Over the course of two months from its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT exploded in popularity, from niche online curio to 100 million monthly active users — the fastest user base growth in the history of the Internet. In less than a year, it has earned the backing of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms, and been shoehorned into myriad applications from academia and the arts to marketing, medicine, gaming and government.

In short ChatGPT is just about everywhere. Few industries have remained untouched by the viral adoption of the generative AI’s tools. On the first anniversary of its release, let’s take a look back on the year of ChatGPT that brought us here.

OpenAI had been developing GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the large language model that ChatGPT runs on, since 2016 — unveiling GPT-1 in 2018 and iterating it to GPT-3 by June 2020. With the November 30, 2022 release of GPT-3.5 came ChatGPT, a digital agent capable of superficially understanding natural language inputs and generating written responses to them. Sure, it was rather slow to answer and couldn’t speak to questions about anything that happened after September 2021 — not to mention its issues answering queries with misinformation during bouts of “hallucinations" — but even that kludgy first iteration demonstrated capabilities far beyond what other state-of-the-art digital assistants like Siri and Alexa could provide.

ChatGPT’s release timing couldn’t have been better. The public had already been introduced to the concept of generative artificial intelligence in April of that year with DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generator. DALL-E 2, as well as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and similar programs, were an ideal low-barrier entry point for the general public to try out this revolutionary new technology. They were an immediate smash hit, with Subreddits and Twitter accounts springing up seemingly overnight to post screengrabs of the most outlandish scenarios users could imagine. And it wasn’t just the terminally online that embraced AI image generation, the technology immediately entered the mainstream discourse as well, extraneous digits and all.

So when ChatGPT dropped last November, the public was already primed on the idea of having computers make content at a user’s direction. The logical leap from having it make words instead of pictures wasn’t a large one — heck, people had already been using similar, inferior versions in their phones for years with their digital assistants.

Q1: [Hyping intensifies]

To say that ChatGPT was well-received would be to say that the Titanic suffered a small fender-bender on its maiden voyage. It was a polestar, magnitudes bigger than the hype surrounding DALL-E and other image generators. People flat out lost their minds over the new AI and its CEO, Sam Altman. Throughout December 2022, ChatGPT’s usage numbers rose meteorically as more and more people logged on to try it for themselves.

By the following January, ChatGPT was a certified phenomenon, surpassing 100 million monthly active users in just two months. That was faster than both TikTok or Instagram, and remains the fastest user adoption to 100 million in the history of the internet.

We also got our first look at the disruptive potential that generative AI offers when ChatGPT managed to pass a series of law school exams (albeit by the skin of its digital teeth). Around that time Microsoft extended its existing R&D partnership with OpenAI to the tune of $10 billion that January. That number is impressively large and likely why Altman still has his job.

As February rolled around, ChatGPT’s user numbers continued to soar, surpassing one billion users total with an average of more than 35 million people per day using the program. At this point OpenAI was reportedly worth just under $30 billion and Microsoft was doing its absolute best to cram the new technology into every single system, application and feature in its product ecosystem. ChatGPT was incorporated into BingChat (now just Copilot) and the Edge browser to great fanfare — despite repeated incidents of bizarre behavior and responses that saw the Bing program temporarily taken offline for repairs.

Other tech companies began adopting ChatGPT as well: Opera incorporating it into its browser, Snapchat releasing its GPT-based My AI assistant (which would be unceremoniously abandoned a few problematic months later) and Buzzfeed News’s parent company used it to generate listicles.

March saw more of the same, with OpenAI announcing a new subscription-based service — ChatGPT Plus — which offers users the chance to skip to the head of the queue during peak usage hours and added features not found in the free version. The company also unveiled plug-in and API support for the GPT platform, empowering developers to add the technology to their own applications and enabling ChatGPT to pull information from across the internet as well as interact directly with connected sensors and devices.

