Attackers can utilize SantaStealer to steal a variety of data from unsuspecting Windows users.
If you’re looking for something to watch during a holiday break from work or school, you can’t go wrong with anime, and right now you can sign-up for a year of Crunchyroll for as low as $65. Holiday discounts running through December 29 bring the anime streaming service’s year-long Fan subscription from $80 down to $67 and its Mega Fan subscription from $120 down to $100. That’s either $13 or $20 off access to one of the largest libraries of anime series and movies out there.
While both the Fan and Mega Fan plans are ad-free, you do get some different benefits depending on which you decide to pay for. Fan subscribers get full access to Crunchyroll’s library, new episodes “shortly after they air in Japan” and five percent off select purchases in the Crunchyroll Store. Mega Fan subscribers get all those benefits, plus the ability to stream on four devices at the same time, download HD quality episodes and movies to view offline, play games from the Crunchyroll Game Vault and receive 10 percent off select products in the Crunchyroll Store.
Notably missing from either subscription is access to Crunchyroll’s new Manga service, but unless you’re specifically looking for reading material, you’ll get plenty of entertainment out of Crunchyroll’s video library. Outside of Netflix, which produces and licenses its own growing collection of anime, Crunchyroll is the de facto place to watch Japanese animation in the US. You’ll find long-running series like One Piece and newer hits like Spy X Family, alongside hundreds of more niche series.
Crunchyroll has its issues, of course. Since the streaming service was acquired by Sony, it’s been particularly interested in using generative AI to subtitle shows, which has already produced poor results. It’s hard to beat Crunchyroll’s library, though, and for as little as $65, you’ll get more than your money’s worth.
Check out our coverage of the best streaming deals for more discounts, and follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/crunchyroll-annual-subscriptions-are-on-sale-for-the-holidays-194345327.html?src=rss
Netflix has inked a deal with iHeartMedia to begin showing video podcasts, so the content will never, ever run out. The partnership covers new episodes from more than 15 popular podcasts, including The Breakfast Club, Dear Chelsea, My Favorite Murder and others. Customers will have access to video podcast episodes in early 2026.
In addition to new footage, the partnership includes a select library of archival episodes from each show. It’s worth noting that YouTube already platforms video versions of many popular podcasts, including stuff like The Breakfast Club.
This follows a similar deal from earlier this year in which Netflix announced plans to stream video podcast episodes from Spotify. That partnership covers stuff like The Bill Simmons Podcast and The Zach Lowe Show, among others.
Many people use podcasts for background noise and soon Netflix will be a major player in that market, such as it is. Disney+ also recently started prioritizing those “barely paying attention” eyeballs, as it inked its own deal to air The Rich Eisen Show on weekdays.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/netflix-will-soon-start-airing-video-podcasts-like-the-breakfast-club-193112093.html?src=rss
The weight of AI server racks has reached a point where legacy data centers cannot accommodate them even with significant retrofitting efforts, The Verge reports. Chris Brown, chief technical officer at Uptime Institute, said most retrofitting attempts would require “bulldozing the building and starting over from scratch.”
AI racks are projected to reach 5,000 pounds compared to the 400 to 600 pounds that racks weighed three decades ago. The dramatic increase stems from hundreds to 1,000 GPUs packed densely into each rack alongside memory chips and liquid cooling systems that can add substantial weight. AI workloads now consume up to 350 kilowatts per rack, 35 times the 10 kilowatts that traditional computer chip workloads averaged a decade ago. Legacy data centers with raised floors typically max out at around 1,250 pounds per square foot for static loads.
Chris McLean, president of Critical Facility Group, said that rack heights have grown from 6 feet to 9 feet over nearly two decades, creating problems with doorframes and freight elevators in older buildings.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
One of the exciting Intel innovations to the Linux kernel this year has been around the Cache Aware Scheduling for helping to deliver better performance on modern CPUs with multiple last level caches. The kernel patches have yet to be upstreamed but testing has shown to be quite promising for grouping tasks sharing data to the same LLC domain to help reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. Those wishing to learn more about Cache Aware Scheduling, there was a presentation on it last week by Intel engineers Tim Chen and Chen Yu at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2025 in Tokyo…
Back in September during Meta Connect, the company previewed a new ability for its smart glasses lineup called Conversation Focus. The feature, which is able to amplify the voices of people around you, is now starting to roll out in the company’s latest batch of software updates.
