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Credit: Nick Walton

What will video games be like when they can truly harness the power of AI? If the machine learning-powered text adventure AI Dungeon 2 is anything to go by, they’ll be open-ended, ludicrously silly, and bags of fun to play.

AI Dungeon 2 isn’t exactly a polished game, but more of a passion project from developer Nick Walton. He’s harnessed the power of a state-of-the-art, open-source text generation system built by OpenAI and fed it a bunch of texts in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure books. The result is a text adventure where, to modify a cliché, the only limit is the AI’s imagination.

You can play AI Dungeon 2 for yourself here. Once you’ve gone through a bit of…

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This genius combination of Christmas string lights and phone charger borders the line between kitschy and adorable, but I first saw it on Apartment Therapy, and I trust their judgment when it comes to cute items. It’s a 50-inch USB cable that comes in a Lightning charger cable version for iPhones, Micro USB for Android phones, and USB-C. And it is freakin’ delightful.

Is it worth buying a $12 charger from a random Amazon store that describes itself as, “Our brand name is: Cewuidy. Our seller’s name is YAGE TALE .”? That’s for you to decide, but for me, it is absolutely worth it. Reviewers say the lights won’t get hot even after being plugged in for 12 hours, and that it’s not absolute garbage because it still works after a year! The…

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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg

Google Assistant is getting a few new skills to make the virtual assistant more useful, adding the option to share photos directly through voice commands, search for podcasts based on a specific topic, and integrate with more note-keeping apps like Any.do, AnyList, and Bring.

Podcast search is the simplest addition. Just ask Assistant to “find a podcast about holiday cooking” or “show me podcasts about New Year’s resolutions,” and Google will suggest episodes for you to listen.

Photo sharing also works the way you’d expect: you can pull up pictures by asking Google to show you a specific person or date, select your favorites, and then ask Google to send them to a friend. The new part here is the voice commands: instead of navigating the…

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Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

The Vergecast is back after a Thanksgiving break and our Pirate Radio series with a new tech news roundup for the week. This week’s theme: billionaires doing weird billionaire things.

Dieter Bohn, Casey Newton, Andrew Hawkins, and Paul Miller begin the show discussing Tesla’s event when it unveiled its new electric pickup truck “the Cybertruck,” as well as Ford revealing its first electric Mustang. Who among the crew is on board for this weird billionaire thing?

In the second half of the show, deputy editor Liz Lopatto joins us from Los Angeles where she is covering Elon Musk’s defamation trial regarding Musk’s bad tweets. Liz explains how this lawsuit came to be and what has happened at the trial so far.

There’s a whole lot more in…

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Disney+ has quickly become the only streaming service people want to talk about in the weeks since it launched, and a big part of that is because of The Mandalorian; specifically, the existence of one Baby Yoda.

The Mandalorian is an incredibly fun, well-crafted show on its own, and Baby Yoda is undeniably wholesome and adorable. Baby Yoda also happens to represent countless dollars in merchandise sales down the road, and The Mandalorian will soon include marketing for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Disney is partially using the show to do what it has always done best: market.

If a Disney property is really successful, it won’t just make $1 billion at the box office, pull in millions of subscribers or viewers every week, and make…

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Image: Netflix

There’s an inevitability to Marriage Story, a feeling of something like gravity: all-encompassing and firm, easy to forget it’s there as it slowly repels instead of attracts. Perhaps it’s due to director Noah Baumbach’s intimate direction and script, which, despite its wrenching subject matter, plays like a rom-com. There’s sharp dialogue, rich with double entendre and implied history, that’s delivered with an energy that makes it a real shame that it’s in the service of people falling apart, not coming together. Lines layer on top of and under one another, delivered with the easy rhythm of people who know each other intimately. The camera gets close, and we get to see them look at each other in ways that words fail to describe.

At the…

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Nobody games alone anymore. That’s never been strictly the case, anyway. Video games have always been relatively social, despite the old basement-dwelling, Cheeto-stained stereotypes. It’s 2019: we’re all gamers now. Part of that is because video games are more accessible now than they ever have been — smartphones are just tiny consoles! — but another part of it is also that games are more visible now. They go viral just like everything else does. (Honk!) That second bit, however, is relatively new. Games are more visible because the way we share them with each other has changed. And a big reason for that is the PlayStation 4.

It all started with the console’s design. Back in 2010, according to our friends over at Polygon, its designers…

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