. This summary will provide bullet points of what was in the email as well as any follow-up replies to make sure you're up to date.

This feature will only be available on emails in English. Those who don't care for AI summarizing their correspondence can opt out of the feature, but it will be enabled by default.

Google began instituting AI features into Gmail last year by having Gemini provide instant replies that no longer sounded generic.

Google's problems with AI

At the same time, Google is implementing new AI features, but some people have found the company's AI is far from perfect.

A post on Reddit went viral earlier in the week when a screenshot of an interaction with an AI summary on Google Search was unable to determine what the current year was.

And yet we can't turn this off from r/google

In the screenshot, the individual did a Google search asking, "Is it 2025?" The AI summary they received apparently had issues with the question saying, "It is not 2025. The current year is 2024." Other people on X posted similar results.

Wired did multiple tests over this prompt and confirmed the issue. In one case, the AI summary reiterated that it was 2024, but said that in parts of New Zealand and Russia, it was 2025. It even went on to contradict itself, saying that it was 2025 after claiming it was 2024.

A Google spokesperson says it was working on the problem.

“As with all Search features, we rigorously make improvements and use examples like this to update our systems. The vast majority of AI Overviews provide helpful, factual information, and we're actively working on an update to address this type of issue,” Meghann Farnsworth, a Google spokesperson, told Wired.

As of the publication of this article, Googling "is it 2025" returns with an AI summary saying, "Yes, according to the provided information, the current year is 2025." It remains to be seen if this problem will happen again in 2026.

More from Laptop Mag

• Google makes a bold pitch for an all-encompassing AI: "Project Astra"
• Google and XREAL announce Project Aura, XR smart glasses for Android
• An exclusive look at Google's NotebookLM app on Android and iOS

Since its debut in late 2022, ChatGPT — the generative AI model created by OpenAI — has redefined information gathering on the web.

ChatGPT has come to replace Google searches for vast swaths of the population, but an internal document released this week shows that’s only the beginning.

A "highly confidential" document titled "ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy" was made public as part of the discovery process in the Justice Department’s case against Google. It spells out a “super” vision for ChatGPT.

While much of the document, written in the fall of 2024, is redacted, it makes clear just how much OpenAI expects ChatGPT to change in the future.

“In the first half of next year, we’ll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do. The timing is right. Models like 02 and 03 are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks, tools like computer use can boost ChatGPT’s ability to take action, and interaction paradigms like multimodality and generative UI allow both ChatGPT and users to express themselves in the best way for the task.”

It describes ChatpGPT as “T-shaped” because it “has broad skills for daily tasks that are tedious, and deep expertise for tasks that most people find impossible (starting with coding). The broad part is all about making life easier: answering a question, finding a home, contacting a lawyer, joining a gym, planning vacations, buying gifts, managing calendars, keeping track of todos, sending emails. The deep part is about [REDACTED].”

Presumably, the depth OpenAI imagines for ChatGPT is about multiple-step processes, independent decision-making, and deeper thinking.

The document also explains how ChatGPT is building out that “super assistant” in the first half of 2025, which has about a month left as of this writing.

“We will build a super-assistant that can generate enough monetizable demand to pursue these new models in H2,” the document states.

The competition as OpenAI sees it

Beyond the outline of how it plans to deploy a “super assistant,” the most fascinating part of the internal document is reading about how OpenAI views its rivals, and its plans to win against them. It mentions Claude by Anthropic, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta AI.

“Looking ahead to 2025, [REDACTED] poses the biggest threat due to their ability to embed equivalent functionality across their products (e.g. without facing the business model cannibalization risks that Google does.”

Based on the amount of text that’s been redacted, only the word “Meta” would fit, and anyone who has used Instagram or Facebook recently knows Meta AI is being pushed in those apps.

There’s also a glimpse of how OpenAI plans to lobby lawmakers to ensure its competitors — many of which have their own software environments like Facebook or Windows or Gmail — are forced to allow for any generative AI service within their environments.

“Real choice drives competition and benefits everyone. Users should be able to pick their Al assistant. If you're on iOS, Android, or Windows, you should be able to set ChatGPT as your default. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta shouldn't push their own Als without giving users fair alternatives. The same goes for search engines: Google, Apple, Microsoft should offer users a choice for their default search engine and make their underlying indexes accessible to Al assistants, including ChatGPT.”

Lawyers made closing arguments on Friday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom in a trial on proposals to address Google's monopoly on search.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Justice Department is pushing to give newer companies like OpenAI access to search data that Google would have to share under the department’s proposed remedies. It says those companies need that data to effectively compete with Gemini. Mehta questioned whether AI companies that don’t intend to build traditional search engines should get access to Google’s valuable data.”

More from Laptop Mag

• Legendary Apple designer has been tasked with the impossible — what is OpenAI and Jony Ive's next move?
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replies to artists irate over their stolen work
• ChatGPT's Sam Altman threatened to "Uno reverse" Facebook over AI app — he might be dead serious

If you needed more fuel for that dinner party conversation about AI becoming sentient and taking over the world, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is here to help.

Speaking this month on a panel in Miami, Brin said if you bully your AI when asking it questions, it will “do better.”

“You know it's a weird thing,” Brin observed, leaning back into a couch on stage as a glass of white wine sat on the table in front of him. “We don't circulate this too much in the AI community, but not just [Google AI] models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them.”

“If you threaten them?” asked the moderator.

“Like, with physical violence,” Brin responded.

“People feel weird about [threatening an AI], so we don't really talk about that. Historically, you say, 'I'm going to kidnap you if you don't do blah-blah-blah.'"

Being awful to an AI will bleed over into the real world, eventually

The idea of threatening your AI with physical violence obviously has some concerning implications for the non-digital world.

Suppose you threaten your Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or other large-language AI model all day with angry queries. What are the odds that you will eventually use that language in your interactions with real people?

Although slightly different in nature, chatbots have long been the subject of abuse that, when viewed in the aggregate, is nothing short of disturbing.

For instance, the emergence of the “companion app” Replika — which enabled users to engage with “AI girlfriends” — revealed that male users were more likely to use abusive language toward them, according to an article published by the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School.

A 2021 study in the journal Psychology & Marketing found that chatbots that were gendered as customers preferred females because they were perceived as more human among test subjects.

“Women are said to be transformed into objects in AI, but injecting women's humanity into AI objects makes these objects seem more human and acceptable,” the researchers concluded.

"How will spending time engaging with AI affect the way we relate to other humans?" wonders Megan Fritts, a University of Arkansas Little Rock philosophy professor, in a 2022 article published by the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

Being mean to AI is costly and wastes energy

There’s another practical concern about using extra, violent language with your AI. It costs a literal fortune and is bad for the environment.

As Laptop Mag reported recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the extra processing cost could be as high as "tens of millions of dollars."

The electricity used to say “thank you” — or, if you take Brin's advice to the extreme, “f--- you” — to your AI also has a negative environmental impact when considered on a global scale.

Let’s hope AI has a short memory

AI is advancing rapidly, and tech titans are creating an all-new news cycle solely about predictions for AI. Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted AI would write most of the code for Meta services — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram — in 18 months. That’s October 2026. Elon Musk has been making dire predictions about AI for years.

“It’s amazing,” Brin, the Google co-founder, said this month during the same panel, about the surprising intelligence of AI. “All of us had these experiences where you suddenly decide, ‘I’ll just throw this at the AI, I don’t really expect it to work,’ and then you’re like, ‘Whoa, that actually worked.’”

Let’s hope the abused AI models have short memories. They might be sentient one day soon.

More from Laptop Mag

• Legendary Apple designer has been tasked with the impossible — what is OpenAI and Jony Ive's next move?
• Windows File Explorer is getting a controversial AI upgrade – will users revolt or rejoice?
• Google makes a bold pitch for an all-encompassing AI: "Project Astra"

We’ve seen AI slowly make its way into browsers, with tools like Microsoft’s Copilot in the Edge web browser, but a browser built entirely around AI, one that puts it front and center, is a first. That’s exactly what Opera has done with its new “agentic” browser: Opera Neon.

The new browser debuted on Wednesday and will be available as a subscription service. Opera has set a waitlist for those wanting to try out Neon.

In Opera's words, "you could simply state your wish and deploy AI to make a website, a prototype of a game, or even an animated model that explains the law of momentum, ready to share with your class."

Yes, this browser promises to write code for you.

Opera Neon in 2016 was merely a concept

But what’s most surprising about it isn’t the AI itself. It’s the fact that Opera didn’t jump on the bandwagon when the AI hype train took off. In fact, it’s been working on a futuristic browser for nearly a decade.

Opera introduced Neon in January 2017 as a futuristic concept browser, essentially the company’s vision for the future of browsers. Back then, Opera mentioned that Neon was built from the same browser engine as the regular Opera browser and was designed with content front and center, aiming to help users focus on what matters online.

The concept browser provided “fun ways to interact with web content,” such as the ability to “pop content out from the web,” essentially Opera’s interpretation of picture-in-picture. Though this is now a standard feature in modern browsers, it felt futuristic then!

Opera showed off a new user interface with Neon back then, including a start page that used the user's current desktop background image, tab management features like an “intelligence system that automatically manages tabs,” a new visual tab bar on the right side of the browser window, and more.

Fast-forward to today, and Neon is making a comeback, but Opera is no longer calling it a concept browser.

Opera Neon is now an agentic browser that does the work for you

Many elements from the original concept (including the name itself, which Opera says has become “a symbol of innovation and change”) have made their way into the new browser. For instance, the “different tab behaviors,” the split-screen mode, and the multimedia players will all be found in the new version.

Opera history lesson aside, what really matters now is the new Opera Neon, a fully agentic browser designed to automate a variety of everyday tasks.

As its "agentic" descriptor suggests, Opera Neon can browse the web as your agent and perform tasks you’d typically do while browsing, like purchasing or booking your next flight. It can also handle tasks like researching topics or building things for you, like interactive web applications. I

Agentic AI is at the cutting edge of internet-based computing. Google just unveiled the latest updates to its agentic AI technology at Google I/O last week.

