Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,000 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

On top of that, he claims that Pearl is significantly less likely to provide misinformation than many other AI search engines—which he believes are likely to deal with “a tidal wave” of lawsuits based on bad answers they give. “Those other players are building amazing technologies. I call them Ferraris or Lamborghinis,” Kurtzig says. “We’re building a Volvo—safety first.”

This pitch about Pearl’s superiority, of course, made me even more keen to try it. Kurtzig seemed so certain that Pearl would still enjoy Section 230 protections. I asked the AI if it agreed.

Pearl said it likely qualifies as an “interactive computer service” under Section 230, which would mean that it’d be shielded from being treated as a publisher, just as Kurtzig suspected. But, the AI went on, “Pearl’s situation is unique because it generates content using AI.” It didn’t have a definitive answer for me after all.

When I asked to speak to a lawyer directly, it rerouted me to JustAnswer, where it asked me to provide the answer I wanted verified. I said I needed to go back and copy the answer, as it was several paragraphs long, but when I navigated back to the Pearl website, the conversation was gone and it had reset to a fresh chat.

When I tried again, this time opening the Pearl browser on desktop, I received a similarly uncertain answer. I decided to trigger a human-fact check; after several minutes, I received the TrustScore™—a measly 3!

Pearl recommended that I seek out an actual expert opinion, porting me to its subscription page. I’d been given a log-in so I didn’t have to pay while I tested the tool. It then connected me with one of its “legal eagle” experts.

Unfortunately, the lawyer’s answers were not clearer than the AI. He noted that there was ongoing legal debate about how Section 230 will apply to AI search engines and other AI tools, but when I asked him to provide specific arguments, he gave a strange answer noting that “most use shell companies or associations to file.”

When I asked for an example of one such shell company—quite confused about what that has to do with a public debate about Section 230—the “legal eagle” asked if I wanted him to put together a package. Even more confused, I said yes. I got a pop-up window indicating that my expert wanted to charge me an additional $165 to dig up the information.

I declined, frustrated.

I then asked Pearl about the history of WIRED. The AI response was serviceable, although basically the same stuff you’ll find on Wikipedia. When I asked for its TrustScore™ I was once again confronted with a 3, suggesting it was not a very good answer. I selected the option to connect with another human expert. This time around, possibly because it was a question about the media and not a straightforward legal or medical topic, it took a while for the expert to appear—well over 20 minutes. When he did, the expert (it was never established what gave him his media bona fides, although his profile indicated he’d been working with JustAnswer since 2010) gave me a remarkably similar answer to the AI. Since I was doing a free test, it didn’t matter, but I would’ve been annoyed if I had actually paid the subscription fee just to get the same mediocre answer from both a human and an AI.

For my last stab at using the service, I went for a straightforward question: how to refinish kitchen floors. This time, things went much more smoothly. The AI returned an adequate answer, akin to a transcript of a very basic YouTube tutorial. When I asked the human expert to assign a TrustScore™, they gave it a 5. It seemed accurate enough, for sure. But—as someone who really does want to DIY refinish my kitchen’s old pine planks—I think when I actually go looking for guidance, I’ll rely on other online communities of human voices, ones that don’t charge $28 a month: YouTube and Reddit.

If you end up testing Pearl, or any other newfangled AI search products, and you have a memorable experience, please do let me know how it went in the comments below the article. You can also reach me by email at kate_knibbs@wired.com. Thanks for reading, and stay warm!

The megapixel race isn’t over if you ask Canon. Today, the company announced a new 35mm full-frame CMOS sensor with a resolution of 410 megapixels. That’s 24,592 x 16,704 pixels and a resolution that’s equivalent to 24K — or 12 times the resolution of 8K and 198 times the resolution of HD.

It’s the ”largest number of pixels ever achieved in a 35mm full-frame sensor,” according to Canon, but don’t expect the company to introduce it on its consumer-ready digital cameras. It’s designed for surveillance, medicine, and other industrial “applications that demand extreme resolution,” and don’t mind paying a small fortune for it.

Thanks to a “redesigned circuitry pattern” and a newly developed “back-illuminated stacked formation in which the pixel segment and signal processing segment are interlayered,” Canon says the sensor has a readout speed of “3,280 megapixels per second,” allowing full-resolution images to be captured at eight frames per second.

Canon will also offer a monochrome version of the sensor with a “four-pixel binning” function that improves low-light sensitivity by treating four nearby pixels as one. Although that reduces its overall resolution, it allows the monochromatic version of the sensor to capture 100-megapixel videos at 24 frames per second.

If you want to maximize your megapixels, you typically need to turn to medium-format or larger sensors and bigger cameras. The Phase One XF IQ4 150MP, for example, can capture images at 150-megapixels. But by putting this much resolution into a 35mm sensor that will be compatible with a wide range of lenses already available for full-frame cameras, Canon says it will help “contribute to the miniaturization of shooting equipment.”

