Author: Geek Planet

A courthouse in Virginia was meant to be the stage for a long-awaited antitrust reckoning. Instead, by most accounts, it occasionally played out like Succession: ad tech edition. Digiday wasn’t in the room but those who were described the remedies phase part legal showdown, part industry confessional. Hat tip to The Monopoly Report and the Check My Ads teams for their close coverage.Here’s a rundown of the gossipy sub plots and quiet power plays that emerged from the courtroom. The spaghetti defense: Google’s security vp Heather Adkins described its systems as a “bowl of spaghetti,” bringing up quantum encryption and…

Google has published a blunt assessment of how reliable today’s AI chatbots really are, and the numbers are not flattering. Using its newly introduced FACTS Benchmark Suite, the company found that even the best AI models struggle to break past a 70% factual accuracy rate. The top performer, Gemini 3 Pro, reached 69% overall accuracy, while other leading systems from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI scored even lower. The takeaway is simple and uncomfortable. These chatbots still get roughly one out of every three answers wrong, even when they sound confident doing it. The benchmark matters because most existing AI tests…

Yes, this is another Sora story. But this one’s less about the tech and more about what it’s doing to the people behind it — creators or as they’re being branded, “vibe creators.” It sounds like a joke, but give it time, it might actually stick. Every day since OpenAI’s video-generation launched last week has made that a little clearer — a glimpse into the next low-effort, high-yield frontier of online expression.To understand why that matters to creators, it helps to understand Sora itself.  OpenAI has effectively built a social network where users can create digitized versions of their faces…

AI is having a transformative impact on content and advertising, and the audio space is no different. But the medium uniquely prides itself on its intimate relationship with its listeners, and the personal connection between host and audience. As AI tools are increasingly used to translate and edit podcast content — as well as streamline and improve audience targeting in audio — podcasters are grappling with striking a balance between protecting the nature of podcasts and evolving the space for the AI era. “Advertisers are looking for outcomes, and [if] using AI helps me get a sale faster, helps me inform a…

This article is republished from National Review with the permission of the author. The push to grant rights to, well, everything continues apace. Now, a long piece in the progressive publication Current Affairs argues that “Wild Animals Deserve Rights, Too.” Animal-rights activist Michael Burrows writes: Wild animals deserve our attention and respect, for the same reasons that we should care about any creature: they are sentient, with recognizable social behaviors and emotions, and just like humans their lives have intrinsic value. But wild animals are also unique, simply by virtue of existing outside of the sphere of human stewardship. They live their lives mostly out of our sight,…

Zoom has launched its next-generation AI Companion 3.0, which brings its AI assistant out of the app and into a dedicated web interface. It isn’t another meeting transcriber and summarizer anymore; Zoom’s latest AI can turn conversations into actionable tasks, create daily reflection reports, draft follow-up emails, and even create documents from meetings or notes. While free Zoom users can use the new AI Companion 3.0 for three meetings every month (including features like AI note-taking, in-meeting questions, summary, and 20 questions via the side panel), the platform is offering the entire suite of AI features for $10 per month…

The business of retail media is booming, turning retailer ad revenue into a fast-growing profit center. Other industries are taking notice and now looking to cash in on their own first-party data and media assets. The industry is barreling toward what could be called peak ad network, as everything from financial corporations to real estate companies look to get in on the ad network frenzy. Retail media, once a catch-all term for retailer-run ad platforms, has expanded into something much broader. And as the definitions evolve, so too, do the implications for strategy and spend.  “I hate to say this, but…

There’s an unsaid rule about giving people some context before adding them to a WhatsApp group, especially if it’s a large group with active members. Until now, you had to do that task manually, acting like a chatbot and summarizing everything in your own words, or by sharing screenshots. However, an upcoming WhatsApp update could help you with this. The Meta-owned messaging platform is testing a new feature called “group chat history sharing” (via a WABetaInfo report). As the name suggests, the feature lets a WhatsApp user (likely the admin) share the chat history (up to 100 messages sent within…

Some are sprinting into the future, using AI to produce, edit and post at a speed that would’ve been unthinkable even a year ago. Others are digging deeper into what makes them human — voice, vulnerability and imperfection.  For now, both are probably right. But the split is getting sharper. The recent arrivals of Meta’s Vibes tab and OpenAI’s Sora app are the reason. Meta because it’s building a scrollable stream of AI-created video. OpenAI for taking that one step further, making it possible for anyone to generate AI video on demand, no camera required. Together, they’ve condensed every hope,…

Google is shutting down a feature that many people used to check whether their personal information had ended up in data breaches. The company has confirmed that its dark web report tool will stop scanning for new leaks in mid-January and will be fully discontinued on February 16, 2026. The feature was designed to alert users if details like their email address, phone number, name, or other personal data appeared in known dark web breach dumps, but Google now says it did not go far enough in helping people act on those alerts. Why Google is pulling the plug on…