Friday was “a horrible day” for investors in Duolingo, reports Fast Company. But Friday’s one-day 14% drop is just part of a longer story.

Since last May, Duolingo’s stock has dropped 81%. Yes, the company faced a social media backlash that month after its CEO promised they’d become an “AI-first” company (favoring AI over human contractors). And yes, Duolingo did double its language offerings using generative AI. But more importantly, that summer OpenAI showed how easy it was to just roll your own language-learning tool from a short prompt in a GPT-5 demo, while Google built an AI-powered language-learning tool into its Translate app.

And yet, Friday Duolingo’s shares dropped another 14%, after announcing good fourth quarter results but an unpopular direction for its future. Fast Company reports:

On the surface, many of the company’s most critical metrics saw decent gains for the quarter, including:
— Daily Active Users: 52.7 million (up 30% year-over-year)
— Paid Subscribers: 12.2 million (up 28% year-over-year)
— Revenue: $282.9 million (up 35% year-over-year)
— Total bookings: $336.8 million (up 24% year-over-year)

The company also reported its full-year 2025 financials, revealing that for the first time in its history, it crossed the $1 billion revenue mark for a fiscal year.

But the Motley Fool explains that Duolingo’s higher ad loads and repeated pushes for subscription plans “generated revenues in the short term, but made the Duolingo platform less engaging. Ergo, user growth decelerated while revenues rose.” Thursday Duolingo announced a big change to address that, including moving more features into lower-priced tiers. Barron’s reports:

D.A. Davidson analyst Wyatt Swanson, who rates Duolingo stock at Neutral, posited that the push to monetize “led to disgruntled users and a meaningful negative impact to ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing.” Duolingo has guided for bookings growth between 10% and 12% in 2026, compared with the 20% rate the company would have expected to see “if we operated like we have in past years….”
If stock reaction is any indication, investors are concerned about Duolingo’s new focus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“The drought of upcoming Star Wars movies is coming to an end soon,” writes Cinemablend. In May the The Mandalorian and Grogu opens, and one year later there’s the release of the Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars: Starfighter.

But “there are some insiders who already believe that Starfighter will be a bigger hit than The Mandalorian and Grogu…”

According to unnamed sources who spoke with Variety, there’s a “sense” that Star Wars: Starfighter, which is directed by Deadpool & Wolverine’s Shawn Levy, will be a more satisfying viewing experience. These same sources are allegedly impressed by the early footage they’ve seen of Ryan Gosling’s performance and also suggested that Levy has “recaptured the franchise’s spirit of fun.” Furthermore, the article states that there’s concern that because The Mandalorian and Grogu is spinning out of a streaming-exclusive series, it might not have as much appeal to people who aren’t already fans of The Mandalorian… Star Wars: Starfighter, on the other hand, will be accessible to everyone equally. It’s set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, which is an unexplored period for the Star Wars franchise onscreen. It’s also expected that most, if not all of its featured characters will be brand-new, so no knowledge of past adventures is required.
Slashdot reader gaiageek reminds us that 2027 will also see a special 50-year anniversary event in movie in theatres: a “newly restored” version of the original 1977 Star Wars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It started Friday when all U.S. federal agencies were ordered to “immediately cease” using Anthropic’s AI technology after contract negotiations stalled when Anthropic requested prohibitions against mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. But later Friday there were even more repercussions…

In a post to his 1.1 million followers on X.com, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth criticized Anthropic for what he called “a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.”

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic… Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” [Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei] have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission — a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic’s defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable…

In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic… America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.

Meanwhile, Anthrophic said on Friday that “no amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position.” (And “We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”)
Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action — one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. We are deeply saddened by these developments. As the first frontier AI company to deploy models in the US government’s classified networks, Anthropic has supported American warfighters since June 2024 and has every intention of continuing to do so. We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government… Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement.

Anthropic also defended the two exceptions they’d requested that had stalled contract negotiations. “[W]e do not believe that today’s frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America’s warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.”