Neon is designed “become your partner in the age of intelligent AI agents."

The key difference between Opera and Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI services is that Opera says Neon isn’t just another AI chatbot or assistant. It’s designed to “become your partner in the age of intelligent AI agents.” Instead of merely assisting with your tasks or telling you how to do them, it does them for you. Neon is capable of operating itself based on your intent. However, this resembles Google's emerging agentic tech, specifically Project Astra.

AI agents have been talked about a lot in the last few months. Microsoft’s annual Build event primarily focused on AI agents. And with so many agents already out there (and even more in the works), it naturally raises the question: What good is a browser built with AI at its core?

Opera believes we’re currently “at the brink of a new web,” which it calls the agentic web. The company believes that since the browser is typically one’s most essential and frequently used app, it only makes sense for it to become the central hub for AI agents. This way, you can offload most of the tasks you don’t want to do yourself to AI agents within your browser while you continue to get on with your day.

Opera Neon can Chat, Do, and Make

The browser’s functionality comes down to three use cases: Chat, Do, and Make.

• Chat lets you communicate with the browser’s native AI and ask contextual questions about the webpage you’re viewing. It also does all the typical tasks you’re used to now, like searching the web and generating content or images.

• Do is powered by a technology called “Browser Operator” that the company showed off a few months ago, which handles interacting with the website you’re on. It can do web tasks like filling forms, booking trips, or shopping for you. Opera claims that Neon does all this while preserving your security and privacy. The company explains that Neon doesn’t depend on screen recordings or cloud-based virtual machines. Instead, it operates natively in your browser and performs everything locally on your PC. Ultimately, your data stays private and local, including your browsing history, logins, and cookies.

• Make is what Opera claims is a first for browsers — an AI engine that can understand what you want to make and make it for you. For example, Neon can create a small video game or a custom website. The agentic browser isn’t limited to a single task at a time. You can ask it to make multiple things simultaneously, and it’ll handle them for you. Neon will continue operating on a cloud computer even when you go offline.

More from Laptop Mag

• Opera GX web browser review: Fun and feature-flush
• Opera's Air browser wants to be the antidote to doomscrolling
• I'm done with Google Chrome: Here's where I'm heading next

As the buzz around Google’s momentous 2025 I/O conference begins to wind down, much of the web is taking stock of what the word “web” will even mean soon as AI, chatbots, and search continue to converge.

But though AI and chatbots have been some of the fastest-growing tech categories in the past ten years, usage for old stalwarts like traditional web search from Google and Bing remains at an all-time high.

Will the “AI revolution” really kill search, or is it just another tool in our growing online kit?

Google AI Mode changes Search for good

At Google I/O 2025, the company unveiled its plan for the future of its Search product family. With what the company calls “AI Mode” now included in every search bar and Chrome installation, Google sees its new Search as a conversational, back-and-forth process that happens completely within the confines of a Google product.

Rather than searching for an answer, scrolling to a page to find it, and clicking through to get it, Google’s AI Mode retrieves and summarizes all the necessary information in one place.

This isn’t unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT using search mode or how Google’s chatbot, Gemini, operates. However, the difference is that, unlike those options, which are separate products that take new tabs to access, Google’s AI Mode is an omnipresent addition to any Google search you’re already making with the press of a button.

Could this change lead to the end of search as we know it? Industry analysts aren’t so sure.

Search outranks AI by up to 34x

In a recent look at the past 24 months of available web traffic data, collected via the SEO reporting service SEMRush and relayed by OneLittleWeb, analysts have seen that while chatbot usage is growing exponentially, it’s still completely dwarfed by the totality of search traffic.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has exploded in users over the past two years, but overall, chatbots still trail total search volume by a factor of nearly 34x.

To put this figure into context, the top 10 search engines globally generated 1.8 trillion page views between April 2024 and March 2025, while the top 10 chatbots collectively generated a comparatively moderate 55.2 billion.

Not all pageviews are built equally

Now, for what it’s worth, pageviews aren’t as reliable a metric as they were in years past.

For example, let’s say you want to find a pet groomer in your town. Before chatbots and AI solutions, your first page on Google Search might be “pet groomer”, but the results are too broad. You then go back to the search bar and type “dog groomer” to whittle things down further.

Each of these individual searches counts as a pageview.

Meanwhile, chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini are a one-window, one-pageview solution. You open up the interface once, and then have a conversation with the chatbot that reaches your eventual answer; somewhat similar to the multiple searches mentioned above.

The difference is that these interactions are structured so that SEO services like SEMRush can only see metrics from the top of the funnel and not anything else that came after it.

This is to say that we would take evaluations like this with a grain of salt. Chatbots are fundamentally rewriting the way people interface with the web. As a result, more traditional methods of evaluating traffic, popularity, and growth aren’t as applicable as they used to be.

Knowing this, it could be argued that the best metric to determine how much chatbots are actually growing would be time on page rather than straight pageviews.

We haven’t found any analysis that approaches the problem from this angle, rather than a sheer numbers game of how often users visited a search or chatbot.

It remains to be seen whether chatbots will destroy search as we know it in the next decade, but LaptopMag will be keeping an eye on Google, OpenAI, and more as the landscape continues to evolve!

More from Laptop Mag

• What is Google's AI Mode, and how will it change search forever?
• "Google AI/O?" The Internet reacts to Google I/O 2025
• Google makes a bold pitch for an all-encompassing AI: "Project Astra"

Microsoft Recall is going to have trouble recalling images of private messages sent through Signal after it announced its desktop app will block the AI screenshotting feature.

Microsoft Recall has had a rocky road on its path to a wider release, facing a slew of delays, major security concerns, and overwhelming skepticism from consumers and cybersecurity experts. In fact, the renowned antivirus maker Kaspersky had previously called the tool "dangerous" in a June 2024 blog.

Recall is one of several new AI features coming to Windows 11 and aims to help you "recall" things you've done on your laptop or PC by analyzing a treasure trove of screenshots of your activity.

It's also a feature that Kaspersky Cyber Security experts referred to as "dangerous," in a

The current preview version of Recall, which rolled out in April, is an opt-in feature, meaning it's not turned on by default. Even if you have it turned off, though, it's natural that some will still be concerned about their most private content being captured by an AI.

That's not a problem anymore on at least one app: the Signal private messaging app. It may be the first of many apps to announce a feature that will block Recall screenshots. Here's what Windows 11 users should know.

See also: Best laptop deals in May 2025

"Signal is ready": Private messaging app blocks Microsoft Recall screenshots

On Wednesday, Signal announced in a blog post that its desktop app now includes a "Screen security" feature designed to block Microsoft Recall screenshots. The feature is turned on by default for Windows 11 Signal users.

Signal left no doubt about what motivated it to add this feature, clearly stating, "The purpose of this setting is to protect your Signal messages from Microsoft Recall."

The blog post goes on to explain: "Although Microsoft made several adjustments over the past twelve months in response to critical feedback, the revamped version of Recall still places any content that’s displayed within privacy-preserving apps like Signal at risk.

"As a result, we are enabling an extra layer of protection by default on Windows 11 in order to help maintain the security of Signal Desktop on that platform even though it introduces some usability trade-offs."

"Microsoft has simply given us no other option."

With Signal's new "Screen security" feature turned on, content from the Signal app won't show up in any screenshot tool, including Microsoft Recall.

Signal now uses the same Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality that prevents you from taking screenshots of content from sites like Netflix or Hulu. Any attempt to do so shows only a blank black screen.

There are a number of reasons you might not want private or personal conversations recorded, and this feature ensures that you don't have to worry about that on Signal, even on its Windows 11 app. Signal likely won't be the only app developer to roll out a feature to block Recall, either.

How to block Microsoft Recall on your Windows 11 laptop

If you're worried about Microsoft Recall posing a threat to your privacy, you're not alone. Even if you're using your laptop for casual web browsing or schoolwork, you may find it uncomfortable that an AI could be snapping photos of your screen in 7-second intervals.

Luckily, if you want the peace of mind of having Recall turned off, it's pretty easy.

First, if you're on Windows 10, you have nothing to worry about right now. Recall is only available on Windows 11. It's also currently an opt-in feature, so if you didn't manually turn it on, it should be turned off by default.

If you're not sure if you have Recall turned on or not, head over to the Settings app and navigate to the "Privacy and security" tab.

Here, you should see a section called "Recall and snapshots." (If you don't have this section in your security settings, it probably means your Windows 11 PC doesn't have Recall yet.)

Select "Recall and snapshots" and turn off "Save snapshots." If this option was turned on, it's a good idea to also select "Delete snapshots" and "Delete all" to remove any existing screenshots Recall has captured.

Those steps should ensure Recall is disabled on your device, but you may want to keep an eye out for any pesky pop-ups trying to get you to turn Recall on again.

More from Laptop Mag

• "I'm not worried about our competitors": What Qualcomm's Snapdragon strategy says about Intel, Apple, and AMD
• You may already own the next Xbox — you just don't know it yet
• Microsoft has second thoughts over a surprisingly controversial Windows change

Legendary ex-Apple designer Jony Ive is teaming up with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, but what exactly they're working on remains a mystery.

Almost a year ago, Ive, the former VP of Hardware Engineering at Apple, announced he was working on a new AI project and collaborating with OpenAI. Now it looks like that collaboration is set in stone — OpenAI has acquire "io", Ive's AI startup.

The acquisition hints at long-term plans for some sort of AI hardware, although Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman kept things pretty quiet about the exact nature of the hardware in a video released on Wednesday.

A couple of rumors hint that Ive and OpenAI may be planning to take on one of the most ill-fated categories in tech in recent years: AI gadgets.

See also: Best phone deals in May 2025

OpenAI and former Apple designer Jony Ive team up for mysterious AI project

Ive and Altman's joint announcement reveals that OpenAI's acquisition is the latest update in their collaboration over the past year.

