• The price gap between Waymo and Uber is narrowing

    January 28, 2026

    A trip in a Waymo robotaxi still costs more, on average, than a comparable ride in a human-driven Uber or a Lyft. But that gap is narrowing, according to new data published Tuesday by Obi, a company that aggregates real-time pricing and pickup times across multiple ride-hailing services. Two factors, working together, are behind the change. Waymo has lowered its pricing, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area where the data was pulled, while traditional ride-hailing rides on the Uber and Lyft networks have risen, according to Obi. The new data was collected between November 27 and January 1,…

  • Despite the annoyances, it has the right idea

    January 28, 2026

    Windscribe is a virtual private network (VPN) with intense “How do you do, fellow kids?” energy. It has servers in 69 countries and an annual plan that costs $69, an obsession with the sex number that rivals Elon Musk’s. I’m shocked that it doesn’t have a subscription costing $4.20 per month. But there’s another side to Windscribe’s cringe: an obsession with independence and a Bernie Sanders-like anger on behalf of an exploited public. In a market where the best VPNs aim for professionalism, Windscribe aspires to be punk. Its iconoclasm may have led it to develop an app that looks…

  • Waabi raises $1B and expands into robotaxis with Uber

    January 28, 2026

    Autonomous vehicle startup Waabi has raised $1 billion and struck a partnership with Uber to deploy self-driving cars on the ride-hailing platform — the company’s first expansion beyond autonomous trucking. The funding consists of an oversubscribed $750 million Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners and roughly $250 million in milestone-based capital from Uber to support the deployment of 25,000 or more Waabi Driver-powered robotaxis exclusively on its platform. The companies did not provide a timeline for such a large-scale deployment.   The partnership represents a bet that the startup’s AI technology can succeed where others have…

  • The best robot vacuums on a budget for 2026

    January 28, 2026

    If vacuuming is your least favorite chore, employing a robot vacuum can save you time and stress while also making sure your home stays clean. While once most robo-vacs landed on the higher end of the price spectrum, that’s not the case anymore. Sure, you could pick up a $1,000 cleaning behemoth with mopping features, but it would be incorrect to assume that you need to spend that much money to get a good machine. Now, you can get an autonomous dirt-sucker with serious cleaning chops for $500 — sometimes even $300 or less. But you get what you pay…

  • Google pitches Gemini to students studying for India’s most competitive college entrance exam

    January 28, 2026

    Google is expanding its push into AI-powered learning by adding full-length practice tests in Gemini for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), India’s nationwide engineering exam used to shortlist candidates for the country’s top technical institutes and taken by millions of students each year. Google said students can take full-length mock exams for the JEE within Gemini, which will offer questions based on vetted content from Indian education firms PhysicsWallah and Careers360. The launch comes after the company recently rolled out similar test-prep tools for the SAT. Once students complete a mock test in Gemini, Google said the chatbot will provide…

  • WhatsApp introduces an advanced security mode to protect against hackers

    January 28, 2026

    Meta’s WhatsApp just introduced , a tool “that further protects your account from highly sophisticated cyber attacks.” This is a one-click button in the settings that automatically initiates a series of defenses. So what does it do? It blocks media and attachments from unknown senders, disables link previews and silences calls from unknown senders. This results in a more restrictive experience, but hopefully a safer one. The company says this isn’t necessarily for regular users, as conversations are already protected by end-to-end encryption. Instead, this is being pitched as a tool for “journalists or public-facing figures” that “may need extreme…

  • Amid Trump attacks and weaponized sanctions, Europeans look to rely less on US tech

    January 28, 2026

    Imagine a world where your credit card no longer works, your Amazon account is shut down, and using U.S. tech companies is no longer an option. It’s almost impossible to shop online, wire bank transfers to an overseas family member, or rely on anything that involves the United States, including the U.S. dollar. For one Canadian, this is now her reality. Last year, the Trump administration added Kimberly Prost, a judge on the International Criminal Court, to its economic sanctions list, after she served on an appeals chamber that in 2020 unanimously authorized the ICC’s prosecutor to investigate alleged war…

  • Google AI Plus is now available in the US for $8 a month

    January 28, 2026

    Google AI Plus, the company’s most affordable AI subscription plan, is now rolling out in the US. It will cost you $8 a month for its features, though you can get it for $4 a month for the first two months for a limited time only. AI Plus gives you access to 200GB of storage, as well as access to the Gemini 3 Pro model, Deep Research and Nano Banana Pro inside the Gemini app. Nano Banana Pro generates images that look so realistic, they’re nearly indistinguishable from ordinary photos snapped on phones. Google even had to limit its usage…

  • OpenAI launches Prism, a new AI workspace for scientists

    January 28, 2026

    OpenAI launched on Tuesday a new scientific workspace program called Prism that is available for free to anyone with a ChatGPT account. Designed as an AI-enhanced word processor and research tool for scientific papers, Prism is deeply integrated with GPT-5.2, which can be used to assess claims, revise prose, or search for prior research. Prism isn’t designed to conduct research on its own and without human guidance. Executives believe it will accelerate the work being done by human scientists, and compared Prism to coding interfaces like Cursor and Windsurf. “I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025…

  • OpenAI releases Prism, a Claude Code-like app for scientific research

    January 28, 2026

    OpenAI is releasing a new app called Prism today, and it hopes it does for science what coding agents like Claude Code and its own Codex platform have done for programming. Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when…