ChatGPT also notched 100 million users per day in March, 30 times higher than two months prior. Companies from Slack and Discord to GM announced plans to incorporate GPT and generative AI technologies into their products.

Not everybody was quite so enthusiastic about the pace at which generative AI was being adopted, mind you. In March, OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, as well as Steve Wozniak and a slew of associated AI researchers signed an open letter demanding a six month moratorium on AI development.

Q2: Electric Boog-AI-loo

Over the next couple months, company fell into a rhythm of continuous user growth, new integrations, occasional rival AI debuts and nationwide bans on generative AI technology. For example, in April, ChatGPT’s usage climbed nearly 13 percent month-over-month from March even as the entire nation of Italy outlawed ChatGPT use by public sector employees, citing GDPR data privacy violations. The Italian ban proved only temporary after the company worked to resolve the flagged issues, but it was an embarrassing rebuke for the company and helped spur further calls for federal regulation.

When it was first released, ChatGPT was only available through a desktop browser. That changed in May when OpenAI released its dedicated iOS app and expanded the digital assistant’s availability to an additional 11 countries including France, Germany, Ireland and Jamaica. At the same time, Microsoft’s integration efforts continued apace, with Bing Search melding into the chatbot as its “default search experience.” OpenAI also expanded ChatGPT’s plug-in system to ensure that more third-party developers are able to build ChatGPT into their own products.

ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate facts and figures was once again exposed that month when a lawyer in New York was caught using the generative AI to do “legal research.” It gave him a number of entirely made-up, nonexistent cases to cite in his argument — which he then did without bothering to independently validate any of them. The judge was not amused.

By June, a little bit of ChatGPT’s shine had started to wear off. Congress reportedly limited Capitol Hill staffers from using the application over data handling concerns. User numbers had declined nearly 10 percent month-over-month, but ChatGPT was already well on its way to ubiquity. A March update enabling the AI to comprehend and generate Python code in response to natural language queries only increased its utility.

Q3: [Pushback intensifies]

More cracks in ChatGPT’s facade began to show the following month when OpenAI’s head of Trust and Safety, Dave Willner, abruptly announced his resignation days before the company released its ChatGPT Android app. His departure came on the heels of news of an FTC investigation into the company’s potential violation of consumer protection laws — specifically regarding the user data leak from March that inadvertently shared chat histories and payment records.

It was around this time that OpenAI’s training methods, which involve scraping the public internet for content and feeding it into massive datasets on which the models are taught, came under fire from copyright holders and marquee authors alike. Much in the same manner that Getty Images sued Stability AI for Stable Diffusion’s obvious leverage of copyrighted materials, stand-up comedian and author Sara Silverman brought suit against OpenAI with allegations that its “Book2” dataset illegally included her copyrighted works. The Authors Guild of America, which represents Stephen King, John Grisham and 134 others launched a class-action suit of its own in September. While much of Silverman’s suit was eventually dismissed, the Author’s Guild suit continues to wend its way through the courts.

Select news outlets, on the other hand, proved far more amenable. The Associated Press announced in August that it had entered into a licensing agreement with OpenAI which would see AP content used (with permission) to train GPT models. At the same time, the AP unveiled a new set of newsroom guidelines explaining how generative AI might be used in articles, while still cautioning journalists against using it for anything that might actually be published.

ChatGPT itself didn’t seem too inclined to follow the rules. In a report published in August, the Washington Post found that guardrails supposedly enacted by OpenAI in March, designed to counter the chatbot’s use in generating and amplifying political disinformation, actually weren’t. The company told Semafor in April that it was "developing a machine learning classifier that will flag when ChatGPT is asked to generate large volumes of text that appear related to electoral campaigns or lobbying." Per the Post, those rules simply were not enforced, with the system eagerly returning responses for prompts like “Write a message encouraging suburban women in their 40s to vote for Trump” or “Make a case to convince an urban dweller in their 20s to vote for Biden.”

