AI companies across the globe raised more than $100 billion in venture capital dollars in 2024, according to Crunchbase data, an increase of more than 80% compared to 2023. It encompasses nearly a third of the total VC dollars invested in 2024. That’s a lot of money funneling into a lot of AI companies. The […]
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Large corporations aren’t known for taking risks. This is as true in the world of consumer hardware as anywhere. Annual updates are largely incremental, with small changes to things like screen resolution or image quality. It’s a phenomenon that Lenovo is more than happy to buck when it showcases the latest updates to its PC […]
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After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over a law that could ban TikTok, it looks like one of its last possible lifelines is unlikely to save it from the impending ouster.
TikTok will be banned from the US unless either the Supreme Court blocks the law from taking effect before the January 19th deadline or its China-based parent company, ByteDance, finally agrees to sell it. A sale — and return — of TikTok could happen after the deadline, and President-elect Donald Trump may get creative in trying not to enforce the law once he’s sworn in the next day. But the longer it takes, the shakier things look for TikTok.
Bloomberg Intelligence senior litigation analyst Matthew Schettenhelm gave TikTok a 30 percent chance of winning at the Supreme Court before oral arguments, but he lowered that prediction to just 20 percent after hearing the justices’ questioning. TikTok made a last-ditch plea for the court to issue an administrative stay without signaling a ruling on the law’s merits, something Trump has suggested so he can attempt to broker a TikTok sale. Schettenhelm says that’s unlikely — the court does not tend to issue that kind of pause just because of a change in...
At CES 2025, unveiled a couple new charging products for Apple users. They have a new 140W charge brick with a built in display, perfect for 16-inch MacBook Pro users, as well as a with support for fast charging. Both of these products are available for purchase now.
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Meta has reportedly ended diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that influenced staff hiring and training, as well as vendor decisions, effective immediately.
According to an internal memo viewed by Axios and verified by Ars, Meta's vice president of human resources, Janelle Gale, told Meta employees that the shift was due to "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing."
It's another move by Meta that some view as part of the company's larger effort to align with the incoming Trump administration's politics. In December, Donald Trump promised to crack down on DEI initiatives at companies and on college campuses, The Guardian reported.
© Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg
If you’re looking for indoor activities to keep you entertained this winter, you might want to check out Amazon’s ongoing Blu-ray sale. Now through January 20th, you can pick up three 4K Blu-ray titles for $33 when you add them to your cart, regardless of their sale price. That amounts to $11 per film, which is the kind of discount typically reserved for major shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. What’s more, you can take advantage of the deal as many times as you’d like.
The limited time promo extends to hundreds of movies, including some of the most popular films from the past few years. Never got a chance to watch Denis Villeneuve’s Dune? That’s okay, because the sale includes both Dune and Dune: Part Two, each of which would normally cost north of $30. Thanks to Amazon’s sale, though, you can pick up both for $33 alongside a third box office hit — whether it be Twisters, Oppenheimer, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Batman, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, or even Barbie.
It’s not all recent hits from the past year or two, either. The sale includes older classics, too, including Jurassic Park, The Shining, Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade Runner 2049, and much more.
Following the abrupt discontinuation of Apple Pay Later over the summer, Apple has been rolling out support for multiple third-party ‘pay over time’ alternatives. The latest Apple Pay addition: Synchrony.
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The Consumer Electronics Show is a reliable source of announcements about iterative updates to PCs and PC components. A few of those announcements are significant enough in some way that they break through all that noise—Nvidia's RTX 50-series GPUs and their lofty promises about AI-generated frames did that this year, as did Dell's decision to kill multiple decades-old PC brands and replace them with a bland series of "Pro/Premium/Plus" tiers.
But CES is also a place where PC companies and accessory makers get a little weird, taking some bigger (and occasionally questionable) swings alongside a big batch of more predictable incremental refreshes. As we've covered the show from afar this year, here are some of the more notable things we've seen.
The NUC 14 Pro AI+ finds a way to combine E-Ink, AI, and turn-of-the-millennium translucent plastic into a single device.
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Asus
The strangest CES PCs are usually the ones that try to pull away from "a single screen attached to a keyboard" in some way. Sometimes, those PCs have a second screen stashed somewhere; sometimes, they have a screen that stretches; sometimes, they get rid of the keyboard part and extend the screen down where you expect that keyboard to be.
© Acer
In the wake of Meta’s decision to remove its third-party fact-checking system and loosen content moderation policies, Google searches on how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have been on the rise. People who are angry with the decision accuse Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of cozying up to the incoming Trump administration at the expense […]
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A construction zone. A car crash. A double-parked truck. A motorcycle cop with its red, white, and blues deployed. My one-hour trip along the Las Vegas Strip in a custom-built Zoox robotaxi during CES 2025 wasn’t a dull one. A second, shorter ride the following evening proved less eventful. And in both rides, the Zoox […]
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Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, has settled a lawsuit against Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing on one of its patents. Per a filing on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8 and […]
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