This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
OpenAI hires Slack’s CEO as its chief revenue officer
10 Dec 2025, 3:00 pm by Emma Roth
OpenAI is bringing Slack CEO Denise Dresser on board to serve as the AI giant’s chief revenue officer. In an announcement on Tuesday, OpenAI says Dresser will oversee the company’s global revenue strategy, while helping “more businesses put AI to work in their day-to-day operations.”
Dresser has worked at Slack’s parent company, Salesforce, for 12 years before becoming the CEO of Slack in 2023. During her time at Slack, Dresser oversaw the release of several new AI features, including a tool that recaps channels and threads, translates company jargon, and the launch of Slackbot as an AI assistant. Rob Seaman, Salesforce’s chief product offi …
The Verge picks the standout tech of 2025
10 Dec 2025, 3:00 pm by Victoria Barrios
Welcome to the end of 2025. Given all the AI announcements in supercomputing, data centers, and company investments, one might say this was “the year of AI,” but this was also the year where we saw design upgrades come to so many smartphones and laptops that 2025 could be called “the year of the flippable, foldable, and rollable hardware.” Or was it “the year of the gaming handhelds,” because who could forget the Nintendo Switch 2 or the ROG Ally X? It all depends on who you ask, which, is exactly what we did.
The Verge video team gathered reporters from across the newsroom to hear which technologies from 2025 stood out to them the most. W …
AI companies want a new internet — and they think they’ve found the key
10 Dec 2025, 2:33 pm by Hayden Field
Over the past 18 months, the largest AI companies in the world have quietly settled on an approach to building the next generation of apps and services – an approach that would allow AI agents from any company to easily access information and tools across the internet in a standardized way. It’s a key step toward building a usable ecosystem of AI agents that might actually pay off some of the enormous investments these companies have made, and it all starts with three letters: MCP.
MCP, or Model Context Protocol, began as a passion project from two Anthropic employees, but since its creation in mid-2024, it’s been widely adopted by companie …
Razer resurrects the first ever gaming mouse as a limited edition
10 Dec 2025, 2:16 pm by Andrew Liszewski
Razer is returning to its roots and relaunching the world’s first gaming mouse that debuted over 25 years ago before there was even a gaming peripheral industry. The original Kärna Razer Boomslang was best known for its encoding wheel that could more accurately track a mouse’s movements at 2,000 DPI. The new Razer Boomslang 20th Anniversary Edition carries forward the original’s symmetrical ambidextrous design but upgrades its rolling ball with a 45,000 DPI optical sensor and other modern conveniences.
The new Boomslang is being released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Razer being founded as a company – not just a brand – and while pri …
The best Christmas gifts for gamers and movie lovers
10 Dec 2025, 2:15 pm by Brandt Ranj
Most of us in the Northern Hemisphere spend the holidays indoors, but you can only watch so many TikToks about cute cats and cooking hacks before the need for something a little more substantive kicks in. Choosing the right game or movie to gift is tough, though, especially if you don’t have an exact read on what your friends and family like. And if you choose poorly, remember that you might also be on the hook to play or watch it with them.
That’s why, this year, we made it our mission to find gifts that appeal to people with diverse interests across a wide price range. If you know an aspiring Dungeon Master or a Wes Anderson devotee, the …
Figma adds more Photoshop-like AI tools for image editing
10 Dec 2025, 2:00 pm by Jess Weatherbed
Figma is launching three new AI-powered creative tools to help users edit their images without jumping to another platform. The new tools are available in Figma Design and Figma Draw, and can be used to quickly remove objects from an image, isolate objects so they can be repositioned, and extend images beyond their previous dimensions.
The Erase object and Isolate object tools are designed to work alongside Figma’s existing lasso tool, which allows users to draw around specific sections of the image they want to edit. Any objects or people within these selections can then be instantly erased from the image while filling in the background be …
AMD FSR Redstone is an exciting and confusing upgrade for Radeon PC gamers
10 Dec 2025, 2:00 pm by Sean Hollister
Today, AMD is soft-launching its latest suite of graphics and performance-enhancing tech, FSR Redstone – and it might take a second to wrap your head around. It certainly did for me.
The good news is that in just three months, AMD has more than doubled the number of games that support the flagship machine-learning version of its upscaling tech, FSR4, to over 200 games in all, and it’s launching ML-based frame generation (yes, “fake frames”) for over 30 titles too. You should be able to find full game lists here sometime today. Both techniques can dramatically increase your framerate while preserving image quality better than FSR 1, 2, or 3 …
A pay-to-scrape AI licensing standard is now official
10 Dec 2025, 2:00 pm by Emma Roth
An open licensing standard that aims to make AI companies pay for the content they vacuum up across the web is now an official specification. Really Simple Licensing 1.0 – or RSL for short – gives publishers the ability to dictate licensing and compensation rules to the web crawlers that visit their sites.
The RSL Collective announced the standard in September with backing from Yahoo, Ziff Davis, and O’Reilly Media. It’s an expansion of the robots.txt file, which outlines the parts of a website a web crawler can access. Though RSL alone can’t block AI scrapers that don’t pay for a license, the web infrastructure providers that support the s …
Aurora will have ‘hundreds’ of driverless trucks on the road by the end of 2026, CEO says
10 Dec 2025, 2:00 pm by Andrew J. Hawkins
It’s been a year of progress and delays for Aurora, the Pittsburgh-based autonomous trucking company founded by Chris Urmson. After promising to launch commercial driverless truck operations in 2024, the company was forced to push the start date until April 2025. A few weeks later, however, it was forced to put safety drivers back in the cabs at the request of the trucks’ manufacturer.
But in a recent interview, Urmson insists that having safety drivers in the cab is a matter of optics, not an indicator of technological regression. Operationally, it has no bearing on Aurora’s progress.
“2025 for us was really about how do we build it to th …
Instagram gives you more control over your Reels algorithm
10 Dec 2025, 1:30 pm by Jess Weatherbed
Instagram is launching a new AI-powered feature for fine-tuning which videos appear in your Reels tab. The “Your Algorithm” update allows you to see which topics Instagram already thinks you’re interested in based on your previous activity, and then remove some, or add new topics, to better direct what kind of videos you actually want to see.
“As your interests evolve over time, we want to give you more meaningful ways to control what you see on Instagram, starting with Reels,” Instagram said in its announcement. “Using AI, you can now more easily view and personalize the topics that shape your Reels, making recommendations feel even more t …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