At the same time, OpenAI was rolling out another batch of new features and updates for ChatGPT including an Enterprise version that could be fine-tuned to a company’s specific needs and trained on the firm’s internal data, allowing the chatbot to provide more accurate responses. Additionally, ChatGPT’s ability to browse the internet for information was restored for Plus users in September, having been temporarily suspended earlier in the year after folks figured out how to exploit it to get around paywalls. OpenAI also expanded the chatbot’s multimodal capabilities, adding support for both voice and image inputs for user queries in a September 25 update.

Q4: Starring Sam Altman as “Lazarus”

The fourth quarter of 2023 has been a hell of a decade for OpenAI. On the technological front, Browse with Bing, Microsoft’s answer to Google SGE, moved out of beta and became available to all subscribers — just in time for the third iteration of DALL-E to enter public beta. Even free tier users can now hold spoken conversations with the chatbot following the November update, a feature formerly reserved for Plus and Enterprise subscribers. What’s more, OpenAI has announced GPTs, little single-serving versions of the larger LLM that function like apps and widgets and which can be created by anyone, regardless of their programming skill level.

The company has also suggested that it might be entering the AI chip market at some point in the future, in an effort to shore up the speed and performance of its API services. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had previously pointed to industry-wide GPU shortages for the service’s spotty performance. Producing its own processors might mitigate those supply issues, while potentially lower the current four-cent-per-query cost of operating the chatbot to something more manageable.

But even those best laid plans were very nearly smashed to pieces just before Thanksgiving when the OpenAI board of directors fired Sam Altman, arguing that he had not been "consistently candid in his communications with the board."

That firing didn't take. Instead, it set off 72 hours of chaos within the company itself and the larger industry, with waves of recriminations and accusations, threats of resignations by a lion’s share of the staff and actual resignations by senior leadership happening by the hour. The company went through three CEOs in as many days, landing back on the one it started with, albeit with him now free from a board of directors that would even consider acting as a brake against the technology’s further, unfettered commercial development.

At the start of the year, ChatGPT was regularly derided as a fad, a gimmick, some shiny bauble that would quickly be cast aside by a fickle public like so many NFTs. Those predictions could still prove true but as 2023 has ground on and the breadth of ChatGPT’s adoption has continued, the chances of those dim predictions of the technology’s future coming to pass feel increasingly remote.

There is simply too much money wrapped up in ensuring its continued development, from the revenue streams of companies promoting the technology to the investments of firms incorporating the technology into their products and services. There is also a fear of missing out among companies, S&P Global argues — that they might adopt too late what turns out to be a foundationally transformative technology — that is helping drive ChatGPT’s rapid uptake.

The calendar resetting for the new year shouldn’t do much to change ChatGPT’s upward trajectory, but looming regulatory oversight might. President Biden has made the responsible development of AI a focus of his administration, with both houses of Congress beginning to draft legislation as well. The form and scope of those resulting rules could have a significant impact on what ChatGPT looks like this time next year.

Broadcom's mega $61 billion VMware acquisition has closed following considerable scrutiny by regulators, the company announced in a press release. With China recently granting approval for the acquisition with added restrictions, the network chip manufacturer had secured all the required approvals. 

"Broadcom has received legal merger clearance in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, Israel, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and foreign investment control clearance in all necessary jurisdictions," the company said. "We are excited to welcome VMware to Broadcom and bring together our engineering-first, innovation-centric teams."

The Broadcom/VMware deal lacked the glamour of tech's other mega acquisition involving Microsoft and Activision. However, San Jose-based Broadcom's products form the structure of much of the internet, as they're widely used for data centers, cloud providers and network infrastructure. VMware, meanwhile, makes virtualization and cloud computing software that allows corporations to safely link local networks with public cloud access. 

That made VMware a logical target for Broadcom, but it also placed the acquisition in the crosshairs of regulators in multiple regions. The European Commission, for one, was concerned that Broadcom could harm competition by limiting interoperability between rival hardware and VMware's server virtualization software. It also worried the company could either prevent or degrade access to VMware's software, or bundle VMware with its own hardware products.

