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I flew DJI’s $199 drone with its new $229 Goggles N3

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I flew DJI’s $199 drone with its new $229 Goggles N3

I’m hoping DJI’s affordable new FPV goggles will be the missing puzzle piece — a way to cheaply buy the “It feels like I’m flying!” experience I had with the DJI Avata for maybe $400 or $500 tops, rather than the current $800 to $1,000 you might have to pay.

See, the company announced its budget $199 Neo drone in September that works with goggles, and today it’s announcing the $229 DJI Goggles N3. Add a $99 RC Motion 3 controller and you get airplane-like flight, with first-person video that puts you in the virtual cockpit.

But I can’t quite confirm that it’s worth your money yet — because DJI says my unit likely shipped with a defect, and I’ll need a little more testing time. More on that below.

At $229, the Goggles N3 are definitely less expensive than previous pairs, saving you $120 over the company’s $349 Goggles Integra, its previous budget set, and they’re less than half the price of the premium $499 DJI Goggles 3. Yet they’ve got the same one-tap defogging (using an internal fan) and DJI O4 video transmission as the Goggles 3. I flew the Neo just as far with the DJI’s cheapest and most expensive goggles before the signal cut out and the drone found its way home. You still get headtracking so you can look up and down while you’re flying forward, too.

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Left: $500 Goggles 3. Right: $229 Goggles N3.
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Same comparison, now with the units upside down.
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

On paper, the N3 even seem better than the more premium models in a couple ways: a wider 54-degree field of view (compare to 44 degrees), an eyebox so big you can put your prescription glasses inside, with no need to twist knobs to make the lenses match your vision, the company claims.

But instead of the crisp, colorful, perfect micro-OLED screens included in all of DJI’s other modern FPV goggles, the N3 has a single, comparatively washed-out LCD screen inside. To aim that panel at your face, there’s a big diagonal optic inside (not unlike a periscope) to bounce the light at a right angle.

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The single screen inside the DJI Goggles N3, captured through the lens.
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

In the case of my review unit, the center of my screen seems to be aimed at the center of my nosepiece. With no way to adjust the lenses, I’m stuck with an out-of-focus image all the time. Not being able to properly see anything has got to be a fluke, right? DJI spokesperson Daisy Kong tells me over the phone that I might have a defective unit.

If it is just a fluke, I’d be fine with most of the other corners DJI has cut. I could live with a slightly washed out image. I don’t miss the loss of the Goggles 3’s barely useful passthrough vision or silicone padding — fabric’s good enough for me. I don’t terribly mind that the Goggles N3 has a visible cable sticking out the side instead of weaving it into the headband like previous models.

While it’s heavier, it’s only 2.3 ounces (65g) heavier than the Goggles 3 according to my kitchen scale, and it’s still reasonably balanced out by the integrated battery at the back of the headset. Frankly, even the Goggles N3 has more wireless range and more fancy features than I typically need. But the core of the experience needs to be a crisp, clear look through the eye of the drone. I’ll let you know if that materializes in the next couple of weeks.

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I should also note that the DJI Neo isn’t anywhere near as good as the Avata or Avata 2 at being an FPV drone, simply because of its weight and power ratios — it’s not as nimble as those more dedicated models, and the wind can more easily push it around.

Like them or not, DJI doesn’t have a lot of other affordable FPV options on the table. The company recently discontinued its $829 Avata Explorer Combo (though you can find some refurbished deals), and Kong says there are “no current plans” to let you use the $350 Goggles Integra with the DJI Neo, even though DJI now lets you use the Avata 2 and DJI Mini 4 Pro with the Integra. So if you don’t like the Goggles N3, the $500 Goggles 3 is the only other set that currently works with the Neo.

In the US, where DJI is facing some import difficulties, it’ll only sell the the Goggles N3 on its own, just as it only sells the DJI Neo on its own. In the UK and Europe, it’s a bundle to start: the new “DJI Neo Motion Fly More Combo” with drone, goggles, controller, three batteries, and a charging hub is available today for £449 or €529, with the standalone $229/£229/€269 Goggles N3 estimated to arrive in late November.

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The best early deals we could find from Amazon, Best Buy and more

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November 6, 2024

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The best early Black Friday 2024 deals we could find from Amazon, Best Buy and more

Black Friday may technically just be one day, but it’s evolved to consume the entire month of November in the US at this point. For the past few years, retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Target have ushered in the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier, and this year is no different.

