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Jay Peters

Jay Peters

News Editor

Jay Peters is a News Editor at The Verge. He covers breaking news in consumer technology, social media, video games, virtual worlds, streaming, and more. He’s appeared on CNBC, NPR, BBC News, WNYC, and other broadcast outlets to discuss technology news.

Before joining The Verge as a News Writer in 2019, Jay worked for Techmeme, where he helped curate the most important technology news of the moment. He actually started his career in technology public relations, working in the field for more than five years. He graduated from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.

When he’s not writing, Jay really likes running. But he prefers to run far, not fast.

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants even more AWS capacity for AI.

“The reality right now is that while we’re investing a significant amount in the AI space and [on] infrastructure, we would like to have more capacity than we already have today,” Jassy said on Thursday’s Q2 2024 earnings call. “We have a lot of demand right now, and I think it’s gonna be very, very large business for us.”

Earlier, Jassy said that AWS’ AI business has a “multi-billion dollar revenue run rate.”


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That’s all, folks.

The app and website for Boomerang, Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming service featuring classic Warner Bros. cartoons, is being shut down on September 30th in favor of Max. WBD is no longer offering Boomerang subscriptions.

However, the Boomerang TV channel will continue to be available, WBD says.


A screenshot of Boomerang’s shutdown notice. The notice says: “Boomerang is Moving to Max! Exciting news…Boomerang is moving to Max on 9/30/2024! As a result, new Boomerang subscriptions are no longer available. Already have a Boomerang subscription? Check your email for more info and sign in to watch our toons now.”
Boomerang’s shutdown notice.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
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AWS is growing thanks to the AI boom.

AWS earned $26.3 billion in net sales during Amazon’s second quarter — a jump of 19 percent over last year. In Amazon’s Q2 earnings press release, CEO Andy Jassy lauded AWS as a top choice for its AI offerings.

But Amazon’s stock price is down after hours due to lower revenues than expected and disappointing Q3 guidance, CNBC reports.


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GitHub users can mess around with different AI models in GitHub Models.

“From Llama 3.1, to GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, to Phi 3 or Mistral Large 2, you can access each model via a built-in playground that lets you test different prompts and model parameters, for free, right in GitHub,” according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. Seems kind of like Microsoft’s take on Hugging Face.


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The Pixel Watch 3’s new, bigger model will reportedly start at $399.

The rumored 45mm model will start at $50 more than the $349 price for the 41mm model, according to Android Headlines. With Google’s next big hardware event coming up on August 13th, we probably won’t have to wait long to see if that pricing is accurate.


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SEC charges IRL’s former CEO.

The SEC charged Abraham Shafi with fraud and “concealing his and his fiancée’s extensive use of company credit cards to pay for personal expenses,” according to a press release.

IRL was shuttered in June 2023 after its board of directors found that 95 percent of the app’s users were fake. Two months before that, Shafi had been suspended by the board after reported misconduct.


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MrBeast issued a statement about ‘inappropriate language’ he used as a teenager.

The statement was included in a larger Associated Press report about the controversies MrBeast is dealing with:

“When Jimmy was a teenager he acted like many kids and used inappropriate language while trying to be funny,” a spokesperson for the YouTuber said in a statement to The Associated Press. “Over the years he has repeatedly apologized and has learned that increasing influence comes with increased responsibility to be more aware and more sensitive to the power of language. After making some bad jokes and other mistakes when he was younger, as an adult he has focused on engaging with the MrBeast community to work together on making a positive impact around the world.”


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There must be some way out of here.

Peacock is no longer developing the Battlestar Galactica reboot from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, Variety reports. The show is apparently being shopped around, but given that it’s already been in the works for years, I’m not getting my hopes up for an imminent release.

While I wait, I’ll just have to watch the best moment of the show on YouTube again, darn.