Ati Motors on Wednesday announced a $20 million raise. The funding arrives as the Indian-based autonomous mobile robots (AMR) startup looks toward global expansion. The firm hopes to tap into increased demand for domestic manufacturing in the U.S., India, and Southeast Asian nations, as countries look to lessen their dependence on China.

In 2023, the Indian IT ministry proposed a nationwide policy titled National Strategy for Robotics to position the South Asian nation as a global robotics leader by 2030. The country ranks as the seventh largest robotics market, with a 59% YoY growth in annual industrial robotics installations, with 8,500 units in 2023, per the International Federation of Robotics. However, it still lags significantly behind China, Japan, and the U.S.

“Our competitor is always the status quo, not really another robot,” Saurabh Chandra, founder and CEO of Ati Motors, said in an interview. “Typically, we are displacing manual operation or somebody driving a vehicle or often somebody pushing it by hands.”

The 7-year-old startup, which has a manufacturing and R&D facility in Bengaluru, has developed seven distinct robots, two of which are currently in testing and will be available starting this quarter. The robots can move trolleys, bins, and pallets in a factory or warehouse.

Ati Motors’ robots come with 3D lidar sensors and have spatial awareness. This enables these robots to work even in a tough environment where harsh weather, including rain, can impact manufacturing. The robots can also move on various flooring conditions and even handle gradients, cracks, or oil spills in their path, Chandra told TechCrunch.

“We do the full stack ourselves,” he said. “That has been our USP that we are able to do complete multi-disciplinary engineering.”

Ati Motors has designed the software and hardware for its robots in-house, including their sensor-fusion algorithms. Like many others in the space, the company relies on Nvidia’s Jetson platform for edge computing. It also offers dedicated fleet management software that can work with other companies’ mobile robots to provide customers interoperability.

“The future is such that millions of robots are going to go into factories. No one company is going to make all the millions of robots alone. And should we want to play with other people from day one? Yes,” Chandra said.

Founded in February 2017, Ati Motors started its journey with a tugging robot. However, based on customer feedback and demand, it expanded into pallet movers and lifters.

The startup offers a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model to let companies lease its AMRs. Customers can also buy the systems outright.

Ati Motors says it has deployed “hundreds” of its Sherpa robots across 40 manufacturers as its customers, including Airbus, Ceat Tyres, Forvia, Hyundai, Samsung, and TVS Motor. Of its total customer base, 80% are in the automobile sector and the U.S. dominates its revenues. Therefore, the startup plans to expand its North American presence in Detroit.

The all-equity Series B funding was co-led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and NGP Capital. It also featured existing investors, including True Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, Athera Venture Partners, and Blume Ventures.

• Samsung wants to expand Knox beyond its traditional enterprise remit
• Three tiers are now available with basic plan available on all Samsung Galaxy devices at no extra cost
• Base, Essentials, and Enterprise plans are tailored to address varying levels of security and management needs

Samsung has announced a new update for Knox Suite, its enterprise security and management solution for Galaxy business smartphones.

The updates introduce a tiered plan system, designed to cater to businesses of various sizes across multiple industries, from small businesses with a cybersecurity checklist through large enterprises.

Secondhand phones with TikTok installed are being listed on eBay for thousands of dollars. And it appears that some people might actually be buying them.

Despite US president Donald Trump signing an executive order on Monday delaying any potential ban of the social media app for 75 days, TikTok remains absent from all US app stores—with Apple and Google giving no hints on whether it will return. That means if you are in America and delete the app or lose your phone, you are currently locked out, with no way to download it again. For content creators, brand marketers, and social media managers, that could spell disaster. And an expensive one at that.

Opportunistic eBayers have taken the chance to cash in on this misfortune. A quick search for “TikTok phone” brings up more than 9,000 listings of used smartphones from the likes of Apple and Samsung, all with the TikTok app already installed.

This is possible by the seller signing out of the iCloud or Google account associated with the device rather than wiping the phone back to factory settings. Any buyer would then need to be careful not to sync to any existing cloud backup, to avoid losing the app they’ve paid so much to get.

Some of these phones are listed for as much as $50,000 under eBay’s Buy It Now selling format, but it’s hard to believe anyone could truly think their phone would sell for that—and there’s no sign that they have.

There are many more listed in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, but as to whether anyone is actually buying them at this price, it still seems unlikely.

What can be said is that, in spite of the inflated prices, there is interest. These phones are selling, but for exactly how much is harder to ascertain. Select the “sold” filter on eBay’s search and there are plenty of sales that appear to be completed, but pretty much all of them have an undisclosed “best offer accepted” note connected to them.

Any finished auctions with incredibly inflated prices look to have been relisted shortly after, suggesting an unsuccessful sale, with only those that sit at close to market value for secondhand phones looking to have actually sold.

A quick glance at auctions that are currently running also show much more reasonable prices than an initial search might suggest.