Early Black Friday deals are already here, bringing discounts to some of our favorite tech we’ve tested this year. While it’s still advisable to wait until the week before Thanksgiving to ensure you’re getting the best of the best deals, you have plenty of opportunities to save right now if you’re eager to get a jump on your gift list this year. These are the best early Black Friday deals we could find; we’ll be updating this post regularly throughout November, so check back for the latest discounts.

  • Apple iPad mini (7th gen) for $400 ($100 off): The latest iPad mini only just arrived this month, but it’s already $100 off with an on-page coupon at Amazon. Only the purple colorway is on sale, but this is a giant discount for a new Apple release, so we wouldn’t expect it to last long. We gave the new mini a review score of 83: It’s a minor refresh, but it continues to provide most of the iPad Air’s strengths in a form factor that’s easier to tuck in a bag and hold with one hand. This deal is available in additional colors at Costco, but only to store members.

  • Apple Pencil Pro for $92 ($36 off): While this deal is a couple bucks higher than the lowest price we’ve ever seen for Apple’s top-of-the-line iPad stylus, it’s still a sizable drop compared to buying from Apple directly. Just be aware that Pencil Pro is only compatible with the most recent iPad Airs and iPad Pros. Also at Walmart.

Photos of Apple’s 13-inch iPad Air, released in 2024

The Apple iPad Air (M2). (Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget)
A small smart display with a white border, the Amazon Echo Show 5, sits on a wood table next to various desktop accessories, displaying the time and the title of a currently playing podcast.

The Amazon Echo Show 5. (Amazon)

  • Amazon Echo Pop for $18 ($22 off): Amazon’s smallest smart speaker has dropped to a record-low price. It’s part of a larger sale that includes the Echo Dot for $28 and the new Echo Spot for $50.

  • Amazon Fire HD 10 for $75 ($65 off): No Fire HD tablet comes close to matching the performance, build quality and app support of an iPad, but they’re significantly more affordable, and they still work well enough if all you need is something for casual streaming, e-reading and web browsing. At this price, the 10.1-inch Fire HD 10 is likely a better value than the smaller Fire HD 8, as it has a sharper display, it’s a tick faster and it can last slightly longer on a charge. Just be ready to deal with a bunch of ads for Amazon’s own apps and services. This discount ties an all-time low, and it’s also available at Best Buy and Target.

  • Amazon Echo Show 5 for $50 ($40 off): We highlight the Echo Show 5 in our guide to the best smart displays. While the Echo Show 8 — which isn’t majorly discounted yet — has a roomier display, louder speakers and sharper cameras, this 5.5-inch model provides most of the same functionality in a design that’s easier to fit on a nightstand. If you’re already onboard the Alexa train, it’ll work nicely as a smart alarm clock. This deal is $10 more than the all-time low we saw last Black Friday, so it may drop further in the weeks ahead, but for now it matches the best price we’ve seen in 2024. Also at Target, Kohl’s and Best Buy.

  • Blink Outdoor 4 (6-pack) for $180 ($300 off): The Outdoor 4 is a wireless, IP65-rated outdoor security camera we highlight in our guide to the best smart home gadgets. It captures decent (if not class-leading) 1080p video, it’s relatively painless to install and it supports features like night vision, motion alerts, local storage and two-way talking. The catch is that it locks things like person detection and cloud storage behind a subscription plan. Still, it’s a solid value on balance, and this deal furthers that. We’ve seen this price on a six-camera bundle for a few weeks, but it’s still an all-time low. An eight-camera pack is also on sale for $250, another low.

  • Audible Premium Plus (3-month) for $1 ($29 off): Those who don’t currently subscribe to Audible can get three months of the audiobook service’s Premium Plus plan for $1. Normally, the service costs $15 per month after a 30-day free trial. As a refresher, Premium Plus is Audible’s upper tier: In addition to giving access the full Audible Plus library, it lets you keep one title from a curated selection of audiobooks each month. We wouldn’t call it essential, but if you’ve been on the fence, this is a good way to see if it’d work for you. Just note that the plan will auto-renew until you cancel.

Beats Solo 4 laying on two books with an iPhone to the left and a black pen in the foreground.

