Samsung Hikes Prices before Prime Day; Getty Images Makes Deal with OpenAI, Polymarket Allegedly Paid Creators to Post Bets They Didn’t Make; Valve-Steam Machine Starts at $1049

The price pressure due to AI data enters gobbling up memory like Pac Man is now getting to consumers. Apple has warned that they will have to raise prices and can’t absorb the increased cost of memory any longer. Now, Samsung has announced that it will bump prices on its Galaxy line. Androidpolice.com reports that most Galaxy smartphones will get an $80 price hike just ahead of Prime Day. The entry level phones will be hiked by $40.  Tablets will get bumped up from $100 to $280 depending on memory configuration. Your old phone as a trade in can ease the pain. Samsung is offering up to a $720 credit towards a Galaxy S26 ultra. Some carriers are doing even better…Verizon is offering up to $1300 in promotional billing credits for customers trading in a qualified tier-one phone and signing up for a new unlimited plan…though you will be locked in for 36 months. 

After fighting AI firms in court vigorously over the use of its stock photos, Getty Images has now inked an agreement with OpenAI to allow its pictures inside ChatGPT. Getty’s licensed content libraries will appear across the search and discovery features of ChatGPT, so that when a user asks the chatbot something that calls for an image, the visual it gets back can be a licensed Getty photograph rather than a synthetic approximation. Interestingly, neither side disclosed financial terms, a revenue split, and nothing about whether or not Getty’s images can be used to train future OpenAI models. Getty is still fighting with other AI firms over the use of its copyrighted stock photo library. 

There has been plenty of controversy about Polymarket, and now we have more. Techcrunch.com says that Polymarket has been paying online creators to post deceptive videos that show them making lucrative bets on the prediction market. The Wall Street Journal analyzed over 1000 videos about Polymarket, and uh, oh. Many of those videos were reportedly filmed on “near-perfect copies” of the Polymarket website, while featuring trades and winnings that were not real. The creator videos were then amplified by a “social-media army” deployed by a marketing contractor. Polymarket said it is “committed to maintaining accurate, fair, and transparent markets” and plans to conduct an audit of its promotional content.

Valve has finally announced that the long-awaited Steam Machine..its living room PC gaming box…will go on sale June 29th starting at $1049. Theverge.com reports that you can put your name in to register, and get on the wait list. The Steam Machine will have 4 configurations, running from the base model at $1049 up to the most tricked-out version with a bundled Steam Controller for $1428. The two higher priced models come with 2 swappable faceplates…’red fabric’ and ‘solid walnut.’ The Steam Machine is a pricy device compared with the Microsoft Xbox or Sony PS5. The big selling point over the gaming platforms is that the Steam Machine is also a powerful Linux computer, too. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.