• 2026 GWM Haval H6 GT PHEV update spied in Australia ahead of expected launch

    January 23, 2026

    An updated GWM Haval H6 GT PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle) SUV has been spotted in Australia, showing interior and powertrain changes ahead of its expected arrival in local showrooms in the coming months. A rival to the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV and BYD Sealion 6, the Haval H6 GT PHEV spied at a Melbourne shopping centre carpark wears ‘PHEV Hi4’ badges, signifying the fitment of the brand’s upgraded PHEV all-wheel-drive system already offered locally on the regular Haval H6 PHEV. It also shows an updated interior, including a larger centre screen, simplified centre console and a new steering wheel —…

  • Mario Kart World adds a team option in Knockout Tour

    January 23, 2026

    Mario Kart World received a free update today that brings a team option to its Knockout Tour mode. Initially, the Knockout races in this Nintendo Switch 2 launch title were only for solo drivers, challenging players to finish ahead of enough other competitors or get eliminated from the series. It was one of the highlights of the game in our review, and this new wrinkle should bring plenty more fun chaos to the racetrack. In the team mode, players compete either in two teams of twelve, three teams of eight or four teams of six. If you don’t have enough…

  • Inference startup Inferact lands $150M to commercialize vLLM

    January 23, 2026

    The creators of the open source project vLLM have announced that they transitioned the popular tool into a VC-backed startup, Inferact, raising $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reporting that vLLM has raised capital from a16z. Inferact’s debut mirrors the recent commercialization of the SGLang project as RadixArk, which sources told us secured capital at a $400 million valuation led by Accel, as we reported on Wednesday. As the focus in AI shifts from training models to deploying them in applications, a…

  • Qwen Researchers Release Qwen3-TTS: an Open Multilingual TTS Suite with Real-Time Latency and Fine-Grained Voice Control

    January 23, 2026

    Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen team has open-sourced Qwen3-TTS, a family of multilingual text-to-speech models that target three core tasks in one stack, voice clone, voice design, and high quality speech generation. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15621v1 Model family and capabilities Qwen3-TTS uses a 12Hz speech tokenizer and 2 language model sizes, 0.6B and 1.7B, packaged into 3 main tasks. The open release exposes 5 models, Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Base and Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base for voice cloning and generic TTS, Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-CustomVoice and Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-CustomVoice for promptable preset speakers, and Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-VoiceDesign for free form voice creation from natural language descriptions, along with the Qwen3-TTS-Tokenizer-12Hz codec. All models support 10 languages, Chinese, English, Japanese,…

  • Elon Musk just told Davos that Tesla will sell humanoid robots next year, really, he swears

    January 23, 2026

    Elon Musk just took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and announced that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot by the end of next year. Musk is the , but this may be the nuttiest one yet. These are humanoid robots that are supposed to be able to do just about any task a human can do. Musk, as usual, gave himself an out if the robots don’t start rolling off the assembly line in 2027, saying that they’ll only be released when Tesla is “confident that it’s very high reliability, very high safety and the range of…

  • Capital One acquires Brex for a steep discount to its peak valuation, but early believers are laughing all the way to the bank

    January 23, 2026

    There’s a feeling of schadenfreude in Silicon Valley when a unicorn stumbles. So when the WSJ broke the news Thursday afternoon that Capital One will acquire Brex for $5.15 billion in cash and stock (Capital One issued an official release confirming the details 30 minutes later), you could practically hear the collective snickering from Sand Hill Road to San Francisco’s South Park. That figure represents less than half of Brex’s last private-market valuation of $12.3 billion from its 2022 Series D-2 round. Before everyone sharpens their knives, consider that for the VCs who backed Brex at its outset, the sale…

  • TikTok finalizes deal for its US entity

    January 23, 2026

    TikTok has finalized the deal for its US entity, with its parent company ByteDance selling majority of its stake to a group of non-Chinese investors. The deal was closed just before the Trump Administration’s latest deadline, banning the app in the US unless it was divested from ByteDance, which will only retain 20 percent of the new entity. TikTok’s investors will own 80 percent, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, an Emirati-state owned investment firm, taking 15 percent each. Other investors include the investment firm of Dell’s CEO. The terms of the deal were first leaked last month, after TikTok…

  • Vimeo starts layoffs after acquisition by Bending Spoons

    January 23, 2026

    Vimeo, the video-hosting platform, is laying off some of its global staff, according to a report from Business Insider. The move comes shortly after the company’s acquisition by the Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons, which purchased it in an all-cash deal last year for $1.38 billion. Bending Spoons confirmed the layoffs to BI but wouldn’t share how many people would lose their jobs. The Verge reports that the cutbacks will impact a “large portion” of the company’s total workforce, citing a LinkedIn post from Vimeo’s former VP of Global Brand and Creative, who stated that he, “along with a large…

  • Toyota’s reborn mid-engine MR2 still years away following Tokyo Auto Salon troll – report

    January 23, 2026

    Toyota has confirmed it’s actively working on a mid-engined sports car, but says it’s still a ways off. Gazoo Racing president Tomoya Takahashi said the performance division was working with Toyota to develop a model with a mid-mounted version of its forthcoming 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder performance engine, but stopped short of naming it the MR2. Between 1984 and 2007, Toyota produced three generations of the MR2, with the transverse engine sitting ahead of the rear axle and driving the rear wheels. However, unlike earlier MR2 models, the next one appears as if it will have all-wheel drive. CarExpert can save…

  • Substack now has a TV app

    January 23, 2026

    It was only 16 months ago that Substack expanded into live video. Since then, it’s become a widely adopted medium on the platform, including by its ever-growing list of cable news expats. Now, the company has decided it’s ready for a bigger screen. Starting today, you can install a new Substack TV app on Apple TV and Google TV devices. Substack describes the app’s initial launch as focusing on “reliable, high-quality viewing” for the platform’s long-form videos. It centers around video posts and livestreams from the creators and publications you follow. There’s also a “For You” section that combines those…