When enabled, the feature is meant to make it easier to hear the people you’re speaking with in a crowded or otherwise noisy environment. “You’ll hear the amplified voice sound slightly brighter, which will help you distinguish the conversation from ambient background noise,” Meta explains. It can be enabled either via voice commands (“hey Meta, start Conversation Focus”) or by adding it as a dedicated “tap-and-hold” shortcut.
Meta is also adding a new multimodal AI feature for Spotify. With the update, users can ask their glasses to play music on Spotify that corresponds with what they’re looking at by saying “hey Meta, play a song to match this view.” Spotify will then start a playlist “based on your unique taste, customized for that specific moment.” For example, looking at holiday decor might trigger a similarly-themed playlist, though it’s not clear how Meta and Spotify may translate more abstract concepts into themed playlists.
Both updates are starting to roll out now to Meta Ray-Ban glasses (both Gen 1 and Gen 2 models), as well as the Oakley Meta HSTN frames. The update will arrive first to those enrolled in Meta’s early access program, and will be available “gradually” to everyone else.
Meta’s newest mode of smart glasses, the Oakley Meta Vanguard shades, are also getting some new features in the latest software update. Meta is adding the option to trigger specific commands with a single word, rather than having to say “hey Meta.” For example, saying “photo” will be enough to snap a picture and saying “video” will start a new recording. The company says the optional feature is meant to help athletes “save some breath” while on a run or bike ride.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/meta-is-rolling-out-conversation-focus-and-ai-powered-spotify-features-to-its-smart-glasses-192133928.html?src=rss
The Meta Horizon Store’s 2025 Holiday Sale discounts blockbuster Quest games for the next three weeks.
You can currently get the Quest versions of titles like Alien: Rogue Incursion, both Arizona Sunshine games, Asgard’s Wrath 2, Skydance’s Behemoth, Metro Awakening, Reach, and Resident Evil 4, for between 35% and 65% off.
You’ll also find discounts on a range of indie titles, such as Arken Age, Bonelab, Dungeons of Eternity, Eleven Table Tennis, Figmin XR, GOLF+, Into Black, Myst, Pistol Whip, Titan Isles, Walkabout Mini Golf, and VRider SBK.
The sale ends at 11:59pm PT on January 4, just under three weeks from now, giving plenty of time for people receiving a Quest headset as a gift this Christmas to get some of the top titles at a discounted price.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
Here’s a list of just some of the games you can grab on sale:
Separately, Meta is also offering 15 sale bundles, letting you get multiple games and/or DLC together for a lower price than buying them individually:
If you already own one of the games in a bundle, the price is lowered to reflect that.
Obsidian’s new space RPG offers you interesting and unexpected choices up until the credits roll
The post Damn, <i>The Outer Worlds 2</i>‘s Flaw System Is So Good appeared first on Kotaku.
A few months ago, I wrote about the ZwiftPower ZRS Browser Extension. Since then, it has undergone substantial upgrades, including an incredibly detailed new profile page that charts your ZRS history! So I reached out to the creator (who goes by the pseudonym “int” on socials) for a look at what has changed, including a detailed list of new features. Here’s what I received…
Since the last Zwift Insider article, the extension has grown quite a bit.
The very first version took only a few hours to build. I probably spent almost the same amount of time writing my response to Zwift Insider when he first reached out. It was just a simple script to inject ZRS scores into ZwiftPower event pages. Nothing fancy.
Back then, I mentioned the article may “give the project new life.” Well, it did. The article brought in more users, and with them came requests. Profile page support. History graphs. More detailed analytics. Each feature request led to another and the codebase went from a few hundred lines to… well, something more substantial.
So here we are again, writing another response after Eric reached out asking if I had any “juicy details” to share.
The active users of the extension already know that not everything went smoothly.
The first major update went live and didn’t last long. Users started processing their lifetime event histories, and some corrupt Zwift events from years ago triggered an infinite fetching loop.
The combination—hundreds of users processing thousands of events each, plus the bug causing endless retries—created an API spike. I fixed the bug immediately after it was reported, but the damage was already done. Zwift decided to enforce authentication requirements, breaking the extension for everyone.
