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Just a week after AMD revealed its own Ryzen 8040 hardware, Intel has entered its own AI PC era. The company’s new Core Ultra notebook chips, codenamed Meteor Lake, are Intel’s first processors to include an NPU, or neural processing unit, for accelerating AI tasks.

Intel claims the Core Ultra chips use up to 79 percent less power than AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 7840U while idling in Windows, and they’re also up to 11 percent faster than AMD’s hardware for multithreaded tasks. Intel, however, didn’t have the upcoming Ryzen 8040 chips to test against. They use the company’s new Intel 4 (7nm) process and should be “the most efficient x86 processor for ultrathin systems.”

As for AI workloads, Intel says Core Ultra chips can reach up to 34 TeraOPS when combining performance across the NPU, GPU and CPU. The big difference is the NPU: It’ll enable features like Windows 11’s Studio Effects, which can blur backgrounds and improve video lighting without hurting your battery life much. With more creative AI workloads, Intel says the Ultra 7 165H is 70 percent faster than the rival Ryzen 7 7840U in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Check out the rest of the specs and benchmark tests from Intel over here, and expect to hear more “AI PC” bluster in 2024.

Oh, and nothing to do with Intel’s chips, but be ready for everyone to be playing with AI-generated backgrounds on Instagram this week.

— Mat Smith

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Threads’ new hashless tags are good for pranks

Meta probably should have seen this coming.

Engadget

Meta finally rolled out searchable tags for all users on Threads, its microblogging Instagram offshoot, and users are taking advantage of a design quirk for a bit of dumb fun. Threads’ “topic tags” are a lot like hashtags, but not entirely the same. For one, there’s no hash (#). It’s pretty basic stuff… which makes the effectiveness of a new prank feel all the more absurd.

Someone can create a Threads post, ideally with a lot of text, then slap a “Show more” tag at the end, seemingly in the middle of a word or sentence. You, the unwitting victim, will then click “Show more” expecting to see the rest of the post, but — surprise! — it’ll direct you to the page for that tag instead.

Ah, pranks. Just in time for Thread’s awaited Europe launch…

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Spider-Man 2’s New Game+ mode pushed back to 2024

Other features, such as audio descriptions, are also delayed.

When Insomniac Games launched Spider-Man 2, it didn’t yet have features like New Game+ and audio descriptions. Community and marketing director, James Stevenson, shared that New Game+ “should” arrive before the end of 2023. But Insomniac has now released a statement explaining it’s targeting the next Spider-Man 2 update for early 2024. Insomniac went on to explain it’s adding more “highly requested features” to the game, such as replaying missions and changing the time of day.

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Engadget’s best gaming laptops

These are our favorites.

Engadget

Gaming laptops have been some of the most intriguing portable PCs for the past few years. They’ve gotten thinner and lighter, but also vastly more powerful and efficient, thanks to advanced CPUs and GPUs. Gaming laptops are where PC makers can get adventurous, with things like rotating hinges and near desktop-like customizability. We lay out the specs that matter, the price you can expect to pay and some of our standout favorites.

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The Hugo Award-winning The Murderbot Diaries books from Martha Wells are becoming a 10-episode Apple TV+ series starring Alexander Skarsgård, Apple announced. It will follow a self-aware "SecUnit" robot that must hide its free will in order to complete a dangerous assignment and comes from About a Boy creators Chris and Paul Weitz. 

"Murderbot is an action-packed sci-fi series, based on the award-winning books by Wells, about a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable 'clients,'" Apple wrote. "Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe."

The Weitz brothers will write, direct and produce the series, while Skarsgård will also serve as executive producer. Apple TV+ currently offers other sci-fi series including Silo, For All Mankind, Invasion and others. The streaming service needs to keep the content flowing as it has doubled Apple TV+ prices in just over a year. At the same time, Apple is looking for the right kind of content as it aims to avoid hot-button topics following the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart. 

Several Murderbot chapters have made Engadget's gift guides and recommended reading lists. We called the Fugitive Telemetry novella a "banger" with "space intrigue and robotic mysteries" and recommended the earlier novella series in our 2019 holiday guide. 

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Gift cards can get a lot of hate as being impersonal, but when it comes down to it, they're a great option for anyone who is unsure what to give. This is all the more true when they come with an extra incentive — as is currently the case for Apple gift cards purchased on Amazon. Right now, Amazon is offering $10 in-store credit with any Apple gift card purchase of $100 or more. All it requires is entering the code HOLAPP at checkout.