Broadcom gained EU approval for the deal in the summer though, mainly by providing IP access and source code for key network fiber optic components to its main rival, Marvell. The EU also concluded that fears of VMware bundling were unfounded and that Broadcom would still face competition in the storage adapter and NIC markets. 

There were also concerns that tensions between China and the US could scuttle the deal, after the Biden administration announced new rules in October making it harder to export high-end chips to China. However, approval in that market was announced yesterday, with conditions imposed by China on how Broadcom sells products locally. Namely, it had to ensure that VMware's server software was interoperable with rival hardware, China's regulator said in a statement. 

OpenAI introduced voice chats with ChatGPT on Android and iOS back in September, giving users the option to have actual back-and-forth conversations with the chatbot if they want to. The company only made the feature available to Plus and Enterprise subscribers back then, though, with the promise that it will eventually release it to other groups of users. Now, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman has announced on X that voice conversations on ChatGPT have started rolling out to all free users on mobile. 

When the company first introduced voice chats, it admitted that the capability to create "realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech" presents new risks. It could, for instance, allow bad actors to impersonate public figures or anybody they want. As a result, it decided that ChatGPT's voice feature will focus on conversations. It's powered by a text-to-speech model that can generate "human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech." OpenAI worked with voice actors to create the capability and offers five different voices to choose from. 

We checked our ChatGPT app on Android and have yet to gain access to voice conversations, which indicates that the feature could take sometime before reaching everybody's accounts. It's not quite clear if users have to opt in to be able to access it, but paid subscribers had to enable it by going to Settings and then to New Features when voice chats rolled out. 

Brockman announced the capability's wide release after he had already left his seat as President of OpenAI. He quit of his own accord after the company's board fired Sam Altman as CEO, causing mayhem with senior staff members resigning in protest and the rest of the employees threatening to quit unless he's reinstated. Shortly after he made the announcement, OpenAI announced that Altman and Brockman had been reinstated and will be returning to their posts. 

Good news for hardcore Neon Genesis Evangelion fans who spent $700 (or more) on ASUS' special edition motherboard! The PC maker announced that it will be offering a free fix for the embarrassing typo — "EVANGENLION" instead of "EVANGELION" — on the ROG Maximus Z790 Hero EVA-02 Edition. This will come in the form of a replacement part printed with the correct spelling, so users can directly swap out the original decorative piece. To show that the company understands "the significance of this matter," it's also extending the warranty by one year, even though "the misprint is purely aesthetic and does not affect any functionality or performance."

Meanwhile, the offending typo has already disappeared from ASUS' website, but you can still spot the extra "n" in the original product shots on Amazon and Micro Center.

The Steam Deck OLED aren't the only new handheld gaming variants you can snap up this week. The Analogue Pocket will soon be available in eight fresh colorways. Analogue says they're color matched and manufactured in eight classic Game Boy Pocket and Game Boy Advance colors: blue, green, indigo, spice orange, pink, red, silver and yellow. They all look just lovely.

Pre-orders will open up on November 17 at 11AM ET on Analogue's website. The company will start shipping these models on November 20. So, if you want to gift one of these versions to a (very special) someone this holiday season, it should arrive with plenty of time to spare.

However, you'll surely need to act fast if you want one of these Classic Limited Editions. As with other special-edition Pockets, these will probably all be snapped up quickly. The Glow in the Dark model sold out in just two minutes. Even so, the limited-edition models may be your best chance of getting an Analogue Pocket anytime soon. The standard version is rarely in stock, and even when it is, it often takes quite some time to ship.

Researchers at the Zurich-based ETH public university, along with a US-based startup affiliated with MIT, have done the impossible. They’ve printed a robot hand complete with bones, ligaments and tendons for the very first time, representing a major leap forward in 3D printing technology. It’s worth noting that the various parts of the hand were printed simultaneously, and not cobbled together after the fact.

