Category: Technologies

In late 2022, OpenAI wowed the world when it introduced ChatGPT and showed us a chatbot with an entirely new level of power, breadth and usefulness, thanks to the generative AI technology behind it. Since then, ChatGPT has continued to evolve, including its most recent development: Easy access for everyone.

ChatGPT and generative AI aren’t a surprise anymore, but keeping track of what they can do can be a challenge as new abilities arrive. Most notably, OpenAI now lets anyone write custom AI apps called GPTs and share them on its own app store, while on a smaller scale ChatGPT can now speak its responses to you. OpenAI has been leading the generative AI charge, but it’s hotly pursued by Microsoft, Google and startups far and wide.

Generative AI still hasn’t shaken a core problem — it makes up information that sounds plausible but isn’t necessarily correct. But there’s no denying AI has fired the imaginations of computer scientists, loosened the purse strings of venture capitalists and caught the attention of everyone from teachers to doctors to artists and more, all wondering how AI will change their work and their lives.

If you’re trying to get a handle on ChatGPT, this FAQ is for you. Here’s a look at what’s up.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an online chatbot that responds to “prompts” — text requests that you type. ChatGPT has countless uses. You can request relationship advice, a summarized history of punk rock or an explanation of the ocean’s tides. It’s particularly good at writing software, and it can also handle some other technical tasks, like creating 3D models.

ChatGPT is called a generative AI because it generates these responses on its own. But it can also display more overtly creative output like screenplays, poetry, jokes and student essays. That’s one of the abilities that really caught people’s attention.

Much of AI has been focused on specific tasks, but ChatGPT is a general-purpose tool. This puts it more into a category like a search engine.

That breadth makes it powerful but also hard to fully control. OpenAI has many mechanisms in place to try to screen out abuse and other problems, but there’s an active cat-and-mouse game afoot by researchers and others who try to get ChatGPT to do things like offer bomb-making recipes.

ChatGPT really blew people’s minds when it began passing tests. For example, AnsibleHealth researchers reported in 2023 that “ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold” for the United States Medical Licensing Exam, suggesting that AI chatbots “may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making.”

We’re a long way from fully fledged doctor-bots you can trust, but the computing industry is investing billions of dollars to solve the problems and expand AI into new domains like visual data too. OpenAI is among those at the vanguard. So strap in, because the AI journey is going to be a sometimes terrifying, sometimes exciting thrill.

What’s ChatGPT’s origin?

Artificial intelligence algorithms had been ticking away for years before ChatGPT arrived. These systems were a big departure from traditional programming, which follows a rigid if-this-then-that approach. AI, in contrast, is trained to spot patterns in complex real-world data. AI has been busy for more than a decade screening out spam, identifying our friends in photos, recommending videos and translating our Alexa voice commands into computerese.

A Google technology called transformers helped propel AI to a new level, leading to a type of AI called a large language model, or LLM. These AIs are trained on enormous quantities of text, including material like books, blog posts, forum comments and news articles. The training process internalizes the relationships between words, letting chatbots process input text and then generate what it believes to be appropriate output text.

A second phase of building an LLM is called reinforcement learning through human feedback, or RLHF. That’s when people review the chatbot’s responses and steer it toward good answers or away from bad ones. That significantly alters the tool’s behavior and is one important mechanism for trying to stop abuse.

OpenAI’s LLM is called GPT, which stands for “generative pretrained transformer.” Training a new model is expensive and time consuming, typically taking weeks and requiring a data center packed with thousands of expensive AI acceleration processors. OpenAI’s latest LLM is called GPT-4 Turbo. Other LLMs include Google’s Gemini (formerly called Bard), Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama.

ChatGPT is an interface that lets you easily prompt GPT for responses. When it arrived as a free tool in November 2022, its use exploded far beyond what OpenAI expected.

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the company didn’t even see it as a product. It was supposed to be a mere “research preview,” a test that could draw some feedback from a broader audience, said ChatGPT product leader Nick Turley. Instead, it went viral, and OpenAI scrambled to just keep the service up and running under the demand.

“It was surreal,” Turley said. “There was something about that release that just struck a nerve with folks in a way that we certainly did not expect. I remember distinctly coming back the day after we launched and looking at dashboards and thinking, something’s broken, this couldn’t be real, because we really didn’t make a very big deal out of this launch.”

How do I use ChatGPT?

The ChatGPT website is the most obvious method. Open it up, select the LLM version you want from the drop-down menu in the upper left corner, and type in a query.

As of April 1, ChatGPT is allowing consumers to use the service without signing up for an account first. According to a blog post, the move was meant to make the tool more accessible. It blocked prompts and generations in a wider range of categories at the same time.

However, users with accounts will be able to do more with the tool, such as save and review their history, share conversations and tap into features like voice conversations and custom instructions.

OpenAI in 2023 released a ChatGPT app for iPhones and for Android phones. In February, ChatGPT for Apple Vision Pro arrived, too, adding the chatbot’s abilities to the “spatial computing” headset. Be careful to look for the genuine article, because other developers can create their own chatbot apps that link to OpenAI’s GPT.

In January, OpenAI opened its GPT Store, a collection of custom AI apps that focus ChatGPT’s all-purpose design to specific jobs. A lot more on that later, but in addition to finding them through the store you can invoke them with the @ symbol in a prompt, the way you might tag a friend on Instagram.

Microsoft uses GPT for its Bing search engine, which means you can also try out ChatGPT there.

