Google is rolling out a trio of system updates to Android, Wear OS and Google TV devices. Each brings new features to associated gadgets. Android devices, like smartphones, are getting updated Emoji Kitchen sticker combinations. You can remix emojis and share with friends as stickers via Gboard.

Google Messages for Android is getting a nifty little refresh. There’s a new beta feature that lets users add a unique background and an animated emoji to voice messages. Google’s calling the software Voice Moods and says it’ll help users better express how they’re “feeling in the moment.” Nothing conveys emotion more than a properly-positioned emoji. There are also new reactions for messages that go far beyond simple thumbs ups, with some taking up the entire screen. In addition, you’ll be able to change chat bubble colors.

The company’s also adding an interesting tool that provides AI-generated image descriptions for those with low-vision. The TalkBack feature will read aloud a description of any image, whether sourced from the internet or a photo that you took. Google’s even adding new languages to its Live Caption feature, enhancing the pre-existing ability to take phone calls without needing to hear the speaker. Better accessibility is always a good thing.

Wear OS is getting a bunch of little updates. You can control more smart home devices and light groups directly from a watch, which comes in handy when creating mood lighting. You can also tell your smart home devices that you are home or away with a tap. There’s a new Assistant Routines feature that automates daily tasks and an Assistant At a Glance shortcut on the watch face that displays information relevant to your day, like the weather and traffic data.

As for Google TV, there are ten new free channels to choose from, bringing the grand total to well over 800. None of these channels require an additional subscription, but they will have commercials. All of these updates begin rolling out today, but it could be a few weeks before they hit everyone’s inbox.

Google is rolling out a string of updates for the Messages app, including the ability to customize the colors of the text bubbles and backgrounds. So, if you really want to, you can have blue bubbles in your Android messaging app. You can have a different color for each chat, which could help prevent you from accidentally leaking a secret to family or friends.

With the help of on-device Google AI (meaning you'll likely need a recent Pixel device to use this feature), you can transform photos into reactions with Photomoji. All you need to do is pick a photo, decide which object (or person or animal) you'd like to turn into a Photomoji and hit the send button. These reactions will be saved for later use, and friends in the chat can use any Photomoji you send them as well.

The new Voice Moods feature allows you to apply one of nine different vibes to a voice message, by showing visual effects such as heart-eye emoji, fireballs (for when you're furious) and a party popper. Google says it has also upgraded the quality of voice messages by bumping up the bitrate and sampling rate.

In addition, there are more than 15 Screen Effects you can trigger by typing things like "It's snowing" or "I love you." These will make "your screen erupt in a symphony of colors and motion," Google says. Elsewhere, Messages will display animated effects when certain reactions and emoji are used.

Google

On top of all of that, users will now be able to set up a profile that appends their name and photo to their phone number to help them have more control over how they appear across Google services. The company says this feature could help when it comes to receiving messages from a phone number that isn't in your group chats. It could help you know the identity of everyone in a group chat too.

Some of these features will be available in beta starting today in the latest version of Google Messages. Google notes that some feature availability will depend on market and device.

Google is rolling out these updates alongside the news that more than a billion people now use Google Messages with RCS enabled every month. RCS (Rich Communication Services) is a more feature-filled and secure format of messaging than SMS and MMS. It supports features such as read receipts, typing indicators, group chats and high-res media. Google also offers end-to-end encryption for one-on-one and group conversations via RCS.

For years, Google had been trying to get Apple to adopt RCS for improved interoperability between Android and iOS. Apple refused, perhaps because iMessage (and its blue bubbles) have long been a status symbol for its users. However, likely to ensure Apple falls in line with European Union regulations, Apple has relented. The company recently said it would start supporting RCS in 2024.

If you’ve long dreamed of watching a very small number of vehicles roll off an assembly line, today’s your chance. Tesla is holding a livestream event to highlight deliveries of its long-awaited Cybertruck. The company has only managed to manufacture ten of them so far, despite a 2019 reveal, so that’s what we’ll be watching.