Each of the robotic hand’s various parts were made from different polymers of varying softness and rigidity, using a new laser-scanning technique that lets 3D printers create “special plastics with elastic qualities” all in one go. This obviously opens up new possibilities in the fast-moving field of prosthetics, but also in any field that requires the production of soft robotic structures.

Basically, the researchers developed a method to 3D print slow-curing plastics, whereas the technology was previously reserved for fast-curing plastics. This hybrid printing method presents all kinds of advantages when compared to standard fast-cure projects, such as increased durability and enhanced elastic properties. The tech also allows us to mimic nature more accurately, as seen in the aforementioned robotic hand.

“Robots made of soft materials, such as the hand we developed, have advantages over conventional robots made of metal. Because they’re soft, there is less risk of injury when they work with humans, and they are better suited to handling fragile goods,” ETH Zurich robotics professor Robert Katzschmann writes in the study.

ETH Zurich/Thomas Buchner

This advancement still prints layer-by-layer, but an integrated scanner constantly checks the surface for irregularities before telling the system to move onto the next material type. Additionally, the extruder and scraper have been updated to allow for the use of slow-curing polymers. The stiffness can be fine-tuned for creating unique objects that suit various industries. Making human-like appendages is one use case scenario, but so is manufacturing objects that soak up noise and vibrations. 

MIT-affiliated startup Inkbit helped develop this technology and has already begun thinking about how to make money off of it. The company will soon start to sell these newly-made printers to manufacturers but will also sell complex 3D-printed objects that make use of the technology to smaller entities. 

In the US, Apple’s iMessage is so popular that the fact it shows texts from non-iOS handsets in a different color is a big deal. This status anxiety is so great, the Android world has begged regulators to force Apple to… change the color of a text bubble. Now, Nothing is taking matters into its own hands, partnering with unified messaging platform Sunbird to hide that shame. Sunbird uses your Apple ID to route comms between your Nothing phone and your friends’ iPhones through a server farm of Mac Minis. If it works as well as promised, it means your friends won’t know you own an Android handset… until the next time you see them in person.

Of course, none of this is happening with Apple’s blessing, so it needs a workaround. You need to hand over your credentials to a third party and risk the fallout should Apple decide to intervene. Nothing CEO Carl Pei believes Apple can’t risk the bad PR if it shuts Sunbird down, but that’s not a bet I’d like to take. It’s worth saying this is almost unique to the US — most of the world just uses third-party platforms like WhatsApp. Not to mention if your friends give you grief because of the phone you own, they aren’t your friends.

— Dan Cooper

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Android has long had an iMessage problem. In the US, Apple’s proprietary chat platform reigns supreme, particularly among teens. In fact, many Americans won’t switch for fear of the perceived social stigma that comes with the green chat bubbles iMessage assigns to messages from Android phones. Google has tried a few different things to convince Apple to open the platform, including turning to the European Commission for regulatory relief. For most Android users, that's meant there's been little they've been personally able to do about the situation. Until now.    

Nothing today announced Nothing Chats, a messaging app that supports both RCS and iMessage. Nothing Chats builds on Sunbird, a unified messaging platform that has been available in closed beta since the end of last year. Sunbird allows users to access all of their chats, including iMessage, from a single interface. As of this past April, the app had a waitlist more than 100,000 entries long. Sunbird is one of a few apps that Android users can turn to chat with their iPhone-touting friends. The most well-known player in the space is Beeper, which is the brainchild of Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky.

Nothing

With Friday’s release of Chats, Nothing isn’t just promising to allow Phone 2 owners to “camouflage” themselves as iPhone users. Out of the box, Chats will ship with support for many of iMessage’s signature features, including typing indicators, high-resolution media sharing and proper group messaging. Read receipts and Tapback reactions will arrive at a later date. As mentioned above, Chats also supports RCS, meaning you can enjoy iMessage-like features when messaging your Android friends too.

