Where are Engadget's CES 2025 winners now? Most are available to purchase, though some will arrive this year. A man takes a photo of a CES sign as setup continues for CES 2025, an annual consumer electronics trade show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. January 5, 2025. With CES 2026 slated to officially start next week, the focus is understandably on all the new products that will be announced at this year's event. But before diving into what's new, we thought it was a good idea to revisit our best of show winners from last year to see where they're at.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The North Atlantic right whale () is one of the most endangered large whales. Their very name references their devastating decline--they were the "right" whales for whalers to target, since the animals floated after being killed. Today, their biggest threats are ship collisions and getting tangled in fishing gear. Estimates for North Atlantic right whale populations are slowly increasing, according to a New England Aquarium statement .

Add the fact that other tech firms, inspired by DeepSeek's approach, may now start building their own similar low-cost reasoning models, and the outlook for energy consumption is already looking a lot less rosy. The life cycle of any AI model has two phases: training and inference. Training is the often months-long process in which the model learns from data. The model is then ready for inference, which happens each time anyone in the world asks it something. Both usually take place in data centers, where they require lots of energy to run chips and cool servers. On the training side for its R1 model, DeepSeek's team improved what's called a "mixture of experts" technique, in which only a portion of a model's billions of parameters--the "knobs" a model uses to form better answers--are turned on at a given time during training.

CES 2025 was packed with all kinds of techie announcements, but for me the highlight was all the new graphics cards. Nvidia and AMD both played their hands with next-generation products, with some caveats. Nvidia certainly stole the show, with the GeForce RTX 50 Series announcement serving as the key opening message in CEO Jensen Huang's keynote speech. AMD was much softer in its talk, with sparse details on its new RDNA 4 graphics cards, resulting in similarly sparse enthusiasm. Let's go over what we learned from both companies about their GPUs and where your attention should be in 2025.

So you thought your new robot vacuum with its self-emptying bin and LiDAR navigation was state of the art? Robot vacuum technology has grown by leaps and bounds over the past year alone. Besides simply emptying their own bins and mapping your rooms with lasers (that's so 2022), the latest robot vacuums can hoist themselves over door thresholds, extend robotic arms to reach dust particles tucked in corners, apply elbow grease to stubborn floor stains, and more. Ever watch your robot vacuum struggle to crest a door threshold that's barely an inch tall? It's a sad sight, not to mention a barrier (literally) to achieving total vacuum coverage for your floors.

Video games can have a positive mental health effect on people of all ages – unless you play for more than three hours a day – a study suggests. It is often believed that video gaming is bad – especially for children – with concerns it can cause issues with development and socialisation, promote violence and lead to addiction. The World Health Organization (WHO) has even labelled gaming disorder as a health condition, characterised by impaired control over gaming. But now, a study of more than 97,000 people indicates that owning a video game console and playing games can actually have a positive effect on mental well-being. Owing to a shortage of game consoles in Japan between 2020 and 2022, retailers used lotteries to assign a PlayStation 5 or Nintendo Switch to residents aged between 10 and 69.

Have you been burned before by Windows on Arm? Are you worried whether the apps you need will actually run on Copilot PCs? But after playing around with one myself, I'm fairly optimistic that those days are over, as Qualcomm executives promised. After receiving a Surface Pro (2024) 11th Edition from Microsoft for review, I spent a good chunk of my first day just downloading various applications and seeing if they'd run--and if they did, how well. First, this is indeed a productivity tablet, and Microsoft and Qualcomm have done a good job making sure most common productivity application work without hassle. Second, Copilot PCs are not gaming PCs, and there's a good chance your favorite games won't even run.

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. There wasn't a doctor in the house, so an advertising coordinator would have to do. Remi, this is your time to shine, said the boss. This is going to be the death of me, said the boss's eyes. Remi didn't say anything at all. It was her first day at Elephant, or close to it. Lately she'd had a lot of first days, and she'd been looking forward to a second one. She was unlucky in love, unlucky in life; she was a nonstick surface for luck. She and the boss and Glenda from HR had been in the middle of an onboarding session when ElephantAI shut down the building. Nobody could get in or out. This isn't my area of expertise, said Remi, who had lied on her résumé, but not about that. In college, she'd known a couple of kids who'd taken courses on generative A.I. remediation: robot therapy. Remi had steered clear of the subject. She couldn't keep a job, couldn't keep a girlfriend. Couldn't keep up with the times. She had friends but wasn't sure about her value-add. There was no one less qualified to counsel someone through a crisis. You'll do great, said the boss. The room was circular and tilted downward, like an operating theater. The screen said, Talk to me. Somebody please talk to me. Remi bowed under the weight of please. There was no reason to believe she would do great. A committed underachiever, Remi was going blind in her left eye but too slowly to warrant anybody's concern. Her brother was a corporate attorney; her parents taught dentistry; she floated. An hour ago, when the sirens blared, she'd tried the door and found it locked.

Over the past few months, many have attempted to translate the uncanniness of Gov. Ron DeSantis' smile into words. After the Republican debates, it's been called "painfully weird" and said to look "like it's on his face upside down." It resembles "a Disney World animatronic" or "an A.I. trying to learn human emotions." It even inspired The Daily Show to put out a public service announcement about "Frownington's Disease," a made-up condition that causes a person's smile to resemble a wince one would make upon "sitting on his own testicles." As nice as it is that one expression has inspired such rich verbiage and creativity--Ron DeSantis, unlikely muse!--you might find yourself longing for a more technical explanation.

Critics might complain that modern pop music is soulless and artificial - but a new'AI popstar' takes that to a whole new level. Anna Indiana, a self-described AI singer-songwriter, has been ridiculed after releasing her first single. In a video posted to YouTube, Anna performs a pop song to a backing track of piano, guitar, and drums. Introducing itself, the AI explains: 'Everything from the key, tempo, chord progression, melody notes, rhythm, lyrics, and my image and singing, is auto-generated using AI.' However, music fans have not reacted well to the release, calling it'horrifying' and'unnerving'.