Billy Steele for Engadget

  • Beats Solo 4 for $100 ($100 off): The Solo 4 is light on features and may be uncomfortable on larger heads, but its even-handed sound and 50+-hour battery life make it worth considering if you prefer a more compact on-ear design instead of traditional over-ears. We gave it a score of 79 in our review. This discount ties an all-time low and is also available at Walmart, Target and Best Buy. The full-size Beats Studio Pro is discounted as well, but that pair is a bit harder to recommend over the top picks in our wireless headphone buying guide.

  • Bose QuietComfort Headphones for $199 ($150 off): This ties the lowest price we’ve seen for Bose’s mid-tier noise-canceling headphones. At this price, their effective ANC and light fit make them a worthy alternative to higher-end pairs like the Sony WH-1000XM5 (our favorite pair overall). That said, their bass-heavy sound won’t be for everyone, and the XM5 has a more comprehensive feature set. Also at Bose.com, Target and Best Buy. The higher-end QuietComfort Ultra, meanwhile, are $100 off and put out even stronger ANC, though we still prefer the XM5 for around the same price.

  • Samsung Music Frame for $248 ($150 off): This unique smart speaker can show art or your own photos while it plays music, and it can sync with your Samsung TV speakers. Also available at Samsung.

  • JBL Clip 5 speaker for $50 ($30 off): This tiny speaker has a built-in clip so you can hang it from a backpack or bag easily, plus it packs good sound with punchy base. You can expect 12 hours of battery life on it as well.

  • Hisense U8N 4K TV (55-inch) for $728 ($371 off): The U8N is the next step up from the U7N in Hisense’s TV lineup, so it should provide better colors, contrast and brightness across the board. If you don’t mind buying a smaller panel for around the same price, this is another new low. Also at Best Buy.

  • Backbone One (PlayStation Edition) for $60: The Backbone One is an comfy gamepad that snaps around your phone and lets you play mobile or cloud-based games without having to rely on touch controls. We’ve recommended it before. This deal on the PlayStation-themed version isn’t an all-time low, but it’s $10 to $20 less than the usual discounts we’ve seen over the past year. Sony’s listing doesn’t specify whether this is the first- or second-gen model — the latter can fit a wider range of phones and cases — but that shouldn’t be a major hindrance if you use an older iPhone or Android device. Both the USB-C and Lightning variants are on sale.

  • Samsung T9 portable SSD (4TB) for $300 ($250 off): The latest model in the T-series of Samsung’s portable drives supports read and write speeds of up to 2,000MB/s, and it has dynamic thermal guard to keep it cool even when you’re pushing it to its limits. Also available at Samsung.

  • Apple iPad Air (13-inch, M2) for $691 ($107 off): If you’d prefer more screen space, the 13-inch iPad Air is also down to an all-time low at Amazon. This model can get slightly brighter than its smaller counterpart, but the two slates are virtually identical otherwise.

  • Apple iPad Air (11-inch, M2) for $497 at Amazon ($102 off MSRP): This is a new low for the latest iPad Air, which we consider to be the best Apple tablet for most people. While it lacks the top-end performance and 120Hz OLED panel of the iPad Pro, it’s much less expensive, and it still gets you a more futureproof M2 chip, a superior display and better accessory support than the base-model iPad. Also at Best Buy.

  • Apple AirTag (4-pack) for $74 at Amazon ($25 off): The AirTag is, unsurprisingly, the top pick for iPhone users in our guide to the best Bluetooth trackers, as it uses Apple’s giant network of Apple devices and ultrawideband tech to locate items accurately. Its effectiveness has had deeply unfortunate side effects, but if you use it as intended, it can provide a little extra peace of mind. While not an all-time low, this deal is a welcome drop from the usual $80 street price we’ve seen for a four-pack in recent months. Also at Best Buy.

  • Apple MacBook Air (13.6-inch, M2) for $700 at Amazon ($300 off): This matches the all-time low for Apple’s last-gen MacBook Air, which remains a perfectly competent notebook for everyday use. The caveat is that this model only comes with 8GB of RAM, so it’s really only meant for lower-power tasks. Apple (finally) made 16GB of memory the standard across its MacBook lineup earlier this week, so this might be an instance of Apple trying to clear out old inventory. Still, this is a great value if you only need a laptop for basic web browsing, emailing and word processing. Clip the on-page coupon to see the full discount.

