Kris Guyer – Page 16

Big AI firms pump money into world models as LLM advances slow

AI, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, openai, superintelligence, syndication, world models / Kris Guyer / September 29, 2025

Runway, a video generation start-up that has deals with Hollywood studios, including Lionsgate, launched a product last month that uses world models to create gaming settings, with personalized stories and characters generated in real time.

“Traditional video methods [are a] brute-force approach to pixel generation, where you’re trying to squeeze motion in a couple of frames to create the illusion of movement, but the model actually doesn’t really know or reason about what’s going on in that scene,” said Cristóbal Valenzuela, chief executive officer at Runway.

Previous video-generation models had physics that were unlike the real world, he added, which general-purpose world model systems help to address.

To build these models, companies need to collect a huge amount of physical data about the world.

San Francisco-based Niantic has mapped 10 million locations, gathering information through games including Pokémon Go, which has 30 million monthly players interacting with a global map.

Niantic ran Pokémon Go for nine years and, even after the game was sold to US-based Scopely in June, its players still contribute anonymized data through scans of public landmarks to help build its world model.

“We have a running start at the problem,” said John Hanke, chief executive of Niantic Spatial, as the company is now called following the Scopely deal.

Both Niantic and Nvidia are working on filling gaps by getting their world models to generate or predict environments. Nvidia’s Omniverse platform creates and runs such simulations, assisting the $4.3 trillion tech giant’s push toward robotics and building on its long history of simulating real-world environments in video games.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has asserted that the next major growth phase for the company will come with “physical AI,” with the new models revolutionizing the field of robotics.

Some such as Meta’s LeCun have said this vision of a new generation of AI systems powering machines with human-level intelligence could take 10 years to achieve.

But the potential scope of the cutting-edge technology is extensive, according to AI experts. World models “open up the opportunity to service all of these other industries and amplify the same thing that computers did for knowledge work,” said Nvidia’s Lebaredian.

Additional reporting by Melissa Heikkilä in London and Michael Acton in San Francisco.

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30 years later, I’m still obliterating planets in Master of Orion II—and you can, too

4X, C:ArsGames, gaming, gog, Master of Orion II, MOO2, PC Gaming, strategy / Kris Guyer / September 28, 2025

I love 4X games. I’ve tried other strategy game genres, but frankly, they don’t stick if they’re not first and foremost 4X games—at the heart of it, it must be about exploring, expanding, exploiting, and yes, exterminating.

I suspect that the first 4X game most people played was some entry in the Civilization franchise—though certainly, a select few played precursors dating back to text-based games in the 1970s.

But for me, the title that kicked off my obsession was Master of Orion II (MOO2)—a game that has you develop and build up planets across a simple galaxy map, researching speculative future technologies, and ultimately wiping out your opponents and claiming dominion over the known universe. (There are other victory conditions too, but that one is the most fun.)

There is something satisfying about making a couple thousand small choices that all add up to that galaxy map gradually changing color in your favor until the final cut scene plays, declaring you the true Master of Orion.

The games I love the most are the ones where you make decisions that compound over many, many hours to a long-term payoff. I’ll take that over games with bite-sized, contained challenges and short play times any day. The deeper and longer the experience, the better the payoff can be. To me, that’s ultimately what makes 4X games great. MOO2 is no exception.

A high score screen declares the player the ultimate master of the universe — I needed this validation. Credit: Samuel Axon

Nostalgic but flawed

That said, it’s not a perfect game. It benefited from the lessons it could learn from more than a decade of 4X games before it, and its designers were clearly thinking about how to make it balanced and fun.

They just missed the mark sometimes. For example, a big part of the game is choosing perks that customize your empire from before the first turn. One of those perks is called “Creative,” which allows you to learn multiple technologies at once rather than one at a time. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone consciously declining to choose that perk unless they’re looking to make things a lot harder for themselves.

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Why LA Comic Con thought making an AI-powered Stan Lee hologram was a good idea

AI, culture, LA comic con, marvel comic, Stan Lee / Kris Guyer / September 27, 2025

Trust us, it’ll be marvel-ous

“I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans… don’t like it, we’ll stop doing it.”

Excelsior, true beliers! Credit: Proto Hologram

Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about an “AI Stan Lee hologram” that would be appearing at the LA Comic Con this weekend. Nearly seven years after the famous Marvel Comics creator’s death at the age of 95, fans will be able to pay $15 to $20 this weekend to chat with a life-sized, AI-powered avatar of Lee in an enclosed booth at the show.

The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea “demonic” and said we need to “kill it with fire before it’s too late.” The AV Club urged its readers not to pay to see “the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!” Reactions on a popular Reddit thread ranged from calling it “incredibly disrespectful” and “in bad taste” to “ghoulish” and “so fucked up,” with very little that was more receptive to the concept.