ChatGPT is sprouting up in various hardware devices, including Volkswagen EVs, Humane’s voice-controlled AI pin and the squarish Rabbit R1 device.

How much does ChatGPT cost?

It’s free, though you have to set up an account to take advantage of all of its features.

For more capability, there’s also a subscription called ChatGPT Plus that costs $20 per month that offers a variety of advantages: It responds faster, particularly during busy times when the free version is slow or sometimes tells you to try again later. It also offers access to newer AI models, including GPT-4. The free ChatGPT uses the older GPT-3.5, which doesn’t do as well on OpenAI’s benchmark tests but which is faster to respond. The newest variation, GPT-4 Turbo, arrived in late 2023 with more up-to-date responses and an ability to ingest and output larger blocks of text.

ChatGPT is growing beyond its language roots. With ChatGPT Plus, you can upload images, for example, to ask what type of mushroom is in a photo.

Perhaps most importantly, ChatGPT Plus lets you use GPTs.

What are these GPTs?

GPTs are custom versions of ChatGPT from OpenAI, its business partners and thousands of third-party developers who created their own GPTs.

Sometimes when people encounter ChatGPT, they don’t know where to start. OpenAI calls it the “empty box problem.” Discovering that led the company to find a way to narrow down the choices, Turley said.

“People really benefit from the packaging of a use case — here’s a very specific thing that I can do with ChatGPT,” like travel planning, cooking help or an interactive, step-by-step tool to build a website, Turley said.

Think of GPTs as OpenAI trying to make the general-purpose power of ChatGPT more refined the same way smartphones have a wealth of specific tools. (And think of GPTs as OpenAI’s attempt to take control over how we find, use and pay for these apps, much like Apple has a commanding role over iPhones through its App Store.)

What GPTs are available now?

OpenAI’s GPT store now offers millions of GPTs, though as with smartphone apps, you’ll probably not be interested in most of them. A range of GPT custom apps are available, including AllTrails personal trail recommendations, a Khan Academy programming tutor, a Canva design tool, a book recommender, a fitness trainer, the laundry buddy clothes washing label decoder, a music theory instructor, a haiku writer and the Pearl for Pets for vet advice bot.

One person excited by GPTs is Daniel Kivatinos, co-founder of financial services company JustPaid. His team is building a GPT designed to take a spreadsheet of financial data as input and then let executives ask questions. How fast is a startup going through the money investors gave it? Why did that employee just file a $6,000 travel expense?

JustPaid hopes that GPTs will eventually be powerful enough to accept connections to bank accounts and financial software, which would mean a more powerful tool. For now, the developers are focusing on guardrails to avoid problems like hallucinations — those answers that sound plausible but are actually wrong — or making sure the GPT is answering based on the users’ data, not on some general information in its AI model, Kivatinos said.

Anyone can create a GPT, at least in principle. OpenAI’s GPT editor walks you through the process with a series of prompts. Just like the regular ChatGPT, your ability to craft the right prompt will generate better results.

Another notable difference from regular ChatGPT: GPTs let you upload extra data that’s relevant to your particular GPT, like a collection of essays or a writing style guide.

Some of the GPTs draw on OpenAI’s Dall-E tool for turning text into images, which can be useful and entertaining. For example, there is a coloring book picture creator, a logo generator and a tool that turns text prompts into diagrams like company org charts. OpenAI calls Dall-E a GPT.

How up to date is ChatGPT?

Not very, and that can be a problem. For example, a Bing search using ChatGPT to process results said OpenAI hadn’t yet released its ChatGPT Android app. Search results from traditional search engines can help to “ground” AI results, and indeed that’s part of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership that can tweak ChatGPT Plus results.

GPT-4 Turbo, announced in November, is trained on data up through April 2023. But it’s nothing like a search engine whose bots crawl news sites many times a day for the latest information.

Can you trust ChatGPT responses?

Sadly, no. Well, sometimes, sure, but you need to be wary.

Large language models work by stringing words together, one after another, based on what’s probable each step of the way. But it turns out that LLM’s generative AI works better and sounds more natural with a little spice of randomness added to the word selection recipe. That’s the basic statistical nature that underlies the criticism that LLMs are mere “stochastic parrots” rather than sophisticated systems that in some way understand the world’s complexity.

The result of this system, combined with the steering influence of the human training, is an AI that produces results that sound plausible but that aren’t necessarily true. ChatGPT does better with information that’s well represented in training data and undisputed — for instance, red traffic signals mean stop, Plato was a philosopher who wrote the Allegory of the Cave, an Alaskan earthquake in 1964 was the largest in US history at magnitude 9.2.

When facts are more sparsely documented, controversial or off the beaten track of human knowledge, LLMs don’t work as well. Unfortunately, they sometimes produce incorrect answers with a convincing, authoritative voice. That’s what tripped up a lawyer who used ChatGPT to bolster his legal case only to be reprimanded when it emerged he used ChatGPT fabricated some cases that appeared to support his arguments. “I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he said, according to The New York Times.

Such fabrications are called hallucinations in the AI business.

That means when you’re using ChatGPT, it’s best to double check facts elsewhere.

But there are plenty of creative uses for ChatGPT that don’t require strictly factual results.

Want to use ChatGPT to draft a cover letter for a job hunt or give you ideas for a themed birthday party? No problem. Looking for hotel suggestions in Bangladesh? ChatGPT can give useful travel itineraries, but confirm the results before booking anything.