I reached out to Zwift, acknowledged I should have coordinated beforehand, and didn’t hear back. So a few days later I implemented a workaround that captures the user’s Zwift token (with the user’s permission, of course) to get things going again.
Besides restoring functionality, authentication unlocked additional API endpoints that made most of the newly added features possible. In the end, the authentication enforcement turned out to be a good thing.
The extension serves a niche within the Zwift community, and I’m glad people find it useful. There’s still plenty to improve—I won’t be running out of ideas anytime soon. I appreciate everyone who’s taken the time to report bugs, suggest features, or simply tell your buddy about it. And special thanks to the testers.
Hopefully, Eric will have a reason to check in again down the road.
If you have thoughts or ideas, feel free to reach out.
(That goes for Zwift, too. It would be cool if we could implement proper OAuth2 authentication and you could relax your CORS restrictions a little bit.)
The ZRS extension enhances ZwiftPower.com by adding ZRS (Zwift Racing Score) data, performance analytics, and racing statistics to profile and event pages. The extension operates as a fully decentralized system, running entirely within the browser environment. All data processing, storage, and analytics occur locally on the user’s device, with no external servers or databases involved.
The extension redesigns the ZwiftPower profile page with a three-column dashboard layout:
Identity Section:
Overlays (on profile picture):
Athlete Stats Section:
Racing Stats Panel:
All sections use category-based color theming (A+ = black, A = red, B = green, etc.).
Progression Subpanel:
Riding Stats Subpanel (toggleable between 30d/Year/Total):
Header: Shows total hours and “since [year]” (year joined Zwift)
Power Radar Chart:
Duration Power Table:
Power Skills:
Three skill categories rated 0.0-10.0 based on percentile vs. intervals.icu distribution data:
Phenotype Detection:
Analyzes power distribution to classify rider into one of six types:
The middle column displays different panels depending on whether viewing your own profile or an opponent’s profile.
4-Week Calendar Grid:
Scrollable Activity List:
Summary Metrics:
Match History List:
This feature requires complete lifetime event processing for the user’s own profile. First-time processing may require a few minutes depending on race history volume.
Power Curve Graph:
Power Zone Background:
Shaded regions showing Zwift’s 7 power zones based on FTP percentage:
Interactive hover shows exact values at specific durations.
Dashboard Metrics (7 cells):
Score History Graph:
Ranking Points Bar Chart:
ZwiftPowers’s ranking system uses top 5 events from last 90 days. This visualization shows which races currently contribute to the ranking score.
The extension calculates how accurately ZRS scores predicted the actual race results using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (ρ):
This metric provides insight into whether the race results aligned with pre-race ZRS expectations (an objective way of determining how well ZRS is actually working).
Events where no ZRS changes occurred (workouts, group rides, etc.) are identified and labeled with a “Non-ZRS Event” indicator, preventing confusion when no scores appear.
The extension aggregates data from multiple sources to provide comprehensive racing analytics:
Profile and event metadata is extracted from ZwiftPower.com through two complementary methods:
Scraping: The extension reads visible event tables directly from the rendered page HTML to extract:
Interception: When ZwiftPower loads profile data via API calls, the extension intercepts these requests to capture:
ZRS scores and detailed race results come directly from Zwift’s official API.
Race Results Endpoint:
Profile Endpoint:
Activities Endpoint:
Max30 Endpoint: (personal profile only)
Power Curve Endpoint:
Benchmark power data embedded directly in the extension from Intervals.icu’s analysis of thousands of real cyclist power files:
Coverage: Age/gender-specific percentile data for:
Share your thoughts below!
Apple doesn’t like to talk about its upcoming products before it’s ready, but sometimes the company’s software does the talking for it. So far this week we’ve had a couple of software-related leaks that have outed products Apple is currently testing—one a pre-release build of iOS 26, and the other some leaked files from a kernel debug kit (both via MacRumors).
Most of the new devices referenced in these leaks are straightforward updates to products that already exist: a new Apple TV, a HomePod mini 2, new AirTags and AirPods, an M4 iPad Air, a 12th-generation iPad to replace the current A16 version, next-generation iPhones (including the 17e, 18, and the rumored foldable model), a new Studio Display model, some new smart home products we’ve already heard about elsewhere, and M5 updates for the MacBook Air, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and the other MacBook Pros. There’s also yet another reference to the lower-cost MacBook that Apple is apparently planning to replace the M1 MacBook Air it still sells via Walmart for $599.