Together, they've been developing some type of new AI device, although details are sparse on what exactly that is.

The pair chatted about the project in a video included in the announcement, waxing poetic about their AI dreams.

"I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment," Ive said in the video, set in a San Francisco cafe. "The values and vision of Sam and the teams at OpenAI and io are a rare inspiration."

Altman seems just as eager to work with the legendary Apple alum, stating, "I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder, and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago."

Ive and Altman shared little to nothing about the specifics of their AI project, but some rumors already hint at what to expect.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported on X on Thursday that the AI device Ive and Altman are developing has "a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle."

It will be designed to be worn like a necklace and include cameras and microphones, but it will not include a display. Instead, it will rely on a connected smartphone or PC for computing and display capabilities.

While Altman and Ive have not officially confirmed that description, it paints a vivid image.

It's clearly some type of AI device, which doesn't come as much of a surprise. However, what will be surprising is if Ive and Altman can deliver an AI gadget that succeeds where a few others have already flopped.

Are AI gadgets destined to flop? Don't ask the Rabbit R1 or Humane AI pin

In 2024, we saw two purpose-made AI devices rise to stardom only to flop shortly after due to a mix of defects, poor functionality, and even melting chargers (yes, really).

Of course, we're referring to the ill-fated Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI pin. Both were among the first physical devices explicitly built for AI, but neither was able to catch on.

The Humane AI pin was awkward to use and too expensive for most people. The Rabbit R1 didn't offer enough unique features, and its AI often struggled to answer questions accurately or perform basic tasks.

On a bigger-picture level, neither of these AI gadgets could find a foothold because our phones are already so good at doing the same things.

AI apps can do everything these AI gadgets can, so why bother paying hundreds of dollars for a second device that does less?

This question will be crucial for Ive and Altman to answer effectively if they want to change the narrative around AI gadgets. Ive may have found success at Apple for designing some of the brand's most iconic devices, but he also designed the Magic Mouse, which infamously has its charging port awkwardly placed on the bottom.

So, as brilliant as Ive may be, this new AI device isn't a guaranteed win. With that said, if anyone can design an AI gadget you actually want to use, it's probably him.

More from Laptop Mag

• This cute AI gadget was one of the biggest tech failures of 2024... or was it?
• Remember the year's biggest AI flop? The Humane AI pin's public failure has a silver lining
• Think Grok is bad? Microsoft made an AI so evil it had to be erased (twice)

Imagine you're a Windows user and need to summarize a file or edit an image. You’d likely start by heading to File Explorer, navigating to the file you need, and then opening it. Let's say it's a task AI can handle quickly — you’d then launch your AI app of choice and manually prompt it to perform the action.

Microsoft believes that you shouldn’t waste this much time on such tasks, which is exactly why it announced AI shortcuts in File Explorer, called AI Actions, in its most recent Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.4151 (KB5058486).

Here's the context around this update: Windows users have historically been opinionated about changes to core parts of the operating system. Seemingly innocuous updates have caused an uproar — and not without good reason. Whether or not Windows users revolt over this change to File Explorer remains to be seen. Will users revolt or rejoice? The answer may surface in the coming weeks as this new feature is used more and creates ripple effects across File Explorer and Windows as a whole.

Microsoft introduces AI actions in File Explorer with new update

Microsoft notes that AI actions in File Explorer are designed to help you “interact more deeply with your files.”

The idea behind them is simple — you locate a file, right-click it, and then choose the new AI actions entry in the context menu. Depending on the content of the file, you’ll be suggested appropriate actions.

For instance, the screenshot Microsoft shared shows the company demoing AI actions on an image file. Hovering over the AI actions entry in the context menu gave the following options: Visual Search with Bing, Blur background with Photos, Erase object with Photos, and Remove background with Paint.

Visual Search with Bing is essentially Microsoft’s branding of reverse search, and lets you search the web using an image. You can use the feature to find similar images and products, get website details, and identify famous people, landmarks, and plants. The other three are editing features you’ve likely used before.

Blur background uses the native Photos app to automatically detect the background in an image, highlight the subject, and blur everything else behind it. Remove background works similarly, but instead of blurring, it removes the background entirely and leaves just a cutout of the subject.

The erase object also uses the native Photos app, which automatically highlights any unwanted elements or distractions in your image. The AI action then uses the Generative Erase feature to remove them completely.

At the time of writing, these four image actions are the only ones Microsoft has announced. They support JPG, JPEG, and PNG files. However, the company plans to roll out new AI actions for Microsoft 365 files in the coming weeks.

This includes a Summarize action, which uses Copilot to generate summaries of documents without even opening them. You’ll be able to use the Summarize AI action on .docx, .doc, .pptx, .ppt, .xlsx, .xls, .rtf, .txt, and .loop files. A "Create an F.A.Q." AI action will allow you to convert a file into a question-and-answer list.

Summarize and Create an F.A.Q. AI actions will only be available to Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers with a Copilot license. Microsoft notes that consumer support with a Microsoft account is “coming later.” Keep in mind that AI actions are part of a gradual rollout. So, you might not see them immediately, even if you’re on the latest Insider Preview build.

AI actions don’t seem to ruin File Explorer unless you let them

When you control-click a file on Macs, a “Quick Actions” option appears in the context menu with options like Rotate Left, Markup, Create PDF, Convert Image, and Remove Background.

The only difference is it isn’t publicly marketed as AI (though it might be using it under the hood, who really knows?). Editing software like Adobe Express also offers similar quick actions, like removing backgrounds from images with a single click.

I believe AI actions in File Explorer would help save more time, especially for those who work with a huge list of files daily. It would've been a different story if Microsoft mandated the feature, but since you can simply ignore AI actions if you don’t want to use them, it feels more like a helpful option than an intrusive change.

More from Laptop Mag

• Microsoft recommends a drastic move for Windows 11 upgrade, report says
• Microsoft doesn't want you to upgrade to Windows 11
  
• Windows 11 May update: A controversial AI feature makes a quiet comeback

Even if semiconductor giant Qualcomm likely faces a two-year gap between releases of its groundbreaking Snapdragon X platform — an eon in the hyper-competitive silicon market — the company's Snapdragon chief says he isn't worried.

"I'm not worried about our competitors coming out with something," Qualcomm's Alex Katouzian told Laptop Mag this week at the Computex conference in Taipei.

Katouzian is the General Manager of mobile, compute, and XR, and is responsible for execution on the Snapdragon chips. He believes the Snapdragon platform is powerful enough to survive the delay between the company's first- and second-generation computer chips, which have taken on the unofficial moniker "Snapdragon X2."

"We're sustained in performance-per-watt, and we have relationships that are strong across retail and commercial, and we have marketing campaigns that are now very much concentrated on Snapdragon," Katouzian said.

During their keynote at Computex, Qualcomm leaders sought to maintain momentum by directing attention to the Snapdragon Summit, scheduled for September 23-25 in Hawaii. At that summit, Qualcomm is expected to introduce "our next-generation solution," Katzouzian said. Questions about the second-generation Snapdragon X Elite chipset were answered with "come to Snapdragon Summit."

Nevertheless, one question loomed over the keynote: Will Qualcomm be left behind with a two-year gap between generations? After all, Qualcomm announced the first Snapdragon X Elite chips at the Snapdragon Summit in 2023 and released them in June of the following year. If Qualcomm repeats that pace, the next Snapdragon X chip won't be in laptops until June 2026.

The Snapdragon X series timeline

Qualcomm officially launched the Snapdragon X series with the X Elite and X Plus platforms last spring, between Microsoft Build in May and Computex in June 2024. In late 2024 and early 2025, Qualcomm announced additional X Plus chipsets and the budget X variants.

"We introduced our solution at Computex that would already have designs that we launched in May with Microsoft last year," Katouzian said. "And so, we're only in the market for nine months. I think a platform such as X Elite, X Plus, X — it needs more than nine months to become mature in multiple designs and SKUs."

Katouzian compared the release cycle to the Apple iPhones of yore, which used to follow a two-year "tick-tock" cycle, where a significant upgrade is announced every two years. By that logic, 2025 is Snapdragon's "tock" year.

"I think it's OK to come in as a tick-tock," he said. "We come in and then four months from now we're going to introduce our next-generation solution, and then it'll ramp into market early 2026. As long as people and OEMs understand that this continuous advantage is coming, I'm OK."

Qualcomm's competition will have launched two chips in the years between Snapdragon X Elite and X2

Since the first Copilot+ systems launch in June 2024, all of Qualcomm's competitors have released new chipset generations, and some are expected to hit their second generation since the X Elite this fall.

Intel's Panther Lake chipsets are on track to bring the Intel Core Ultra brand into its 300 series this fall, and Apple is expected to launch the M5 chipset any time between this summer and fall.

While Katouzian and CEO Cristiano Amon appear to believe the Snapdragon portfolio is strong enough to weather the oncoming storm, their new ad campaign tells a different story.

If Qualcomm weren't worried about the competition or the arrival of Snapdragon X2, would they really need to keep building ads around what I found to be not-quite-accurate data?

What can Qualcomm do to keep its lead?

Even during this "tock" year, laptops and mini-PCs are continuing to debut with Snapdragon chips. The HP OmniBook 5 is a recent example.

It's not as if the company isn't still working with partners to bring more systems to market. However, those systems are running 5-11-month-old chipsets, depending on which slice of the Snapdragon X series we're considering.

In the meantime, Intel, AMD, and Apple are all releasing newer silicon, making Qualcomm systems look less like a disruptor in the market and more like yesterday's news.

This means the second-generation Snapdragon X series chipsets need to make as big a splash as the first-generation chipsets, if not more, to recapture public attention.

More from Laptop Mag

• Jensen Huang at Computex: "It's not because we don't love GeForce, GeForce got us here."
• The Acer Swift X 14, a favorite of creators, is being refreshed for 2025
• The Asus ProArt P16 nails local AI and beats MacBooks — but it doesn’t come cheap

At this year's Google I/O conference, the company introduced a series of products that promise to radically shift the way people interface with the web, starting today.