Apple's gift cards are available for standard amounts like $100 and $250 but can also be customized to any amount. Once purchased, Amazon can send the gift card to its recipient via email or text message with a personalized note attached. However, it doesn't have to be sent out immediately, with the ability to schedule it for any date. The specific time, though, is in Amazon's hands with a note stating it will arrive any time that day after 12 AM. 

The deal is only available "while supplies last" and is limited to one per customer. The email field offers the ability to send gift cards to a maximum of 999 recipients, so this is an important stipulation. The credit should then arrive within 24 hours of your purchase. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Google is creating a new, more sophisticated Android AI assistant called Pixie set to arrive with its Pixel 9 phone, according to a report from The Information. Based on the company's new Gemini large language model (LLM), it'll be able to perform "complex and multimodal tasks" like giving you directions to the nearest store to buy a product you photographed on your smartphone. 

The assistant will be exclusive to Google's Pixel devices and use data from Google products like Gmail and Maps. That would help it "evolve into a far more personalized version of the Google Assistant," the report states. It appears to be a separate product from Google's Assistant with Bard showed off at Made By Google in October. 

If accurate, the report on the update shows Google making whiplash changes to its AI roadmap to keep rival OpenAI in its sights. Google only just revealed its Gemini AI last week as an answer to GPT-4, calling it "the most capable model we’ve ever built." It also announced that Gemini would come to Android via a new product called Nano, giving your phone the capability to do things like summarize conversations and calls without the need to be online. 

As a reminder, Gemini launched last week as an integrated multimodal AI, rather than multiple models stacked together. That will supposedly allow it to "seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models." With Pixie powered by Gemini, it could be a far more sophisticated personal assistant than, say, Google Assistant. Gemini will also power the next generation of Bard, Google's AI chat assistant. 

As with past Google products, though, it's going to be hard for consumers to grok (see what I did there) all the different AI offerings. We've now got Pixie, Bard, Gemini, Gemini Nano (for smartphones), Gemini Pro (for Chrome, API calls and more) and Gemini Ultra, coming in 2024. By contrast, OpenAI has kept things relatively simple with GPT-4 being its LLM, ChatGPT being the chat assistant, and DALL-E the image generator. Most savvy consumers have at least heard of those things, but Google has once again made it hard for people to keep up with its own product family. 

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Alas, The Last of Us Online will never see the light of day. Naughty Dog has announced that it has "made the incredibly difficult decision to stop" its development. It explains that the online team had a clear vision of the project and had already refined its gameplay. However, it soon became clear when the company was ramping the game up to full production that it was going to bite off more than it can chew. If it releases an online game, it has to dedicate all its resources to supporting post launch content in the future. That means becoming a studio that exclusively offers live gaming services — one with no capacity to release more single-player narrative games like the original The Last of Us titles. 

The studio first gave us a peek at concept art from the project in 2022, but it offered very little in terms of updates since. After the PlayStation Showcase in May, it admitted that it knows fans of the franchise are looking forward to hearing more about the game but that it realized that it needed more time to work on it and couldn't share details just yet. Bloomberg reported shortly after that, though, that the studio had already reassigned developers working on the project to other teams and was reconsidering its viability. Clearly, Naughty Dog has decided its path, and it doesn't lead to the release of an online title. The developer says it has "more than one ambitious, brand new single player game" in the works and will be sharing what's next when it's ready.

Despite Elon Musk's earlier attempts to avoid further testifying for the Twitter-takeover investigation, his luck appears to have run out. Reuters reported that in a San Francisco hearing on Thursday, a federal judge shot down Musk's attorney's challenge on whether the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) officials had the power to issue subpoenas, thus ruling that the exec must therefore comply with the regulator and appear for testimony. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler was quoted saying, "you've got one more four-hour deposition, one more day of depositions to survive and it's over." Failing that, the judge would have to issue an order.

The SEC's ongoing probe dives into Musk’s late disclosure of his stake in Twitter — a publicly-traded company back then — which went against the requirements of US securities law. This 10-day delay on the paperwork, along with some potentially misleading information within, may have earned the exec as much as $156 million, according to The Washington Post. Former Twitter shareholders also filed a class-action lawsuit against Musk over his controversial $44 billion takeover of the social media platform, which has since been renamed X.

While it's unlikely that Musk can skip future testimonies for this case, he would be better off heeding Beeler's advice, regardless. "It seems unlikely there’s going to be any more hassle," the judge added, should the world's richest man "work it out" with the SEC. Whether that would help his case is a whole different matter, of course.

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