  • Anker Soundcore Motion+ for $69 at Amazon ($31 off): We recommend the Soundcore Motion+ in our guide to the best portable Bluetooth speakers. While it isn’t especially light or compact, it pumps out a more spacious sound than most speakers in its price range, it’s waterproof and it lasts a decent 12 to 15 hours per charge. We’ve seen this discount a few times before, but it comes within a few bucks of the lowest price we’ve tracked. Also at Anker’s online store with an on-page coupon.

  • Hisense U7N 4K TV (65-inch) for $700 at Amazon ($300 off): Various reviews around the web suggest that the U7N is one of the year’s better TV values, with impressive brightness and contrast for the money. It supports up to a fast 144Hz refresh rate in 4K, which is great for gaming, and it runs on the easy-to-grok Google TV platform. Its image can wash out when viewed at an angle, though, and it’s limited to two HDMI 2.1 ports. This discount is a new low for the 65-inch model. Also at Best Buy.

  • Dyson Digital Slim cordless vacuum for $250 ($250 off): It’s hard to beat a Dyson for less than $300, but we do expect even more Dyson Black Friday deals to pop up as we get closer to the big day. This model is 33 percent lighter than the Dyson V11, which could make it a good pick for someone who loathes their current, heavy-duty upright vac. The LED screen shows power mode, maintenance alerts and remaining run time, and you should get up to 40 minutes of battery life here. Also available at Dyson.

Black Friday 2024 lands on November 29 this year.

We expect some Black Friday tech deals to start as early as November 1. Over the past few years, retailers have been kicking off the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier. This trend will continue in 2024, and you’ll likely find early Black Friday deals available online and in stores in the weeks before the actual shopping event.

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Some Black Friday tech deals will end immediately on Saturday, November 30. But those will likely be few and far between. Along with starting deals earlier and earlier, retailers have also extended Black Friday deals past the day for a while now, too. In the tech space, we’ve seen many Black Friday deals in the past run through Cyber Monday.

There is no one place to buy all of the best Black Friday deals, but you can expect the big retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Target to have many of the same Black Friday deals available — both in the lead up and on the day itself. We also recommend checking direct-to-consumer sites like Apple, Samsung, Sonos and others to make sure you’re getting the best deal before you cross things off your list.

You typically will not find cash discounts on Apple’s website for Black Friday, though it has offered various gift card bundles during Black Friday in recent years. You may be able to find local Apple store discounts on accessories, but Apple isn’t a retailer known for slashing prices on its products. However, you can find more traditional Apple Black Friday tech deals at other retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Target and Best Buy.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

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Science & Environment

Oil market’s future still uncertain under Donald Trump after election win

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30 mins ago

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November 6, 2024

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Oil market's future still uncertain under Donald Trump after election win


Offshore workers examine hydrocarbon samples aboard the Chevron Corp. Jack/St. Malo deepwater oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, U.S., on Friday, May 18, 2018.

Luke Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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U.S. oil producers are looking forward to less regulations on crude production under a Donald Trump presidency, meaning higher oil supply and consequently lower prices.

But it’s not that straightforward: Trump who was announced Wednesday as the winner of the 2024 election, has also vowed to put more sanctions on Iranian and Venezuelan barrels, meaning the global market could become tighter, potentially boosting prices.

At the same time, the increased likelihood of trade wars under Trump could dampen global economic growth and slow oil demand. So the picture for the market’s longer-term outlook is, well, decidedly mixed.

“Conceptually, the impact of a potential second Trump term on oil prices is ambiguous, with some short-term downside risk to Iran oil supply … and thus upside price risk,” Goldman Sachs commodities analysts wrote in a research note Monday. “But medium-term downside risk to oil demand and thus oil prices from downside risk to global GDP from a potential escalation in trade tensions.”

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The U.S. has a 'clear competitive advantage' on energy, says TotalEnergies CEO

Trump expressed his enthusiasm for increased U.S. oil production while giving a speech from the Republican campaign headquarters in Florida on Wednesday, just hours before his victory was confirmed. He made a reference to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the independent candidate who he said would become a part of his team.

“Bobby, stay away from the oil, stay away from the liquid gold!” Trump said in a joking tone. “We have more than Saudi Arabia and Russia.” Kennedy is known for his history of environmental activism.