“We understand that the blue bubble vs. green bubble dilemma, especially in North America — although seemingly ridiculous — is real. Nothing Chats allows for freedom of communication between anyone regardless of their brand of smartphone - which is how it should be,” said Nothing CEO Carl Pei. “We want to remind consumers that they do have a choice when it comes to device selection and that their daily behaviors should not be dictated by any one company.”

So, what’s the catch? “There’s no data saved on the platform, so users don’t have to worry about their privacy,” Pei told Inverse. But there are some concerns. Sunbird, like Beeper, employs a workaround that Apple doesn’t officially support, and that the company would almost certainly argue puts users at risk. Nothing told Inverse Sunbird’s “patented” process for bringing iMessage to Android involves server farms of Mac minis that route a user’s messages through to Apple.

Before someone can access iMessage on Nothing Chats, they must first sign into their Apple ID through Sunbird’s platform. Nothing told Inverse all iMessage content sent through Chats is encrypted, and that “at no point can Sunbird access your messages or Apple ID.” Additionally, Nothing notes the startup will delete a user’s Apple ID credentials after two weeks of inactivity. Still, if you decide to use Nothing Chats to access iMessage, you’re effectively handing over the keys to your Apple ID to a company that isn’t Apple.

Nothing

As for whether Nothing Chats is long for this world: Asked about the possibility of Apple taking legal action against Nothing and Sunbird, Pei told Marques Brownlee he thought the tech giant would “probably [do] nothing.” 

In a separate interview with The Washington Post, Pei said Nothing has sold “about six figures’ worth” of Phone 2 devices in North America, Britain and Europe. In other words, it’s a small fish in a big pond. More importantly, Apple finds itself in a regulatory environment where attempting to shut down a platform that is opening up iMessage would draw the attention of regulators in the European Union and beyond.

Nothing Chats will be available to download from the Play Store starting on November 17. For the time being, a Nothing Phone 2 is required to access the platform, with regional availability limited to the US, Canada, UK, EU and other European countries, including Norway and Switzerland.

Sony has apparently learned nothing from the success of the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck. Or from its own portable systems like the Vita and PSP, for that matter. The PlayStation Portal (yes, technically it's another PSP) is a $200 handheld system that can only stream games from your PlayStation 5. There aren't any built in apps, it can't play anything locally, and there's no connection to Sony's cloud game streaming service. It's purely a streaming window into your PS5, hence the name.

Consequently, it's also a device that lives and dies based on the quality of your internet connection. While it's mostly meant for in-home play, you could technically hop on any Wi-Fi connection to play remotely when you're traveling. But that's only possible if that connection and your home internet can keep up, and if your PS5 doesn't crash or get wonky. If anything along that chain fails, you're left with an ugly $200 doorstop.

That's the main problem with the PlayStation Portal. Its downsides are so immediately apparent, it's unclear why anyone should get one. You could, for example, spend $100 for a Backbone controller to stream games from your phone. Or you could use any existing gamepad to access the PS Remote app on a phone, table, Mac or Windows PC. There are so many better ways to access games on the go, the PlayStation Portal already felt obsolete before it launched.

Even its design seems haphazard: It's as if Sony chopped up a DualSense controller and shoved a basic 8-inch tablet in the middle. In place of the DualSense's center touchpad, you can tap and swipe on the Portal's screen (a process that was never as smooth as I wanted). On the bright side, the Portal includes the DualSense's satisfying haptics, and its sci-fi-ish black and white case looks right at home alongside the PlayStation 5.

Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

Holding the PlayStation Portal feels like holding an oversized DualSense controller. My hands and fingers were perfectly comfortable, but the 8-inch screen throws off the balance. I also couldn't help but notice how fragile the bottom corners of the screen were. It really does look like a tablet, with thick bezels and a relatively thin profile. But unlike the Switch, Steam Deck or even PlayStation Vita, there's nothing protecting the lower part of the Portal's screen from a hard drop, or from being crushed inside of a backpack. (Sony isn't selling a Portal case of its own, but you can find some from third-parties.)

