• LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product

    January 7, 2026

    LMArena, a startup that originally launched as a UC Berkeley research project in 2023, announced on Tuesday that it raised a $150 million Series A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Felicis and the university’s fund, UC Investments. The startup bolted out of the gate as a commercial venture with a $100 million seed round in May at a $600 million valuation. This new round means it raised $250 million in about seven months. LMArena is best known for its crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards. Its consumer website lets a user type a prompt…

  • Hyundai Kona Electric prices slashed by $13,000

    January 7, 2026

    New drive-away deals for the popular Hyundai Kona lineup are headlined by discounts of more than $13,000 for all-electric versions of the small SUV. For the first quarter of 2026, Hyundai Australia is offering national drive-away pricing across entry-level versions of the Kona and Kona Hybrid (HEV), as well as more substantial discounts across the Kona Electric range. The Kona Electric Standard Range now starts from $45,990 drive-away, representing a massive $13,157 saving based on a NSW postcode. With the Kona HEV now starting from $39,990 drive-away, the gap between hybrid and EV power has shrunk to just $6000. After…

  • Lenovo and Motorola are releasing their own on-device AI assistant

    January 7, 2026

    If the world didn’t already have one too many digital assistants, Lenovo is adding another one to the pile. On Tuesday evening, the company announced Qira, a cross-device AI for both its own computers and Motorola smartphones. Set to arrive later this quarter, it will live at the system level of Lenovo devices. Users won’t need to open or switch to the assistant. Instead, “it’s always present,” says Lenovo. Of course, you can ignore Qira, and it will stay quiet if you don’t need the software to do anything for you. Occasionally, Lenovo says Qira will surface proactive suggestions, and…

  • Intel is building a handheld gaming platform including a dedicated chip

    January 7, 2026

    Intel is looking to double down on gaming hardware with a new chip and platform for portable gaming devices. The platform will include hardware and software, Intel vice president and general manager of PC products, Daniel Rogers, announced at CES on Monday. It will be built off of the company’s Intel Core Series 3 processors, known as Panther Lake, which was announced last year and is now being rolled out in a variety of PCs. This future platform includes a chip specifically for handheld gaming devices, according to reporting from IGN, which was confirmed by TechCrunch. These Panther Lake chips…

  • NVIDIA AI Released Nemotron Speech ASR: A New Open Source Transcription Model Designed from the Ground Up for Low-Latency Use Cases like Voice Agents

    January 7, 2026

    NVIDIA has just released its new streaming English transcription model (Nemotron Speech ASR) built specifically for low latency voice agents and live captioning. The checkpoint nvidia/nemotron-speech-streaming-en-0.6b on Hugging Face combines a cache aware FastConformer encoder with an RNNT decoder, and is tuned for both streaming and batch workloads on modern NVIDIA GPUs. Model design, architecture and input assumptions Nemotron Speech ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) is a 600M parameter model based on a cache aware FastConformer encoder with 24 layers and an RNNT decoder. The encoder uses aggressive 8x convolutional downsampling to reduce the number of time steps, which directly lowers…

  • Hyundai Inster deal sees $7000 slashed off baby EV

    January 7, 2026

    Hyundai Australia is advertising a new drive-away pricing offer for the pint-sized Inster electric vehicle (EV), with the base Standard Range receiving discounts of over $7000. This nationwide offer sees the Inster Standard Range priced from $35,990 drive-away, representing a saving of $7288 based on a NSW postcode. For reference, the MY26 Hyundai Inster Standard Range normally starts from $39,000 before on-road costs. While not explicitly stated by the Korean manufacturer, this significant price cut is no doubt in response to increasing competition from Chinese competition, with the BYD Atto 1 able to be bought from as little as $26,500…

  • The Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable concept goes big wide at the touch of a button

    January 7, 2026

    Lenovo might have the most concept devices of any company at CES 2026, but the wildest and most interesting one is almost certainly the Legion Pro Rollable which features a 16-inch flexible display that can expand to not one but two different sizes. To make the Legion Pro Rollable, Lenovo started out with a standard Legion Pro 7i and kept the bottom half including all of its ports and support for an RTX 5090 GPU. But then the company went a bit crazy: Instead of replacing the notebook’s original 16-inch OLED screen with a rollable variant that extends upwards like…

  • The most bizarre tech announced so far at CES 2026

    January 7, 2026

    While CES 2026 is full of tech giants unveiling their latest innovations, the real excitement comes from discovering unexpected, quirky gadgets that make you ask, “Who thought of this?” We’re here to spotlight the wildest products we’ve found so far at CES 2026, from an AI-powered panda that responds to your touch, to Razer’s holographic anime assistant, and plenty more weirdness that makes you do a double-take. An AI anime companion that watches you from your desk  Razer’s Project AVA, originally introduced last year as an esports AI coach, has evolved into something new: a 5.5-inch animated holographic desk companion…

  • Implementing Softmax From Scratch: Avoiding the Numerical Stability Trap

    January 7, 2026

    In deep learning, classification models don’t just need to make predictions—they need to express confidence. That’s where the Softmax activation function comes in. Softmax takes the raw, unbounded scores produced by a neural network and transforms them into a well-defined probability distribution, making it possible to interpret each output as the likelihood of a specific class.  This property makes Softmax a cornerstone of multi-class classification tasks, from image recognition to language modeling. In this article, we’ll build an intuitive understanding of how Softmax works and why its implementation details matter more than they first appear. Check out the FULL CODES here.…

  • Motorola just announced a foldable phone to rival Samsung and Google at CES

    January 7, 2026

    Motorola just announced its very first side-foldable smartphone, joining the ranks of the Pixel 10 Pro Fold and the Galaxy Z Fold 7. The Razr Fold boasts an impressive 6.6-inch external screen and an 8.1-inch flexible main display. The company hasn’t provided dimensions, so we don’t know how thick it is. We do know, however, that it’ll include support for the Moto Pen Ultra stylus. This is actually a fairly big deal, as Samsung dropped the feature for the Z Fold 7. Modern foldables basically double as tablets, so a stylus is always appreciated. Motorola There’s a robust camera system…