As teased, Meta’s launched its Twitter rival, timed perfectly to capitalize on the latter’s recent struggles and contractions. Threads has started rolling out worldwide, though it won’t be available in the European Union until the company addresses potential regulatory concerns.

Some basic features are missing – the sort of thing Twitter (and normal Instagram) is already capable of. That includes hashtags (!), account switching on the same device and post editing. The company described Threads as a “separate space for real-time updates and public conversations,” which relies on users’ Instagram credentials but will eventually be compatible with a wider swath of decentralized services like Mastodon.

If you haven’t tried it already, you log in to Threads with your existing Instagram account – or make a new one. Usernames and verification status carry over, although you can tweak your bio and profile if you want to change it up from your Instagram one. It’s all very old Twitter in style, with support for text posts up to 500 characters, as well as photos and videos. Threads will also support reposts — its version of a retweet — as well as quote posts. Users can limit their replies and block and report other users, thankfully.

At this early stage, Threads is a reminder for all the users on Instagram that I muted long ago. Remember, just because you can post something to Threads, you don’t have to. (But we all know I did anyway.)

– Mat Smith

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Samsung will unveil its new foldables on July 26th

Prepare for an early morning live stream.

Samsung

Samsung has confirmed the date of its latest Unpacked product launch. The event will take place on July 26th at 7 AM ET, the company announced today. The early start is because Samsung will stream from Seoul, South Korea – home territory. When Samsung began teasing Unpacked last month, it promised the event would feature its latest generation of foldable devices. In other words, expect new iterations of the Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip. Because it’s Samsung, though, don’t be surprised to see more wearables or even a tablet. Even if you didn't ask for either.

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OpenAI is forming a team to rein in superintelligent AI

The announcement comes as governments debate how to regulate AI technologies.

OpenAI is forming a dedicated team to manage the risks of superintelligent AI. A superintelligence is a hypothetical AI model smarter than even the most gifted and intelligent human, and it excels in multiple areas of expertise instead of one domain, like some previous-generation models. OpenAI believes such a model could arrive before the end of the decade.

“Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems,” the non-profit said. “But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.” I hope they recruit Sarah Connor.

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Fisker gives us a better look at its 600-mile range Ronin EV

It's set to be revealed in full on August 3rd.

Fisker

Fisker has given us another glimpse of the 600-mile range Ronin convertible EV and promised to unveil it in full on August 3rd. Like the original Fisker Karma, it's a low and swoopy four-door "super GT" sedan that will join its Ocean SUV. There's no word yet on price, but the company previously promised to keep it under $200,000. If that’s out of your price range, Fisker is working on its most affordable EV yet, the four-door Pear, which should start at $29,900 before any incentives.

Continue reading.

Meta's Twitter rival Threads just went live and has already exceeded 10 million signups within the first seven hours, according to (a Thread by) CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The app is now available globally (except in Europe), with the rapid signup pace showing Meta's enormous ability to scale up compared to other Twitter rivals like Bluesky — which still requires invite codes. 

To, er, mark the occasion, Zuckerberg tweeted for the first time in over a decade with the classic Spider-Man standoff picture (showing that unlike Elon Musk, he actually knows how memes work). "10 million signups in seven hours," he added on Threads. 

With Threads, Meta is taking on Twitter and alternatives like Mastodon. It's under the purview of Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, who is planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub. That's the source protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized services sometimes collectively referred to as the “Fediverse.”

Threads is strongly tied to Instagram and built on the same platform, giving Meta an effective way to advertise it. Any users who pre-ordered the app on iOS received a push notification when Threads went live, another move that no doubt boosted signups. 

The site is not without early teething issues, though. The biggest complaint is the lack of a chronological, following-only feed, with users stuck with whatever the Threads algorithm decides to push their way. ("95 percent of the posts I see are completely irrelevant to me," complained one user). It also lacks post editing (which Facebook and Instagram both have), hashtags, account switching and more. 

Mosseri has addressed all those issues, posting on Threads that a following-only feature is "on the list." He said the same about post editing and account switching, and added that hashtags will be tappable "in time." 

Engadget

Another key problem for many users is the lack of a web version of Threads. Much like Instagram was for a long time, Threads is read-only on browsers, with posting limited to the iOS and Android apps (Mosseri has yet to address this). Finally, the design of Threads seems to be a love it or hate it affair, with some users finding the layout less intuitive than Twitter.

Verification remains another key talking point. Elon Musk famously changed Twitter's system so that only Twitter Blue subscribers would receive the blue check mark (or very notable public figures and news sites). That made the experience less enjoyable for many users, as it became difficult to tell who was an official athlete, celebrity, journalist, etc. 