But Chris DeMoulin, the CEO of the parent company behind LA Comic Con, urged critics to come see the AI-powered hologram for themselves before rushing to judgment. “We’re not afraid of people seeing it and we’re not afraid of criticism,” he told Ars. “I’m just a fan of informed criticism, and I think most of what’s been out there so far has not really been informed.”

“It’s unfortunate that a few people have really negative things to say about it, sight unseen, just the level of it being a concept,” DeMoulin continued. “It’s not perfect. I’m not sure something like this can ever be perfect. But I think what you strive to do is feed enough information into it and test it enough so that the experience it creates for the fans is one that feels genuine.”

“It’s going to have to be really good or we’re all going to say no”

This isn’t the first time LA Comic Con has featured an interactive hologram (which for the Stan Lee experience means a life-sized volumetric screen-in-a-box that can show different views from different angles). Starting in 2019, the convention used similar technology to feature Boffo the Bear, a 7-foot-tall animated blue ursid who served as the MC for a live talent show featuring famous voice acting talent. But Boffo was powered by a real-time motion-captured improv performance from actor Mark DeCarlo rather than automated artificial intelligence.

A live mo-capped version of Boffo the Bear hosts a panel with voice actors at LA Comic Con.

In the years since Boffo’s introduction at the con, DeMoulin said he’s kept up with the team behind that hologram and “saw the leaps and bounds that they were making in improving the technology, improving the interactivity.” Now, he said, it’s possible to create an AI-powered version that ingests “all of the actual comments that people made during their life” to craft an interactive hologram that “is not literally quoting the person, but everything it was saying was based on things that person actually said.”

DeMoulin said he called Bob Sabouni, who manages the Stan Lee Legacy brand, to pitch the AI Stan Lee avatar as “kind of an entry point into people asking questions about the Marvel universe, the stories, the characters he created.” Sabouni agreed to the idea, DeMoulin said, but added that “it’s gonna have to be really good or we’re all going to say no.”

With that somewhat conditional approval, DeMoulin reached out to Proto Hologram, the company that had developed the Boffo the Bear experience years earlier. Proto, in turn, reached out to Hyperreal, a company that describes itself as “powering ownership, control, performance, and monetization of identity across digital ecosystems” to help develop the AI model that would power the Lee avatar.

A promotional video from Proto Holograms shows off the kind of volumetric box that the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar will appear in.

Hyperreal CEO and Chief Architect Remington Scott tells Ars that the company “leverages a customized ecosystem of cutting-edge AI technologies” to create “bespoke” and “custom-crafted” AI versions of celebrities. To do that for Stan Lee, DeMoulin said they trained a model on decades of content he had left behind, from tapes of dozens of convention panels he had appeared on to written and spoken content gathered by the managers of the Stan Lee Universe brand.

Scott said Hyperreal “can’t share specific technical details” of the models or training techniques they use to power these recreations. But Scott added that this training project is “particularly meaningful, [because] Stan Lee had actually begun digitizing himself while he was alive, with the vision of creating a digital double so his fans could interact with him on a larger scale.”

After incurring costs of “tens of thousands into six figures” of dollars, DeMoulin said he was finally able to test the Lee hologram about a month ago. That first version still needed some tweaks to get the look and feel of Lee’s delivery just right, though.

“Stan had a considered way of speaking… he would pause, he had certain catch phrases that when he used them he would say them in a certain way,” DeMoulin said. “So it took a while to get to the hologram to be able to say all that in a way that [Sabouni] and I and others that work with Stan felt like, ‘Yeah, that’s actually starting to sound more like him.’”

“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words”

Anyone who is familiar with LLMs and their tendency to confabulate might be worried about the potential for an AI Lee avatar to go off-script or make things up in front of a live audience. And while DeMoulin said he was concerned about that going in, those concerns have faded as he and others who worked with Lee in his lifetime have spent hours throwing “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of questions at the hologram “to sort of see where the sensitivities on it are.”

“The only words that are gonna be in Stan’s mouth are Stan’s words,” DeMoulin said. “Just because I haven’t personally seen [the model hallucinate] doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, but that hasn’t been my experience.”

The living version of Stan Lee appeared at the Wizard World convention in 2018, shortly before his death. Credit: Getty Images

While a moderator at the convention will be on hand to repeat fan questions into a microphone (to avoid ambient crowd noise from the showfloor), DeMoulin said there won’t be any human filtering on what fans are allowed to ask the Lee avatar in the 15- to 20-minute group Q&A sessions. Instead, DeMoulin said the team has set up a system of “content governors” so that, for instance, “if you ask Stan what he thought of the last presidential election he’s gonna say ‘That’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about the Marvel universe.'”