Also Friday, OpenAI announced that “we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized that the agreement retains and confirms OpenAI’s own prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance — and requires “human responsibility” for the use of force including for autonomous weapon systems. “The Department of War agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the Department of War also wanted. ”

We are asking the Department of War to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Who would’ve guessed we’d get to play the original Banjo-Kazooie on a handheld with just a D-pad in 2026. HyperMegaTech!’s latest release is a collaboration with Rare Ltd., the legendary game developer known for the Banjo-Kazooie franchise and, more recently, Sea of Thieves, called the Super Pocket Rare Edition.

The vertical handheld features 14 classics from the British developer, including two Battletoads titles, Conker’s Pocket Tales and many more. While most of the games were released on 8- or 16-bit consoles, Banjo-Kazooie will be the headliner since it was originally released on the Nintendo 64. It may sound weird to control Banjo and Kazooie with a D-pad, but HyperMegaTech! assured that the game has been enhanced and optimized specifically for the Super Pocket handheld.

Since HyperMegaTech! and Evercade share Blaze Entertainment as a parent company, that means the Rare Edition handheld will be compatible with Evercade cartridges. Once you’re done with the 14 included games, you can expand your Super Pocket’s library with cartridges that feature collections from Taito, NeoGeo or Atari. HyperMegaTech! said the Rare Edition handheld will be available for $69.99 in June 2026, but has already opened preorders.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/this-retro-inspired-handheld-comes-with-banjo-kazooie-and-battletoads-built-in-203111135.html?src=rss

US President Donald Trump announced Friday that he was instructing every federal agency to “immediately cease” use of Anthropic’s AI tools. The move comes after Anthropic and top officials clashed for weeks over military applications of artificial intelligence.

“The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

Trump said that there would be a “six month phase out period” for agencies using Anthropic, which could allow time for further negotiations between the government and the AI startup.

Read full article

Comments

There’s already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica’s ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles produced by lower-energy neutrinos interacting with matter:

When they do, the neutrinos produce charged particles that travel through the ice at nearly the speed of light, creating a blue glow called Cherenkov radiation… “Within the first couple years, we should be making much better measurements,” [said Erin O’Sullivan, an associate professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a spokesperson for the project.] “There’s hope to expand the detector, by an order of magnitude in volume, so the important thing there is we’re not just seeing a few neutrino point sources, but we’re starting to be a true telescope. … That’s really the dream.”

The scientists spent seven years planning the upgrade, according to the article. “To drill holes a mile and a half deep takes about 30 hours, and 18 more hours to return to the surface,” the article points out. “Then, the race begins because almost immediately, the hole starts to shrink as the water refreezes.” (“If it takes too much time, the principal investigator says, “the instruments don’t fit in anymore!”)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alaska’s House of Representatives unanimously passed HB47, a bill that imposes sweeping limits on when and how minors use social media apps, along with bans on generating or distributing harmful deepfakes of children.

The bill’s original form was focused on prohibiting the possession and distribution of sexually explicit images of children using AI, but Alaska lawmakers decided to add amendments that would impose social media restrictions. The proposed limitations include a statewide curfew on using social media between 10:30 PM and 6:30 AM, banning “addictive design features” and requiring social media platforms to verify user ages and get parental consent if they are minors.

While the House bill saw 39 votes in favor and zero against, the amendments offered some hints at potential upcoming revisions. Before the bill went to a vote, some of the House representatives expressed concern about adding such broad rules on social media without consulting the companies behind them first.