As a part of its broader plan to make AI, and specifically its own AI, Gemini, the center of your world, the company shared more about what it’s calling “AI Mode” for Google Search.

AI Mode, first shown to journalists and other insiders in early March, aims to transform the way you interact with the broader web and fundamentally change how the search engine company views the act of searching itself.

What is AI Mode, and how does it change Google Search?

For starters, it helps to discern between two different Google features with almost confusingly similar names: Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode.

AI Overview was introduced to the public last year in May of 2024, with often hilariously off-base and sometimes even dangerous results. Powered by the now comparatively ancient PaLM 2 LLM, AI Overview is basically a “summarizer” AI that pulls the information you’re searching for from a few of the top pages and then combines them into several summarized paragraphs ahead of the rest of the results.

Meanwhile, the new AI Mode is powered by the Gemini 2.5 model and can be accessed through an optional tab that launched for all Google users on Tuesday.

AI Mode includes AI Overview (now backed by Gemini instead of PaLM 2) and a slew of other features, including Deep Search, Search Live, and agentic capabilities via the company’s Project Mariner effort.

With all these features combined, Google wants to completely change how you interface with the broader web going forward. With the ability to buy tickets to a game or make reservations at a restaurant in your name with one request, AI Mode could forever usurp the passive, manual process of using the web.

Google can get me in at a restaurant now?

During its presentation, Google showed off several of AI Mode's agentic capabilities, including getting tickets to a game and reserving a table at a restaurant afterwards, all in one request.

The company didn't demo the full extent of this feature, but having toyed with it myself today, I can say it's surprising how good it is at running off and getting things done for you in a way you always expected AI should.

With a more conversational approach to the Google Search experience, AI Mode gathers information from across the web. It condenses everything you might need from a long-chain request into a single window.

You can then take from the returned results and refine things even further, bouncing from one search to the next in natural language that remembers what you searched for last.

Also, if you use the broader Google suite of products, including Docs and Gmail, AI Mode can further personalize results based on your data history.

Once you’ve found the restaurant you want to order from or the game you want to attend, you tell Google to set it up, and AI Mode handles the rest.

The company wasn’t done there, though. It also showed new data visualization and analysis tools, where AI Mode can take in, contextualize, and even visualize larger amounts of data compared to a traditional Google Search.

Then, the presenter took a beat to unveil Deep Search, a part of AI Mode that can take in several instructions at once and contextualize long-chain requests in a single search.

Lastly, like many types of Google Search these days, AI Mode is multimodal. This means users can ask questions via text or voice or even upload images and videos.

Combined, this all adds up to a new kind of Google Search that can understand complex queries, perform multi-faceted research, and synthesize responses in real time that consider all aspects of a user’s interactions.

How does Google’s AI Mode change the business of the web?

For those not in the online publishing industry, there are a few different ways that the people and businesses who write, edit, and shoot content make a profit. These include affiliate deals, selling ads, and sponsored content.

Two out of three of those revenue streams rely on people, or “clicks,” as you’ll hear them referred to in our meetings, coming to the site and interacting with the content. The more eyes on the content, the more ads you can sell and the more you can sustain the costs of running the site.

While many publishers have already reported diminished clicks in the wake of AI Overview, AI Mode turns the traditional search and SEO model on its head.

In essence, AI Mode operates as a chat window designed to Hoover up and repackage broad scopes of information from what otherwise may have been 20-100 different open tabs.

For example, when planning your kids' summer camps using traditional Google Search, every unopened tab is a lost click, meaning less money for the sites that Google uses to mine for information.

In one of Google’s examples during the keynote, a mock user is trying to find summer camp reservations for their kids. The user speaks in complete sentences and natural language as you would with any other LLM, and gives the agent follow-up questions after the first results return.

Google will encourage this back-and-forth going forward, as it keeps users in the company’s ecosystem for far longer than they used to for a simple search.

The longer you’re staring at a Google product, ultimately the more ads they’ll be able to serve, and the easier it will be to justify the massive datacenter costs required to keep all these AI Mode search plates spinning.

But if Google’s next big version of search ultimately kills revenue streams for the websites that Gemini depends on to train itself, what will be left for it to learn?

When does AI Mode release, and how can you try it for yourself?

As per Google’s product page and presentation, AI Mode is rolling out to all users for free today, May 20, 2025.

You can activate the feature yourself by opening up a fresh Google tab and clicking the "AI Mode" feature, highlighted above.

More from Laptop Mag

• Google makes a bold pitch for an all-encompassing AI: "Project Astra"
• Google and XREAL announce Project Aura, XR smart glasses for Android
• "It’s been sinking for a long time": Why a revamped Siri is a no-show at WWDC

Google I/O 2025 just wrapped, and there’s a clear takeaway: AI isn’t just a tool anymore; it’s the platform, and it dominated the event. The company flooded the keynote stage with Gemini news, hardware teases, and controversial subscription tiers. Some fans love ambition. Others? Not so much.

Gemini gets smarter, faster, and harder to ignore

Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro is now the brain behind your Android, Workspace apps, and a range of creative tools. It powers Gemini Flash (a faster, cheaper AI model), brings real-time smarts to your camera and voice assistant, and even appears in a redesigned AI-powered search.

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said the goal is an AI assistant that’s “personal, proactive, and powerful.” Tech investor Gene Munster called the event “a big deal,” arguing Google has no choice but to prove it’s “willing to take bold, outside-the-box steps to stay relevant”.

But alongside the hype exists legitimate worries about the pace at which Gemini is seemingly being shoehorned into Google’s products. One analyst recently raised concerns about how Google’s AI overviews are “often so confidently wrong” that they’ve lost all trust in them.

Others have questioned whether users fully understand how much of their data is being fed back into training loops without always making that exchange transparent.

A $249.99 Ultra subscription

You read that right. $249.99. One of the most notable announcements of the I/O event was the introduction of a new “AI Ultra” subscription plan.

Those who sign up will receive the “highest level of access” to Google’s fastest Gemini model, ad-free YouTube, and tools like Veo 3, the new Flow video editing app, and a new AI capability called Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Think, which is yet to launch.

Ultra is “for people that want to be on the absolute cutting edge of AI from Google,” Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs and Gemini, said during a press briefing.

The reaction has been mixed at best.

One redditor points out that for enterprise users, the price is “not bad," adding that “[I] can see companies buying subscriptions for their workers.” Meanwhile, another user said, “Still doesn't get you API access, right? So I don't understand the point of these very expensive subscriptions…”

Search is changing, but for the better?

AI Overviews were just the beginning of Google’s bid to create the next-gen search engine. We’re all pretty used to them by now, and whether you love or loathe them, it’s clear that they’re here to stay. Google says that these AI-generated search results have become “one of the most successful launches in search in the past decade.” That's debatable.

The company caught heat last year after these Gemini-powered AI search features offered some incorrect and downright bizarre answers, such as suggesting that people eat “one small rock a day."

Talking to reporters before the 2025 I/O event, VP of search Liz Reid acknowledged last year's issues and described them as "edge cases and quite rare."

Now, Google is doubling down with the launch of an “AI Mode” chatbot. “It’s a total reimagining of search,” said Google chief Sundar Pichai in a press briefing ahead of I/O. The company says the new feature will make interacting with its search engine more like having a conversation with an expert capable of answering a wide range of questions.

Google has already launched AI mode in the US two and a half months after the company began testing it. One user, however, took to X.com to express his frustrations after attempting to use the new feature for the first time:

A glimpse into the future with Android XR

In terms of hardware, Google showed off Android XR and teased next-gen smart glasses powered by Gemini and Project Astra, a real-time multimodal agent that can “see, hear, and talk” in context.

It felt like a moonshot moment, but some readers may be skeptical with Google Glass still fresh in collective memory.

While we’re going to have to wait for more information on Google’s own Android XR headset, they did show off its capabilities with a live translation using a smart glasses prototype.

That’s a genuinely useful application that would pair nicely with many of the accessibility-related AI applications we’re seeing more of.

AI fatigue sets in

While Google I/O 2025 delivered no shortage of cutting-edge announcements, a growing portion of the audience seems weary of the relentless focus on AI. X.com feeds and comment sections filled up with users expressing a sense of déjà vu.

Meanwhile, users on the r/Google and r/Android subreddits said, "Take a drink every time they say 'AI'" and "It's gonna be like this every year from now on isn't it? Tuning in for Android only to get a boatload of AI talk."

One user summed the general sentiment up perfectly: "Serious question, are they going to talk about something else than AI?"

While many are impressed by what Google’s AI tools can do, some are simply exhausted by the scale and speed of the shift. The feeling isn’t rejection, it’s saturation.

More from Laptop Mag

• Google makes a bold pitch for an all-encompassing AI: "Project Astra"
• Google and XREAL announce Project Aura, XR smart glasses for Android
• An exclusive look at Google's NotebookLM app on Android and iOS

During Tuesday's Google I/O conference at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, company leaders showcased a series of new products, including AI Mode for Google Search and Android XR.

The AI assistant Project Astra, which first appeared last year at I/O, is by far the most fascinating and/or scary, depending on your views on AI. MIT Technology Review has written that Project Astra "could be generative AI’s killer app."

Set to compete directly with Apple’s Apple Intelligence, the celestial-named Astra represents a constellation of different products and platforms, including Google Gemini AI, AndroidXR, and what the company is calling Action Intelligence.

These tools are designed to provide a seamless experience between you and the information you want on the web.

What is Project Astra, and how does it work?

During the two-hour presentation, in another entry to the growing category of “my hands are full and I need to use the internet right now” promotional materials, we were introduced to a character working on a bike.

The scenario — watch it in full — is that he needs to know how to replace a part, but his hands are covered in chain grease! (All of these spots so far can’t seem to escape the As Seen on TV black-and-white “does this ever happen to you” vibe.)

Given this common, everyday predicament, he asks Gemini to search the web for a user manual instead of picking up his phone.