For power users, though, the most interesting revelation might be that Apple is working on a higher-end Apple Silicon iMac powered by an M5 Max chip. The kernel debug kit references an iMac with the internal identifier J833c, based on a platform identified as H17C—and H17C is apparently based on the M5 Max, rather than a lower-end M5 chip. (For those who don’t have Apple’s branding memorized, “Max” is associated with Apple’s second-fastest chips; the M5 Max would be faster than the M5 or M5 Pro, but slower than the rumored M5 Ultra.)
U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in a social media post on Tuesday. From a report: The pronouncement appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to finalize a trade framework they announced this year. The United States has been pushing Europe to open up its tech sector to American firms. But U.S. officials have complained that the European Union has not walked back broader regulation of company business practices while also proceeding with investigations of major American tech firms like Google, X, Amazon and Meta.
In a social media post, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which has carried out the negotiations, said that the European Union and some member states had “persisted in a continuing course of discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines and directives” against American companies.
The United States had raised concerns with the European Union about these issues for years “without meaningful engagement,” all while allowing European companies to operate freely in the United States, it said. If the European Union continues these policies, the United States would “have no choice but to begin using every tool at its disposal to counter these unreasonable measures,” the U.S.T.R. said. It named fees and restrictions on service companies among the possibilities, and said it would use the same approach against other countries that echoed Europe’s strategy.
The post singled out potential European service providers that could be targeted by name, listing Accenture, DHL, Mistral, SAP, Siemens and Spotify, among others.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Baldur’s Gate 3 studio promises its not using AI to cut corners
The post The Head Of Larian Responds To Gen AI Backlash, Says It’s ‘Not A Replacement’ For ‘Skill Or Craft’ appeared first on Kotaku.
Puzzling Places adds Journey Mode, remastered puzzles, improved hand tracking and more in a free update.
The Realities.io developed VR jigsaw game, known for turning real-world locations into tactile 3D puzzles, is rolling out a large update for the holiday season. Its headline feature is Journey Mode, a new way to play designed to offer a calmer, low-effort experience.
Rather than the game’s normal loop, where the player gets all the pieces of a disassembled puzzle at once, Journey Mode begins with a single central piece and offers only a small set of pieces to add at a time. Players then attach pieces to grow the center, allowing the scene to gradually assemble in an almost guided progression.
0:00
Today’s update also overhauls hand tracking, which Realities.io says has been optimized for sharper responsiveness and more intuitive reactions. Updated tutorials have been added, as well as “natural gestures” like poking puzzle pieces to inspect them, dragging them to switch tabs, and a “throw-back” motion to return pieces to their staging area.
Quality of life updates are also promised. These include the addition of a new in-game menu, an updated start screen with quick-start options, personalized stats, and tailored puzzle pack recommendations. Puzzling Places’ library features more legible thumbnails for easier browsing, and puzzle and pack ratings are now visible directly from the storefront.
Lastly, the base game’s lineup of puzzles has been refreshed, swapping out older puzzles for community favorites. Four puzzles have been remastered with new animations and effects as well.
Puzzling Places’ Holiday Update is available now as a free download on Quest, PS VR2, and Pico. The game is also available on Apple Vision Pro, and coming to Steam at a later date.
On Dec. 21, 2025, Ebenezer Scrooge will be haunted for the last time by disembodied spirits wearing Quest 2 or newer headsets.
Thereafter, the first fully embodied telling of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in consumer VR will play on loop around the holiday each year, replaying the spatially captured performance by Agile Lens.
“One of our white whales we finally achieved this holiday was a method for perfectly recording EVERYTHING that happens during a live show,” wrote architect and producer Alex Coulombe over direct message. “Mocap, show cues, audio, even everything the audience does. And we can play it back completely on demand.”
Since 2021, Agile Lens has put together the experimental VR telling of A Christmas Carol using the latest cutting edge capture and streaming technologies, including Unreal’s MetaHuman avatars. The production, along with other Agile Lens projects like a gigantic holodeck selling real estate in Texas, led the group to develop a tool called “Stage Presence” for the creation of future theatre-based productions in VR.