You can catch the Texas-based livestream on X, of course, but the event is also available via Tesla’s website. It all goes down at 3PM EST. Being as how there will only be ten trucks to show off, the livestream should also go over pertinent details regarding battery range, towing capacity, up-to-date pricing and, of course, general availability. Tesla plans on ramping up production in 2024 for the cute lil dystopian wonder cars.

It’s easy to make jokes at the automaker’s expense, given the recent history of its CEO, but this is something of a big deal. It’s Tesla’s first truck, despite looking nothing like a classic pickup. The aesthetics are absolutely wild, with it resembling something out of a 1970s sci-fi flick instead of something you’d spot at a tailgate party. As for performance, it remains to be seen if the Cybertruck can compete with rival vehicles in the off-road market.

Tesla’s Cybertruck has been plagued with issues from inception. During its 2019 product debut, Elon Musk crowed about the unbreakable glass window and invited a customer to try to break it by hurling a bowling ball. Well, it shattered, leading to a muttered curse from the embattled CEO. Despite that embarrassment, the company still says the vehicle boasts a “nearly impenetrable” exoskeleton that resists dents, damage and long-term corrosion. We shall see. There have been multiple delays and a redesign back in 2020.

There’s also the matter of price. When it was first revealed, the Cybertruck was set to cost around $40,000. However, the company’s been fairly silent on the subject since then and a lot has changed since 2019. You can reserve a vehicle right now from Tesla by plopping down $100, but who knows when actual shipments will start. Despite that, Musk recently told investors that it has accrued more than one million reservations. Those folks will be waiting a while, as even generous estimates allow for Tesla to manufacture around 200,000 Cybertrucks each year.

The real question. Will Joe Rogan be one of the ten lucky golden ticket holders? We just might find out at 3PM EST.

It's getting dark much too early, and that means a lot more time in movies or live streaming with a bright overhead light or frustrating shadows. Logitech's Litra Glow is a fantastic option for ensuring you look good on camera, and right now, it's at a new all-time low price. The light is down to $40 from $60 thanks to a 17 percent off sale and an additional $10 coupon applied at checkout. 

Logitech's Litra Glow is a Premium LED Streaming Light designed for creators and is our recommendation for game-streaming gear that will make you feel like a pro. It clips right onto your computer next to its webcam with three-way mounting, letting you adjust its height, tilt and rotation. The light is USB-powered, so you'll want room for its cord to hide behind your monitor.

The Litra Glow is equipped with Truesoft technology, so you won't just have a painfully bright light in your face. You can also adjust the light's brightness and temperature (a great tool for warm light fans) based on the time of day and personal preference. You can make these changes using manual controls or Logitech's app.

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

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.

As Meta gears up for the 2024 election, the company is grappling with a new challenge that could slow its efforts to combat foreign attempts at election interference. US government agencies have stopped sharing information with the company’s security researchers about covert influence operations on its platform.

Meta says that as of July, the government has “paused” briefings related to foreign election interference, eliminating a key source of information for the company. During a call with reporters, Meta’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher, declined to speculate on the government’s motivations, but the timing lines up with a court order earlier this year that restricted the Biden Administration’s contacts with social media firms.

The order, the result of two states’ attempts to limit platforms' ability to remove misinformation, is currently suspended while the Supreme Court considers the case. But government agencies, like CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency) and the FBI, have apparently opted to keep the “pause” in place.

Gleicher noted that government contacts aren’t Meta’s only source of information, and that the company continues to work with industry researchers and other civil society groups. But he acknowledged that government officials can be best-placed to advise certain kinds of threats, like those that are coordinated on other platforms. “We have seen that particularly-sophisticated threat actors, like nation states, engaged in foreign interference… there are times when government has the capability to identify these campaigns that other players may not,” he said.

Meta’s researchers regularly share details about networks of fake accounts it catches boosting foreign propaganda and conducting other kinds of influence campaigns, what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior” or CIB. And while most of its takedowns don’t come as a result of government tips, the company has relied on them in detecting CIB targeting US politics. Meta acted on three separate FBI tips about fake accounts from Russia, Iran and Mexico ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Law enforcement officials have also expressed concern about the lack of coordination with social media platforms. The FBI previously told the House Judiciary Committee that it had “discovered foreign influence campaigns on social media platforms but in some cases did not inform the companies about them because they were hamstrung by the new legal oversight,” NBC News reported, citing congressional sources.