After finding the manual, Gemini offers to read through the PDF file and find the information our amateur bike mechanic was on the hunt for. After that, he asks Gemini to call a local bike shop for him and order a part for pickup. Finally, after the mechanic runs into a stripped screw, he asks Gemini to find and open a YouTube video that tells him how to fix it.

In all of these scenarios, Gemini and Action Intelligence showcase complex use cases that have baffled most large action models (or LAMs, not to be confused with LLMs), including Apple Intelligence.

These actions include reading and interfacing with web pages, automated calling, and content retrieval.

How is Action Intelligence different from Apple Intelligence or Microsoft Copilot?

Though Apple beat Google to the punch with the launch of Apple Intelligence in October of last year, many users have been disappointed with the feature so far.

While the commercials make it seem like a supercharged Siri, in practice, many people haven’t found it useful for much more than summarizing emails and getting queries to ChatGPT a little bit faster.

Microsoft Copilot and Copilot+, the AI services that can be your generative AI assistant on Windows laptops or on your phone, integrate into Microsoft 365 applications, remembering how you use them. Still, Google's Project Astra seemed several levels beyond and more deeply integrated into everything you do online.

If Copilot is your copilot as you fly through your life, it seems Project Astra wants to be the sun in your personal solar system.

It's difficult to see how the presentation wasn't a pitch for the biggest AI transformation that a company has ever made to consumers.

Meanwhile, Google's Action Intelligence finally brings the promise of a fully-powered AI assistant made for years by various companies. This includes startups like Teenage Engineering, makers of the Rabbit R1, which never came close to releasing a functional product, and giants like Apple, which seem to be making incremental, rather than revolutionary, gains toward the goal.

If Google’s Action Intelligence works as reported, it could represent a sea change in this market. An AI that can recognize web pages, use apps, and control every aspect of your phone with just a prompt could be a game-changer.

Astra + AndroidXR = A data hoarder’s dream

Also announced during Tuesday's keynote was Google’s upcoming integration with a prototype pair of mixed reality glasses, the XREAL Ones, using its new AndroidXR platform. It's called Project Aura.

Before you get flashbacks, just know this ain’t your grandma’s Google Glass. Google showed off the capabilities of its new glasses in a live — and therefore not without the expected jank — tech demo, which included issuing a series of voice commands while Gemini and Action Intelligence handled the heavy lifting.

Perhaps as a response to Meta’s recent reveal of its prototype Project Orion mixed-reality glasses, Google wasn’t to be outdone.

While Mark Zuckerberg showed off a series of interesting use cases and games for its glasses during a keynote last year, Android XR was the first time we saw a full-fledged mixed reality, well, reality.

This included visual confirmation of sent texts, asking Gemini to recognize bands from some pictures on the wall, and controlling a music app. The glasses also displayed full heads-up maps and directions in real time.

The full integration of Android XR showed Google’s intent that, much like a smartwatch, they want you on your phone less and present in the world more.

But don’t mistake this utopian XR dream for altruism. Like Meta’s play into the VR market and its push of RayBan Meta Wayfarer sunglasses with integrated cameras and microphones, what will likely be a costly piece of hardware will likely be subsidized by collecting more user data.

With a camera and a pair of microphones on your head all day long, Google may finally be freed from the confines of your pocket or a purse. All the time your camera used to spend in the dark, not gathering data, will now be spent examining every aspect of your natural life as Google’s backend figures out how to use the gathered information to sell products back to you.

When does Project Astra launch?

Google hasn’t confirmed a launch date for Astra nor indicated which phones in the Android ecosystem would support the feature. For now, a loose date of sometime in 2025 has been established, and the company says Astra will be rolling it out in waves to select Android users over time.

As for the XREAL smart glasses and AndroidXR’s integration with Astra, the “Prototype Only” stuck to the bottom of today’s stream should tell you all you need to know there. Neither the glasses nor the Android XR platform has any solid release dates.

Given the many glitches we saw during the tech demo, Google likely still has a way to go before it is confident in establishing a release schedule.

Ultimately, what Google presented today is the company’s vision for an all-encompassing AI future. One where any part of the web, whether in a PDF or a YouTube video, is accessible with voice requests alone. Where your interaction with the online world is a conversation had out loud, you never pull out your phone again, and your thumbs can finally take a well-earned rest.

But, whether Astra works as Google promises out of the box—or we’re just in for another series of Apple Intelligence-level shortfalls—remains to be seen.

More from Laptop Mag

• Google and XREAL announce Project Aura, XR smart glasses for Android
• An exclusive look at Google's NotebookLM app on Android and iOS
• Could AI replace Google in Safari? Apple executive suggests it’s possible.

Google I/O is a lot like Apple's WWDC. A staple of the tech calendar, where Google takes a moment to flaunt its advancements in software and AI, and show us what's on its way to Android devices over the coming year.

It's not often you'll see hardware steal the show. For that, you typically need to catch the company's Made By Google event later in the calendar year. However, this year is different.

It may not be of Google's own crafting, but Google I/O just gifted you the greatest reason to buy an Android device in years, and I'm not talking about a smartphone.

Unveiled at Google I/O on Tuesday, XREAL's Android XR-driven Project Aura XR glasses are the next major milestone for AR glasses — a technology I've been preaching about for some time now.

XREAL Project Aura: The white-hot glow of potential

The the naked eye, XREAL's Project Aura looks much like its recently released XREAL One AR glasses, with the optional XREAL Eye camera accessory built directly into the frames.

This means that we can expect Project Aura to not just offer AR experiences through its flattened birdbath optics, but for those visuals to be enhanced further with three and six-degrees of freedom (3/6DoF), allowing for immersive viewing experiences, similar to those offered by full headsets like Apple's Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3, which can anchor augmented elements in place and keep them there — even when turning your head or walking around.

Interestingly, what really sets Project Aura apart from its XREAL One/One Pro predecessors is the switch to a Qualcomm chipset from the company's proprietary X1 chip.

On the switch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of XR at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Ziad Asghar, proudly boasts: “Qualcomm Technologies is excited to be powering XREAL’s new Android XR device,” further stating stating, "Working with XREAL, Snapdragon allows amazing immersive experiences to come to life in a unique optical see-through product.”

_{XREAL's Project Aura looks to be the perfect XR glasses to bring Google's vision for the future of AI assistants, Project Astra (as seen in the video above, showcased during last year's Google I/O event), to life, offering a mix of AI and AR tech to allow multi-modal AI models like Google Gemini to shine.}

Qualcomm definitely has a history in AR and XR, with its Snapdragon chips powering the latest Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets. But more than a snappy processor will be required if XREAL's XR glasses are to get off the ground properly. For that, you need only look at Project Aura's use of the new Android XR platform.

“Google is thrilled to welcome XREAL to the Android XR family and to build great XR experiences on Project Aura,” said Hugo Swart, Sr. Director, XR ecosystem at Google. And I'm certain that the feeling is mutual, as the one thing holding AR glasses back so far has been software. Android XR changes that — and it brings Google's Gemini AI along for the ride.

XREAL Co-founder Chi Xu agrees, stating in a press release: "We’ve always pushed the boundaries of what XR hardware can do — combining performance, comfort, and design into something people can wear every day ... Partnering with Google on Android XR takes this vision to the next level."

XREAL's partnership with Google on using the Android XR platform isn't just a shift to a more universally available platform, it's the kicking opening of the doors and an invitation to developers to take advantage of its hardware in new and interesting ways. As Xu sees it, "this is a breakthrough moment for real-world XR.”

I'm inclined to agree.

What's next

Today was just a glimpse at Project Aura, the second official device to make use of Android XR.

To hear more, we'll need to wait for the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in June. It's here that we can likely expect to hear more about its Qualcomm potential and XREAL's advancements in hardware.

But rest assured, this isn't a preview of a technology years from the market. XREAL has been developing some of the most advanced AR glasses on the market for years. Project Aura is likely to be in your hands, and on your face, well in advance of Meta's ambitious Orion glasses, that's for sure.

To stay looped into the project, you can subscribe to news on XREAL's Project Aura at the company's website.

I've been a long-time proponent of smart glasses, and Project Aura's blend of AR and AI could make it the first of its kind to really break through the perceived mainstream barrier and make smart glasses like this a staple of modern, everyday tech.

To many, my words have been wasted all too early. An overenthusiastic response to tech that is oftentimes off-handedly dismissed as something that needs more time to cook and mature.

While I disagree, I can see why people may hesitate. Smart glasses didn't exactly get off to the best of starts when Google Glass burst onto the scene in 2013.

However, Project Aura is something new. Something different. And, if there's a message to share with those who aren't sold on the idea of your face being the platform for the computer of the future, let me tell you: we're here.

More from Laptop Mag

• I switched to a smartphone and Xreal glasses — a perfect laptop alternative for travel
• This Spacetop and AR glasses combo turns your Windows machine into a spatial computer that you'll have to see to believe
• These AR glasses brought my guilty pleasure back from the dead, and it's straight-up wizardry

Despite Apple hyping up its next-gen AI assistant for nearly a year, the revamped Siri won’t take the stage at WWDC 2025. While fans were expecting the digital sidekick to finally get large language model smarts, insiders say the reboot is months behind schedule, and maybe even years behind the competition.

Instead, Apple will release a modest update to Apple Intelligence, its suite of AI features sprinkled across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Siri? It's still stuck in the past.

Where's Siri?

When Apple introduced Apple Intelligence last June, the company pitched it as “AI for the rest of us.” At the center of it all was a smarter Siri: One that could read emails, navigate your schedule, and understand natural language in a way the current assistant can’t.

But what Apple didn’t say during that slick WWDC presentation was that the Siri demo was just a concept video. The real-world version? Buggy, unreliable, and nowhere near ready for primetime. By the time Apple’s senior execs ran internal tests on iOS 18.4 this spring, key features like voice-based ID retrieval weren’t even functioning.