For topics that are Marvel-related, though, the AI avatar won’t shy away from controversy, DeMoulin said. If you ask the avatar about Jack Kirby, for instance, DeMoulin said it will address the “honest disagreements about characters or storylines, which are gonna happen in any creative enterprise,” while also saying that “‘I have nothing but respect for him,’ which is I think largely what Stan would have said if he was asked that question.”

Hyperreal’s Scott said the company’s approach to training digital avatars on verified content “ensures responses stay true to Stan’s documented perspectives and values.” And DeMoulin said the model is perfectly willing to say when it doesn’t know the answer to an appropriate question. In early testing, for instance, the avatar couldn’t answer a question about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, DeMoulin said, because that wasn’t part of its training data. After a subsequent update, the new model provided a relevant answer to the same question, he said.

“We are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead”

Throughout our talk, DeMoulin repeatedly stressed that their AI hologram wasn’t intended to serve as a replacement for the living version of Lee. “We want to make sure that people understand that we are not trying to bring Stan back from the dead,” he said. “We’re not trying to say that this is Stan, and we’re not trying to put words in his mouth, and this avatar is not gonna start doing commercials to advertise other people’s products.”

DeMoulin said he sees the Lee avatar as a kind of futuristic guide to a library of Marvel information and trivia, presented with a fun and familiar face. “In the introduction, the avatar will say, ‘I’m here as a result of the latest developments in technology, which allow me to be a holographic representation of Stan to answer your questions about Marvel and trivia’ and this, that, and the other thing,” DeMoulin said

Still, DeMoulin said he understands why the idea of using even a stylized version of Lee’s likeness in this manner could rub some fans the wrong way. “When a new technology comes out, it just feels wrong to them, and I respect the fact that this feels wrong to people,” he said. “I totally agree that something like this–not just for Stan but for anyone, any celebrity alive or dead–could be put into this technology and used in a way that would be exploitative and unfortunate.”

Fans like these, seen at LA Comic Con 2022, will be the final arbiters of whether the AI-powered Stan Lee avatar is respectful or not. Credit: Getty Images

That’s why DeMoulin said he and the others behind the AI-powered Lee feel a responsibility “to make sure that if we were going to do this, we never got anywhere close to that.” Moreover, he said he’s “disappointed that people would be so negative about something they’ve not seen. … It’s not that I think that their point of view is invalid. What I think is invalid is having a wildly negative point of view about something that you haven’t actually seen.”

Scott said concerns about respect for the actual human celebrity are why they “partner exclusively with authorized estates and rights holders like Stan Lee Universe.” The “premium, authenticated digital identities” created by Hyperreal’s system are “not replacing artists” but “creating respectful digital extensions that honor their legacy,” Scott said.

Once fans actually see the AI-powered Lee avatar in person, DeMoulin said he’s confident they’ll see the team behind the convention is “trying to do it in a way that will actually be delightful and very much be consistent with Stan’s legacy… We clearly have to set our sights on doing this right, and doing it right means getting people that knew and loved the guy and worked with him during his career to give us input, and then putting it in front of enough fans to know if we’re doing it in a way that lives up to his standards.”

And if he’s wrong about the expected reception? “I suppose if we do it and thousands of fans interact with [it] and they don’t like it, we’ll stop doing it,” he said. “I saw firsthand the impact that Stan had in that [convention] environment, so I think we have a team of people together that love and respect that and are trying to do something which will continue that. And if it turns out, for some reason, this isn’t that, we won’t do it.”

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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YouTube Music is testing AI hosts that will interrupt your tunes

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, Tech, youtube, youtube music / Kris Guyer / September 27, 2025

YouTube has a new Labs program, allowing listeners to “discover the next generation of YouTube.” In case you were wondering, that generation is apparently all about AI. The streaming site says Labs will offer a glimpse of the AI features it’s developing for YouTube Music, and it starts with AI “hosts” that will chime in while you’re listening to music. Yes, really.

The new AI music hosts are supposed to provide a richer listening experience, according to YouTube. As you’re listening to tunes, the AI will generate audio snippets similar to, but shorter than, the fake podcasts you can create in NotebookLM. The “Beyond the Beat” host will break in every so often with relevant stories, trivia, and commentary about your musical tastes. YouTube says this feature will appear when you are listening to mixes and radio stations.

The experimental feature is intended to be a bit like having a radio host drop some playful banter while cueing up the next song. It sounds a bit like Spotify’s AI DJ, but the YouTube AI doesn’t create playlists like Spotify’s robot. This is still generative AI, which comes with the risk of hallucinations and low-quality slop, neither of which belongs in your music. That said, Google’s Audio Overviews are often surprisingly good in small doses.