The true impact of any TikTok premium is somewhat unclear, then, but that isn’t stopping people from trying. Results for the TikTok phone search term went up by over 2,000 items during the course of writing this article—a sense of urgency no doubt pushed along by the fact the app could be returned to the app stores at any time.

At the moment, a TikTok search on either app store is met with statements from Google and Apple citing legal requirements as the reason the app is not available on their stores. This is despite Trump’s executive order clearly instructing the Department of Justice to “take no action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act.”

Whether TikTok reappears before the 75 days is up remains to be seen—as does any deal Trump cuts in the meantime—but those exiled are not completely without options. This week, thousands of users have flocked to another Chinese-owned social media platform, RedNote, leaving the app scrambling to hire English moderators.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has also been doing its bit to take lost TikTokers under its wing, introducing a flurry of new familiar features and even offering big influencers as much as $5,000 to join its platforms.

Chris Young, Microsoft’s head of business development and its venture unit, resigned from his role on Wednesday, the company said.

Young led Microsoft’s M12 venture fund, and was what’s known as a named officer. Microsoft’s other named officers include CFO Amy Hood, top lawyer and vice chair Brad Smith, head of sales Judson Althoff, and CEO and chairman Satya Nadella.

Because Young was a named officer, Microsoft was legally obligated to publicly report his compensation, responsibilities, and departure. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced Young’s resignation in an SEC filing.

When Microsoft filed its annual proxy report in October, it listed Young’s accomplishments as increasing M12’s “engagements” in areas like AI and data infrastructure, working with company leadership in emerging tech, closing a strategic partnership, and helping the company make progress on its big sustainability goals. The company also said that Young “championed diversity and inclusion within the business development organization and across the company.”

Young was formerly CEO of McAfee. He joined Microsoft in 2020 to replace the company’s previous dealmaker, Peggy Johnson, who founded M12. M12 was originally created by the Seattle tech giant to keep tabs on emerging Silicon Valley tech and rising startups through typical venture investment. Under Young, it became more like an extension of Microsoft’s business development team.

The SEC filing did not indicate why Young was leaving. It did say that he would be staying on as an employee until March to assist with the transition, although no longer in his former job. Young did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

“We are deeply grateful for the significant impact Chris had at Microsoft over the past 4 years,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “During Chris’ tenure, he led hundreds of strategic partnerships, fostered a culture of innovation, and laid the groundwork for our future growth. We support Chris’ decision to pursue a new endeavor.”

Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like singling out one bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. That is “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.’’ The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it’s the Elon Musk–led effort to cut government spending by a trillion bucks or two. Though DOGE was, until this week, pitched as an outside body, this move makes it an official part of government—by embedding it in an existing agency that was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget called the United States Digital Service. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new head will be more tightly connected to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.

The new USDS will apparently shift its former laser focus on building cost-efficient and well-designed software for various agencies to a hardcore implementation of the Musk vision. It’s kind of like a government version of a SPAC, the dodgy financial maneuver that launched Truth Social in the public market without ever having to reveal a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is surprising in a sense because, on its face, DOGE seems more limited than its original super ambitious pitch. This iteration seems more tightly centered on saving money through streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and messy IT infrastructure. There are big savings to be had, but a handful of zeros short of trillions. As of yet, it’s uncertain whether Musk will become the DOGE administrator. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (The first USDS director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “’I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.”) But reportedly Musk pushed for this structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I hear that inside the Executive Office Building, there are numerous pink Post-it notes claiming space even beyond USDS’s turf, including one such note on the former chief information officers’ enviable office. So maybe this could be a launch pad for a more sweeping effort that will eliminate whole agencies and change policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising considering that there are dozens of other orders that equally beg for explanation.)

One thing is clear—this ends United States Digital Service as it previously existed, and marks a new, and maybe perilous era for the USDS, which I have been enthusiastically covering since its inception. The 11-year-old agency sprang out of the high-tech rescue squad salvaging the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that almost tanked the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who used internet-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; the nimble “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government tech as nifty as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked out of the agency’s funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. The USDS typically took on projects that were mired in centi-million contracts and never completed—delivering superior results within weeks. It would embed its employees in agencies that requested help, being careful to work collaboratively with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the different systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom.

During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat—it was the rare Obama initiative that survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got buy-in from Trump’s in-house fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record talk early in 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; she gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were looking up, at least for the moment. Nonetheless, the four Trump years became a balancing act in sharing the agency’s achievements while somehow staying under the radar. “At Disney amusement parks, they paint things that they want to be invisible with this certain color of green so that people don’t notice it in passing,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves that color of green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx on gathering statistics—some of which the administration wasn’t eager to publicize.

By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was wearing thin. A source tells me that at one point a Trump political appointee noticed—not happily— that USDS was recruiting at tech conferences for lesbians and minorities, and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointee accepted that but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the reimbursement line, could they just say LWT?