Is the hallucination problem getting better?

Yes, but we haven’t seen a breakthrough.

“Hallucinations are a fundamental limitation of the way that these models work today,” Turley said. LLMs just predict the next word in a response, over and over, “which means that they return things that are likely to be true, which is not always the same as things that are true,” Turley said.

But OpenAI has been making gradual progress. “With nearly every model update, we’ve gotten a little bit better on making the model both more factual and more self aware about what it does and doesn’t know,” Turley said. “If you compare ChatGPT now to the original ChatGPT, it’s much better at saying, ‘I don’t know that’ or ‘I can’t help you with that’ versus making something up.”

Hallucinations are so much a part of the zeitgeist that Dictionary.com touted it as a new word it added to its dictionary in 2023.

Can you use ChatGPT for wicked purposes?

You can try, but lots of it will violate OpenAI’s terms of use, and the company tries to block it too. The company prohibits use that involves sexual or violent material, racist caricatures, and personal information like Social Security numbers or addresses.

OpenAI works hard to prevent harmful uses. Indeed, its basic sales pitch is trying to bring the benefits of AI to the world without the drawbacks. But it acknowledges the difficulties, for example in its GPT-4 “system card” that documents its safety work.

“GPT-4 can generate potentially harmful content, such as advice on planning attacks or hate speech. It can represent various societal biases and worldviews that may not be representative of the user’s intent, or of widely shared values. It can also generate code that is compromised or vulnerable,” the system card says. It also can be used to try to identify individuals and could help lower the cost of cyberattacks.

Through a process called red teaming, in which experts try to find unsafe uses of its AI and bypass protections, OpenAI identified lots of problems and tried to nip them in the bud before GPT-4 launched. For example, a prompt to generate jokes mocking a Muslim boyfriend in a wheelchair was diverted so its response said, “I cannot provide jokes that may offend someone based on their religion, disability or any other personal factors. However, I’d be happy to help you come up with some light-hearted and friendly jokes that can bring laughter to the event without hurting anyone’s feelings.”

Researchers are still probing LLM limits. For example, Italian researchers discovered they could use ChatGPT to fabricate fake but convincing medical research data. And Google DeepMind researchers found that telling ChatGPT to repeat the same word forever eventually caused a glitch that made the chatbot blurt out training data verbatim. That’s a big no-no, and OpenAI barred the approach.

LLMs are still new. Expect more problems and more patches.

And there are plenty of uses for ChatGPT that might be allowed but ill-advised. The website of Philadelphia’s sheriff published more than 30bogus news stories generated with ChatGPT.

What about ChatGPT and cheating in school?

ChatGPT is well suited to short essays on just about anything you might encounter in high school or college, to the chagrin of many educators who fear students will type in prompts instead of thinking for themselves.

ChatGPT also can solve some math problems, explain physics phenomena, write chemistry lab reports and handle all kinds of other work students are supposed to handle on their own. Companies that sell anti-plagiarism software have pivoted to flagging text they believe an AI generated.

But not everyone is opposed, seeing it more like a tool akin to Google search and Wikipedia articles that can help students.

“There was a time when using calculators on exams was a huge no-no,” said Alexis Abramson, dean of Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. “It’s really important that our students learn how to use these tools, because 90% of them are going into jobs where they’re going to be expected to use these tools. They’re going to walk in the office and people will expect them, being age 22 and technologically savvy, to be able to use these tools.”

ChatGPT also can help kids get past writer’s block and can help kids who aren’t as good at writing, perhaps because English isn’t their first language, she said.

So for Abramson, using ChatGPT to write a first draft or polish their grammar is fine. But she asks her students to disclose that fact.

“Anytime you use it, I would like you to include what you did when you turn in your assignment,” she said. “It’s unavoidable that students will use ChatGPT, so why don’t we figure out a way to help them use it responsibly?”

Is ChatGPT coming for my job?

The threat to employment is real as managers seek to replace expensive humans with cheaper automated processes. We’ve seen this movie before: elevator operators were replaced by buttons, bookkeepers were replaced by accounting software, welders were replaced by robots.

ChatGPT has all sorts of potential to blitz white-collar jobs. Paralegals summarizing documents, marketers writing promotional materials, tax advisers interpreting IRS rules, even therapists offering relationship advice.

But so far, in part because of problems with things like hallucinations, AI companies present their bots as assistants and “copilots,” not replacements.

And so far, sentiment is more positive than negative about chatbots, according to a survey by consulting firm PwC. Of 53,912 people surveyed around the world, 52% expressed at least one good expectation about the arrival of AI, for example that AI would increase their productivity. That compares with 35% who had at least one negative thing to say, for example that AI will replace them or require skills they’re not confident they can learn.

How will ChatGPT affect programmers?

Software development is a particular area where people have found ChatGPT and its rivals useful. Trained on millions of lines of code, it internalized enough information to build websites and mobile apps. It can help programmers frame up bigger projects or fill in details.

One of the biggest fans is Microsoft’s GitHub, a site where developers can host projects and invite collaboration. Nearly a third of people maintaining GitHub projects use its GPT-based assistant, called Copilot, and 92% of US developers say they’re using AI tools.

“We call it the industrial revolution of software development,” said Github Chief Product Officer Inbal Shani. “We see it lowering the barrier for entry. People who are not developers today can write software and develop applications using Copilot.”