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Asus’ new ROG Xbox Ally X set to break the bank at $999.99

ASUS, asus rog ally, asus rog ally x, gaming, Portable gaming / Kris Guyer / September 26, 2025

Microsoft and Asus revealed the ROG Xbox Ally handheld PC gaming line in June and promised an October 16 launch date in August. But they waited all the way until Thursday night to reveal preorder pricing set at $599.99 for the base ROG Xbox Ally hardware and a whopping $999.99 for the souped-up ROG Xbox Ally X.

Those prices put the baseline ROG Xbox Ally units in the same general price tier as competition like Valve’s Steam Deck OLED, Lenovo’s Legion Go S, and even Nintendo’s Switch 2. But the higher-grade ROG Xbox Ally X is significantly more expensive than almost all competing gaming handhelds, thanks in part to components like a Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor and an NPU that Asus says will ensure it is ready for a future when “AI enhancements” are rolling out in new games.

That may seem like overkill when Steam Deck users seem content using their handheld mainly for low-end games like Vampire Survivors and Hades. But Asus said that, in pre-release hardware tests, the ROG Xbox Ally X gets “up to a 30% performance boost” over 2024’s ROG Ally X on high-end games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The newer hardware also gets “up to twice the battery life” over the ROG Ally X on a game like Hollow Knight Silksong, Asus said.

The new Xbox Ally line keeps the same 7-inch 1080p screens and starting RAM and storage capacity as the regular ROG Ally units from years past. But in addition to upgraded processors, Asus’ new handhelds also sport branded Xbox-style controls and logos and promise easy access to “all of the games available on Windows” through the new “Xbox experience for handhelds” that can handle games from various storefronts and manage launchers.

We’ll have to wait until we get our hands on our own testing units to see how that extra power and new interface compare to the competition. For now, the ROG Xbox Ally can be preordered directly from the Asus shop or retailers like Microsoft and Best Buy.

Company	Name	Release year	Current starting price	Processor	Starting storage	RAM	Screen size
Valve	Steam Deck LCD	2022	$399.00	AMD Zen 2	256GB	16GB	7 inches
Asus	ROG Ally	2023	$499.99	Ryzen Z1	512GB	16GB	7 inches
Valve	Steam Deck OLED	2023	$549.00	AMD Zen 2	512GB	16GB	7.4 inches
Asus	ROG Xbox Ally	2025	$599.99	Ryzen Z2 A	512GB	16GB	7 inches
Lenovo	Legion Go S	2025	$649.99	Ryzen Z2 Go	512GB	16GB	8 inches
Lenovo	Legion Go	2023	$749.99	Ryzen Z1 Extreme	1TB	16GB	8.8 inches
Asus	ROG Ally X	2024	$799.99	Ryzen Z1 Extreme	1TB	24GB	7 inches
Asus	ROG Xbox Ally X	2025	$999.99	Ryzen Z2 Extreme	1TB	24GB	7 inches

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Sierra’s Dream Chaser is starting to resemble a nightmare

Dream Chaser, iss, NASA, Sierra space, Space / Kris Guyer / September 26, 2025

However, in its news release, NASA said it is no longer obligated to a specific number of resupply missions.

Chasing those defense dollars

In its own statement on the announcement, Sierra Space said the new approach will provide it with more “flexibility” as the company seeks to attract national defense contracts.

“Dream Chaser represents the future of versatile space transportation and mission flexibility,” said Fatih Ozmen, executive chair at Sierra Space, in the statement. “This transition provides unique capabilities to meet the needs of diverse mission profiles, including emerging and existential threats and national security priorities that align with our acceleration into the Defense Tech market.”

Although the NASA news release does not detail the space agency’s concerns about allowing Dream Chaser to approach the station, sources have told Ars the space agency has yet to certify the spacecraft’s propulsion system. The spacecraft is powered by more than two dozen small rocket engines, each capable of operating at three discrete levels of thrust for fine control or more significant orbit adjustments. Certification is a necessary precursor for allowing a vehicle to approach the orbiting laboratory.

Sierra said it is now targeting a “late 2026” debut for Dream Chaser, but that date is far enough in the future that it is likely subject to Berger’s Law, and probably means no earlier than 2027. This all but precludes a cargo mission to the International Space Station, which is scheduled to be deorbited in 2030, and presently has two more-than-capable supply vehicles with SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop’s new, larger Cygnus.

It is possible that Dream Chaser could serve a future market of commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit, but to do so, Sierra will have to get the vehicle flying reliably, frequently, and at a relatively low cost to compete with Dragon and Cygnus. Those are big hurdles for a spacecraft that is now many years behind schedule and no longer has any guaranteed government missions.

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Amazon agrees to make canceling Prime easy, will refund customers $1.5B

Amazon, Amazon Prime, consumer harms, e-commerce, federal trade commission, ftc, Policy / Kris Guyer / September 25, 2025

Amazon must also post prominent disclosures describing how auto-renewals and cancellations work, as well as offer “an easy way for consumers to cancel Prime, using the same method that consumers used to sign up.”

