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Meta's Threads is pulling further ahead of Elon Musk's X on mobile, based on recent estimates from analytics firm Similarweb, Forbes reports. In the first stretch of January, Threads averaged roughly 143 million daily active users worldwide on mobile devices, compared with about 126 million for X.
Similarweb's year-over-year snapshot shows Threads growing sharply, up 37.8 percent year-over-year, while X's daily mobile audience fell 11.9 percent across the same period. The picture is more mixed in the US, where X still holds a narrow edge on mobile. Similarweb data puts X at about 21.2 million daily active US mobile users in early January versus roughly 19.5 million for Threads.
However, Threads' US mobile usage has risen substantially faster over the past year, surging almost 42 percent to X's 18 percent. X remains far larger on desktop, where it draws around 150 million daily users or visits worldwide, while Threads' web presence sits at just 9 million.
Forbes also reported on Similarweb data for Bluesky, another competing text-based platform started by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey left the board in the summer of 2024, later telling Pirate Wires he believed Bluesky was "literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company," in reference to Twitter
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 Meta's Threads has now reportedly surpassed its rival X (formerly Twitter) in daily mobile usage globally.
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We now have some idea of what's at stake in the longstanding feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI. As first reported by Bloomberg, the latest filing, as part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its non-profit status, claims that Musk is owed anywhere between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages from the "wrongful gains" of OpenAI and Microsoft.
Musk claimed in the filing that he's entitled to a portion of OpenAI's recent valuation at $500 billion, after contributing $38 million in "seed funding" during the AI company's startup years. Along with providing "roughly 60 percent of the nonprofit's seed funding," Musk offered recruiting of key employees, introductions with business contacts and startup advice, according to the filing. The monetary estimate comes from C. Paul Wazzan, a financial economist who's serving as Musk's expert in the case. According to Wazzan's calculations, OpenAI earned between $65.5 billion and $109.43 billion in wrongful gains, while Microsoft saw between $13.3 billion and $25.06 billion.
The lawsuit between Elon Musk and OpenAI dates back to March 2024, when the xAI CEO first filed a legal action claiming that OpenAI violated its non-profit status. Musk later added Microsoft as
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 When it comes to ultra-humanlike Westworld-style robots, one of their most defining features are lips that move in perfect sync with their spoken words. A new robot not only sports that feature, but it can actually train itself to speak like a person.
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Robotics,
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Into this fractious and uncertain landscape lands the Asus ROG Xbox Ally handheld, and its more souped-up version, the ROG Xbox Ally X. Launching later this week at $600 and $1,000, respectively, these gadgets are some major firsts for Microsoft. They're the first Xbox portable devices, even if their claim to being "Xboxes" is mostly a matter of marketing. They're the first post-Steam Deck portable gaming PCs made explicitly in cooperation with Microsoft and Xbox, though Asus has made two generations before them. And they're the official debut of the Xbox Fullscreen Mode, Microsoft's answer to the Steam Deck user interface.
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Those are just some of the things that Google's Gemini have been reporting in its Home Briefs—the summaries it can produce of the daily goings-on detected by Nest security cameras and other connected smart home devices—and some Gemini for Home users say they're getting thoroughly creeped out by the briefings, particularly with Halloween right around the corner.
"Throughout the morning, several instances of people in black cloaks or robes were observed standing in the yard," read a Home Brief screenshot posed by a Google Home user on Reddit. "The unusual presence of individuals in black cloaks or robes continued into the afternoon, with multiple sighting in the yard and approaching the driveway."
Talk about a spooky report, but the reality turned out to be pretty innocuous.
"It's hilarious, I got this summary today," the user said. "For the ‘black cloaks or robes,' I have Halloween decorations that the camera sees."
The user allowed that the creepy description was more or less "accurate," but that another event reported in the briefing ("a person was seen walking by the playset in the Backyard") didn't happen: "The person by the playset doesn't exist, the clip showed nobody."
In a similar occurrence, another Gemini for Home users posted a
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