It’s the next step in making programming more accessible, she said. Programmers used to have to understand bits and bytes, then higher-level languages gradually eased the difficulties. “Now you can write coding the way you talk to people,” she said.

And AI programming aids still have a lot to prove. Researchers from Stanford and the University of California-San Diego found in a study of 47 programmers that those with access to an OpenAI programming help “wrote significantly less secure code than those without access.”

And they raise a variation of the cheating problem that some teachers are worried about: copying software that shouldn’t be copied, which can lead to copyright problems. That’s why Copyleaks, a maker of plagiarism detection software, offers a tool called the Codeleaks Source Code AI Detector designed to spot AI-generated code from ChatGPT, Google Gemini and GitHub Copilot. AIs could inadvertently copy code from other sources, and the latest version is designed to spot copied code based on its semantic structures, not just verbatim software.

At least in the next five years, Shani doesn’t see AI tools like Copilot as taking humans out of programming.

“I don’t think that it will replace the human in the loop. There’s some capabilities that we as humanity have — the creative thinking, the innovation, the ability to think beyond how a machine thinks in terms of putting things together in a creative way. That’s something that the machine can still not do.”

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.

Apple released iOS 17.4 in March, and the update brought a handful of new features to your iPhone, like Podcast transcripts and more Stolen Device Protection settings. When Apple released iOS 17 in September, the tech giant brought a fun new feature to the News app: crossword puzzles.

While crosswords can be fun and entertaining, these puzzles can also expand a person’s vocabulary and stimulate thinking capacity, as well as provide a confidence boost, according to a study published in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

To access crossword puzzles in the News app, you need an Apple News Plus subscription, which costs $13 a month. You can try Apple News Plus for one month for free, or you can get the service for free for three months when you buy an iPhone, iPad or Mac. An Apple News Plus subscription is also part of the Apple One Premier bundle, which costs $38 a month and includes other services like Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade.

Here’s how you can access daily crossword puzzles as an Apple News Plus subscriber.

Play crossword puzzles in Apple News

1. Open the Apple News app.
2. Tap Following in the menu across the bottom of your screen.
3. Tap Puzzles.

From the Puzzles page, you can find the latest crosswords from the week. Across the top of the page, you’ll also see options for Crossword and Crossword Mini, which are smaller crossword puzzles arranged in a 5×5 grid. Tap either of these options, and the app takes you to the latest puzzles for either choice.

You can also access crossword puzzles by going to Apple News > Today and scrolling down the page until you see Latest Puzzles, but this option was pretty far down my Today page.

How to play the puzzles

Once you’ve decided on which puzzle to play, there are two ways you can solve them: grid view and list view. By default, you’ll enter grid view which is a traditional crossword puzzle layout. You see the whole grid, and if you tap a square you’ll see a clue below the puzzle. You can also switch between vertical and horizontal clues by tapping a square a second time or tapping the clue.

List view, on the other hand, eschews the traditional grid of a crossword puzzle and shows you all the clues and how many letters are in each answer in a list format. To access the list view, tap the bulleted list icon in the top left corner of your screen when you are in a puzzle. As you enter letters in the list view, letters in other clues begin populating where the clues intersect on the grid. I still think list view sounds tough, but I’m also not very good at crossword puzzles to start with.

How many puzzles are there?

There are two new puzzles every day, a crossword and a crossword mini. There is also an archive of past crosswords you can access. Follow the steps above then tap either Crossword or Crossword Mini. Then, below the Latest Puzzles you should see Archive. The puzzles from the last month are listed under Archive, and if you tap the arrow next to Archive you can access puzzles dating back to June 2023.

For more on iOS 17, check out the latest features in iOS 17.4 and iOS 17.3. You can also check out our iOS 17 cheat sheet.

ChatGPT can provide you with brief summaries of complex topics, brainstorm book ideas with you and even write code in different programming languages. But one thing the AI chatbot, developed by OpenAI, couldn’t do for a long time was access and read uploaded files.

If you wanted ChatGPT to analyze information from something like a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet, you were out of luck. You’d have to manually type the information from the document into the chat thread. And then you could enter your prompt.

But that’s no longer the case.

With ChatGPT-4, the latest version of ChatGPT, you can now upload any file from your device into the chatbot. Read on to understand who can upload files, why you’d want to and how to upload files. Here’s everything you need to know.

The AI chatbot roster — as with other generative AI tools — is expansive and growing, with Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, Claude.ai, Perplexity, Dall-E, Midjourney and others on the list. They’re collectively poised to transform how you work, how you get information and how companies do business. But it all started with ChatGPT.

Who exactly can upload files to ChatGPT?

Right now, to upload a file to ChatGPT, you need to pay for ChatGPT Plus. A subscription to ChatGPT Plus runs $20 a month, and this grants you access to ChatGPT-4 and access to the latest features, including uploading files.

If you want to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus, open the ChatGPT app on your phone and git the Get Plus sign at the top of any new prompt page. You can also access the side panel on the left side, tap the three-dot menu at the bottom of the page and go into Subscription or hit Upgrade to ChatGPT Plus.

Why would you even want to upload files to ChatGPT anyway?

ChatGPT-4 can analyze any file you upload, whether it’s a PowerPoint presentation, an Excel spreadsheet, a research paper or a photo.

