Chevy's electrified ZR1X is the quickest Corvette ever.
We're barely recovered from meeting the 2025 Corvette ZR1, and now Chevrolet has announced a regenerative hybrid variant (no plugging in here), dubbed the ZR1X. This 2026 Corvette model takes the E-Ray's EV modes and all wheel drive setup, turns up the horsepower, and puts it in a package with the ZR1's LT7 V8, along with some other tweaks for maximizing performance on the road or the track.
This 'true American hypercar' with 1,250 horsepower will go from zero to 60 mph in under two seconds, GM estimates. No price announced yet.
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Razer Pro Click V2 Vertical Review: A Stellar Ergonomic Mouse
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The packaging feels like Razer spent significant effort designing it, but it's understated in a way that sets the tone for a professional rather than a gaming audience. Razer's usual neon green is absent. The box is minimal, with clean typography and a soft matte finish. Inside, the mouse is snugly cradled, accompanied by a USB-A wireless dongle and a USB-C-to-USB-A charging cable. There is no unnecessary clutter, which speaks to the product's seriousness. Holding the mouse for the first time confirms that impression. It weighs a substantial 5.29 ounces without feeling heavy, a balance that immediately suggests quality. The matte white plastic body feels smooth, and the soft-touch gray thumb rest offers a stable anchor point. The aesthetic leans toward modern and unobtrusive, fitting neatly into a professional desktop setup without drawing attention. The Pro Click V2's most defining feature is its vertical orientation. It places your hand in a handshake-like position rather than flat on the desk. That orientation reduces forearm pronation and shifts the load off the wrist joint, one of the key contributors to repetitive strain injuries. While vertical mice can sometimes feel like ergonomic experiments, Razer's design is confident. The angle is steep enough to relieve strain but not so extreme that it feels unnatural, placing your hand in a natural handshake position. After a brief adjustment period, it becomes second nature. Over the course of initial testing, the ergonomic benefits become apparent, with reduced wrist tension compared with traditional mice. The button layout is intuitive. Left- and right-click buttons, a clickable scroll wheel, a DPI toggle on top, and multiple side buttons form the core controls. Each button feels well-placed, with crisp, satisfying clicks. Even the scroll wheel has just the right amount of resistance. Nothing feels loose or under-engineered. 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Sam Altman said none of his 'best people' at OpenAI were enticed by Meta's $100 million signing bonuses
Meta tried to recruit OpenAI's top talent with $100 million signing bonuses, says Sam Altman. Altman said that so far, "none of our best people have decided to take them up on that." Meta recently made a $15 billion investment in data-labeling firm Scale AI. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said Meta's attempts to poach his best staff with generous signing bonuses were not successful. Altman talked about the competition OpenAI faces from Meta on his brother's podcast "Uncapped with Jack Altman," in an episode that aired on Tuesday. "I've heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor, and I think it is rational for them to keep trying. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they've hoped," Altman said of Meta's $15 billion investment in data-labeling firm Scale AI. But Altman said he found it "crazy" when Meta tried to recruit OpenAI's employees by offering them $100 million signing bonuses if they jumped ship. "I'm really happy that at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," Altman said. "People sort of look at the two paths and say, 'Alright, OpenAI's got a really good shot, a much better shot actually, delivering on superintelligence and also may eventually be the more valuable company,'" he continued. Meta has a $1.77 trillion market capitalization, and OpenAI was last valued at $300 billion in March. Altman said Meta's approach of growing its talent pool by dangling eye-watering pay packages could come at the expense of its culture. "The strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they're focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don't think that's going to set up a great culture," Altman said. "There's many things I respect about Meta as a company, but I don't think they are a company that's like great at innovation," he added. The hunt for AI talent has been heating up as companies seek to dominate the field. Aravind Srinivas, the founder and CEO of AI search startup Perplexity, said in a March 2024 episode of the "Invest Like The Best" podcast that companies must offer "amazing incentives and immediate availability of compute" if they want to hire AI talent. "I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta, and you know what they said? 'Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,'" Srinivas said, referencing the AI chips made by Nvidia. Naveen Rao, the vice president of AI at Databricks, said in an interview with The Verge last year that there are fewer than 1,000 researchers who are capable of building frontier AI models. "It's like looking for LeBron James," Rao said. "There are just not very many humans who are capable of that." Representatives for OpenAI and Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider
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AI, bot farms and innocent indie victims: how music streaming became a hotbed of fraud and fakery
