AI funding rounds, acquisitions, partnerships and leadership changes, plus regulation, copyright lawsuits and big compute deals.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian just unveiled Delta Concierge, an AI assistant launching this year to rebook delayed flights and guide passengers to their gates. Instead of generic chatbots, the airline is targeting real operational pain points, using AI behind the scenes to optimize gate assignments and flight connections.
Samsung just teamed up with Instacart to turn its 2025 Bespoke smart fridges into automated grocery restock hubs. Powered by AI Vision Inside food recognition, users can order missing groceries right from the fridge screen for same-day delivery. Existing AI Family Hub+ units will also receive the feature via network firmware updates in 2025.
NVIDIA just unveiled its GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs at CES, doubling generative AI performance with FP4 support. The new quantization cuts model memory needs in half, allowing models like FLUX.1 to run locally on under 10GB of VRAM in just five seconds. The flagship RTX 5090 launches January 30.
NVIDIA just launched the DRIVE AI Systems Inspection Lab to help automakers and suppliers verify self-driving tech against strict international safety standards. Accredited by ANAB, the lab evaluates partners' software on the DRIVE AGX platform across functional safety, cybersecurity, and AI compliance, with Continental and Sony among the first onboard.
Apple just announced it will update iOS to clearly label Apple Intelligence notification summaries after repeated complaints from the BBC. The beta feature had been badly butchering news alerts, including falsely claiming a shooting suspect shot himself. You can already turn off notification summaries under Settings > Notifications if you do not trust them.
AMD just previewed its next-gen Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT GPUs at CES, built on a new 4nm RDNA 4 architecture. The biggest shift is FSR 4, which now relies on machine learning upscaling powered by dedicated on-die AI accelerators. Both cards drop in Q1, though specs and prices remain under wraps.
Qualcomm just expanded its Snapdragon X lineup with a cheaper Arm laptop chip, bringing Copilot Plus PCs down to around $600. It features an eight-core Oryon CPU and a 45 TOPS NPU to keep all of Microsoft's on-device AI features intact. Why it matters: Qualcomm is aggressively taking Windows on Arm mainstream to squeeze Intel where it hurts.
Intel just unveiled a massive PC chip refresh at CES 2025, led by its Core Ultra 200 series across desktop and mobile. The new silicon features dedicated NPUs, AI-based power management, and up to 3.3x faster local Llama 3 8B performance on the 285H. Systems begin shipping later this month.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just admitted that the company is currently losing money on its $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan because heavy users are running it far more than anticipated. Altman confessed he personally chose the price thinking it would turn a profit, and OpenAI is now reportedly weighing subscription price hikes or usage-based billing.
Aiper just unveiled the IrriSense Smart Irrigation Sprinkler at CES 2025, a $399 plug-and-play yard sprinkler that doesn't require buried pipes. Users can map their lawn in an app to avoid spraying sidewalks, while weather tracking and soil sensors skip routines if it just rained. It basically turns lawn care into a precision task.
Withings just revealed Omnia, a futuristic smart mirror concept that packs a smart scale base and an embedded AI voice assistant. The device measures weight, heart, and metabolic metrics, pulls data from other wearables, and talks you through daily health feedback with optional telehealth tie-ins. It is currently in development with no set release date.
OpenAI just shared personal reflections on the two years since launching ChatGPT, detailing the company's turbulent scaling and internal drama. The leadership noted they now know how to build AGI, predicting the first AI agents will "join the workforce" in 2025 before setting sights on superintelligence.
Hugging Face just published a breakdown of AI agent autonomy levels and their ethical risks. The team warns that ceding control sharply increases safety hazards, specifically recommending developers avoid building fully autonomous agents that can write and execute their own code.
xAI just closed a massive $6 billion Series C funding round, pushing its valuation to $45 billion. Backed by Nvidia, AMD, and Sequoia, the fresh cash will help double its 100,000-GPU supercluster and accelerate the rollout of its next-generation Grok models.
YouTube just launched a new opt-in system that gives creators control over which third-party AI companies can train on their videos. The feature defaults to blocking all third-party scraping, offering a whitelist of 18 firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Apple. The catch: Google itself will still train its own models on creator content.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth just laid out the company's roadmap for 2025, calling smart glasses the first hardware category completely defined by AI. The company is rolling out an early access preview of Live AI this month, shifting assistants from prompt-based replies to proactive helpers that follow your day.
OpenAI just published a postmortem for Wednesday’s three-hour outage across ChatGPT, Sora, and its API. It turns out the culprit wasn’t a cyberattack, but an internal telemetry rollout that overloaded Kubernetes API servers and broke DNS resolution. The company is now revamping its deployment safeguards to prevent similar lockouts.
OpenAI just published historical emails and timelines hitting back at Elon Musk's repeated lawsuits. The records reveal Musk himself pushed to turn OpenAI into a for-profit entity back in 2017 and even incorporated a company, but walked away after being denied majority control and the CEO role.
Google just unveiled Android XR, a new operating system built with Samsung for headsets and smart glasses. The platform deeply bakes in Gemini so you can talk about what you see, multitask across virtual screens, and run standard Android apps. Samsung's first headset, Project Moohan, drops next year.
TwelveLabs just locked in $30 million in fresh strategic funding, bringing its total to $107.1 million, to advance its dedicated video search and analysis AI. Backed by Snowflake, Databricks, and In-Q-Tel, the startup also hired former SK Telecom CTO and Siri architect Yoon Kim as president. Why it matters: While tech giants push general multimodal models, TwelveLabs bets purpose-built video models will dominate enterprise archives and security workflows.
