Technology

When Jon M. Chu first announced that his big-screen Wicked adaptation would be split into two parts, there was concern about whether the original musical’s second act could be fashioned into a fully fleshed-out movie. Compared to the stage show’s lengthy first act, where all the musical’s most recognizable songs are front-loaded, the second act is shorter and moves at a much faster pace while picking up after a big time jump. It was easy to imagine Wicked: Part Two (the original title) being too disorienting and frenetic to work as a standalone feature. But Wicked: For Good proves that Universal made the right call by giving this epic fantasy more space to breathe and really dig into what makes its characters tick.Though it would have been understandable if Wicked: For Good immediately ...

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Selling your car online should be simple. Lately, though, more sellers are running into fake "vehicle report" demands from so-called buyers. The pitch looks routine, yet it leads straight to a payment page on a site you don't know. We heard from Nick K. of Washington, who spotted the pattern in real time."In trying to sell a car, it has become apparent that there is a scam related to CarFax-type reports," Nick wrote in an email to us. "The way it works is a guy texts or emails saying they are interested in your car, but they say they must have a car report from a specific service. At first, I thought it was just a way for a guy to sell more reports, but after thinking about it for a while, it seems like it could be a great way to harvest cr...

Meta’s impressive, photorealistic digital replicas of real places built using its “Hyperscape” capture tech, which uses the cameras on a Quest 3 or Quest 3S VR headset to scan a room, have so far been solitary spaces. If you wanted to visit a virtual version of a room in your house (or of Gordon Ramsay’s home kitchen), you could only do it on your own. But beginning this week, Meta is rolling out the ability to share links that will let other people visit Hyperscape rooms with you in a Quest 3 or 3S VR headset or via the Meta Horizon mobile app.Up to eight people will be able to be in one instance of a Hyperscape world, according to a Meta blog post, and it hopes to increase that number in the future. Meta is also “moving rendering on-device” and adding audio to Hyperscape worlds.Howeve...

I gave Google’s new Nano Banana Pro a try, and it immediately took my clothes off. I didn’t ask it to, but the AI model evidently decided my greetings card would look better with more skin.Nano Banana Pro is, as the name suggests, aimed at professionals. Powered by Gemini 3, it’s effectively an upgrade of the company’s popular image generation and editing tool that went viral in a social media trend that turned selfies into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Google says it lets you create higher quality images that you can print, render legible text onto pictures, and blend multiple images together into a single composition. It’s also meant for “people who want to feel like professionals,” Naina Raisinghani, a product manager at Google DeepMind, told The Verge. That sounds good, because I am ...

It’s no secret that Elon Musk shapes the X social platform and X’s “maximally truth-seeking” Grok AI chatbot to his preferences. But it’s possible Musk may have needed a bit of an extra ego boost this week, because Grok’s worship of its creator seems, shall we say, more noticeable than usual.As a number of people have pointed out on social media over the past day, Grok’s public-facing chatbot is currently prone to insisting on Musk’s prowess at absolutely anything, no matter how unlikely — or conversely, embarrassing — a given feat is.If pressed, Grok will also contend Musk would be the best at eating poop or drinking urine, but it would prefer to focus on how good he is at making rockets, please. At least some of these posts have been deleted in the past hour; X did not immediately res...

Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, allowing you to use an on-device AI model to power some of its features. With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft’s Foundry Local tool or the open-source Ollama, both of which run AI models on your device’s neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud.That means you won’t need to purchase API credits to perform certain actions, like having AI translate or summarize the text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device.Along with support for on-device AI, you can now configure Advanced Paste to work with multiple other online models, including Azure OpenAI, Gemini, and Mistral. The tool previously only supported OpenAI.There’s a new design tweak fo...

Bethesda is now selling a highly-detailed wearable replica of the Pip-Boy 3000 from Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It was designed using the 3D models of the accessory in the games to make it as accurate as possible, and is available for preorder now for $299.99, with shipping expected to start as early as June 2026. Sadly, it won’t arrive in time for the season two premiere of Amazon’s Fallout series that starts on December 17th, 2025.The Pip-Boy 3000’s screen can be toggled between the classic green UI seen in Fallout 3 or the yellowish interface used in New Vegas. Bethesda says “almost all of the in-game content” accessible in both titles has been replicated including hundreds of menus that can be navigated with scroll wheels and dials, and you’ll even find a playable version of t...

OpenAI is widely rolling out group chats inside ChatGPT, allowing you to invite up to 20 other people to your conversation with the AI chatbot. The feature is now available globally to all logged-in users, following a short pilot earlier this month.OpenAI positions the feature as a way to collaborate with friends, family members, or coworkers when doing things like organizing a dinner, creating travel plans, and drafting an outline — all with ChatGPT on board.You create a group chat by selecting the “people” icon in the top-right corner of the ChatGPT app. ChatGPT will then copy your existing chat to a new group chat, where you can add others by sending them a link to your conversation (which they can also share). ChatGPT will prompt you to enter a name, username, and photo the first ti...

If you’ve been waiting for some relief after Sonos raised its prices earlier this year in response to US tariffs, Black Friday presents a rare opportunity. With many products on sale for their lowest price to date for Black Friday, and the Sonos app being in far better shape than it was a year ago, it’s a great time to pick up a Sonos gadget.If you’re looking to upgrade your home theater setup ahead of the holidays, Sonos’ entire soundbar lineup is heavily discounted through December 1st, as are smart speakers like the Sonos Era 100 and portable Roam 2. The Sonos Ace — the company’s first pair of noise-canceling headphones — are down to their best price to date at several retailers, if you truly want to go all in on the Sonos ecosystem.Right now, both the Sonos Arc Ultra (Amazon, Best B...

Two years ago, “BBL Drizzy” was the AI music shot heard around the world: a song with vocals that sounded like Drake bubbled up from nowhere and launched what was shaping up to be a battle of artistry, likeness, and of course, copyright. The big three labels — Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records — sued AI companies Udio and Suno for copyright infringement “en masse”; they staged public spats with TikTok over issues including AI content on the platform; and they began spinning up AI detection tools to keep tabs on how their music moved around.Now the music industry and AI startups appear largely aligned on a (monetizable) path forward — and it looks a lot like the system artists are already stuck in.“KLAY is not a prompt-based meme generation engine ...