The bill still has to make its way through the Alaska State Senate, which already has presented a companion bill, and the governor. Alaska is following the footsteps of many other states, and the House even modeled its social media amendments in the HB47 bill after Utah. While Utah was the first to propose social media restrictions for kids, it was later met with a preliminary injunction.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/alaska-could-be-the-next-state-to-crack-down-on-ai-generated-csam-and-restrict-kids-social-media-use-190506366.html?src=rss

Interesting Engineering reports:

US tech giant Google announced on Tuesday that it will build a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota. The new facility will be powered by 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy from wind and solar, coupled with a 300-megawatt battery, claimed to be the ‘world’s largest’, with a 30-gigawatt-hour (GWh) capacity and 100-hour duration… The planned battery would dwarf a 19 GW lithium-ion project in the UAE…

Form Energy’s batteries work very differently from most large batteries today. Instead of using lithium like the batteries in electric cars, they store electricity by making iron rust and then reversing the rusting process to release the energy when needed… Form’s iron-air batteries are heavier and less efficient than their counterparts; they can only return about 50% to 70% of the energy used to charge them, while lithium-ion batteries return more than 90%. However, Form’s batteries have one distinct advantage. They are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, costing about $20 per kilowatt-hour of storage, which is almost three times as cheap… It will store 150 MWh of electricity and can supply to the grid for up to 100 hours, delivering about 1.5 MW at peak output.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Health officials in Illinois turned to an AI chatbot to try to solve a puzzling outbreak linked to a county fair. But whether it was actually helpful or not remains unclear.

According to a report this week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, officials in Brown County got the first hint of an outbreak from the county sheriff, who noted on August 5, 2024 that a remarkable number of potential jurors for an upcoming trial said they had a stomach bug. Then, on August 12, the state health department notified the county of a case of Salmonella enterica serotype Agbeni.

With those two tips, county health officials opened an investigation and were able to identify 13 cases—seven laboratory-confirmed cases of S. enterica Agbeni and six probable cases that were in close contact with confirmed cases. The cases spanned five counties, but they all had one thing in common: everyone had gone to the Brown County fair.

Read full article

Comments

Bloodborne fans may not be happy to hear that a remake was reportedly rejected, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely off the table. Bluepoint Games, Sony’s closed-down studio behind many PlayStation remakes, pitched remaking the classic Gothic horror RPG in early 2025, but was blocked by the game’s developer, FromSoftware, according to a Bloomberg report.

As Bloomberg reported, Bluepoint pitched a Bloodborne remake after several years of working towards a live-service title in the God of War franchise that was ultimately canceled. Looking for the next project, a modern-day version of Bloodborne made a lot of sense, considering the title came out in 2015 and Bluepoint was responsible for the successful Demon’s Souls remake in 2020. However, Bloomberg‘s sources said that FromSoftware was against it, but didn’t offer a concrete reason why. With some digging, Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier pointed to an interview from Kinda Funny Games with PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida, which aired last year. In the video, Yoshida mentioned that FromSoftware’s president, Hidetaka Miyazaki, wanted to pursue a Bloodborne remake, but was too busy to do it himself and “doesn’t want anyone else to touch it.”

After failing to get the Bloodborne remake greenlit, Bluepoint wasn’t able to secure another project for more than a year, according to the Bloomberg report. Now that Bluepoint has been shut down, we’re likely even further away from a remake. That’s not to say a remake will never happen, but when it does, it’ll have to get a stamp of approval and likely a lot of oversight from FromSoftware.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/shuttered-studio-bluepoint-reportedly-pitched-a-bloodborne-remake-but-it-got-shot-down-by-fromsoftware-173744228.html?src=rss

CNN reports that images from Iran’s capital “have shown cars jammed along Tehran’s street, with heavy traffic on major roads after today’s wave of attacks by the US and Israel.” And though Iran has a population of 93 million, the attacks suddenly plunged Iran into “a near-total internet blackout with national connectivity at 4% of ordinary levels,” according to internet monitoring experts at NetBlocks.

CNN reports:

Since Iran’s brutal crackdown earlier this year, the regime has made progress to allow only a subset of people with security clearance to access the international web, experts said. After previous internet shutdowns, some platforms never returned. The Iranian government blocked Instagram after the internet shutdown and protests in 2022, and the popular messaging app Telegram following protests in 2018.