“The process cannot be difficult, costly, or time-consuming,” the FTC said.

Moving forward, Amazon must also pay for “an independent, third-party supervisor to monitor Amazon’s compliance” with the distribution of customer refunds.

Celebrating the victory after a 3–0 vote approving the settlement, FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson described Amazon’s $2.5 billion payout as a “record-breaking, monumental win for the millions of Americans who are tired of deceptive subscriptions that feel impossible to cancel.”

The press release cited internal documents in which Amazon executives and employees “knowingly discussed” how hard it was to cancel Prime, exchanging messages admitting that “subscription driving is a bit of a shady world” and suggesting that forcing unwanted subscriptions was “an unspoken cancer.”

“The evidence showed that Amazon used sophisticated subscription traps designed to manipulate consumers into enrolling in Prime and then made it exceedingly hard for consumers to end their subscription,” Ferguson said. “Today, we are putting billions of dollars back into Americans’ pockets and making sure Amazon never does this again.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

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Reviewing iOS 26 for power users: Reminders, Preview, and more

AI, Apple, generative ai, iOS, Reviews, Tech / Kris Guyer / September 25, 2025

These features try to turn iPhones into more powerful work and organization tools.

iOS 26 came out last week, bringing a new look and interface alongside some new capabilities and updates aimed squarely at iPhone power users.

We gave you our main iOS 26 review last week. This time around, we’re taking a look at some of the updates targeted at people who rely on their iPhones for much more than making phone calls and browsing the Internet. Many of these features rely on Apple Intelligence, meaning they’re only as reliable and helpful as Apple’s generative AI (and only available on newer iPhones, besides). Other adjustments are smaller but could make a big difference to people who use their phone to do work tasks.

Reminders attempt to get smarter

The Reminders app gets the Apple Intelligence treatment in iOS 26, with the AI primarily focused on making it easier to organize content within Reminders lists. Lines in Reminders lists are often short, quickly jotted-down blurbs rather than lengthy, detailed complex instructions. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how the AI can sometimes lack enough information in order to perform certain tasks, like logically grouping different errands into sensible sections.

But Apple also encourages applying the AI-based Reminders features to areas of life that could hold more weight, such as making a list of suggested reminders from emails. For serious or work-critical summaries, Reminders’ new Apple Intelligence capabilities aren’t reliable enough.

Suggested Reminders based on selected text

iOS 26 attempts to elevate Reminders from an app for making lists to an organization tool that helps you identify information or important tasks that you should accomplish. If you share content, such as emails, website text, or a note, with the app, it can create a list of what it thinks are the critical things to remember from the text. But if you’re trying to extract information any more advanced than an ingredients list from a recipe, Reminders misses the mark.

iOS 26 Suggested Reminders — Sometimes I tried sharing longer text with Reminders and didn’t get any suggestions. Credit: Scharon Harding

Sometimes, especially when reviewing longer text, Reminders was unable to think of suggested reminders. Other times, the reminders that it suggested, based on lengthy messages, were off-base.

For instance, I had the app pull suggested reminders from a long email with guidelines and instructions from an editor. Highlighting a lot of text can be tedious on a touchscreen, but I did it anyway because the message had lots of helpful information broken up into sections that each had their own bold subheadings. Additionally, most of those sections had their own lists (some using bullet points, some using numbers). I hoped Reminders would at least gather information from all of the email’s lists. But the suggested reminders ended up just being the same text from three—but not all—of the email’s bold subheadings.

When I tried getting suggested reminders from a smaller portion of the same email, I surprisingly got five bullet points that covered more than just the email’s subheadings but that still missed key points, including the email’s primary purpose.

Ultimately, the suggested Reminders feature mostly just boosts the app’s ability to serve as a modern shopping list. Suggested Reminders excels at pulling out ingredients from recipes, turning each ingredient into a suggestion that you can tap to add to a Reminders list. But being able to make a bulleted list out of a bulleted list is far from groundbreaking.

Auto-categorizing lines in Reminders lists

Since iOS 17, Reminders has been able to automatically sort items in grocery lists into distinct categories, like Produce and Proteins. iOS 26 tries taking things further by automatically grouping items in a list into non-culinary sections.

The way Reminders groups user-created tasks in lists is more sensible—and useful—than when it tries to create task suggestions based on shared text.

For example, I made a long list of various errands I needed to do, and Reminders grouped them into these categories: Administrative Tasks, Household Chores, Miscellaneous, Personal Tasks, Shopping, and Travel & Accommodation. The error rate here is respectable, but I would have tweaked some things. For one, I wouldn’t use the word “administrative” to refer to personal errands. The two tasks included under Administrative Tasks would have made more sense to me in Personal Tasks or Miscellaneous, even though those category names are almost too vague to have a distinct meaning.