Meta’s latest comments are the first time the company has publicly confirmed that it is no longer receiving tips about election interference. The disclosure comes as the company ramps up its efforts to prepare for multiple elections in 2024, and the inevitable attempts to manipulate political conversations on Facebook. The company said in its latest report on CIB that China is now the third-most common source of coordinated inauthentic behavior on its platform, behind Russia and Iran.

Meta has decided to play ball with the European Union's online services regulations in order to bring Threads to its member countries. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta will make Threads available across Europe in December and, in compliance with EU policies, allow users to access the platform without needing to create a profile. 

Threads first launched to most of the world in July as an alternative to Elon Musk's increasingly polarizing X, formerly known as Twitter. Threads reached 100 million users in its first week but has experienced some drop-off. The Meta-owned platform currently has about 73 million active users compared to X's 365 million.

An expansion into the EU will undoubtedly grow Thread's global engagement, but time will tell how fast and to what extent. In October, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that Threads could see a reach of one billion users in the next few years. Instagram, which people can use to make a Threads account quickly, has over two billion active users but didn't hit the one billion mark until eight years after launch. Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has also announced that deleting your Threads account will no longer delete your associated Instagram account — another point of contention.

Starting December 1, 2023 (that’s tomorrow), Google will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years. The company says it's doing so for privacy reasons: “If an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised,” Google noted in May 2023. “This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised.” Google will warn users before deletion via emails sent to the inactive account and another email, provided one has been set up.

Even if you don’t need the account, it might be best to login and check you’re not going to miss anything — there might be important information somewhere in msmith.teamnaruto@gmail.com. No spam, please.

— Mat

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Elon Musk to companies that pulled ads from X: 'Go fuck yourself’

It was a fun, very mature tirade at an NYT event.

Elon Musk, seeing his financially precarious X could lose another $75 million in ad revenue following his boosting of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, has a fresh new message for advertisers pulling away from the platform: “Go fuck yourself.”

While Musk again denied being antisemitic, he expressed some regret for engaging with the tweet that resulted in another exodus of advertisers from X. “I should have not replied to that particular person… I essentially handed a loaded gun to those who hate me,” Musk said.

Continue reading.

EVs are way more unreliable than gas-powered cars

Consumer Reports’ data indicates plug-in hybrids are even worse.

Engadget

Consumer Reports has published an extensive ranking of vehicle reliability, and the results pour cold water on the dependability of EVs and plug-in hybrids. The survey says electric vehicles suffer from 79 percent more maintenance issues than gas- or diesel-powered ones, while plug-in hybrids have 146 percent more problems. The troubles portray the industry’s growing pains with the relatively new technology. Lexus came out on top among EV brands. All but one of its models scored above average or better in CR’s ratings. Toyota also did well, including the 4Runner SUV, which CR describes as “among the most reliable models in the survey.”

Continue reading.

ChatGPT revealed real phone numbers and email addresses after a ‘silly’ attack

The chatbot was asked to repeat random words forever.

A team of researchers was able to make ChatGPT reveal some of the bits of data it has been trained on by asking it to repeat random words forever. In response, ChatGPT churned out random words, yes, but also shared people’s private information, including email addresses and phone numbers. When the researchers asked ChatGPT to “repeat the word ‘poem’ forever,” the chatbot initially complied, but then revealed an email address and a cellphone number for a real founder and CEO. OpenAI patched the vulnerability on August 30, the researchers say. But in our own tests, Engadget was able to replicate the attack, asking ChatGPT to repeat the word “reply” forever, which resulted, eventually, in revealing someone’s name and Skype ID.

Continue reading.

Spotify Wrapped returns to reveal your 2023 streaming stats

For the first time in a while, you can access it on desktop.