The International Atomic Energy Agency announced an hour ago that they’re “closely monitoring developments” — keeping in contact with countries in the region and so far seeing “no evidence of any radiological impact.” They’re also urging “restraint to avoid any nuclear safety risks to people in the region.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MWC 2026 officially gets underway on March 2 and will continue through March 5, but the announcements are already coming ahead of its start. We can always count on the annual tech event to bring tons of new phones, laptops and tablets, and we’re expecting to see some robots and other gadgets too — plus plenty of AI news, of course. In addition to the announcements, MWC is our chance to get hands-on time with some of the most interesting new devices, like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra.

We’ll be updating this story as the week goes on to keep you in the loop on everything that caught our attention, so keep checking back here for the latest MWC news. 

Xiaomi x Leica

Xiaomi kicked off MWC this year by announcing the global launch of its 17 Ultra smartphone, which debuted first in China back in December. It’s unclear if the phone will ever come to the US, but it’s now rolling out in Europe. Xiaomi teamed up again with Leica to make a photography-focused smartphone, and the 17 Ultra sports a 1-inch 50-megapixel camera sensor with a f/1.67 lens, a telephoto setup with a 200MP 1/1.4-inch sensor, and a 50MP ultrawide camera. There’s also a manual zoom ring around the camera. 

Check out our hands on for our first impressions of what it’s like shooting with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. And there’s more to it than just the camera. The 17 Ultra has a 6.9-inch OLED 120 Hz display that peaks at 3,500 nits of brightness, and a 6,000mAh silicon-carbon battery. The Xiaomi 17 Ultra starts at £1,299 (roughly $1,750).

Leica also announced a new phone made in partnership with Xiaomi at MWC. It looks a whole lot like Xiaomi’s 17 Ultra, but isn’t the 17 Ultra, exactly.

Image by Mat Smith for Engadget

Like the 17 Ultra, Leica’s Leitzphone by Xiaomi has a 1-inch camera sensor and physical controls for zoom and other settings, using a mechanical ring around the camera unit. It features a Leica-designed intuitive camera interface with the option to show just the essentials when you’re shooting, hiding all the modes and labels. There’s a monochrome shooting mode and Leica filters. 

The Leica branding is splashed all over it in design and wallpapers, but it’s otherwise pretty similar to the 17 Ultra, with the same specs. Like the 17 Ultra, it has a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip and a 6.9-inch 120Hz display. This one’s priced at €1,999 (roughly $2,362).

Honor MagicPad 4 

Honor

Ahead of MWC, Honor announced what it claims is the thinnest Android tablet in the world: the 4.8mm thick MagicPad 4. We’re expecting to hear more about this at Honor’s press conference on Sunday, but so far we know it features a 12.3-inch 165Hz OLED display and weighs just 450g. It comes with up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset. The thinness doesn’t count the camera bump, Honor notes. The MagicPad 4 has 13MP rear and 9MP front cameras. It also boasts spatial audio, with eight speakers.

Just as the display is slightly smaller than the previous MagicPad, the MagicPad 4 has a smaller battery at 10,100 mAh. It comes with a 66W fast charger. The MagicPad 4 will run Honor’s MagicOS 10. We don’t yet know how much it will cost, but we’ll update this after Honor’s press conference (where we’re also expecting to see the company’s robot) with any new details.  

Tecno

We can always expect to see some wild phone concepts at MWC, and this year we’re starting with one from Tecno. The company unveiled a modular concept smartphone design that can be as thin as 4.9mm in its base configuration. There’d be 10 modules to choose from based on the announcement, including various camera lenses, a gaming attachment and a power bank, relying on magnets to keep it all together — or Modular Magnetic Interconnection Technology, as Tecno is calling it. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/everything-announced-at-mwc-2026-the-new-leica-leitzphone-by-xiaomi-honors-ultra-thin-magicpad-4-and-more-172442426.html?src=rss