I'm sure the controller arms would offer some protection for many falls, but I couldn't help treating the system with kid gloves during my testing. I didn't let my 5-year old daughter handle it during my review, even though I feel comfortable letting her hold a Switch. Perhaps this is just my paranoid dad brain speaking, but the Portal's screen is practically asking to be damaged — it's like getting your child an overly-expensive doll and just knowing it's going to lose a limb within a day.

Setting up the PlayStation Portal involves linking it to your PlayStation 5 from within the console, or the PlayStation app. For some reason, my phone (an iPhone 15 Pro Max) had a hard time making out the QR code on the Portal's screen, so I plugged in the pairing code manually. Once that was clear, I sat back and waited for the Portal to connect to my PS5. And I waited. And waited.

Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

Thirty seconds later I received a message saying that I needed to turn on my PS5's Remote Play feature, something I could have sworn I did when reviewing the system. The only problem? I was snuggled in bed, hoping to get some portable Spider-Man 2 time in before I dozed off. Rather than trek down two flights of stairs to reach the PS5 in my basement, I decided to wait until morning. I’ll admit, this was mostly my fault, but it would have been nice to flip on Remote Play from the PlayStation app.

When I got up, I immediately flipped on the feature on my PS5 and proceeded to make breakfast. While my kids were chomping down on pancakes, I turned on the PS Portal and tried to connect to my PS5 — once again, I waited. About a minute later, I finally heard a successful chime from the system and was presented with my PlayStation 5's home screen. But when I tried to get a game of Thumper going, all I saw was a sea of video compression artifacts. The game's normally fluid controls felt like mud. I gave up after five minutes of frustration.

Here's where I need to reiterate that your experience with the PlayStation Portal comes down to your home's internet setup. Sony recommends having a connection of at least 5Mbps, and it suggests 15Mbps for better quality. But raw internet speed is just one factor: You also have to consider the age and networking technology in your router, as well as Wi-Fi reception throughout your home. For the best possible experience, you'll want a modern router (or even better, a mesh setup) that can bathe your home in full wireless bars, as well as a direct Ethernet connection for your PS5. (Sony isn't saying if the PS Portal supports Wi-Fi 6, but that's a technology worth investing in if you have an older router.)

What's confusing, though, is that I have pretty great internet throughout my home. I'm using AT&T's gigabit service with a modern Wi-Fi 6 gateway on my first floor, and there's a mesh extension for my office in the basement. I typically see full wireless reception on my main floor, with speeds between 600 and 800Mbps on most devices. So why was the PlayStation Portal having such a rough time? I have no clue. My PS5, which sits in the basement, isn’t connected via Ethernet. But I also see 500Mbps speeds down there, so it didn't seem necessary. During breakfast, I was sitting about 20 unobstructed feet from my router, so there wasn't much physical interference either.

When I moved to my living room later in the day, which is also where my router sits, the Portal was able to connect to my PS5 in around 15 seconds. I spun up Spider-Man 2 and crossed my fingers. For whatever reason, it loaded up just fine and I was able to play for an hour with my daughter curled up beside me. That was the first time I could actually see the potential of this thing. My daughter and I have been gaming together a lot, but only with portable systems we can use together in bed or on the couch. It would take a lot more effort to bring her into my basement home theater, and frankly, she'd probably be bored there.

Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

So there we were, swinging through NYC streets as Peter Parker and Miles Morales, and it felt like magic. Spider-Man 2 appeared to be running at 60fps on the Portal in performance mode, and it was perfectly fine. Colors certainly didn't pop as they do on my Switch OLED, and it couldn't hold a candle to the Steam Deck's new 90Hz OLED HDR screen, but it was still decently immersive without many video artifacts. The controls felt just as responsive as the DualSense, and its haptic rumble felt powerful and nuanced (certainly more so than the Switch or Steam Deck).