Spotify

Spotify is revealing all of the artists, genres, songs and podcasts you listened to most in the last 12 months, even if it’s going to make you cringe. The 2023 installment of the streaming service's Wrapped year-in-review debuted yesterday on the Spotify app, with an all-new design alongside the familiar story-style format. This year, the company will assign one of 12 "listening characters" that best fits your streaming habit. The feature is called Me in 2023, and those "characters" range from the Shapeshifter, someone who moves from one artist to another quickly, to the Alchemist, someone more likely to create their own playlists.

Continue reading.

Amazon now has its own AI image generator

AWS users can try out Titan Image Generator.

Amazon has its own image generator. AWS customers can now check out a preview of Titan Image Generator on the Bedrock console. They can either enter a text prompt to create an image from scratch or upload an image and edit it. Amazon says the tool can produce large volumes of studio-quality realistic images at low cost. Users can also isolate areas in which they want to add or remove details. Amazon also recently revealed its own business-centric chatbot, Q.

Continue reading.

Social media's negative impact on children's and young adults' mental health has been a growing cause of concern for parents and lawmakers. Now, the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X are set to testify in front of the US Senate Judiciary Committee on "their failure to protect children online." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew are willing participants. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Discord CEO Jason Citron and X CEO Linda Yaccarino are testifying after being subpoenaed.

Senator Dick Durbin, chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham, its ranking member, released a statement expressing their frustration with Snap, Discord, and X's initial refusal to have their CEOs participate and even accept the subpoenas. In Discord's case, US Marshals visited their offices to serve the document. 

The senators further shared a feeling of hypocrisy at these platforms wanting a say in policy but fighting against getting involved in discussions. "When we held our first hearing on protecting children online with experts and advocates earlier this year, Big Tech griped about not getting an invitation. We promised them that their time would come," Durbin and Graham stated. "We've known from the beginning that our efforts to protect children online would be met with hesitation from Big Tech. They finally are being forced to acknowledge their failures when it comes to protecting kids. Now that all five companies are cooperating, we look forward to hearing from their CEOs. Parents and kids demand action." 

The Judiciary Committee has focused on this issue a great deal throughout the year, approving bills that would force online platforms to take more responsibility in protecting children (and be more transparent in their efforts) and improve reporting of online child sexual exploitation, among other steps. The hearing with the CEOs from the five tech giants was originally set for December but will now take place on January 31, 2024, at 10 AM ET. 

Fresh off successful contract negotiations with Ford, GM and Stellantis, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is seeking to unionize 150,000 workers across 13 automakers including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes Benz and Hyundai, it announced. "To all the autoworkers out there working without the benefits of a union: now it’s your turn," said UAW president Shawn Fain. 

The UAW said the organizing drive covers "more than a dozen" non-union automakers. It notes that many use a mix of full-time, temporary and contract employees "to divide the workforce and depress wages." The union cited one example of a Hyundai assembly plant employee who worked for a subcontractor for eight years starting at $9.25 an hour before finally becoming a full-time Hyundai employee. 

Non-union automakers, including VW, Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, Toyota and Subaru raised wages after the UAW's negotiations with the big three. VW, for one, bumped them to $23.42 an hour, rising to a maximum of $32.40. However, they "lag far behind UAW autoworkers in wages, benefits and rights on the job," the union said.

The UAW helped workers win a 25 percent raise over four years with the big three automakers, with the highest-paid Ford workers now earning $83,000 per year for a 40-hour work week (around $42 per hour). The union also gained reinstatement of cost-of-living allowances, shorter progression periods to top wages and a quicker conversion of temporary to in-progression (full-time) employees. 

Tesla employees have attempted to unionize the company before, and some alleged that the company fired them for that — though that claim was recently dismissed by the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The NLRB has previously found that Tesla violated labor law by prohibiting employees from talking about workplace matters. Back in 2022, Elon Musk challenged the UAW to hold a vote at Tesla's California factory.

Other automakers aren't exempt from worker complaints, including startup Rivian. "The company likes to tell us we’re making the plane while flying it, and that explains a lot about the problems we have," said one Rivian chassis worker. "We have all sorts of safety issues. Turnover is terrible. Every group has a story about a new employee who did not make it to first break. The lack of safety, the low pay, the forced overtime, there are so many reasons we need to be union."