U.S. oil and gas production hit record highs under the Biden administration, which gradually changed its approach to the industry despite campaigning on pledges of environmental stewardship.

U.S. crude futures — both West Texas Intermediate and international benchmark Brent crude — are currently trading in the $70 to $75 per barrel range, which is lower than what many oil producers seek to balance their costs and budgets amid slowed global demand for oil and growing supply.

Energy sector is the best sector under Biden

But a further push to open drilling projects, putting more supply on the market, would lead to lower prices, thereby decreasing revenues for American producers, said Cole Smead, president and CEO of Smead Capital.

“If the Trump administration opens up federal leases for oil and gas, Federal lands would get 25% per barrel of revenues. You will have a lot of trouble finding an oil company that can make money at $52.50 per barrel with what they have left from a $70 barrel,” Smead said in emailed notes. “The only thing that will cause drill baby drill to happen is higher oil prices based on these margins.”

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“Drill baby, drill is going to run into the energy vigilantes,” he added. “Now that equity investors in the energy business know what free cash flow looks like they won’t give it up. They will allow capital expenditures to go up over their dead body.”

‘Clear competitive advantage’

The U.S. is the world’s largest oil producer, accounting for 22% of the global total, according to the Energy Information Administration, with Saudi Arabia next, producing 11%. The vast majority of U.S. crude is consumed within the country, which is also the world’s largest oil consumer.

The CEO of French oil major TotalEnergies told CNBC over the weekend that whoever wins the presidency should ensure that the U.S. doesn’t lose its energy advantage.

“U.S. energy has been unleashed … since the last two, three years, production of oil has never been so high,” in the country, Patrick Pouyanne told CNBC in Abu Dhabi.

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“For me, today, the U.S. has a clear competitive advantage on energy compared to many [in the] rest of the world,” he said. “So I will be surprised to see whoever is elected lose the competitive advantage.”

OPEC always plays the long game, Energy Aspects' Amrita Sen says

Many in the market forecast lower crude prices due to Trump’s encouragement of domestic oil production and greater supply. Amrita Sen, founder and director of research at London-based Energy Aspects, sees it differently due to the specter of sanctions.

“Every hedge fund I’ve spoken to thinks bearish, because [Trump has] tended to tweet about low oil prices … I actually think it’s the opposite,” she said. “There’s an enormous amount of sanctioned barrels right now in the market, especially Iranian volumes.” Iran is currently producing 3.5 million barrels per day of crude or more, Sen said, with 1.8 million of those being exported, as sanctions and their enforcement loosened under the Biden administration.

“You could lose a million barrels per day of that … when Trump was in power, Iranian exports were just 400,000 barrels per day,” Sen said. “Now I’m not saying it’s going to go down all the way, because smuggling networks are bigger and better probably now, but you could lose a million there,” she said, adding that some Venezuelan barrels could go off the market as well.

For Smead, the outlook is bearish, as he predicts lower prices putting many producers — particularly those with higher production costs — in a less-than-ideal situation.

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“The price of goods that are produced is the number one factor in America’s policies,” he said. “If you are not the low-cost producer, you should be scared.”



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Nvidia advances robot learning and humanoid development with AI and simulation tools

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November 6, 2024

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Nvidia advances robot learning and humanoid development with AI and simulation tools

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Nvidia revealed new AI and simulation tools that will advance robot learning and humanoid development.

The world’s biggest tech company by valuation (worth $3.432 trillion) said that the tools will enable robotics developers to greatly accelerate their work on AI-enabled robots, with tools revealed this week at the Conference for Robot Learning (CoRL) in Munich, Germany.

The lineup includes the general availability of the Nvidia Isaac Lab robot learning framework; six new humanoid robot learning workflows for Project GR00T, an initiative to accelerate humanoid robot development; and new world-model development tools for video data curation and processing, including the Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer and Nvidia NeMo Curator for video processing.

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The open-source Cosmos tokenizer provides robotics developers superior visual tokenization by breaking down images and videos into high-quality tokens with exceptionally high compression rates. It runs up to 12 times faster than current tokenizers, while NeMo Curator provides video processing curation up to seven times faster than unoptimized pipelines.

Also timed with CoRL, Nvidia released 23 papers and presented nine workshops related to robot learning, and also released training and workflow guides for developers. Further, Hugging Face and Nvidia announced they’re collaborating to accelerate open-source robotics research with LeRobot, Nvidia Isaac Lab and Nvidia Jetson for the developer community.