“We have no plans to shut down the app at this time— after the all-day VR replays on Christmas Eve, likely we’ll leave it as a bit of a museum where you can visit Charles Dickens’s study and see our old “Next Show in…” counter,” Coulombe wrote. “Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll find a good reason to bring it out of retirement.”
Tickets are free in Quest 2 or newer VR headsets to the final live showings held from Friday to Sunday. The performance stars Ari Tarr as Dickens and Scrooge with Debbie Deer as the ghosts, both of them wearing Quest Pro headsets for face and body capture. You’ll become a Ghost of Christmas Present during the tellings this weekend, and visible to Scrooge as a disembodied spirit helping him come to terms with his behavior.
“I’m really proud of it. I’m going to miss it a lot. It’s been such a joy and such a useful resource to come back to,” said Kevin Laibson, who worked as a producer on the production. “You really can’t mess up a Christmas Carol – everyone knows it and loves it.”
As A Christmas Carol becomes a production running on repeat like other holiday movies and TV shows, the spirits who appear at the live “taping” in VR this weekend will be joined by ghosts of the present from the future.
“Likely next year we’ll pick a few dates to trigger some shared VR replays,” Coulombe wrote. “The ‘live’ audience will be there as ghosts of the “present” right alongside the audience ghosts of the “past”— it will all get very meta.”
We’re extremely curious to see what Agile Lens and their creators do next with theatre in VR and with their Stage Presence tool. There have been some impressive theatrical experiences like The Under Presents and The Tempest and much more made in VR by others, but nothing that’s been able to keep a troupe of actors employed continuously.
“VR live theatre is wonderful in terms of accessibility, but it’s still far from the ideal of actual breathing people in the same venue gasping and laughing together,” Coulombe wrote. “And so we’d love the chance to combine our mixed reality theatre toolset with our virtual reality theatre toolset for a production that caters to an on-site audience while also inviting participants from around the world to join in. That’s the goal of Stage Presence— a modular toolkit to service a wide range of live XR productions.”
In this article, you will learn how to use the time command to determine the execution time of a command or shell script taken by your system or server in Linux.
mprindle writes: The Texas Attorney General sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users’ data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology.
The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and China-based companies Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation. Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office also highlighted “serious concerns” about the two Chinese companies being required to follow China’s National Security Law, which could give the Chinese government access to U.S. consumers’ data.
According to complaints filed this Monday in Texas state courts, the TV makers can allegedly use ACR technology to capture screenshots of television displays every 500 milliseconds, monitor the users’ viewing activity in real time, and send this information back to the companies’ servers without the users’ knowledge or consent.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Stealth shooter Espire: MR Missions gets a standalone release in early access, and existing Espire 2 owners get it for free.
Revealed last month, Espire: MR Missions expands upon the mixed reality mode previously seen in Espire 2: Stealth Operatives. This comes with 29 different missions that dynamically adapt to your home, taking out guards and navigating traps between 21 small-scale single-room missions and eight large-scale multi-room missions. That’s out now for the wider Quest platform.
0:00
Detailing its reasons for making this a standalone launch, developer Digital Lode advised that it’s “proven very difficult to maintain the MR mode within the larger Espire 2 VR game” as mixed reality technology evolves. The developer also believes that roomscale mixed reality offers a different appeal compared to Espire 2’s fully immersive VR missions.
As such, Espire 2: Stealth Operatives will return to being 100% focused on VR and its existing MR support will eventually be removed. Because of this, anyone who bought Espire 2 on Quest before today’s launch will receive MR Missions for free, while all future Espire 2 owners will get a discounted rate.
As for its latest additions, the early access release of MR Missions comes with five new missions and a new target shooting game mode. Digital Lode advised that its core ‘Espire Spatial Adaptation System’ for adapting levels to your space has seen “tonnes of improvements,” while some mechanics have been simplified. There’s also a new user interface that’s been designed for mixed reality.
Espire: MR Missions is out now in early access on Quest for $8.99. A full release date is unconfirmed, though the studio advised that it’s preparing a roadmap of “new missions, modes, features, and content.”
As I write this, I’m coming off a lunch break that lasted a little too long because I couldn’t stop watching YouTube Shorts on my TV. And if Instagram Reels are your own vertical video poison—and you own an Amazon Fire TV device—you can now do the same. Starting today, you can download the new Instagram for TV app to watch Reels on your big screen via a dedicated interface that should be way more natural than simply casting the mobile app from your phone.
