On Monday, veteran game developer Rebecca Ann Heineman died in Rockwall, Texas, at age 62 after a battle with adenocarcinoma. Apogee founder Scott Miller first shared the news publicly on social media, and her son William confirmed her death with Ars Technica. Heineman’s GoFundMe page, which displayed a final message she had posted about entering palliative care, will now help her family with funeral costs. Rebecca “Burger Becky” Heineman was…

On Tuesday, Microsoft and Nvidia announced plans to invest in Anthropic under a new partnership that includes a $30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services. Nvidia will commit up to $10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, with both companies investing in Anthropic’s next funding round. The deal brings together two companies that have backed OpenAI and connects them more closely to…

Microsoft has been adding AI features to Windows 11 for years, but things have recently entered a new phase, with both generative and so-called “agentic” AI features working their way deeper into the bedrock of the operating system. A new build of Windows 11 released to Windows Insider Program testers yesterday includes a new “experimental agentic features” toggle in the Settings to support a feature called Copilot Actions, and Microsoft…

As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into. Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining…

Google has kicked its Gemini rollout into high gear over the past year, releasing the much-improved Gemini 2.5 family and cramming various flavors of the model into Search, Gmail, and just about everything else the company makes. Now, Google’s increasingly unavoidable AI is getting an upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro is available in a limited form today, featuring more immersive, visual outputs and fewer lies, Google says. The company also says…

Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest and most famous tech CEOs, but he hasn’t actually been a CEO of anything since 2021. That’s now changing as he takes on the role of co-CEO of a new AI company, according to a New York Times report citing three people familiar with the company. Grandiosely named Project Prometheus (and not to be confused with the NASA project of the same…

Five men have pleaded guilty to running laptop farms and providing other assistance to North Koreans to obtain remote IT work at US companies in violation of US law, federal prosecutors said. The pleas come amid a rash of similar schemes orchestrated by hacking and threat groups backed by the North Korean government. The campaigns, which ramped up nearly five years ago, aim to steal millions of dollars in job…

Apple’s Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company’s primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that’s counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version. Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart…

Oracle has been hit harder than Big Tech rivals in the recent sell-off of tech stocks and bonds, as its vast borrowing to fund a pivot to artificial intelligence unnerved Wall Street. The US software group founded by Larry Ellison has made a dramatic entrance to the AI race, committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next few years on chips and data centers—largely as part of…

Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes to the point where readers believe they can identify AI writing by its overuse alone—although people can overuse it, too. On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT has started following custom…