Accelerating robot development with Isaac Lab

Nvidia Isaac Lab Project GR00T Models

Nvidia Isaac Lab is an open-source, robot learning framework built on Nvidia Omniverse, a platform for developing OpenUSD applications for industrial digitalization and physical AI simulation.

Developers can use Isaac Lab to train robot policies at scale. This open-source unified robot learning framework applies to any embodiment — from humanoids to quadrupeds and collaborative robots — to handle increasingly complex movements and interactions.

Leading commercial robot makers, robotics application developers, and robotics research entities around the world are adopting Isaac Lab, including 1X, Agility Robotics, The AI Institute, Berkeley Humanoid, Boston Dynamics, Field AI, Fourier, Galbot, Mentee Robotics, Skild AI, Swiss-Mile, Unitree Robotics, and Xpeng Robotics.

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Project GR00T: Foundations for general-purpose humanoid robots

The humanoids are coming. Building advanced humanoids is extremely difficult, demanding multilayer
technological and interdisciplinary approaches to make the robots perceive, move and learn skills effectively for human-robot and robot-environment interactions.

Project GR00T is an initiative to develop accelerated libraries, foundation models and data pipelines to accelerate the global humanoid robot developer ecosystem.

Six new Project GR00T workflows provide humanoid developers with blueprints to realize the most challenging humanoid robot capabilities. They include things such as GR00T-Gen for building generative AI-powered, OpenUSD-based 3D environments and more.

“Humanoid robots are the next wave of embodied AI,” said Jim Fan, senior research manager of embodied AI at Nvidia, in a statement. “Nvidia research and engineering teams are collaborating across the company and our developer ecosystem to build Project GR00T to help advance the progress and development of global humanoid robot developers.”

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Today, robot developers are building world models — AI representations of the world that can predict how objects and environments respond to a robot’s actions. Building these world models is incredibly compute- and data-intensive with models requiring thousands of hours of real-world, curated image or video data.

Nvidia Cosmos tokenizers provide efficient, high-quality encoding and decoding to simplify the development of these world models. They set a new standard of minimal distortion and temporal instability, enabling high-quality video and image reconstructions.

Providing high-quality compression and up to 12 times faster visual reconstruction, the Cosmos tokenizer paves the path for scalable, robust and efficient development of generative applications across a broad spectrum of visual domains.

1X, a humanoid robot company, has updated the 1X World Model Challenge dataset to use the Cosmos tokenizer.

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“Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer achieves really high temporal and spatial compression of our data while still retaining visual fidelity,” said Eric Jang, vice president of AI at 1X Technologies, in a statement. “This allows us to train world models with long horizon video generation in an even more compute-efficient manner.”

Other humanoid and general purpose robot developers including Xpeng Robotics and Hillbot are developing with the Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer to manage high-resolution images and videos.

NeMo Curator

NeMo Curator now includes a video processing pipeline. This enables robot developers to improve their world-model accuracy processing large-scale text, image and video data.

Curating video data poses challenges due to its massive size, requiring scalable pipelines and efficient orchestration for load balancing across GPUs. Additionally, models for filtering, captioning and embedding need optimization to maximize throughput.

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NeMo Curator overcomes these challenges by streamlining data curation with automatic pipeline orchestration, reducing processing time significantly. It supports linear scaling across multi-node multi-GPU systems, efficiently handling over 100 petabytes of data. This simplifies AI development, reduces costs and accelerates time to market.

Availability

Nvidia Isaac Lab 1.2 is available now and is open source on GitHub. Nvidia Cosmos tokenizer is available now on GitHub and Hugging Face. NeMo Curator for video processing will be available at the end of the month.

The new Nvidia Project GR00T workflows are coming soon to help robot companies build humanoid robot capabilities with greater ease.

For researchers and developers learning to use Isaac Lab, new getting started developer guides and tutorials are now available, including an Isaac Gym to Isaac Lab migration guide.

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AI coding assistants can help startups develop products, seed VCs believe

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November 6, 2024

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Renegade Partners

By now, there’s hardly a coder in the world who isn’t using an AI copilot in some way. But using GitHub Copilot or Cursor.AI to ask technical questions and get debugging help could be just the beginning. AI coding may one day involve agents that can write the programs themselves based on a natural language prompt. Such programs may even replace human engineers.