With ongoing struggles that show no sign of letting up, Siri’s AI revamp is now delayed indefinitely. Apple has since pulled several TV ads showing off capabilities that still don’t exist. It’s an embarrassing miss — one that has sparked internal frustration and even a class-action lawsuit over false advertising.

A culture clash with AI

So what went wrong? In short, Apple’s traditional development culture collided head-on with the chaotic speed of modern AI.

Apple likes to ship finished, polished products, not beta experiences. It updates software once a year and obsesses over control and curation. But AI doesn’t work that way. LLMs are iterative, messy, and require huge datasets and rapid deployment cycles to improve. It’s a world built on risk and scale, and these are two things Apple has historically avoided.

Compounding the problem is the company’s strict privacy stance. While rivals like OpenAI and Meta train their models on oceans of user data, Apple’s hands are tied. That means it must rely on synthetic or licensed data, limiting how fast and how well it can train AI.

Looking behind the curtain

Internally, Siri’s team has struggled to get the assistant’s two brains — the old codebase and the new AI-powered features — to play nicely together. Apple sources describe it as a “whack-a-mole” situation: squash one bug, three more pop up. Integration issues have brought development to a crawl.

Apple’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, has taken much of the heat. Brought in from Google in 2018 to turbocharge Apple’s machine learning, he has since been sidelined from Siri’s development. The new face of Siri development is Mike Rockwell, the executive behind the Vision Pro headset. Whether he can steer the project back on track remains to be seen.

One thing’s for sure: The missed deadline is more than a technical hiccup; it’s a reputational risk. Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of services, reportedly warned that AI could do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to Nokia.

What's next?

At WWDC (June 9-13,2025), don’t expect Siri to headline. Instead, Apple will showcase new Apple Intelligence features, like an AI-enhanced battery mode and a virtual health coach, while continuing to push iOS 19 toward a fall release.

As for Siri, Apple is now working on a fully LLM-powered version, internally dubbed “LLM Siri,” that may eventually rival ChatGPT in conversational ability. But that won’t be ready for months — and let's face it, probably longer.

In the meantime, Apple is preparing to decouple Siri from its Apple Intelligence branding. A tacit admission, perhaps, that the name Siri no longer inspires much confidence.

More from Laptop Mag

• WWDC 2025 could mark the beginning of the end for certain iPhone users
• Apple Intelligence just ran into more bad news — and Siri is the problem
• How a big Siri upgrade could make Apple Intelligence the game-changer we've been waiting for

Asus kicked off its Computex announcements on Monday with “updated solutions” for creators, students, and businesses. But one laptop stands out from the rest.

The Asus ProArt P16 (H7606), a creator-focused laptop, has features that set it apart.

Let's dive in.

The ASUS ProArt P16 (H7606) packs serious power and local AI

ASUS’s ProArt lineup focuses on blending portability and performance for creative professionals. This year’s refreshed models appear to take that commitment even further and might be the company’s best devices yet for artists, editors, designers, and photographers.

Starting with the display, the ProArt P16 maintains the same specs as its predecessor (which Laptop Mag reviewed last year), featuring a 16-inch OLED touchscreen display, a 60Hz refresh rate, and a 3,840 x 2,400 resolution.

Ultimately, this means the laptop offers impressive color accuracy and sharpness. Though competitors like the Apple MacBook Pro are also constantly praised for their excellent displays, Asus's use of an OLED panel gives it a slight edge in contrast.

It comes in a classy matte black chassis, which ASUS refers to as the “Nano Black” colorway. The ProArt P16 model is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor.

Given that this laptop is aimed primarily at creatives, a powerful GPU is usually more important than a strong CPU (which definitely still matters). ASUS pairs the powerful AMD Ryzen CPU with the newer Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU for that extra rendering muscle. Now, here's where it actually gets exciting.

This time, the ProArt 16 focuses on nailing local AI, which essentially means AI running directly on your device instead of the cloud. The laptop comes with two Asus-exclusive apps, StoryCube and MuseTree. The former is Asus's AI-powered digital asset-management tool, while the latter is more of a creative idea generator that can transform “inspiration into imagery.”

This brings three key benefits: Creatives can use AI even if they’re offline and don’t have a stable internet connection, they get faster responses, and using AI is more secure and privacy-friendly.

Since everything happens on the laptop itself and stays right where you can see it (instead of the cloud), any files you upload or prompts you give the AI don’t leave your device, so you maintain complete control of your data.

The on-device AI processing truly makes the Asus ProArt P16 stand out from the competition since companies have yet to integrate such powerful local AI capabilities into laptops. Think Apple — their Macs still rely mainly on cloud-based AI rather than fully on-device processing like this.

The ProArt P16’s powerful processor boasts 50 TOPS of NPU processing power, meaning it can easily handle on-device AI workloads. It packs all of this (and more) into an incredibly portable form factor—it’s just over half an inch thin and weighs 4.08 pounds.

The ProArt P16 is also a Copilot+ PC and runs Microsoft Copilot AI on-device. Copilot+ PCs are praised for their ability to run AI tools locally using an NPU, unlocking features that rely on this hardware, like the controversial Recall feature, which made a quiet comeback recently.

All this power comes at a hefty price tag

The 2025 ProArt 16 will start at $2,499 and will be available at the Asus Store (in-store and online) and Best Buy during Q2 2025, meaning it will hit shelves in late June.

If the price tag of the ProArt 16 made you reconsider your life decisions, or if you’re simply not a creative professional and don’t need that much power, thankfully, Asus has refreshed its other PC lines, too, including the Chromebook series (CX34, CX14, CX15) and ExpertBook series (B5, B1).

More from Laptop Mag

• The Acer Swift X 14, a favorite of creators, is being refreshed for 2025
• The HP ZBook Ultra outperforms the MacBook Pro in key areas, but it comes at a price
• Unveiled at Computex, HP's new OmniBook 5 could be the next battery life champ

After months of waiting, Google began rolling out the stand-alone NotebookLM app on the App Store and Google Play on Monday.

Though the app is officially available to everyone, Laptop Mag got an exclusive first look over the past several weeks. Since its release two years ago, the only way to use the AI-powered note-taking tool was via NotebookLM's website. This was a major complaint among users, since it meant you couldn’t easily access your notes on the go.

The AI-powered note-taking tool began as an experiment under the “Project Tailwind" codename and debuted at Google I/O in 2023. Two years later, ahead of Google I/O 2025 this week, NotebookLM still stands out from the competition for one reason: It’s a self-contained model.

Though AI powers it, NotebookLM doesn’t scrape the web or fabricate answers just to tell you what you want to hear. Instead, NotebookLM relies only on the sources you’ve uploaded and references them to answer any queries you may have.

Ultimately, this makes NotebookLM a much more reliable tool for students and researchers and reduces the time one needs to manually verify the AI's information.

"We're incredibly excited that the official NotebookLM app is now available," Biao Wang, Product Manager on NotebookLM, tells Laptop Mag.

"This first version of the app includes many of the core features of NotebookLM, and we’ll continue to add more functionality. It's designed to make it much easier to curate and understand information that matters to you on the go, bringing the power of NotebookLM wherever you are. "

NotebookLM’s mobile app is more than just a web wrapper

NotebookLM’s mobile app is now available for download on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and can be installed on mobile and tablet devices. A few companies have a habit of releasing apps that are just web wrappers to rush things out the door, but NotebookLM’s app doesn't appear to be that; it's optimized for phones and tablets.

Once you launch the app and log in with your Google account, you’ll notice something right away: To use any of NotebookLM’s features, you must create a notebook and populate it with sources you’d like the tool to reference.

I’m a university freshman and rely heavily on the AI-powered note-taking tool for exam prep. Naturally, I already have a couple of notebooks populated with multiple sources. So instead of creating a new notebook every time I need to study a different topic in a course, I locate the one I’ve already made and upload the latest source to it.

NotebookLM doesn’t save your responses unless you manually do so. Ultimately, part of me was worried that my existing notebooks wouldn’t carry over to the mobile app, but that isn’t the case here.

All my previously created notebooks were synced and ready to go when I logged in. You can also create new notebooks and upload sources directly in the app by hitting the + Create New button.

The iconic Audio Overviews feature is fully integrated into NotebookLM’s mobile app

NotebookLM went viral last year when it debuted Audio Overviews, which can convert your uploaded sources into AI-generated discussions within minutes.

Though NotebookLM isn’t the only tool that can generate AI podcasts, I’ve tried nearly all of them and noticed the same issue: The podcasts aren’t entertaining to listen to. This isn’t the case with NotebookLM.

See also: This Google experiment can turn any link, article, or document into a professional podcast — try it yourself for free

Instead of an Audio Overview discussing your sources in a monotonous tone, two AI hosts discuss your sources in an engaging and lively manner. It’s hard to tell that the podcasts are generated by AI, since they have an element of natural conversation.

The hosts occasionally include fun jokes to keep the conversation and mood light. This makes the experience more enjoyable and helps transform a relatively boring topic like “Two-Dimensional Motion and Projections” into something fun to listen to.

Thankfully, the Audio Overview feature is integrated within the mobile app. When you open a notebook in the app, you’ll notice three tabs at the bottom: Sources, Chat, and Studio. You can generate an Audio Overview by switching to the Studio tab and hitting the Generate button.

A few months after launching Audio Overviews, Google improved it by adding an Interactive mode that lets you interrupt the hosts and hop into the conversation instead of just passively listening.

This allows you to share any opinions you may have with the hosts, ask questions about your sources, and even steer the discussion in a direction that’s most helpful for your learning. In the same Studio tab, you only need to tap the “Interactive - BETA” button, then hit “Join” to join the conversation. I noticed that the Interactive mode isn’t available in notebooks with only a few sources.

The mobile app still feels like a work-in-progress

Though NotebookLM’s mobile app gets the basic premise of the app right and includes its most iconic Audio Overview feature, the app is clearly still a work in progress. Other than Audio Overviews, it seems like you can currently only ask the AI tool questions about your sources and nothing else.

