• AMD’s Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU will arrive on January 29 and cost $499

    January 24, 2026

    At CES earlier this month, AMD announced the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, a more wallet-friendly take on its $700 9950X3D. The company promised the new chip would be out sometime in the first three months of the year, and it’s going to arrive a bit sooner than you might have expected. It can be all yours on January 29 for $499. AMD says the 9850X3D builds on the 9800X3D with an 400MHz upgrade to the boost clock. It can reach boost speeds of 5.6GHz. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is an 8-core CPU with 16 threads and 104MB of combined L2 and…

  • The best-looking vehicles in Australia in 2026

    January 24, 2026

    Taste is subjective, and that goes for car design, too. And isn’t that a good thing? Otherwise, we’d all be driving generic-looking, virtually indistinguishable SUVs and utes. Okay, so a lot of Australians are. Nevertheless, in our diverse market, if you look beyond the ubiquitous and often conservative mid-size SUVs and utes, you’ll find everything from fashionable French cars and futuristic Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) to flashy American pickups and SUVs, and seemingly everything in between. Those of us in the CarExpert editorial team have decided to share the vehicles we find the most attractive. Yes, we’re just judging a…

  • US Congress members call for ‘thorough review’ of EA’s $55 billion sale

    January 24, 2026

    Before Electronic Arts goes private in a groundbreaking sale, some US lawmakers are pleading for some federal oversight. Democratic members of the US Congress, as part of the Congressional Labor Caucus, penned a letter asking the Federal Trade Commission to “thoroughly review” the $55 billion acquisition of EA. EA confirmed the sale to the Public Investment Fund, or the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in September, but the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. Before the official change of ownership, the 46 House Democrats who signed the letter to…

  • Tech CEOs boast and bicker about AI at Davos

    January 24, 2026

    There were times at this week’s meeting of the World Economic Forum when Davos seemed transformed into a high-powered tech conference, with on-stage appearances by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and even more industry executives. The big topic, unsurprisingly, was AI, with CEOs laying a vision for the technology’s transformative potential while also acknowledging ongoing concerns that they’re inflating a massive bubble. Amidst all that big-picture prognostication, they also found time to take swipes at their competitors, and even at their ostensible partners. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s…

  • Report reveals that OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model cites Grokipedia

    January 24, 2026

    OpenAI may have called GPT-5.2 its “most advanced frontier model for professional work,” but tests conducted by the Guardian cast doubt on its credibility. According to the report, OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 model cited Grokipedia, the online encyclopedia powered by xAI, when it came to specific, but controversial topics related to Iran or the Holocaust. As seen in the Guardian‘s report, ChatGPT used Grokipedia as a source for claims about the Iranian government being tied to telecommunications company MTN-Irancell and questions related to Richard Evans, a British historian who served as an expert witness during a libel trial for Holocaust denier David…

  • SEC drops lawsuit against Winklevoss twins’ Gemini crypto exchange

    January 24, 2026

    The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its lawsuit against Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The Winklevoss twins were donors to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and also backed his family’s business ventures. In a joint filing on Friday, the SEC and Gemini asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, which centered on the collapse of an investment product called Gemini Earn, with some investors losing access to their money for 18 months. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Gemini in 2023 and accused the company of defrauding investors. To justify dismissing the SEC’s…

  • Google says it’s working to fix Gmail issue that’s led to flooded inboxes and increased spam warnings

    January 24, 2026

    If your Gmail inbox is all out of whack today, you’re not alone. Gmail users have been encountering issues with the automatic filters that keep their main inbox free from the clutter of promotional emails and non-urgent updates, and some have reported seeing notices that emails have not been scanned for spam. Google confirmed to Engadget and in an update on its Workspace status dashboard that it’s aware of the problems, and is currently working on a fix. On social media and DownDetector, some Gmail users have also reported delays in receiving messages, leading to issues with two-factor authentication logins.…

  • Former Googlers seek to captivate kids with an AI-powered learning app

    January 24, 2026

    Big Tech companies and upcoming startups want to use generative AI to build software and hardware for kids. A lot of those experiences are limited to text or voice, and kids might not find that captivating. Three former Google employees want to get over that hurdle with their generative AI-powered interactive app, Sparkli. Sparkli was founded last year by Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang. As parents, Poojary and Kang were not able to satisfy their children’s curiosity or give engaging answers to their questions. “Kids, by definition, are very curious, and my son would ask me questions about…

  • More Cult of the Lamb, a World War II computer mystery and other new indie games worth checking out

    January 24, 2026

    Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. It’s been a very busy week of fun game releases (next week will be too!), so let’s get into some of them after a quick reflection on gaming while traveling. I love my Steam Deck. I really truly do. It’s a fantastic machine. And yet when I brought it with me on a five-week trip over the holidays, I used it for barely an hour the entire time. That doesn’t really justify the space and weight it takes up in my bag. The same holds true…

  • A new test for AI labs: Are you even trying to make money?

    January 24, 2026

    We’re in a unique moment for AI companies building their own foundation model. First, there is a whole generation of industry veterans who made their name at major tech companies and are now going solo. You also have legendary researchers with immense experience but ambiguous commercial aspirations. There’s a clear chance that at least some of these new labs will become OpenAI-sized behemoths, but there’s also room for them to putter around doing interesting research without worrying too much about commercialization. The end result? It’s getting hard to tell who is actually trying to make money.  To make things simpler, I’m proposing a kind of sliding scale for any company making…