Stevie Bonifield is a news writer at The Verge covering all things consumer tech, from laptops and gaming gear to AI and cybersecurity. Before joining The Verge, Stevie spent almost two years writing for Laptop Mag and has also written news, reviews, and features for PC Gamer, Tom’s Guide, IGN, XDA, and TechRadar.
During Roblox’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday, CEO David Baszucki commented on the photorealistic upsampling tech he’d shared a demo of earlier this week:
“...I do want to highlight, we’re right on the edge, really, in the whole AI space of running real-time photoreal video models in 2K at 60 hertz. ...This will not be free. This will use cloud compute. We will have some kind of way of subscribing or paying for this.”
In a unanimous vote, the Senate passed a rule on Thursday that bars senators and their staff from trading on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, effective immediately, as CNBC reports. The ban follows growing concerns about insider trading — earlier this month, Kalshi banned three political candidates for bets related to their races.
The Financial Times reports Alphabet’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, responded to employee opposition to the deal Google signed with the Pentagon in a memo on Tuesday, saying, “Staying engaged with governments, including on national security, will help democracies benefit from responsible technologies.”
Users can now generate and download files directly in Gemini without needing work-arounds like telling it to export to Google Docs first. Google says the feature is available to all Gemini users and is ready to create files in Workspace apps (Drive / Docs / Sheets) or “.pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .csv, LaTeX, Plain Text (TXT), Rich Text Format (RTF) and Markdown (MD).”
The video game piracy community is claiming Denuvo’s anti-piracy software can now be cracked or bypassed on every title that uses it, as TechSpot and XDA report. Denuvo and 2K Games are reportedly pushing back already with a “14-day mandatory online check” for popular games like NBA 2K25 and 2K26.