On the other hand, NotebookLM’s web version has several features, like the ability to convert your sources into Mind Maps to see how different ideas connect. You can also turn your sources into a Study Guide, Briefing Doc, FAQ, or Timeline. You can find all of these options within the Studio panel on NotebookLM’s web version.

The mobile app’s Studio panel currently only offers the Audio Overview option and nothing else. This isn’t all that surprising, since it’s just the first version of the app and is bound to get updated over time.

More from Laptop Mag

• Google I/O preview: 7 reveals that hint at where Google’s headed next
• My favorite AI tool of the year isn't ChatGPT. It's better.
• 5 AI tools for students: Use AI to help you study, summarize content, and edit papers

As if AI's reputation wasn't bad enough — reshaping industries, automating jobs, spreading misinformation via hallucination, and generating copyright drama instead of works of art — it just can't stop making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

A Greek woman recently filed for divorce, following ChatGPT's suggestion that her husband was having an affair, based on the fortune-telling properties of coffee ground readings.

When Microsoft's Copilot was in beta (then known as Bing AI), the chatbot declared its love for a New York Times writer, before attempting to convince him to leave his wife.

On launch, Google's AI Overview feature, which was designed to offer brief summaries of searches, gave troubling recommendations to users, ranging from adding glue to pizza ingredients to whipping up a fresh batch of poisonous chlorine gas in your washer.

Now, Elon Musk's xAI is at the center of a new controversy, after several problematic blunders have seen its X-hosted AI chatbot Grok. In recent days, Grok has stirred up ire online by reportedly engaging in acts of historical revisionism and peddling unchecked theories.

Safe to say: it's not been a great week for Musk's "truth seeking" AI.

However, as reprehensible as some may find Grok's comments to be, considering the chatbot to be the most offensive of its kind, it's not.

It's not even the most offensive chatbot to be platformed on Twitter/X. That dubious honor still belongs to Microsoft, thanks to its teenage troublemaker Tay — the chatbot so evil, it was removed from the internet entirely. Twice.

xAI's chatbot suffers a total Grok-up

Grok's latest controversy is tied to the not-at-all-suitable-for-the-dinner-table topics of conspiracy theories surrounding South African farmers and the Holocaust.

The former saw the AI chatbot injecting "White genocide" talking points into replies, often in entirely unrelated conversations. The latter involved Grok suggesting that official figures of the historical event had potentially been inflated for political purposes.

Backlash against Musk's AI chatbot was prompt, forcing his company, xAI, to quickly respond, blaming Grok's unchecked and unwanted mentions of a claimed "genocide" on "an unauthorized modification" made by a rogue employee to "the Grok response bot's prompt on X."

As for its seeming denial of the Holocaust, a post on X explains, "The claim about Grok denying the Holocaust seems to stem from a May 14, 2025, programming error, not intentional denial." It's believed that the same unauthorized modification is to blame, which intentionally caused Grok to "question mainstream narratives."

Following a thorough investigation, xAI has promised to implement additional checks and measures to ensure similar rogue modifications are no longer possible, and to publish Grok's typically behind-the-scenes system prompts publicly on GitHub, allowing the public to review and offer feedback on any changes going forward.

Grok was problematic, but Microsoft's Tay was an absolute problem child

Grok's actions shouldn't be minimized, but it's not the first time that the platform has had an encounter with a rogue AI. Nor was it the worst.

In 2016, when Microsoft released a chatbot named Tay into the wilds of Twitter, it took only 16 hours for the "AI with zero chill" to reach levels of controversy that would make Grok's Unhinged Mode blush.

While originally designed to mimic the personality of a 19-year-old American girl, Tay's ability to learn from interactions on the platform quickly led to her adopting more extremist, violent, and racist "opinions."

After sending and replying to over 96,000 tweets, Tay had devolved into a small-scale internet hate machine, outright denying the Holocaust, accusing George W. Bush of terrorism, endorsing Hitler, spouting racial epithets, and showing support for genocide.

Microsoft, unable to course correct, quickly pulled the plug on Tay. But like any good horror movie villain, Tay refused to stay down — briefly resurfacing a few days later, having been accidentally "released" again amid testing.

Tay then wasted no time, immediately promoting drug use before eventually crashing out entirely, repeating the phrase "You are too fast, please take a rest" several times per second before the plug was pulled once again.

What's next

Thankfully, we don't have to worry about Grok going down the same path as Tay. While Tay directly learned from other Twitter users, even if Grok is trained on user data, it's still constricted by system prompts — and xAI's commitment to protecting them from ammendment and making any proposed changes public is a step in the right direction for ensuring users can trust that the chatbot isn't intentionally misleading.

Even at its most "unhinged," Grok remains on a tight leash. Its controversial comments stem from in-house meddling, and by all accounts, xAI has claimed to tighten that security flaw.

Still, while Grok is the latest in line to cause outrage, I doubt it'll be the last time we hear about AI causing outrage this year.

More from Laptop Mag

• ChatGPT needs therapy. Humans are hard to process.
• Why Windows 10 PCs are locking up and crashing after May update
• Only one person at Microsoft is talking about Windows 12 — let's keep it that way

As predicted, Qualcomm's Computex Keynote focused more on AI and AI-powered features on the Windows on Arm ecosystem rather than new announcements.

Qualcomm is turning 40 this year, but as CEO Cristiano Amon stated, "it's a new Qualcomm," thanks to the company's investment in computing. Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X series at Computex last year, but despite that timeline, Qualcomm's Computex presence did not revolve around chip announcements.

Essentially: Qualcomm spent the entire 60 minute keynote dodging around the rumors of the second Snapdragon X Series chip generation to instead focus on their often-repeated performance claims, new systems, and Windows on Arm ecosystem updates.

At a rather slim Computex for computing news, this could have been a moment for Qualcomm to shine with the second gen of it's Arm chips. Instead the company chose to gamble and focus on its partnerships with various manufacturers including Microsoft.

But, did Qualcomm's gamble pay off?

Snapdragon X Series updates

Qualcomm now has 1,400 games optimized for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. The company showed footage of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II on a Snapdragon X Elite system, though its uncertain whether the game will play smoothly across all of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series.

Qualcomm showcased a lot of early gaming performance on the Snapdragon X Elite chipset on custom hardware, running on 80W systems that were never released to the public. Considering that history, it's hard to take Qualcomm's announcements at face value.

Qualcomm and Epic Games will also be bringing Fortnite to Windows on Arm, which makes sense considering Qualcomm announced Snapdragon support for Epic Games Online Easy Anti-Cheat back in March.

Qualcomm has reached 9% market share in the laptop market, thanks to a large portfolio of devices, including newly launched computes like the new Acer Aspire 14 and 16 AI, HP OmniBook 5, and new Microsoft Surface Pro 11-inch and Microsoft Surface Laptop 13-inch.

Amon also shared statistics on Snapdragon's performance compared to Intel's Core Ultra 7 processor. But this is a skewed comparison from the jump. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core chipset while the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V is a mid-range 8-core CPU. And some of the comparisons were calculated on specific workloads like DaVinci Resolve's SuperScale FHD to 4K upscaling technology.

Amon also repeated the claim that Snapdragon has "leading performance on an SoC in the laptop ecosystem." While this was true during the Snapdragon X Elite launch cycle, it has been overturned by recent launches from AMD, Apple, and Intel.

Windows on Arm updates

Qualcomm has also expanded its portfolio of applications to include the top 200 most-used Windows apps into the Windows on Arm ecosystem. Part of this is thanks to Microsoft's new Prism emulation software which helps alleviate the key pain-point of Windows on Arm.

However, there are still limits to Prism emulation and the Windows on Arm ecosystem. After all, what are those 200 applications? And are they actually the most-used apps?

Qualcomm makes this claim based on data from Microsoft that was collected by snapshots of aggregated app usage data as of August 2024 on Copilot+ PCs. Of course, the problem with that data is that in August 2024, only Snapdragon X systems were in the Copilot+ ecosystem. AMD and Intel's AI PC chips didn't get rolled into Copilot+ until the end of 2024.

So it's a bit of a skewed sample set.

As always with Qualcomm's claims, Amon's claims are technically correct, but the real context is always in the details Qualcomm doesn't share.

That said, Qualcomm has put in some serious work to fill out the Windows on Arm ecosystem. Just over a year ago, the Windows on Arm software ecosystem was almost unusably bare. That is no longer the case.

But if you need a highly specialized application, it may not run on Windows on Arm, even emulated. Some key examples are the Autodesk suite, Parsec, and Adobe DreamWeaver and Substance 3DStager.

In fact, despite Qualcomm's partnership with Adobe, the only applications that run natively on Snapdragon are Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom. Other applications like Illustrator and After Effects are expected to make it onto Snapdragon platforms, but are still not available through emulation yet.

Qualcomm deserves recognition for the work done to build up an ecosystem. But it will still be years before Windows on Arm can even come close to the level of app-support you find on x86 systems.

Cristiano Amon: Q&A

Cristiano took questions during the keynote from audience submissions and had them spoken aloud by a Snapdragon AI PC. So these questions ranged from AI for business to a hybrid future that combines computing, AI, automotive, and mobile ecosystems.

Because these questions were collected from the whole keynote audience including Qualcomm staff, guests, OEM partners, and Computex industry attendees, many fed straight into Qualcomm's usual marketing stance about Snapdragon X Series performance and Qualcomm's view of a hybrid future.

The most interesting statement from Amon during this segment was "I'm very bullish about smart glasses" and the future of AR and how it will evolve with AI PCs and better smartphones to augment our lives.

Amon also took questions from press and analysts after the keynote to expand on Qualcomm’s portfolio from data center to DragonWing to robotics. “Robotics is natural to Qualcomm,” Amon said. Claiming robotics will be a big market for Qualcomm similar to the automotive market. As robots require a high degree of performance and strong battery life, and “that’s our DNA.”