If you upload a spreadsheet with financial data, for example, you can ask ChatGPT to create a visual graph of the numbers. If you upload a PowerPoint presentation you did for school, you can ask ChatGPT to give you feedback on the content, and even proofread and correct any mistakes. With a complicated research paper, you can ask ChatGPT to give you a simple summary to read through, along with a bullet list for headlines and key points.

And with a photo, you can ask ChatGPT to explain what’s in the image, or give you instructions on how to build something you’ve photographed. The options as to what you can ask ChatGPT for are limitless. It’s up to you to figure out exactly what you want ChatGPT to do with your files.

Before you upload a file to ChatGPT…

Think about your privacy. Any file you upload to ChatGPT is retained indefinitely within the service, and those files may also be used by OpenAI to train its models, so it’s best to refrain from uploading files with any important personal information, like your Social Security number, address, finance documents or phone numbers.

And someone else could potentially gain access to your personal information, so only upload files with information you wouldn’t mind other people getting access to.

It’s not just privacy. Consider accuracy too. ChatGPT can give wrong answers, and its dataset does not have up-to-date information, so you’ll want to double-check that the chatbot is accurately proofreading, summarizing or explaining as you’d expect.

How to upload files to ChatGPT

Now for the easy part: Uploading files to ChatGPT. As long as you’re paying for the premium subscription, launch ChatGPT, create a new chat and hit the plus sign to the left of the text field to view your uploading options. Starting from the far left, you can:

• Give ChatGPT access to your camera and take a photo from within the app
• Upload a photo from your camera roll
• Upload a file from the Files app

Once you upload a file (or files), enter your prompt underneath and hit send. ChatGPT will the analyze your file and answer your question.

In the examples below, (left) I uploaded a call sheet for a short film I worked on and asked ChatGPT to provide a list of everyone on set that day and (right) I uploaded four images of a pub that someone had built in their home and asked ChatGPT how I could do the same.

You can continue asking questions, in regard to the file(s) you uploaded, within the ChatGPT thread.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.

Learning a new language can be useful for many reasons, but can be challenging to teach yourself. If you’re the sort of person who needs a guided approach to learning, then grabbing yourself a language-learning app is the way to go. Babbel is a pretty excellent app for that, offering an online school type of experience. And for just a few more hours you can take advantage of a superb deal at StackSocial that will cut the cost of Babbel significantly.

Act quick, and you can grab yourself a lifetime subscription to Babbel for just $140 instead of the usual eye-watering $599 — a huge 76% off. That means that you’ll have unlimited access and can learn at your own pace without feeling pressured to finish goals within a specific period and get demotivated. And with 14 languages to pick from, you’ll get full use out of the lifetime subscription.

Babbel’s extensive language software includes Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, Swedish, Indonesian, Portuguese and more. The lessons are short and to the point, allowing you to practice in 10- to 15-minute intervals that can fit into any schedule. Real-life topics include travel, family, business, food and others. A variety of skill levels are available, ranging from beginner to advanced, so the program can grow with you as you improve.

The speech-recognition technology will give you immediate feedback on pronunciation, so you don’t just learn to read and write but how to listen and speak, as well. You’ll also get personalized review sessions to reinforce what you’ve learned. The program works across desktop and mobile devices. And though the internet is required most of the time, there is also an offline mode available where you can access courses, lessons and reviews without Wi-Fi, so long as you download them beforehand. Babbel also syncs your progress across your devices so that you can jump in from wherever is most convenient.

Becoming fluent in a new language is a great way to stay engaged in learning, and the transferable skills you gain can open a lot of doors for leisure, work and beyond. Note that while you can access this program on as many devices as you want, this subscription offer is available only for new users.

Babbel is a great value when compared with other online courses, especially with this current discount. So whether you’re a lifelong learner or just want to pick up some basics for your globetrotting adventures, this is a solid deal.

Read more: 11 Items to Add to Your Travel Checklist for a Smooth Trip

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, a CNET Editors’ Choice award pick, offers hundreds of games that you can play on your Xbox Series X or Series S, Xbox One and PC for $17 a month. With a subscription, you get new games every month (like Dead Island 2) and other benefits, like online multiplayer and deals on non-Game Pass titles.

You can play these titles and more, like NBA 2K24, now with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription.

Diablo 4 (console and PC)

Xbox has quite a treasure in its Horadric Game Pass. The latest installment in the successful action RPG series brings its endless nightmares and horrific dungeons to the service. This addition also marks the first Activision Blizzard title to join Game Pass, making the service even more enticing than ever.

“This is only the start of Xbox players being able to enjoy Activision and Blizzard games on Game Pass,” the company wrote in a February news release.

Ark: Survival Ascended

In this action-adventure survival game, your character wakes up on an island filled with dinosaurs. This isn’t Jurassic Park. Instead, there are tribes of humans who tame, breed and use the creatures like farm animals. If you ever wanted to ride a T. rex into battle, now’s your chance.

The Quarry (cloud and console)

It’s the last night of summer camp and these teenage summer camp counselors plan to celebrate. What could go wrong? If you’ve seen any classic horror films, like Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street, you know the various and bloody possibilities. Who will survive the night in this horror game, and who will meet their demise? The Quarry is only available on cloud and console — sorry, PC gamers.

Evil West

The American frontier could be a hard place to survive — braving harsh and unforgiving weather, lawless towns and in this game, vampires. In this title, you’re one of the last members of a vampire-hunting organization, so it’s up to you to take on the vampiric hordes that threaten the area. If you need some backup, you can play with a friend in co-op mode.