There is a battle gripping the music business today around the manipulation of streaming services – and innocent indie artists are the collateral damage. Fraudsters are flooding Spotify, Apple Music and the rest with AI-generated tracks, to try and hoover up the royalties generated by people listening to them. These tracks are cheap, quick and easy to make, with Deezer estimating in April that over 20,000 fully AI-created tracks – that's 18% of new tracks – were being ingested into its platform daily, almost double the number in January. The fraudsters often then use bots, AI or humans to endlessly listen to these fake songs and generate revenue, while others are exploiting upload services to get fake songs put on real artists' pages and siphon off royalties that way. Spotify fines the worst offenders and says it puts 'significant engineering resources and research into detecting, mitigating, and removing artificial streaming activity', while Apple Music claims 'less than 1% of all streams are manipulated' on its service. That may sound encouraging, but in a streaming business worth $20.4bn globally (according to the IFPI), it's likely that hundreds of millions of dollars are being skimmed off annually by rogue operators. Part of the problem is that while the barriers of entry for musicians have been dramatically lowered – uploading songs to streaming services is much easier than manufacturing CDs or vinyl – the barriers of entry for fraudsters are lower too. So the industry has declared war, but hair-trigger automated detection systems mean that artists are seeing their music taken offline even when they've done nothing wrong. Darren Owen, chief operating officer of music distribution company Fuga, suggests streaming fraud 'started to blow up across the industry' around 2021. Grappling with it now makes up 50% of his workload. Using AI and machine learning, Fuga gives streaming patterns a 'severity score', separating out 'non-human listening patterns' to spot fraud. 'You're not going to listen to the same song at the same time across multiple devices,' Owen says, noting that countries like India, Vietnam, Thailand and parts of eastern Europe are hotbeds of click-farm activity, using low-paid workers. 'It's become clear that organised criminals are involved in it as well.' It is not just services like in Germany – which was taken offline after a court injunction – and others in Canada and Brazil who are being targeted by record industry trade bodies for offering artificially inflated streams. Universal Music Group (UMG), the biggest record company in the world, has been accused by Drake of conspiring to increase the play count of Kendrick Lamar's diss track Not Like Us, an allegation UMG denies. The Guardian has spoken to multiple artists who found themselves at the sharp end of this war on manipulation, where unexpected spikes in streams get taken as proof of guilt. Darren Hemmings is managing director of music marketing company Motive Unknown and a musician himself. His distributor recently informed him that a track on one EP, having jumped from 'a few plays a day' to more than 1,000, was guilty of manipulation. 'I wouldn't blame them for drawing that conclusion,' he says, but 'it's very judge, jury, executioner'. He did not manipulate the streams, but could not identify the root cause – other than it simply becoming popular with actual listeners. Northern Irish rock band Final Thirteen had some of their music taken off streaming services due to a spike in the tens of thousands. They suspect this came after a play on Radio 1, but their distributor automatically concluded they were manipulated. 'It's really hard for any artist to prove that they didn't [manipulate streams], but it's even harder for Spotify to prove that they did,' says their drummer, Doobes. '[They] take it down and that's it.' Adam J Morgan, who makes music as indie act Naked & Baked, had a track get over 10,000 streams in a week, possibly from use in a TikTok video, but it was zapped by his distributor RouteNote as suspicious. 'I hadn't done anything wrong and they didn't provide any evidence,' he says, believing it was down to an overly anxious RouteNote. 'I spent that weekend trying to work out what was going on, but Spotify said my music hadn't been flagged at all.' RouteNote did not respond to a request for an interview. Takedowns can cause musicians inconvenience, derail marketing and cost them money. Matthew Whiteside, artistic director of experimental classical event The Night With… (and head of the TNW Music label) had three different albums taken down amid claims of artificial streaming. He tracked it back: TNW Music tracks were being added to manipulated playlists. 'It made no sense [why they were added] based on the genre.' His distributor said he could resubmit the album again, at $40 per album, but with no guarantee it would not be removed again. 'Streaming in general is geared against the smaller and the niche,' he says. 'If we get 1,000 streams a month on an album, I'd be very happy.' As such, paying to resubmit an album is beyond their release budget. Deezer claims it was the first streaming service to implement fraud detection systems. 'We look at a lot of indicators that help our algorithm decide if a user is fraudulent or not,' says Thibault Roucou, the company's royalties and reporting director. 'When we ask for a takedown, we look manually at what's happening and we're very confident that it is extreme manipulation.' Unfortunately, systems elsewhere for taking down tracks often presume guilt and the appeals system is so arduous that small acts, already struggling, just give up. Pop singer Levina, who represented Germany at Eurovision in 2017, saw her music taken off streaming services without warning – it was flagged because she unintentionally had the same name as another artist. 'With streaming services, it's almost impossible to [appeal] through them,' she sighs. 'You fill out a form but it leaves you quite powerless.' She is also chair of the artist council within trade body Featured Artists Coalition, and they are finalising 'minimum standards for what distributors should be doing'. She proposes a traffic light warning system that allows acts time to present their defence or take action to address the problems. Streaming services and distributors now accept this battle is about containment rather than total elimination. Owen, however, says the latest iteration is not fraudsters manipulating the streams of a few tracks by large amounts, but rather boosting multiple tracks a small amount to fly under detection radars. For Hemmings, this could result in a two-tier streaming economy, with smaller acts abandoning the main streaming platforms, where earnings are derisory anyway, to focus on a service such as Bandcamp. 'This could provoke a conclusion among large swathes of the independent music community that they're just better off focusing on other ways to make money.'
