The holidays are over, but there's one winter tradition left. CES is back, once again turning Las Vegas into a haven for the tech-obsessed. Samsung is holding its annual CES press conference on January 8 at 2PM PT / 5PM ET, a day before exhibitions officially open. Engadget will have a dozen staffers on the ground in Las Vegas, and you can follow along from home by watching the livestream on Samsung's Global Newsroom site. Samsung is, of course, a big company with its hands in just about every cookie jar, so you may wonder what the press conference will focus on.

The annual CES trade show in Las Vegas is upon us and NVIDIA is holding a major press conference that will offer details regarding "a spectrum of cutting-edge technologies." It goes down on Monday, January 8, at 8AM PT / 11AM ET, the day before CES 2024 officially kicks off. You can watch it directly on NVIDIA's website, or you can hit up the company's YouTube page or Twitch channel. We are unveiling the latest generative AI breakthroughs at #CES2024. Stay tuned to our livestreamed special address on Monday, Jan. 8, at 8 a.m. PT and explore 14 conference sessions to keep up with the newest #AI, robotics, and gaming technologies.

AMD always brings something interesting to CES -- hopefully CES 2024 is no different. It will feature AMD's chair and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, and the company's senior vice president and GM of computing and graphics, Jack Huynh. Like many companies, AMD says its focus for the press conference on AI -- in this case, as it pertains to personal computers. The livestream's landing page says that "AMD is powering the end-to-end infrastructure that will define the AI era, from cloud installations to enterprise clusters, AI-enabled intelligent embedded devices and PCs." If all of that sounds very vague and boring, don't fret: While we don't know exactly what AMD plans to unveil at CES 2024, it's usually the time that the company unveils the CPUs and GPUs that will be in laptops through the coming year.

Fox News correspondent CB Cotton reports on how predators are allegedly targeting children on social media on'The Faulkner Focus.' A 31-year-old Florida man was arrested and faces charges after police say he hid a missing Ohio teen and planned to have sex with her. Detective Henrick Osthed arrested Thomas Ebersole on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024, the Marion County Sheriff's Office said in a news release. An FBI special agent had reached out to Det. Investigators found the girl after she logged into World of Warcraft, an online video game, from Ebersole's home address in Dunnellon, police said.

Fujitsu aims to jumpstart stalled negotiations to sell a $730 million stake in its air-conditioning business, a deal that may help propel its expansion into a hot nascent market for AI services. The Japanese icon, which is disposing of consumer-oriented businesses, remains in talks with multiple parties for a speedier sale of Fujitsu General, Chief Executive Officer Takahito Tokita said in an interview. The urgency to close has grown against the backdrop of escalating geopolitical and economic uncertainty, which is roiling company valuations. Fujitsu has held talks with potential buyers including Bain Capital and KKR & Co. for the sale of its 44% stake. But the negotiations have bogged down over price.

Cruise, General Motors' self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce--about 900 employees--the company announced Thursday. The cuts are part of a broader restructuring to focus the robotaxi unit on a narrower path to commercialization. Instead of expanding its commercial robotaxi service to multiple US cities, the company will relaunch its currently paused service in just one. Cruise wants to "enhance our safety standards and processes before we scale," company co-president and CTO Mo ElShenawy wrote in a letter to employees announcing the layoffs today. A company blog post said that 24 percent of full-time Cruise employees will be let go, with a focus on field and commercial operations, and corporate staffing, though some engineers are also affected.

There is a tension at the heart of ChatGPT that may soon snap. Does the technology expand our world or constrain it? Which is to say, do AI-powered chatbots open new doors to learning and discovery, or do they instead risk siloing off information and leaving us stuck with unreliable access to truth? Earlier today, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a partnership with the media conglomerate Axel Springer that seems to get us closer to an answer. Under the arrangement, ChatGPT will gain the capacity to present its users with "summaries of selected global news content" published by the news organizations in Axel Springer's portfolio, which includes Politico and Business Insider.

Google DeepMind has announced its much-anticipated family of artificial intelligence chatbots, Gemini, which will compete with OpenAI's GPT series. According to Google, Gemini Ultra, its largest and most capable new model, outperforms OpenAI's most capable model, GPT-4, at a number of text-based, image-based, coding, and reasoning tasks. Gemini Ultra will be available through a new AI chat feature called Bard Advanced from early next year, the company said. It is currently being refined and is undergoing "trust and safety checks, including red-teaming by trusted external parties," according to the announcement. Google DeepMind also announced the launch of Gemini Pro, which is now available to the public through Google's Bard chat interface, and the smaller Gemini Nano, which will run on Google's Pixel 8 Pro smartphone.

The ChatGPT developer's new board of directors and its briefly fired but now-restored CEO, Sam Altman, said last week that they're trying to fix the unusual corporate structure that allowed four board members to trigger a near-death experience for the company. The startup was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, but it develops AI inside a capped-profit subsidiary answerable to the nonprofit's board, which is charged with ensuring that the technology is "broadly beneficial" to humanity. To stabilize this unusual structure, OpenAI could take pointers from longer-lived companies with a similar arrangement--including introducing a second board to help balance its founding mission with its for-profit pursuit of returns for investors. OpenAI deferred comment for this story to new board chair Bret Taylor. The veteran tech executive told WIRED in a statement that the board is focused on overseeing an independent review of the recent crisis and enhancing governance.

US Senators John Kennedy (R-LA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill Wednesday to end involuntary facial recognition screening at airports. The Traveler Privacy Protection Act would block the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from continuing or expanding its facial recognition tech program. It would also require the government agency to explicitly receive congressional permission to renew it, and it would have to dispose of all biometric data within three months. Senator Merkley described the TSA's biometric collection practices as the first steps toward an Orwellian nightmare. "The TSA program is a precursor to a full-blown national surveillance state," Merkley wrote in a news release.