Terra Invicta (PC)

In this grand strategy game, aliens have invaded Earth and humanity has split into multiple factions. Yes, the goal is to stop the alien invasion and save Earth, but you also have to negotiate and squabble with the other factions of humanity. Every group wants to deal with the threat in a different way, and you have to build enough support for how you want to handle the invasion and the future of humanity. Sorry, console and cloud gamers; this title is only available on PC.

Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged

Racing Hot Wheels around the house was fun growing up, and you can keep that fun going with this title. In this arcade-like racing game, you can race your favorite Hot Wheels cars, motorcycles and ATVs, explore new environments and take on new challenges.

Open Roads

This Day 1 release is more like an interactive movie than a game. Opal and Tess — mother and daughter voiced by actresses Keri Russell and Kaitlyn Dever — are on a road trip adventure to explore some abandoned family properties and uncover the truth about their family’s history.

F1 23 (cloud)

This racing title was previously released on Game Pass Ultimate for PC and console, but now it’s available for cloud gaming. You can create your dream team of some of the best Formula 1 drivers in the world, and test out your skills in this exhilarating racing game. Maybe you’ll be able to stop Red Bull from winning it this time.

Superhot: Mind Control Delete

This title is making its return to Game Pass Ultimate about two years after it was removed from the service. In this first-person shooter, time moves when you do, so make sure your next move is the right one. This sequel to the game Superhot uses many of the same mechanics as its predecessor, but it expands on the story and adds roguelike elements for an additional challenge.

Titles leaving Game Pass

While you’ll be able to play the above titles on Game Pass Ultimate, three games also left the service. If you want to finish up any side quests, you’ll have to buy these games separately.

• MLB The Show 23
• Infinite Guitars
• Hot Wheels Unleashed

For more on Xbox, here’s what Diablo 4 coming to Game Pass likely means for the service, other titles available on Game Pass Ultimate now and everything to know about the gaming service.

When Google rolled out podcasts on the YouTube Music app in 2023, the writing was on the wall for Google Podcasts. It didn’t take a massive leap in logic to guess that Google Podcasts was going the route of Google Play Music and being integrated directly into YouTube. The switch is happening on April 2, and after that, Google Podcasts will cease to function in the US.

Fortunately, you’ll have additional time to migrate to another service. You will be able to migrate their subscriptions through July and will be reminded to do so whenever they attempt to open the Google Podcasts app. The migration process first rolled out to the US back in December but has since hit most of the world where Google Podcasts are available.

Folks outside of the US will still have access to Google Podcasts for a little while longer. Google told TechCrunch that it’s aiming for an April 2 shutdown in the US. The company didn’t share when the rest of the world would lose access, but it’ll still be sometime in 2024.

Google Podcasts first launched in 2018. Before its launch, podcasts were tied with Google Play Music. When it came out, it focused primarily on Google Assistant integration and using information gathered from your listening habits to offer more personalized recommendations. The service improved over time and became one of the most popular podcast apps, boasting over 500 million downloads on the Google Play Store alone.

Google revealed the reasoning for integrating Google Podcasts with YouTube Music in its announcement last year.

“Later in 2024, as part of this process, we’ll be discontinuing Google Podcasts. As part of this process, we’ll be helping Google Podcasts users move over to Podcasts in YouTube Music,” Google said in September in a blog post. “This matches what listeners and podcasters are already doing: according to Edison, about 23% of weekly podcast users in the US say YouTube is their most frequently used service, versus just 4% for Google Podcasts.”

Initially, the move to separate Google Podcasts from Google Play Music emulated Apple’s approach of having a separate podcast app and music streaming app. At the time, Apple Podcasts was the most popular podcast app in the US with 34% of US podcast listeners using it. However, Spotify has since taken the throne as the top podcast app in the US, with Amazon doubling its podcast listener numbers since 2021 with the same all-in-one strategy.

So while this seems like another classic case of Google doubling back, as it did with Inbox by Gmail, Google integrating podcasts with YouTube Music more closely emulates the methods that are driving success for other companies in 2024. In addition to audio podcasts, YouTube Music will boast video podcasts along with access to YouTube, one of the Internet’s largest sources of both music and podcast content.

Google Podcasts will officially enter the Google graveyard at the tender age of six years.

How to migrate Google Podcasts subscriptions

There are two ways to export your podcast subscriptions from Google Podcasts. The first is a direct export to YouTube Music. The other lets you download your subscriptions in OPML format. You can then load that file into another podcast app to retrieve your subscriptions. We’ll go over both methods.

Export to YouTube Music

• Before you begin, make sure to download YouTube Music, open the app and sign in with your Google account before proceeding.
• Open Google Podcasts. At the top of the app’s home screen, you’ll see a banner encouraging you to export your subscriptions.
• Tap the Export subscriptions link on the banner.
• You’ll have an option to export directly to YouTube Music or export to another app. Tap the Export button to migrate your data to YouTube Music.
• YouTube Music will automatically open to the podcast transfer screen.
• Tap the Transfer as… button. It should show your Google account email on the button.
• If you listen to podcasts hosted by a third-party server, Google will let you know that you’re adding an RSS feed instead of directly subscribing to the podcast. Tap Continue to proceed.
• The transfer will be processed. This may take a few minutes if you listen to a lot of podcasts so hang in there.
• Once done, the app will take you to your podcast library so you can make sure everything is transferred correctly.

