Google is rolling out head and facial expression tracking to more Chromebooks, letting users navigate hands-free without a mouse. Built for users with motor impairments and based on its Project Gameface tool, it recommends at least 8GB of RAM. The company also unveiled new real-time classroom screen-sharing controls and teased over 20 upcoming laptops for 2025.
Adobe just rolled out major beta updates across its video suite ahead of the Sundance Film Festival. Premiere Pro gains on-device, AI-powered natural language footage search and 17-language caption translation, while After Effects overhauls its caching system to let older hardware preview complex comps smoothly. Finding needle-in-a-haystack B-roll just got a lot faster.
Samsung just unveiled the Galaxy S25 lineup at Unpacked 2025, turning the hardware into a vehicle for a new integrated AI platform powered by Gemini. A long-press of the power button lets the assistant run tasks across Samsung and Google apps, while adding features like video audio erasing. Why it matters: Phone AI is finally moving past chatbots to actually doing multi-step chores across your phone.
Meta is preparing a major wearables push for 2025, working on sports-focused Oakley smart glasses and a high-end pair with a built-in lens display dubbed Hypernova. The company is also exploring camera-equipped earbuds and smartwatches, aiming to weave its AI into more everyday hardware.
Apple just temporarily disabled notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in the latest iOS 18.3 developer beta. The Apple Intelligence feature sparked backlash after hallucinating crucial facts, including wrongly claiming a shooting suspect shot himself in a BBC alert. Apple plans to bring it back later with italic styling, individual app toggles, and clear warnings that AI summaries "may contain errors."
Sony just revealed new patents exploring how AI can predict player movements to reduce online gaming lag. Using a camera to track player behavior and anticipate inputs, the company is also looking into AI to catch cheaters and detect player frustration. It is still on paper, but it hints at how PlayStation might tackle latency.
Samsung just dropped a teaser video hinting at major AI upgrades for the upcoming Galaxy S25. In the demo, the AI handles a multi-step spoken request—finding a specific restaurant, messaging a contact, and updating the calendar all at once. The "true AI companion" will officially debut at Galaxy Unpacked on January 22.
Mercedes-Benz just partnered with Google Cloud to power its next-gen MBUX Virtual Assistant using Gemini. The smart navigation agent can handle complex multi-turn chats and remember conversation context throughout a trip, debut set for the new CLA running MB.OS later this year.
VideoLAN just showed off built-in, real-time AI subtitling and translation for VLC at CES 2025. The feature runs entirely locally and offline without cloud services, with plans to support more than 100 languages. There is no official release date yet, but it marks a massive privacy-friendly upgrade for local media playback.
Garmin just won a CES Innovation Award for its next-gen Unified Cabin solution, built alongside Qualcomm's Snapdragon Cockpit Elite platform. The setup uses generative AI to generate personalized cabin themes, brings dedicated voice assistants and audio to every passenger seat, and relies on UWB sensors to detect seat occupancy.
Stability AI and NVIDIA just rolled out SPAR3D at CES, turning single 2D images into detailed 3D objects in just 0.7 seconds. The architecture pairs a point diffusion model with a triplane transformer, letting creators edit point clouds and rebuild meshes in 0.3 seconds. Weights are open on Hugging Face for RTX AI PCs.
NVIDIA just expanded its NIM microservices and AI Blueprints to RTX AI PCs, pairing prepackaged model APIs with RTX 50 Series FP4 compute. By cutting VRAM requirements by more than half, developers can run complex agentic workflows locally without painful optimization. Hardware support arrives next month.
McAfee just unveiled McAfee Scam Detector at CES 2025, an AI-powered tool built to identify scams across text messages, emails, and online video streams in real time. The proactive system flags deceptive and deepfake threats before victims can be duped. It will roll out at no extra cost to McAfee customers starting this spring.
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 Project Digits at CES 2025, a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer powered by its new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip. The compact workstation packs 128GB of memory, letting researchers and developers run models with up to 200 billion parameters right on their desks—or link two together for 405-billion-parameter beasts. It begins shipping in May.
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.