Preview comes to iOS

With the iOS debut of Preview, Apple brings an app for viewing and editing PDFs and images to iPhones, which macOS users have had for years. As a result, many iPhone users will find the software easy and familiar to use.

But for iPhone owners who have long relied on Files for viewing, marking, and filling out PDFs and the like, Preview doesn’t bring many new capabilities. Anything that you can do in Preview, you could have done by viewing the same document in Files in an older version of iOS, save for a new crop tool and a dedicated button for showing information about the document.

That’s the point, though. When an iPhone has two discrete apps that can read and edit files, it’s far less frustrating to work with multiple documents. While you’re annotating a document in Preview, the Files app is still available, allowing you to have more than one document open at once. It’s a simple adjustment but one that vastly improves multitasking.

More Shortcuts options

Shortcuts gets somewhat more capable in iOS 26. That’s assuming you’re interested in using ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence generative AI in your automated tasks. You can tag in generative AI to create a shortcut that includes summarizing text in bullet points and applying that bulleted list to the shortcut’s next task, for instance.

An example of a Shortcut that uses generative AI. Credit: Apple

There are inherent drawbacks here. For one, Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT, like many generative AI tools, are subject to inaccuracies and can frequently overlook and/or misinterpret critical information. iOS 26 makes it easier for power users to incorporate a rewrite of a long text that has a more professional tone into a Shortcut. But that doesn’t mean that AI will properly communicate the information, especially when used across different scenarios with varied text.

You have three options for building Shortcuts that include the use of AI models. Using ChatGPT or Apple Intelligence via Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which runs the model on an Apple server, requires an Internet connection. Alternatively, you can use an on-device model without connecting to the web.

You can run more advanced models via Private Cloud Compute than you can with Apple Intelligence on-device. In Apple’s testing, models via Private Cloud Compute perform better on things like writing summaries and composition compared to on-device models.

Apple says personal user data sent to Private Cloud Compute “isn’t accessible to anyone other than the user—not even to Apple.” Apple has a strong, yet flawed, reputation for being better about user privacy than other Big Tech firms. But by offering three different models to use with Shortcuts, iOS 26 ensures greater functionality, options, and control.

Something for podcasters

It’s likely that more people rely on iPads (or Macs) than iPhones for podcasting. Nevertheless, a new local capture feature introduced to both iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 makes it a touch more feasible to use iPhones (and iPads especially) for recording interviews for podcasts.

Before the latest updates, iOS and iPadOS only allowed one app to access the device’s microphone at a time. So, if you were interviewing someone via a videoconferencing app, you couldn’t also use your iPhone or iPad to record the discussion, since the videoconferencing app is using your mic to share your voice with whoever is on the other end of the call. Local capture on iOS 26 doesn’t include audio input controls, but its inclusion gives podcasters a way to record interviews or conversations on iPhones without needing additional software or hardware. That capability could save the day in a pinch.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

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NASA targeting early February for Artemis II mission to the Moon

artemis II, NASA, sls rocket, Space / Kris Guyer / September 23, 2025

NASA is pressing ahead with preparations for the first launch of humans beyond low-Earth orbit in more than five decades, and officials said Tuesday that the Artemis II mission could take flight early next year.

Although work remains to be done, the space agency is now pushing toward a launch window that opens on February 5, 2026, officials said during a news conference on Tuesday at Johnson Space Center.

The Artemis II mission represents a major step forward for NASA and seeks to send four astronauts—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—around the Moon and back. The 10-day mission will be the first time astronauts have left low-Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

Hardware nearing readiness

The mission’s Space Launch System rocket has been stacked and declared ready for flight. The Orion spacecraft is in the final stages of preparation and will be attached to the top of the rocket later this year.

Early next year, the combined stack will roll out to the vehicle’s launch site at Kennedy Space Center, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director. At the pad, the rocket and spacecraft will be connected to ground systems, and after about two weeks, it will undergo a “wet dress rehearsal.”

During this fueling test, the first and second stages of the rocket will be fully loaded with liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and the countdown will be taken down to T-29 seconds. After this test, the rocket will be de-tanked and turned around for launch.

Due to the orbits of Earth and the Moon and various constraints on the mission, there are launch windows each month that last four to eight days. In February, that window opens on the fifth, and it would be an evening launch, Blackwell-Thompson said.

After launching, the Orion spacecraft will separate from the upper stage of the SLS rocket a little more than three hours after liftoff. It will spend about 24 hours in orbit around Earth, during which time the four astronauts on board will perform various checkouts to ensure the vehicle’s life support systems, thrusters, and other equipment are performing nominally.

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Broadcom’s prohibitive VMware prices create a learning “barrier,” IT pro says

Biz & IT, Broadcom, vmware / Kris Guyer / September 23, 2025

Broadcom didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment for this article.