So far, only users verified on Instagram (and not Facebook) have received the blue badge on Threads. While Instagram verification is notoriously more difficult to get, it's largely held by influencers and creators. But Threads is positioned as a discussion site and will likely be focused on news (if it's to compete with Twitter), so it might make sense to allow Facebook verified users to also be verified on Threads — or create an all-new verification system.

In any case, it's still early days for Threads and the app will no doubt change substantially in the near future. It's clear that users have strong opinions — whether Meta listens to them or not will be an interesting story over the next few months.  

The Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social network Bluesky has launched a paid domain service in partnership with Namecheap as a way for users to verify their identity. In a post discussing its plans to make Bluesky sustainable, the team said "users become the product" when a company relies on ads. Since Bluesky set out to "build a protocol where users can own their data," it chose to explore "other avenues of monetization" instead. It's worth noting that the social app started as a project funded by Twitter, but it has lost its connection to the website after Elon Musk took over. 

Since earning by ads isn't an option, the team thought of offering paid services, starting with domain names. Users can already set up custom domain names to use with Bluesky, but they have to go through a separate process with a domain registrar first. This integration will supposedly allow them to do so in under a few minutes. They can simply log into their account, search for a domain name to use as a handle and then pay for it all within Bluesky's interface. For a Twitter competitor that doesn't have a centralized verification system, using a domain name is the best way for a user to verify that they are who they say they are. US Senators, for instance, have apparently been using the senate.gov domain to verify their identities. 

Users who use the integrated service will be able to manage their domain settings and configurations within Bluesky, and they can forward emails sent to their domains to an address of their choice. They can also choose to redirect their domain to their Bluesky profile or any URL they want. And in the event they decide to leave the platform or to use another registrar, they can transfer their domain away. 

Based on Bluesky's announcement, domain integration is just the first in what could be several paid services available on the platform. It says it's exploring other services it "can bundle to users to provide a more seamless experience." That said, Bluesky is still in private beta, and those interested will have to join a waitlist before they can get in. 

We knew it was coming but Samsung has confirmed the date of its latest Unpacked. The event will take place on July 26th at 7AM ET, the company announced today. The early start time is due to the fact Samsung plans to host the showcase from its home base of Seoul, South Korea. When Samsung first began teasing Unpacked last month, it promised the event would feature its latest generation of foldable devices. In other words, expect new iterations of the Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip. Thanks to pre-release leaks, we have a pretty good idea of what Samsung has planned for those devices. In the case of the former, all signs point to a refined hinge mechanism that allows the Z Fold 5 to close flat, while the most significant change with the Z Flip 5 looks to be a larger front-facing cover display.

Ahead of the 26th, Samsung is offering a $50 reservation credit for those who decide they want to pre-order the Galaxy Z Fold 5 or Galaxy Z Flip 5 sight unseen. If you want to take advantage of the promotion, all you need to do is visit the company’s website and provide your name and email. If you later change your mind, thankfully it’s a no-commitment offer.

Threads, Meta’s text-based app to challenge Twitter, is now official. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new service one day ahead of the July 6th launch date that appeared in app stores earlier this week. Meta has begun rolling out the new service around the world, though it won’t be available within the European Union until the company addresses potential regulatory concerns.

In a blog post announcing the Twitter rival, the company described Threads as a “separate space for real-time updates and public conversations” that relies on users’ Instagram credentials but will eventually be compatible with a wider swath of decentralized services like Mastodon.For now though, Threads users log into the app and website with their existing Instagram account. The company will “carry over” existing usernames and verification status to Threads, though users have the option to further customize their profiles.

Like on Instagram, the company will rely heavily on recommendations to help people discover new accounts to follow. And Meta has been quietly testing the service with a small group of celebrities and creators, as well as its own employees, so new users won’t be greeted with an empty social network.

The service itself looks remarkably similar to Twitter though its design will feel familiar to Instagram users. It supports text posts up to 500 characters, as well as photos and videos up to five minutes. Threads will also support reposts — its version of a retweet — as well as quote posts. Users can also limit their replies, block and report other users. And posts from Threads can be easily shared to users’ Instagram Story for added visibility.

Meta

The launch comes at a particularly chaotic moment for Twitter, just days after Elon Musk announced strict rate limits that severely restricted the number of posts many users could view on the platform. The company also stopped showing tweets to logged-out users, before quietly backtracking. Musk, who has complained about AI companies training their platforms on Twitter data, blamed both unpopular moves on “data scraping.”

With Threads, Meta is challenging not just Twitter but the growing wave of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon. The company is planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open source protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized services sometimes collectively referred to as the “Fediverse.”

