Author: Geek Planet

By now, it’s hard to ignore where OpenAI is headed.The executive hints, the ad world hires, the burn rate that would make tech CEO blush – all signs point to advertising. This week’s launch of its long-rumored browser only reinforces that view. Digiday traces the steps that brought the company to this inevitable moment.  December 2024: OpenAI reverses anti-advertising stance Last December, the company’s CFO Sarah Friar made it publicly clear: OpenAI had “no active plans to pursue advertising”, but the team was open to exploring new revenue streams, she told the Financial Times.  That was a huge step on…

AT&T just announced a new service called Turbo Live that could prevent your network connection from slowing to a crawl at crowded events. It addresses an issue most of us have faced at busy stadiums, where network congestion makes even simple tasks like uploading a photo to Instagram or calling an Uber incredibly frustrating. In its announcement, AT&T describes Turbo Live as a “VIP connection” that lets anyone with a 5G smartphone boost their connection at live events. What makes the service stand out is that it is not exclusive to AT&T, and even lets Verizon and T-Mobile subscribers sign…

ChatGPT is sending more shoppers to e-commerce sites, but most aren’t buying. A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hamburg and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management finds that referral traffic from ChatGPT converts far worse than traditional marketing channels such as Google Search, email and affiliate links. The paper, authored by Maximilian Kaiser and Christian Schulze, examined 12 months of first-party data from 973 e-commerce sites generating a combined $20 billion in annual revenue. Researchers analyzed more than 50,000 transactions from ChatGPT referrals and compared them with 164 million transactions from traditional channels. While organic LLM traffic…

Apple plans to turn Siri into a full-fledged AI chatbot later this year, as it scrambles to catch up with rivals like OpenAI and Google after years of falling behind in generative AI. The move follows reports that Apple plans to power Siri’s AI overhaul using Google’s Gemini technology. The overhaul would fundamentally change how Siri works. Internally codenamed Campos, the new Siri is expected to replace the current interface entirely and behave more like a conversational chatbot. Users would still summon it the same way, by saying “Hey Siri” or holding the side button, but the experience would feel…

It looks like PC gamers might be in for another rough ride next year. A new report claims NVIDIA is planning to drastically dial back production of its GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards in 2026. The problem isn’t that people aren’t buying them; it’s that the global memory market is in a crunch, and the massive explosion of artificial intelligence is eating up all the supply. AI demand may squeeze RTX 50-series supply The rumor mill started spinning on China’s Bobantang tech forum and was later picked up by outlets like Benchlife and OC3D. The word is that NVIDIA is…

Aruna Ravichandran leads marketing for Webex at Cisco with a 99% remote team, less than 1% attrition and what she calls “maniacal execution.” We caught up with her at the recent Webex One convention in San Diego to learn about her philosophy on thriving in the AI era and how she sees the future of work, marketing and tech evolving. How has AI fundamentally changed how your team works? I think about AI in three layers. Layer one: people who feel AI will take their job. Layer two: people who worry someone better at AI will take their job. Layer…

Last year, Apple released the new and improved AirPods Pro 3. The device launched three years after the AirPods Pro 2, with significant improvements in sound quality and noise cancellation. And while this is the usual cadence for the Pro-grade AirPods — once every two or three years — Apple is expected to break that trend this year. The Cupertino giant is reportedly working on a new, high-end version of the current-generation AirPods Pro 3, and it could go official alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and the first foldable iPhone at the September 2026 launch event. Why Vision Pro could…

The ad dollars are nice but the real prize for Amazon is the infrastructure itself – the rails on which the entire system runs. Up until now that’s been the quiet part of its ad strategy. Moving forward it’s saying it out loud. The company is launching a managed cloud network built specifically to handle the high-speed, data-intensive transactions that make programmatic advertising possible. It’s called AWS RTB Fabric, and it’s been quietly in beta for months.  At its core, it’s a specialized computing environment built inside AWS to host and move real-time bidding traffic – the trillions of bid requests…

Motorola appears to be gearing up to launch two new G series smartphones. While the company has yet to make an official announcement, early retail listings for the upcoming Moto G67 and Moto G77 have surfaced on a Greek retailer’s website, offering a detailed look at both budget-friendly phones ahead of the launch. The listings, published by Insomnia, include images revealing the designs for both models, which look nearly indistinguishable. The devices feature a textured back panel and a square camera module that tapers toward the top and left edges. On the front, the phones sport a slightly curved display…

Apple may be inching toward an iPhone-class chip MacBook, and the trail starts in a place most people never see: internal kernel debug kit files used by its engineers. MacRumors reports that Apple accidentally posted the kit on its website earlier this year, then pulled it after details began leaking. Inside the Mac-related listings, the files reference two unreleased MacBook setups. One uses the older A15, the other points to A18 Pro. The split matters because it suggests Apple tested the concept with whatever worked, then moved on to something that looks closer to a real product candidate. Two MacBook…