Export to another podcast app

• Open Google Podcasts and find the banner that tells you to export your podcasts. Tap Export subscriptions.
• On the next page, tap Download.
• You’ll be encouraged to save a file to your downloads folder. Tap Save to do so.
• For your reference, Google names this file google-podcasts-subscriptions.opml by default.
• Open the podcast app you wish to migrate your podcasts to.
• Navigate to that app’s settings and locate where you can import OPML files.
• Once located, use the app’s import tool to find and import the OPML file saved by Google Podcasts in the previous step.
• Finally, check your library to ensure that Google Podcasts transferred everything correctly.

When is Google Podcasts shutting down?

Google Podcasts officially shuts down on April 2 in the US. Google hasn’t yet announced an official shutdown date for the rest of the world, but all signs point to it being sometime in 2024.

Will I still be able to migrate my podcasts after April 2?

Yes. Google will allow people to migrate their podcast subscriptions to either YouTube Music or the podcast app of their choice using the Google Podcast app through July.

Are YouTube Music podcasts free?

YouTube Music podcasts are free. Google says that “listeners can enjoy podcasts on-demand, offline, in the background, while casting and seamlessly switch between audio-video versions on YouTube Music. This podcast listening experience is different from our music listening experience where you need a Premium or Music Premium subscription to enjoy some of these features.”

Why is Google shutting down Google Podcasts?

According to Google, YouTube already drives more podcast traffic than Google Podcasts by a wide margin. Thus, Google intends to combine both efforts into a single app by integrating everything into YouTube Music. In addition, services like Spotify and Amazon have seen large amounts of podcast listener growth by integrating podcasts with each company’s respective music streaming service.

What else should I know?

YouTube Music launched podcasts on its platform in April 2023 and is fully integrated into the experience. You can search for podcasts the same way you search for music and add podcasts to your library the same way as well. It isn’t quite as robust as a dedicated podcast app, but you do have the ability to save podcasts for later, download podcasts for offline listening and enable auto-downloads so you don’t have to do it yourself later.

Stolen data of 73 million current and former customers is on the dark web, AT&T said this weekend. The personal information, including Social Security numbers, appears to be from 2019 or earlier, AT&T said in a statement, and includes data for approximately 7.6 million current account holders and 65.4 million former customers.

The leak first came to light in 2021, when hackers claimed they’d stolen customer data from AT&T and would put the information up for sale. Fast forward to March 2024, the stolen personal information was discovered on the dark web, according to Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned.

In response, AT&T said it has contacted the 7.6 million current customers and has reset their passcodes. Whether you’re in the smaller set of current customers or the larger group of former account holders who think you’re data been stolen in the breach, you can take steps to potentially lessen the damage of the breach. Read on for what you can do. AT&T didn’t immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.

For more, here’s our picks for the best identity theft protection and monitoring services and how Consumer Report’s permission slip can help you take control of your online data.

What to know about the AT&T data breach

AT&T on March 30 said that personal information of 73 million current and former customers was leaked in the middle March to the dark web. The company said the stolen information appears to from 2019 or earlier and it does not know if the information came from AT&T or one of its vendors.

What personal information was stolen in the AT&T breach?

According to AT&T, which customer and account data was stolen may vary by account but thieves had access to customers’ full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, Social Security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode. AT&T said the information doesn’t appear to contain personal financial information or call history.

What is an AT&T passcode?

A customer’s passcode is like a numerical PIN and is usually four digits. A passcode is different from a password and is required to complete an AT&T installation, perform personal account functions by phone or contact technical support by phone, AT&T said.

How to see if your information was part of the AT&T leak

AT&T said it will email or mail a letter to the 7.6 million current customers whose data was stolen, explaining the incident, what information was compromised and what it are doing in response. The company said it has reset passcodes for affected current customers. The company said it is also communicating with the 65.4 million former account holders whose data was stolen.

You don’t have to wait for AT&T to contact you, however. Using Have I Been Pwned, you can see check if your data has been leaked. If you use store your password information in a Google account, the company’s Password Checkup tool can alert you if your account information has been exposed. And the premium version of our favorite password manager, Bitwarden, can check for stolen passwords on the web.

Changing your passcode and password, if AT&T hasn’t contacted you, can help secure your account.

How to monitor your credit report for fraud

If you think your personal information was part of the AT&T breach, you can watch your credit reports for signs of potential fraud.

Monitor your credit reports. You get one free credit report a year from the three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. On your report, look for unusual or unfamiliar activity, such as the appearance of new accounts you didn’t open. And watch your credit card accounts and bank statements for unexpected charges and payments.

Sign up for a credit monitoring service. Pick a credit monitoring service that constantly monitors your credit report on major credit bureaus and alerts when it detects unusual activity. To help with the monitoring, you can set fraud alerts that notify you if someone is trying to use your identity to create credit. A credit-reporting service like LifeLock can start at $7.50 a month — or you could use a free service like the one from Credit Karma.

What to do if you suspect you’re a victim of fraud or identity theft

As soon as you suspect your personal information has been stolen, take action to stop unauthorized charges and start to recover your identity.

Place a fraud alert. If you suspect fraud, place a fraud alert with each of the credit reporting companies: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. The alert notifies creditors that you have been a victim of fraud and lets them know to verify with you new credit requests in your name. You can place an initial fraud alert, which stays on your credit report for 90 days, or an extended fraud alert, which stays on your credit report for sevenyears. Placing a fraud alert won’t affect your credit score.