“Our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide you the option to stop using Threads and transfer your content to another service,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks.”

As Meta explains, this means that users from Mastodon and other services that support ActivityPub will be able to follow and interact with public-facing posts on Threads. (Private accounts on threads will still be able to manually approve new followers from other services.) And other developers could one day create their own Threads-compatible features and services.

For now, it’s not clear how long it will take for Meta to fully integrate ActivityPub into Threads. In an early post on the service that was briefly viewable ahead of its official launch, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company was “committed” to the protocol, but didn’t provide a timeline. It’s also not clear how ActivityPub integration could affect content moderation and other safety issues. While Meta’s Threads app has the same content moderation policies as Instagram, services built by other developers are able to set their own standards and policies just as different instances on Mastodon have their own guidelines and norms. Meta notes that this will give users “the freedom to choose spaces that align with their values.”

At the moment, the biggest question facing Threads, though, is whether it has a chance at becoming a viable Twitter alternative. Since Musk took over the company last year, Twitter users have flocked to alternative platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, T2, and others. But so far none have achieved anything close to the scale of Twitter, much less Meta. But, with more than 1 billion Instagram users, Zuckerberg and Meta are clearly hoping that they can gather momentum much more quickly than other decentralized upstarts.

OpenAI is forming a dedicated team to manage the risks of superintelligent artificial intelligence. A superintelligence is a hypothetical AI model that is smarter than even the most gifted and intelligent human, and excels at multiple areas of expertise instead of one domain like some previous generation models. OpenAI believes such a model could arrive before the end of the decade. “Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems,” the non-profit said. “But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.”

The new team will be co-lead by OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, the research lab's head of alignment. Additionally, OpenAI said it would dedicate 20 percent of its currently secured compute power to the initiative, with the goal of developing an automated alignment researcher. Such a system would theoretically assist OpenAI in ensuring a superintelligence is safe to use and aligned with human values. “While this is an incredibly ambitious goal and we’re not guaranteed to succeed, we are optimistic that a focused, concerted effort can solve this problem,” OpenAI said. “There are many ideas that have shown promise in preliminary experiments, we have increasingly useful metrics for progress, and we can use today’s models to study many of these problems empirically.” The lab added it would share a roadmap in the future.

Wednesday’s announcement comes as governments around the world consider how to regulate the nascent AI industry. In the US, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has met with at least 100 federal lawmakers in recent months. Publicly, Altman has said AI regulation is “essential,” and that OpenAI is “eager” to work with policymakers. But we should be skeptical of such proclamations, and indeed efforts like OpenAI’s Superalignment team. By focusing the attention of the public on hypothetical risks that may never materialize, organizations like OpenAI shift the burden of regulation to the horizon instead of the here and now. There are much more immediate issues around the interplay between AI and labor, misinformation and copyright policymakers need to tackle today, not tomorrow.

Spotify is notifying users who’ve subscribed to its Premium service through Apple’s in-app purchase system that it will no longer be supporting it as a payment method. As a refresher, Spotify hasn’t allowed users to subscribe through Apple’s in-app purchase since 2016. However, those who had already subscribed via that method years ago could keep paying Spotify that way until now.

As reported by Variety, the company is emailing affected subscribers about the upcoming change. The email reads, “We’re contacting you because when you joined Spotify Premium you used Apple’s billing service to subscribe. Unfortunately, we no longer accept that billing method as a form of payment.” Spotify continues to say that those users will automatically be switched to the company’s Free, ad-supported tier at the end of the current billing cycle. “If you wish to keep your Premium subscription, you will need to re-subscribe after your last billing period has ended and your account has been moved on to the Free account.”

But that’s probably for the best. Due to Apple taking 30 percent of in-app purchases, Spotify users who were subscribed through in-app purchases were being charged an extra $3 per month compared to subscribing through Spotify directly. That’s despite the fact that Apple now reduces its commission rate to 15 percent on subscriptions after the first year. Apple said in a regulatory filing from 2019 that it collected that 15 percent fee on roughly 680,000 Spotify customers. Users transitioning from Apple’s payments can subscribe to Premium via a credit card or PayPal.

Both Apple and Google charge a “tax” on their respective app stores, regardless if a user is purchasing apps or subscribing through in-app purchase. Early last year, Google announced that it would be piloting a program that would allow third-party billing systems on Android, beginning with Spotify called User Choice Billing (UCB). Google began rolling out UCB to Spotify users late last year. Though, it’s unclear how many users are subscribing via UCB compared to using Google’s standard in-app purchase system. While there have been rumors about Apple allowing third-party app stores on iOS, there aren’t any official plans for those or for accepting third-party billing.