AI coding startups that can generate code from a natural language prompt include Replit and Bubble, among many others.

Eventually, some VCs believe, companies will hire fewer human engineers and have each human manage AI coding agents. “It’s not pie in the sky. It’s in the near future, but it’s not today,” VC Corinne Riley, partner at Greylock, said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week.

Coding assistants are already commonly allowed during the coding technical interview for prospective hires at many of Greylock’s portfolio companies, she added.

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However, she doesn’t believe that AI agents should ever be used to replace human engineers in really young companies, to save cash. At the seed stage, “what you’re doing is you’re building the foundations of the company, right? And so if you’re making major engineering trade-offs at that stage, it’s probably not the right decision. Those are decisions that you can make in the future,” she said.

Yet, cash management is also the very reason why young startup engineers should be using AI coding assistance as much and as well as they can right now, countered VC Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and general partner of Hustle Fund, onstage.

“One of the major challenges of the early stages, you don’t quite know exactly what problem you’re solving and quite exactly what the ICP [ideal customer profile] is and quite exactly what they need. So you’re going to end up throwing out a lot of work. So the faster you can go, and the faster you can iterate, the better in order to learn quickly,” Yin said. 

She believes early-stage startups should be open to any tool that lets founders quickly hack together sample products to move faster, even if it would all have to be carefully rebuilt more thoughtfully later. “I would actually be a proponent of that if it means you can learn that much faster,” she said.

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That’s in contrast to the days before AI, when every pilot would have to be coded by someone who had the skills. Today, an engineer can prompt a model, use some AI debugging, and take a peek. 

In agreement is VC Renata Quintini, co-founder of early-stage Renegade Partners.

“If it’s about discovering product-market fit or testing out, you should use that leverage, but I wouldn’t worry about optimizing this at the seed stage,” she said onstage.

Interestingly, as startups founded in 2024 launch out of the gate using AI development processes, we could be witnessing the seeds of the first future AI agent workforce. And the first people to get AI agents as co-workers would be coders themselves. It’s a thought that is equal parts ironic and prophetic.

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Google’s Pixel Watch 3 is available at a new record low price for Verge readers

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1 hour ago

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November 6, 2024

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Google’s Pixel Watch 3 is available at a new record low price for Verge readers

If you thought you needed to wait until Black Friday to score a steep discount on the new Google Pixel Watch 3, we’ve got some good news: right now, Wellbots is giving readers of The Verge an exclusive $75 discount, dropping the wearable down to a new all-time low price until November 12th. The 41mm, Wi-Fi-enabled configuration starts at $274 ($75 off) from Wellbots when you apply code VERGEBF75, while the same code drops the price of the 45mm Pixel Watch 3 with Wi-Fi down to $324 ($75 off).

Google managed to pack an impressive number of noteworthy features into its latest wearable, which is why it’s our favorite fitness smartwatch for Android users. It’s an even better fitness and health tracker than before, with custom running workouts, AI-generated workout suggestions, and a Cardio Load metric that takes into consideration how hard your heart is working during a training session. European users can even take advantage of a new Loss of Pulse Detection feature, which connects you emergency services if a lack of pulse is detected. Sadly, though, the feature has yet to receive FDA clearance in the U.S.

Along with offering even more advanced fitness features, the Pixel Watch 3 is also an even more capable smartwatch with offline Google Maps and better integration with other Google services. It can even now double as Google TV remote, while you also now view your Nest Doorbell or Camera feed straight from your smartwatch. As if that’s not impressive enough, the wearable also now sports an ultra wideband chip that enables remote unlocking for Pixel devices and even some BMWs.

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Organizations are fighting a losing battle against advanced bots

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2 hours ago

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November 6, 2024

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Bad Bots

The new generation of advanced bots is now on everyone’s radar. The rise of high-quality IPs and generative AI has led to the emergence of today’s ‘super bots’. These bots can forge fingerprints, enact distributed attacks at scale, mimic human behavior using machine learning, and fool traditional CAPTCHAs up to 100% of the time.

There’s a lot of discussion about how organizations’ cybersecurity strategies must now rapidly evolve to keep up with these increasingly advanced bots. But beneath this narrative lies another truth: most organizations still haven’t even nailed down simple bot protection yet.

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