Compatibility problems

Migrating off of VMware hasn’t only resulted in delayed projects for the Indiana school district; it has also brought complications for its HCI hardware. The district’s IT director told Ars that Dell won’t provide long-term support for the hardware if it’s not running VMware. This is despite Dell reportedly touting a “10-year lifespan” on the devices when the district first bought in, in 2019, per the IT professional.

“They’re basically holding our service contract hostage if we don’t buy VMware,” the IT director told Ars.

Put in a bind, the IT team is trying to repurpose the hardware without Dell support, noting that the district had already invested $250,000 in the system over six years.

“It’s made us have to go back to the drawing board for the next three to four years, essentially,” the IT leader said.

The Indiana IT director said Dell suggested that the district could buy an entirely new stack of server hardware with new support, but budget limits, especially over the coming years, make this unreasonable.

“New IT balloons very quickly, and [Dell workers] don’t really seem to understand that I can’t just spend that amount of money randomly,” the director said.

The Indiana district is now using the unsupported hardware, too.

“We are currently flying blind,” the IT director said.

Ars reached out to Dell Technologies about the school district’s situation and the impact that higher VMware prices have on organizations that have relied on Dell technology tied to VMware. A spokesperson shared the following statement:

Dell Technologies remains committed to supporting all VxRail customers with active support agreements. VxRail continues to deliver value for thousands of organizations globally, and we work closely with customers to ensure they can maximize their investment. Dell has a long history of offering choice through a broad portfolio of technology partners and solutions, helping organizations to select the path that best aligns to their strategy, infrastructure needs, and long-term IT goals.

Over in Idaho, VMware was part of Idaho Falls School District 91’s IT setup since at least 2008. The school district operated about 80 VMs running on four ESXi hosts, all managed centrally through vCenter. The VMs hosted mission-critical systems, including the student information system, key databases, and other applications that directly support teaching and learning, Donovan Gregory, the district’s IT SysNet administrator, told Ars.

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Here’s how potent Atomic credential stealer is finding its way onto Macs

amos, Apple, atomic, Biz & IT, credential stealer, macOS, malvertising, Security / Kris Guyer / September 22, 2025

Ads prominently displayed on search engines are impersonating a wide range of online services in a bid to infect Macs with a potent credential stealer, security companies have warned. The latest reported target is users of the LastPass password manager.

Late last week, LastPass said it detected a widespread campaign that used search engine optimization to display ads for LastPass macOS apps at the top of search results returned by search engines, including Google and Bing. The ads led to one of two fraudulent GitHub sites targeting LastPass, both of which have been taken down. The pages provided links promising to install LastPass on MacBooks. In fact, they installed a macOS credential stealer known as Atomic Stealer, or alternatively, Amos Stealer.

Dozens targeted

“We are writing this blog post to raise awareness of the campaign and protect our customers while we continue to actively pursue takedown and disruption efforts, and to also share indicators of compromise (IoCs) to help other security teams detect cyber threats,” LastPass said in the post.

LastPass is hardly alone in seeing its well-known brand exploited in such ads. The compromise indicators LastPass provided listed other software or services being impersonated as 1Password, Basecamp, Dropbox, Gemini, Hootsuite, Notion, Obsidian, Robinhood, Salesloft, SentinelOne, Shopify, Thunderbird, and TweetDeck. Typically, the ads offer the software in prominent fonts. When clicked, the ads lead to GitHub pages that install versions of Atomic that are disguised as the official software being falsely advertised.

Here’s how potent Atomic credential stealer is finding its way onto Macs Read More »

What climate targets? Top fossil fuel producing nations keep boosting output

climate change, fossil fuels, paris agreement, Science, syndication / Kris Guyer / September 22, 2025

Top producers are planning to mine and drill even more of the fuels in 2030.

Machinery transfers coal at a port in China’s Chongqing municipality on April 20. Credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images

The last two years have witnessed the hottest one in history, some of the worst wildfire seasons across Canada, Europe and South America and deadly flooding and heat waves throughout the globe. Over that same period, the world’s largest fossil fuel producers have expanded their planned output for the future, setting humanity on an even more dangerous path into a warmer climate.

Governments now expect to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas in 2030 as would be consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to a report released Monday. That level is slightly higher than what it was in 2023, the last time the biennial Production Gap report was published.

The increase is driven by a slower projected phaseout of coal and higher outlook for gas production by some of the top producers, including China and the United States.

“The Production Gap Report has long served as a mirror held up to the world, revealing the stark gap between fossil fuel production plans and international climate goals,” said Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a foreword to the report. “This year’s findings are especially alarming. Despite record climate impacts, a winning economic case for renewables, and strong societal appetite for action, governments continue to expand fossil fuel production beyond what the climate can withstand.”

The peer-reviewed report, written by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Climate Analytics and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, aims to focus attention on the supply side of the climate equation and the government policies that encourage or steer fossil fuel production.