Music-streaming app Tidal has begun rolling out hi-res FLAC streams across the platform, according to CEO Jesse Dorogusker via a Reddit post. FLAC (free lossless audio codec) streams offer high fidelity audio up to 24-bit/192Hz. These files are on the larger side, taking up around four times the space of a standard MP3, which is why you rarely see the format on widely-adopted streaming platforms.

The feature is rolling out in early access for iOS users and the company says listeners can choose from over six million tracks available in the hi-res FLAC format, with more being added every day. All you have to do is update the beta app, if you have access, and select the “Max” quality in settings. Dorogusker says that Tidal is waiting for user response before making the tools more widely available. The CEO notes that the new streaming option will be available for all users in August, for Android fans and those not affiliated with the company’s early access plan.

Previously, Tidal used MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) audio for hi-res streaming, but this is more of an upscaling technique than an actual file type. Dorogusker hasn’t addressed the continued use of MQA, but has said that the company will “support multiple formats” of hi-res audio.

With more access to hi-res audio comes a hi-res price tag. You need a HiFi Plus subscription to access FLAC streams, which costs $20 per month. Tidal recently increased the price for standard subscriptions, from $10 to $11 per month. Rumors abound that industry leader Spotify is preparing its own hi-fi tier.

If cost has been standing in the way of you picking up that smart display you really want, then today might be your lucky day. Early Prime Day sales are here, and they're slashing the prices on some of our favorite smart displays, the Echo Show series. The Echo Show 5 third generation is at a new all-time low price, with a 50 percent discount bringing its cost to $45 from $90.

Amazon released its third-gen Echo Show 5 in May with better sound quality and 20 percent faster speeds than its predecessor. It uses Alexa to set timers, check the weather and turn on a playlist. Music-wise, it can stream Amazon Music (obviously), Apple Music and Spotify. You can use its 2MP camera to call loved ones or check in on your pets while out. The device itself is made of 100 percent recycled aluminum. 

Early Prime Day sales have also brought Amazon's Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 10 down to record-low prices. The Echo Show 8 second generation is down from $130 to $60 — a 54 percent discount — and features an eight-inch screen, 13MP screen for video calls, 1200 x 800 resolution and visual ID personalization. The third-generation Echo Show 10 is down from $250 to $163 — a 35 percent discount — and touts the same features found on the Echo Show 8, but on a 10.1-inch screen.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for the best Amazon Prime Day tech deals. Learn about Prime Day trends on In the Know. Hear from Autoblog’s car experts on must-shop auto-related Prime Day deals and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

OnePlus has unveiled the Nord 3, and it's a significant upgrade over the 2T — to the point where you might prefer it over comparable rivals. The new mid-range model jumps to a 6.7-inch, 120Hz 2,772 x 1,240 screen, promising a big boost over the 6.4-inch, 90Hz 1080p panel from its predecessor. You'll also get 80W wired fast charging the company claims can deliver a 60 percent charge in 15 minutes.

The OnePlus Nord 3 also makes the leap to a MediaTek Dimensity 9000 chip (versus the 2T's Dimensity 1300), and it now comes with up to 16GB of RAM instead of last year's 12GB. The battery is larger, too, at 5,000mAh versus 4,500mAh. The device's 50MP primary camera is the same as on the higher-end OnePlus 11. That won't beat the absolute best cameras on the market, but it's more compelling in this price class. You can also expect an 8MP ultra-wide camera, a 2MP macro sensor and a 16MP front cam.

Software support is stronger this time around. OnePlus now promises three years of major OS updates for the Nord 3 compared to just two for the 2T. You'll also receive four years of security fixes. That's not as extensive as for the OnePlus 11 or rivals like Samsung, but it still means your phone will likely remain up to date until you're ready to replace it.

OnePlus is taking Nord 3 pre-orders today, starting at €449 ($488) for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Pay €549 ($597) and you'll get 16GB of RAM alongside 256GB of storage. At the moment, though, it's only poised to reach 16 European Union countries as well as key markets like India. It's not surprising that OnePlus won't release the phone in the US (the company only offers its entry Nord N-series stateside), but it's also not coming to the UK as of this writing. A spokesperson toldTech Advisor last week that "logistical challenges" with customs prevented it from offering the Nord 3 and other phones online. You may still see a UK debut, but not in the immediate future.

Whether or not it's a good buy versus the Google Pixel 7a or Samsung Galaxy A54 depends on your priorities. OnePlus is offering some of the best display, camera hardware and memory in this category, but Google typically produces better real-world photos and offers a 'pure' Android interface with timelier upgrades. Samsung, meanwhile, offers better secondary cameras than OnePlus, more updates and tight integration with its ecosystem.