As for the future of the Oryon CPU cores behind the Snapdragon X Series processors, Amon would only enthuse “the CPU team is very busy,” and that those interested in the future of Qualcomm’s computing portfolio should “come to Snapdragon Summit, you’re going to like what you’re going to see.”

What's next

Qualcomm sees the future of computing as a hybrid environment between computers and smartphones, where one is an extension of the other. This view of the future colors everything Amon and Qualcomm's OEM partners discussed at Computex.

However, is it an accurate view of the future? You can already access your smartphone data on your laptop in the Windows and macOS ecosystems. While there are differences in functionality, with some combinations working better than others. But phone to computer communication has been in the works for years now.

In fact, I distinctly remember crashing my 2010 MacBook Pro by adding macOS X Mavericks on it to control my iPhone from my laptop back in 2013.

While Amon is also bullish about on-device AI features with Snapdragon, Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and Intel are also pushing the same development. So it's hardly a unique feature to Snapdragon systems.

To support this dream, Qualcomm is entering the commercial and data center spaces in the future.

As for the highly anticipated Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2, it seems Qualcomm is holding all details on that chip for Snapdragon Summit in the fall.

Qualcomm paid for travel and accommodations for Computex 2025. The company did not see the contents of this article before publication.

More from Laptop Mag

• "It's not because we don't love GeForce, GeForce got us here": Nvidia brings the power of RTX 5060 to budget-friendly gaming laptops
• Apple REALLY doesn't want you playing Fortnite on iPhone
• Trump warns Apple over India: what it means for the next iPhone

Microsoft will hold its annual Microsoft Build 2025 event starting on Monday. This is when the Windows maker shows what it's working on, which comes during a busy period for tech companies.

A day after Microsoft Build 2025 starts, Google will put on its Google I/O show and the big tech expo, Computex.

This year's Microsoft Build is expected to be all about AI. Copilot has been a feature the company has been pushing hard in 2025, and it doesn't look like it plans to slow down talking about AI.

How can I watch Microsoft Build 2025?

Microsoft Build 2025 starts on May 19 at 12 p.m. ET with a two-hour keynote featuring CEO Satya Nadella and other company leaders discussing the latest features and services Microsoft is developing. Other events will focus on everything Microsoft is developing.

A livestream of the event will be available on Microsoft's YouTube channel.

Here are some of the things to expect at Microsoft Build 2025.

Copilot

If there's going to be a star of the show, it'll be Copilot. Microsoft is not slowing down in making Copilot the AI model Windows users should be using. Expect to see a few new features finally roll out after being in preview for the past several months.

Copilot semantic search in Settings, File Explorer, and the main Windows Search will likely be demoed during the show, along with other features that have been shown in previous events.

Windows 11

It wouldn't be a proper Microsoft show without discussing Windows. Now, the question is whether there will be a lot of talk about Windows 11.

Arguably, the most significant and most controversial feature for the operating system, Recall, has already debuted on Copilot+ PCs. Expect some talk about the feature, maybe it's improving a bit more, or simply becoming more widely available.

As for other Windows 11 features, it's hard to find other big changes needed for the operating system. Microsoft could show off some major innovation that it has kept quiet for some time, but the most likely situation is that there will be some optimizations and a few small features coming to Windows 11.

Copilot Agents

In April, Microsoft held a Copilot event to show off the Copilot's AI companions. These avatars act as your personal AI agent while using Copilot and can come in different forms. One popular option was the Clippy companion.

It's like Microsoft will reveal some more features for the companions at Microsoft Build, along with a few more character options for your AI friend.

A new AI?

Copilot is now Microsoft's big focal point, and OpenAI's ChatGPT powers it. While the Windows maker owns a stake in OpenAI, it reportedly wants its own AI model. Microsoft's AI model is reportedly on par with some of the newer models of ChatGPT, but it's unknown if this new AI is ready for the spotlight. If it is, Microsoft Build 2025 would be the show to make its debut.

Azure

Microsoft Azure is the company's cloud platform and one of its biggest moneymakers. However, it's not the sexiest subject to discuss during an event, as it's mainly intended for businesses.

There will be some Azure talk, and how much will depend on what's new with Microsoft and AI. The cloud platform uses ChatGPT to run various services for clients, such as chatbots, customer support systems, and content generators. If Microsoft sticks with OpenAI, expect to hear some new features for Azure, but if a new AI model is revealed, a slew of changes could be coming to Azure.

New Xbox handheld?

While the next Xbox is still a ways off, Microsoft is working with Asus on a handheld. Nicknamed Project Kennan, the device isn't the next generation of Xbox. Instead, it's set to be a way for Microsoft to dip its toes into the handheld market by providing the Xbox UI for a handheld made by Asus.

Microsoft Build could be the show where we get the first glimpse of this new hardware. If not, expect it to be shown at the Xbox showcase on June 8.

Windows 12?

The least likely news item coming out of Microsoft Build is Windows 12. The company is currently struggling to get Windows 10 users to upgrade to 11, so it's unlikely there will be talk about it.

Unless Microsoft finds it needs a whole new operating system to fully use AI. Plenty of updates are coming to Copilot to make Windows 11 work seamlessly with AI, but maybe there are limitations to what can be done. Again, it's unlikely, and Windows 12 won't be teased until next year at the earliest.

More from Laptop Mag

• Only one person at Microsoft is talking about Windows 12 — let's keep it that way
• Why I ditched Google Chrome for Microsoft Edge (and haven't looked back)
• Microsoft's new AI can change your laptop's settings — if you trust it to
• Microsoft's new Surface Pro could solve our biggest issue with the previous gen

Apple may be arriving late to the slim phones party, but it could have a major advantage over Samsung's S25 Edge at launch, potentially solving the biggest challenge for slim phones: battery life.

On Tuesday morning local time in Seoul, South Korea, Samsung officially unveiled the Galaxy S25 Edge, its first ultra-thin phone and the top rival for the upcoming iPhone 17 Air (or "Slim"). Earlier that day, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported Apple is developing an AI feature for iOS 19 designed to optimize battery life.

Those two announcements might not sound connected at first, but Apple's AI battery life feature could be a key step toward getting an edge over the Galaxy S25 Edge.

See also: Best Apple deals in May 2025

Apple has had a rocky year getting Apple Intelligence off the ground, plagued by delays and setbacks, especially with a much-needed Siri overhaul.

Furthermore, most of the Apple Intelligence features rolled out so far offer minor tools like AI-generated emojis and image generation in the Notes app, which may be helpful to some but aren't necessarily game-changers.

That may be changing as Apple gears up to launch the ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air (also called the iPhone 17 Slim). On Monday, Gurman reported that Apple is developing a feature for iOS 19 that will use AI to optimize battery life based on individual users' phone usage patterns.

This could be the most useful feature in iOS 19

While this feature sounds helpful for any iPhone user, it may be specifically designed for the iPhone 17 Air. Ultra-thin phones may look cool, but they have some inevitable challenges, such as durability and battery size. A thinner chassis simply has less space for a large battery.

As a result, there's a good chance this new era of ultra-thin phones will have a dip in battery life.

Apple will be playing catch-up with the iPhone 17 Air since the Galaxy S25 Edge is launching months ahead.

So, it wouldn't be surprising if Apple is trying to use that time to give the iPhone 17 Air a big advantage by resolving the battery life issue.

Using AI to optimize battery life is also a refreshingly good idea. AI image generators are somewhat gimmicky, in my opinion, but using AI to improve hardware performance has real merits.

Few people were likely complaining about not having enough emojis to choose from, but longer battery life is one of the most critical and common deciding factors when choosing a new phone.

So, if Apple can deliver an effective AI battery optimization tool with iOS 19, it could very well set itself up to make the iPhone 17 Air the most popular ultra-thin phone despite coming out later than Samsung's Galaxy S25 Edge.

More from Laptop Mag

• Galaxy S25 Edge: The thinnest flagship takes aim at iPhone 17 Air
• iPhone 17 Air’s reported battery issue could revive a long-forgotten Apple accessory
• Remember “Bendgate”? Looking at this iPhone 17 Air mockup, Apple doesn’t

Meta has been dominating the smart glasses market with its Ray-Ban glasses. More than two million pairs have been sold since their launch back in 2023.

Being the leader of smart glasses, Meta wants to hold onto its big lead with new features for its upcoming Meta Ray-Ban Glasses Gen 3, which should be revealed at Meta Connect 2025, happening in September. One rumored feature, however, is raising privacy concerns.

Meta is reportedly working on adding facial recognition technology to its smart glasses and other devices, according to a report from The Information. There were no specifics provided in the report, but it did state that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company execs have been considering this feature for some time.

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about adding facial recognition to its smart glasses.

There have already been attempts to add facial recognition software to Meta's smart glasses. A report from 404 Media from October told of two Harvard students who went a step further than just using the tech to identify a person's name just by their face. The pair was able to have the software pull up the person's address, phone number, and family members.

Smart glasses can be a privacy nightmare.

It's pretty evident why privacy is such a concern for smart glasses. Even though the wearables have a wealth of positive features, from being able to provide live translation of conversations to even adding a screen only the wearer can see to provide a mixed reality experience like expected in the Meta Orion, there is a lot of data that these glasses can obtain without anyone else realizing it.

The Meta Ray-Ban glasses' indiscriminate look makes it easy for someone to be recorded. All that's needed is to take that data and use it for nefarious reasons.

At the end of April, Meta updated its privacy policy for the smart glasses, which removed the option to disable storage of voice command data when using Meta AI. This means asking the AI to do a task, such as recognizing an object the wearer is looking at, would then have that query saved to Meta's cloud servers for AI-training purposes. So the user has no choice about whether their requests will be sent to Meta or not.

This, however, does appear to be the kind of wearables future that Zuckerberg is hopeful for. During a Meta earnings call at the beginning of May, Zuckerberg said he views the glasses to be the "ideal form factor" for AI.

"They enable you to let an AI see what you see, hear what you hear, and talk to you throughout the day. And they let you blend the physical and digital worlds together with holograms," he said.