• Meta is closing down its VR meeting rooms as part of its wider cull

    January 18, 2026

    Meta is killing the standalone Workrooms app on February 16, 2026. The company presented Workrooms as a virtual reality space where teams can meet and collaborate in an immersive environment when it launched the product. Now Meta says its Horizon platform has evolved enough to support “a wide range of productivity apps and tools,” so it “made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app.” The company recently slashed its spending on the metaverse and started the process to lay off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division. Due to those layoffs and organizational changes, it closed…

  • Netflix will give WBD movies 45-day theater exclusivity if deal goes through

    January 18, 2026

    The fate of Warner Bros. Discovery remains the biggest story in Hollywood, with Paramount Skydance refusing to back down from its rival bid to the proposed Netflix acquisition of the company. If the Netflix deal does go through, the company’s co-chief executive, Ted Sarandos, has attempted to ease concerns around what that could mean for theaters. In an interview with The New York Times, Sarandos responded to a question about his company’s commitment to the theatrical business by insisting that he has no interest in bringing a swift end to it. “We will run that business largely like it is…

  • NVIDIA Releases PersonaPlex-7B-v1: A Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Model Designed for Natural and Full-Duplex Conversations

    January 18, 2026

    NVIDIA Researchers released PersonaPlex-7B-v1, a full duplex speech to speech conversational model that targets natural voice interactions with precise persona control. From ASR→LLM→TTS to a single full duplex model Conventional voice assistants usually run a cascade. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) converts speech to text, a language model generates a text answer, and Text to Speech (TTS) converts back to audio. Each stage adds latency, and the pipeline cannot handle overlapping speech, natural interruptions, or dense backchannels. PersonaPlex replaces this stack with a single Transformer model that performs streaming speech understanding and speech generation in one network. The model operates on…

  • Our favorite 3-in-1 wireless charger is on sale for 32 percent off

    January 18, 2026

    Now that the winter holidays are well and truly past, now’s the perfect time to take stock of your tech setup. If you were gifted (or gifted yourself) some new gear in December, make sure that you’ve got the proper accessories to keep that gear performing at its best. If a new way to power all those batteries would be a benefit, Amazon’s currently running a discount on an excellent wireless charging pad. The UGREEN MagFlow Qi2 3-in-1 Charger Station 25W is on sale for $95. That’s only a little bit above the lowest price we’ve ever seen for the…

  • Papers Please but with zombies, a farming-based shoot-’em-up and other new indie games worth checking out

    January 18, 2026

    Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. Several neat-looking games arrived this week, we got release dates for several others that I’m really looking forward to and a brand-new Steam festival was announced. The Love, Romance, and Heartbreak Debutante Ball is said to be the first Valentine’s Day-themed Steam festival. It’ll run from February 13 to 20 and feature more than 100 games, including discounts and demos. A showcase will take place on February 13 at 1PM ET on the Sunny Demeanor Games YouTube channel too. Organizers say the festival includes a wide…

  • Grab a four-pack of AirTags on sale for $65

    January 18, 2026

    Most Apple products are pretty expensive, but some of the most affordable (and useful) ones are AirTags. The Bluetooth trackers are priced pretty reasonably even when not on sale, but they can be a steal if you can get them on a discount — like right now. A four pack of AirTags is on sale for $65 at Amazon, which is only a few dollars more than the record-low price we saw during Black Friday this year. Apple That’s a near-record low price on the Bluetooth trackers.  $65 at Amazon AirTags can be useful for people who travel frequently, helping…

  • Why Silicon Valley is really talking about fleeing California (it’s not the 5%)

    January 18, 2026

    If you’ve been following the billionaire exodus from California with some confusion, here’s what’s actually driving the nervousness: it’s not the 5% rate. As highlighted Friday in the New York Post, the proposed wealth tax would hit founders on their voting shares rather than the actual equity they own. Take Larry Page, who about 3% of Google but controls roughly 30% of its voting power through dual-class stock. Under this proposal, he’d owe taxes on that 30%. For a company valued in the hundreds of billions, that’s a lot more than a rounding error. The Post reports that one SpaceX…

  • Elon Musk is looking for a $134 billion payout from OpenAI and Microsoft

    January 18, 2026

    We now have some idea of what’s at stake in the longstanding feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI. As first reported by Bloomberg, the latest filing, as part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its non-profit status, claims that Musk is owed anywhere between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages from the “wrongful gains” of OpenAI and Microsoft. Musk claimed in the filing that he’s entitled to a portion of OpenAI’s recent valuation at $500 billion, after contributing $38 million in “seed funding” during the AI company’s startup years. Along with providing “roughly 60 percent…

  • Get NBA League Pass for up to 55 percent off right now

    January 17, 2026

    NBA League Pass, the streaming service that lets you catch hundreds of out-of-market NBA games, is on sale right now for up to 55 percent off. The League Pass Premium subscription is on sale for $75, down from $160, while League Pass Standard is marked down to $50 from $110. We’re almost halfway through the season at this point, so it makes sense for a service like League Pass to start offering some discounts. The Standard plan includes commercials and support for only one device at a time, while the Premium tier offers no commercials, in-arena streams during breaks in…

  • Who gets to inherit the stars? A space ethicist on what we’re not talking about

    January 17, 2026

    In October, at a tech conference in Italy, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos predicted that millions of people will be living in space “in the next couple of decades” and “mostly,” he’d said, “because they want to,” because robots will be more cost-effective than humans for doing the actual work in space. No doubt that’s why my ears perked up when, at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco weeks later, I found an on-stage prediction by Will Bruey, the founder of space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries, so striking. Rather than robots doing the work as Bezos envisioned, Bruey…