Currently exclusive to Amazon devices, the Instagram for TV app supports up to five accounts and comes with full functionality for searching for Reels and profiles, as well as liking Reels and browsing comments or reactions (although text posts and photo posts are not included). Unlike on the standard mobile feed, Amazon says “Reels are organized into channels tuned to your interests,” which you can see from a horizontal home screen.
These channels are somewhat similar to the YouTube Shorts interface that’s baked into the standard YouTube TV app, showing you a small selection of shorts you can choose from based on a thumbnail. Examples include “For you” and “Popular with Friends,” but you’re also still able to swipe past any Reel to your heart’s content, and let the algorithm take you for a ride. A post from Meta also says channels could include Reels tailored to a specific topics that match your interests, like “sports highlights” or “hidden travel gems,” although the company hasn’t provided any screenshots or videos showing this off quite yet.
According to Meta, the new app is currently “an early test.” It’s starting with U.S.-based Amazon devices, and the company says it will “expand to more devices and countries” as it learns more (Amazon also says it’s the “first” company to get the app, implying others will get their own versions in the future).
Currently, the Instagram for TV app is available in the Amazon Appstore for the following devices:
Fire TV Stick HD
Fire TV Stick 4K Plus
Fire TV Stick 4K Max (1st and 2nd Gen)
Fire TV 2-Series
Fire TV 4-Series
Fire TV Omni QLED Series
In addition to adding channels to the Reels experience, Meta says that future updates may also add ways to use your phone as a remote, share feeds with friends, and explore “a more intuitive way to channel surf.”
Instagram for TV leaves TikTok as the last major short form video platform without a dedicated TV app, although The Information reported earlier this Summer that TikTok is looking to catch up soon.
While official Instagram for TV support is currently limited to Amazon devices, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck if you don’t have a Fire TV stick or display. To watch Instagram Reels on your TV without using the Instagram for TV app, open Instagram Reels on your phone and start browsing. Next, pull up your phone’s quick settings menu by swiping down from the top-right corner.
On iOS, search for the screen mirroring button (which looks like two overlapping screens), and on Android, search for a button that says something like “Cast” (it will vary depending on your device). Tap it to see any compatible wireless screen mirroring devices nearby, which will let you view the mobile Instagram app on a TV screen, and even send audio over with it. It’s not foolproof—my LG OLED TV works with iOS Screen Mirroring but not Pixel casting—but it’s worth a shot.
Following the release of GPT-5.2 last week, OpenAI has begun rolling out a new image generation model. The company says the updated ChatGPT Images is four times faster than its predecessor. If you’re a frequent ChatGPT user, you’ll know it can sometimes take a while for OpenAI’s servers to create images, particularly during peak times and if you’re not paying for ChatGPT Plus. In that respect, any improvement in speed is welcome.
The new version is also better at following instructions, including when you want to edit something the new model just generated. You can ask the system to add, subtract, combine, blend and even transpose elements. At the same time, OpenAI says the update offers better text rendering. That’s something many image models have traditionally struggled with, but according to the company, the new ChatGPT Images is capable of handling denser and smaller text. As part of the today’s model update, OpenAI is additionally adding a dedicated Images section to the ChatGPT sidebar. Here you’ll find preset filters and prompts you can look to for inspiration.
The new ChatGPT Images arrives just as Nano Banana Pro is responsible for a surge in Gemini usage. In October, Google said its chatbot had 650 million users, up from 450 million just a few months earlier in July. Nano Banana Pro has proven so popular, the company recently limited free users to just two image generations per day. For OpenAI, a strong response to Nano Banana Pro probably wasn’t as important as ensuring it came out swinging against Gemini 3 Pro, but ChatGPT Images is a big part of why there are 800 million ChatGPT users.
“We believe we’re still at the beginning of what image generation can enable,” OpenAI said. “Today’s update is a meaningful step forward with more to come, from finer-grained edits to richer, more detailed outputs across languages.”
OpenAI is rolling out the new ChatGPT Images to all users starting today. If you’re one of those people who miss GPT-4o, you’ll be happy to learn you can continue to use the older version of the tool through a custom GPT.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chatgpt-image-generation-is-now-faster-and-better-at-following-tweaks-180000750.html?src=rss