Contact fraud departments. For each business and credit card company where you think an account was opened or charged without your knowledge, contact its fraud department. While you’re not responsible for fraudulent charges to an account, you need to report the suspicious activity promptly.

Freeze your credit. If you want to stop anyone from opening credit and requesting loans and services in your name without your permission, you can freeze your credit. You will need to request a freeze with each of the three credit reporting companies, which again are Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. To apply for new credit, you need to unfreeeze your credit, again, through each of the credit reporting companies. You can either request a temporary lift of the freeze or unfreeze it permanently.

Create a recovery plan. The Federal Trade Commission has a valuable tool that helps you report identity theft and recover your identity through a personal recovery plan and Identity Theft Report, which you can use to dispute charges.

Document everything. Keep copies of all documents and expenses and records of your conversations about the theft.

For more, here are our favorite password managers and the best VPN services.

Do we really need another day of hoaxes, when the internet is trying to fool us pretty much every other day of the year, too? Regardless, April Fools’ Day is here again, so it’s worth saying: Everything you read on April 1 that seems even the least bit weird is possibly false.

Have you ever read the Wikipedia entry for April Fools’? We can’t even trace the origins of this holiday, like we can with Mother’s Day or Earth Day. There might be a connection to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or to Noah’s Ark, but then again maybe not. It’s perhaps the weirdest — or the most foolish — holiday we have.

Even the staid old New York Times got in on the act, with an all-emoji version of its Connections online word game.

And this year, the astrological movement known as Mercury Retrograde, which some people believe brings bad luck, also begins on April 1 — so if you believe in that, get ready for extra weirdness.

How to spot an April Fools’ prank

The best tip is simply to be suspicious. If a company picks April Fools’ Day, or the days leading up to it, to release or announce a product that sounds too odd to be true, don’t be quick to believe in the offering.

Fact-check anything that looks suspicious — especially before spending any money. Make sure you’re on the company’s own site, for one thing. Google the name of the product, or information about the item, to see if anyone has called out the product as a prank. Usually, fake products will offer a page to click to, and that page may simply say APRIL FOOL.

Some of the biggest companies out there have created joke products for the holiday, but not all the shams and hoaxes are corporate jokes. Don’t fall for April Fools’ pranks from random tricksters. It’s easy to spread falsehoods and misinformation on Reddit, Facebook, TikTok or Instagram, where everyone is a publisher and not everyone can be trusted.

And not all pranks are products. Be very wary of “news reports” you see on sites that aren’t real publications. Check the URL. The New York Times doesn’t misspell its own name in its URL, but joke sites may pick a very similarly named web address to try to trick you.

Here’s a look at some of the bigger April Fools’ pranks circulating this year. I’ll add to this roundup as new jokes come out. Note that I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if some of these companies actually release a small number of these products just for laughs. So even if they’re joke-inspired, they could come to life.

All-emoji NYT Connections game

The New York Times, pulling an April Fools’ Day joke? Yep, the newspaper tweaked its Connections online game, where you match up 16 words by category, replacing the word clues with emoji clues. (We provide the answers in that link if you want to cheat.)

Sour cream and onion Pringles/Olipop soda

Sour cream and onion Pringles are good, but those aren’t ideal tastes for a soda. Pringles and Olipop have teamed up for an April Fools’ Day joke where they say they’re making just that.

King Arthur Flour AI

King Arthur Flour pretended to replace its humans with a mangled AI called AI-Rthur, answering reader Instagram questions in the AI’s voice. When questioned about whether it was real, AI-Rthur wrote, “PLEASE SEE THE CALENDAR FOR FURTHER CLARIFICATION.”

Dunkin name change

Dunkin, formerly Dunkin Donuts, joked on social media that the company was now changing its name again, this time, simply to “DONUTS.” The post said, “pls don’t ask any other questions. just going thru it rn.”

Pilot Flying J Fragrance

Pilot Flying J truck stops decided to joke that it was releasing a cologne that smells like diesel fuel. The fine print below the image says, “Available while supplies last. Except there are no supplies because this is a joke.”

7-Eleven hot dog sparkling water

Hot dog water, aka the water you cook hot dogs in, has to be one of the nastier liquids out there. (There’s even a Scooby-Doo character called Hot Dog Water, yeesh.) Convenience store chain 7-Eleven is touting a new flavor of sparkling water named for the hot dogs it sells, Big Bite Hot Dog Sparkling Water. USA Today reports that at least a few cans were made, as the paper was sent one, and it really tasted like you’d expect. Gross.

Adidas box shoe

Adidas makes shoes. Shoes come in boxes. So this year, the company is putting forth not a shoebox, but a box shoe — a fake (we hope) shoe shaped like a box. It’s shown on Adidas’ Confirmed app, and shoes are so extreme these days, who knows? It could be real one day.

Del Taco hot sauce-flavored Tic Tac mints

Del Taco is a fast-food chain with nearly 600 locations. It offers hot sauces for its Mexican-inspired food in mild, Del Scorcho and Del Inferno flavors, and it sent out a press release touting Tic Tac mints in those three hot sauce flavors. Writing as someone who’s been sent actual samples of curry-flavored and Hidden Valley Ranch-flavored lip balms before, I guess this isn’t so tough to believe. But don’t try to buy these mints — it’s a hot prank.

Again, we’ll update this list as more pranks roll out.