“Governments have such a significant role in setting up the rules of the game,” said Neil Grant, a senior expert at Climate Analytics and one of the authors, in a briefing for reporters. “What this report shows is most governments are not using that influence for good.”

Chart showing growth in fossil fuel production — Credit: Inside Climate News

The report’s blaring message is that these subsidies, tax incentives, permitting and other policies have largely failed to adapt to the climate targets nations have adopted. The result is a split screen. Governments say they will cut their own climate-warming pollution, yet they plan to continue producing the fossil fuels that are driving that pollution far beyond what their climate targets would allow.

The report singles out the United States as “the starkest case of a country recommitting to fossil fuels.” The data for the United States, which draws on the latest projections of the US Energy Information Administration, does not reflect most of the policies the Trump administration and Congress have put in place this year to promote fossil fuels.

Since January, Congress has enacted billions of dollars in new subsidies to oil and gas companies while the Trump administration has forced retiring coal plants to continue operating, expanded mining and drilling access on public lands, delayed deadlines for drillers to comply with limits on methane pollution and fast-tracked fossil fuel permitting while setting roadblocks for building wind and solar energy projects.

In response to the report, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email, “As promised, President Trump ended Joe Biden’s war on American energy and unleashed American energy on day one in the best interest of our country’s economic and national security. He will continue to restore American’s energy dominance.”

Chart showing planned fuel production — Credit: Inside Climate News

The Production Gap report assessed the government plans or projections of 20 of the world’s top producers. Some have state-owned enterprises while others are dominated by publicly listed companies. The countries, which were chosen for their production levels, availability of data and presence of clear climate targets, account for more than 80 percent of fossil fuel output. The report models total global production by scaling the data up to account for the rest.

All but three of the 20 nations are planning or projecting increased production in 2030 of at least one fossil fuel. Eleven now project higher production of at least one fuel in 2030 than they did two years ago.

Expected global output of coal, oil, and gas for 2030 is now 120 percent more than what would be consistent with pathways to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and 77 percent higher than scenarios to keep warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The greater the warming, the more severe the consequences will be on extreme weather, rising seas and other impacts.

While previous installments of the report were published under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Program, this year’s version was issued independently.

In a sign of the world’s continuing failure to limit fossil fuel use, the modeling scenarios the report uses are becoming obsolete. Because nations have continued to burn more coal, gas and oil every year, future cuts would now need to be even steeper than what is reflected in the report to keep climate targets within reach.

“We’re already going into sort of the red and burning up our debt,” Grant said.

Three nations alone—China, the United States and Russia—were responsible for more than half of “extraction-based” emissions in 2022, or the pollution that comes when the fossil fuels are burned.

Ira Joseph, a senior research associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was not involved in the report, said its focus on supply highlights an important part of understanding global energy markets.

“Any type of tax breaks or subsidies or however you want to call them lowers the break-even cost for producing oil and gas,” Joseph said. Lower costs mean more supply, which in turn lowers prices and spurs more demand. The projections and plans the report is based on, Joseph said, reflect this global give and take.

Chart showing fossil fuel increase by country — Credit: Inside Climate News

The biggest changes since the last report come from a slower projected decline in China’s coal mining and faster expected growth in gas production in the United States. Smaller producers are also expecting sharper increases in gas output.

The report did highlight some bright spots. Two additional governments—Brazil and Colombia—are developing plans that would align fossil fuel production with climate goals, bringing the total to six out of the 20. Germany now expects a more accelerated phase-out of coal production. China is speeding its deployment of wind and solar energy. Some countries have also reduced subsidies for fossil fuels.

Yet these measures clearly fall far short, the report said.

The authors called on governments to coordinate their policies and plan for how they can collectively lower production in a way that keeps climate targets within reach without shocking the economies that depend on the jobs and revenue provided by mining, drilling, and processing the fuels. They pointed to a handful of efforts—called Just Energy Transition Partnerships—to provide financing from wealthy countries to support phasing out coal in developing or emerging economies. These programs have struggled to mobilize much money, however, and the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from them.

Grant said the policies indicate that government officials are failing to adapt to a more uncertain future.

“Change doesn’t happen in straight lines, but I think if you look at the Production Gap report this year, what you see is that many governments are still thinking in straight lines,” Grant said.

The policies the team examined foresee fossil fuel use remaining steady or declining gradually. The result, Grant argued, could be one of two scenarios: Either fossil fuel use remains high for years, in line with these production plans, or it declines more quickly and governments are unprepared for the sudden drop in sales.

“Those would lead to either climate chaos or significant negative economic impacts on countries,” Grant said. “So we need to try to avoid both of those. And the way to do that is to try to align our fossil fuel production plans with our climate goals.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Author name: Kris Guyer