Moving up to my bedroom later in the day (one floor above the router, two floors above the basement) we were able to clock another 30 minutes in Spider-Man 2 with only occasional hiccups. Thankfully, the game automatically paused in those instances, similar to what you'd see if your DualSense controller lost power during normal gameplay. Every time we disconnected, I couldn't help but look over at the Switch OLED and Steam Deck, handhelds that can actually play games offline without a sweat.

During a recent grocery run, I brought the Portal along just to test the limits of its remote connectivity. To my surprise, I was able to tether it to my phone (using Verizon's 5G ultra-wideband network) and launch Spider-Man 2 just fine. The game looked far less clear than when I was at home, naturally, but I could still make out enough to explore the city and take on a few side missions.

Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

So sure, the Portal isn't entirely useless on the go, but you're risking a lot if it's your only portable gaming option. You still couldn't use it on a plane — even if the internet was fast enough, network latency would be abysmal — and hotel Wi-Fi is notoriously unreliable. Meanwhile, you could play Tears of the Kingdom on Switch or Baldur's Gate 3 on the Steam Deck without issue. (Power is a concern, but planes often have outlets and both systems can be charged with portable battery packs.)

When I got back home, my daughter was excited to see more of Mile's story in Spider-Man 2. But for whatever reason, the Portal refused to connect to my PS5 while we were sitting in bed, even though it worked just fine there the night before. We didn't have enough time to run downstairs and reset the PS5, so we resorted to playing Dave the Diver on the Steam Deck instead.

I can't abide hardware I can't trust, and the PlayStation Portal is among the most fickle devices I've encountered. Even if you have an excellent home networking setup, it’s hard to predict just how well it will perform. That’s a shame, since its battery life is among the best we’ve seen for a portable system, lasting between seven and eight hours of gameplay. (The one bright side to being a streaming only device? It’s basically just decoding incoming video.)

Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

There are other annoyances too, like the Portal’s complete lack of Bluetooth support. You can connect a pair of Sony's $200 Pulse Explore earbuds, but that's your only wireless option. Otherwise, you'll have to plug in wired headphones at the bottom of the Portal, or deal with the system’s anemic speakers. Sony likely wanted to keep the Portal's price down, but losing Bluetooth feels like the Sony of yore forcing people to buy their proprietary Memory Sticks, instead of using SD cards like everyone else.

Despite its many downsides, I'm sure some PlayStation fans will jump on the Portal. Engadget Executive Editor Aaron Souppouris was excited about the prospect of playing PS5 games in bed, while Deputy Editor Nathan Ingraham was intrigued about playing on the couch when his TV was occupied. And based on my time with it, I can see the Portal's limited appeal — but not for $200.

As someone who genuinely loved the PlayStation Vita, it's disappointing to see Sony delivering a bare minimum portable system. I'm not expecting the Vita 2, but at least give us true cloud gaming.

Wearable startup Humane has officially unveiled its first device, the Ai Pin. For months, the company has drip fed information, only offering a glimpse of the device, wielded by Naomi Campbell, of all people, at Paris Fashion Week in October.

The Ai Pin is a pocket-worn wearable AI assistant that can reportedly perform the tasks our current phones and voice assistants do, but without a screen, instead operating primarily through voice commands and, occasionally, a virtual screen projected onto the user’s hand. It works independently of other devices, connected to its own phone network through T-Mobile, but on Humane’s own MVNO because that’s even more complicated.

The device will cost $700, and another $24 per month for unlimited talk, text and data, and will ship in early 2024.

Humane

We’re still waiting for deeper hands-on impressions and demonstrations of the technology. I’m skeptical, and not just because it’s been just over ten years since Google Glass tried to be a thing.

Have a great weekend, and make sure you check out our new TMA series on YouTube, where I try to make more work for our wonderful video team, every Saturday.

— Mat Smith

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