Nvidia unveils'reasoning' AI technology for self-driving cars Nvidia boss Jensen Huang on Monday announced Alpamayo, a tech platform the company says will help self-driving cars think like humans. Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions, Huang said on stage at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas. Huang also said Nvidia has begun producing a driverless car powered by its technology, the Mercedes-Benz CLA, in partnership with the German automaker. The vehicle will be released in the US in the coming months before being rolled out in Europe and Asia. Wearing his trademark black leather jacket, Huang told an audience of hundreds that the project has taught Nvidia an enormous amount about how to help partners build robotic systems. Analysts say the announcement reinforces Nvidia's leadership in integrating AI hardware and software, deepening its push into physical AI.

At CES 2026, Everything Is AI. Integrated chatbots and built-in machine intelligence are no longer standout features in consumer tech. If companies want to win in the AI era, they've got to hone the user experience. The New Year's Eve champagne isn't even warm yet, and CES week is already upon us. The giant annual celebration of consumer tech kicks off the first full week of January as companies across the world convene in Las Vegas to hawk their latest innovations.

Demands for software-defined vehicles (SDV) are rising and electric vehicles (EVs) are increasingly being equipped with powerful computers. This enables onboard AI systems to optimize charge-aware path optimization customized to reflect vehicle's current condition and environment. We present VEGA, a charge-aware EV navigation agent that plans over a charger-annotated road graph using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with budgeted A* teacher-student guidance under state-of-charge (SoC) feasibility. VEGA consists of two modules. First, a physics-informed neural operator (PINO), trained on real vehicle speed and battery-power logs, uses recent vehicle speed logs to estimate aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance, mass, motor and regenerative-braking efficiencies, and auxiliary load by learning a vehicle-custom dynamics. Second, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent uses these dynamics to optimize a path with optimal charging stops and dwell times under SoC constraints. VEGA requires no additional sensors and uses only vehicle speed signals. It may serve as a virtual sensor for power and efficiency to potentially reduce EV cost. In evaluation on long routes like San Francisco to New York, VEGA's stops, dwell times, SoC management, and total travel time closely track Tesla Trip Planner while being slightly more conservative, presumably due to real vehicle conditions such as vehicle parameter drift due to deterioration. Although trained only in U.S. regions, VEGA was able to compute optimal charge-aware paths in France and Japan, demonstrating generalizability. It achieves practical integration of physics-informed learning and RL for EV eco-routing.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As any diligent stargazer knows, mid-summer means one thing: the Perseids! This meteor shower hits its peak on August 12 this year, and while that date is inconveniently close to that of this month's full moon, there should still be plenty of meteors on show for those who choose their time and location with care. As another long summer day has finally receded into another summer night, look east. If the sky is clear, you might well spy the Summer Triangle.

Uber will invest 300m in electric vehicle maker Lucid in a robotaxi deal that aims to start with one major US city late next year. The two companies announced the new partnership on Thursday. Over six years starting in 2026, Uber will acquire and deploy over 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs that will be equipped with autonomous vehicle (AV) technology from startup Nuro, the three companies said in a statement. The agreement illustrates the renewed plans and push for financing for self-driving cabs, years after a first wave of autonomous driving investment produced only a limited number of vehicles. Tesla has recently launched a robotaxi trial in Austin, and Alphabet's driverless taxi unit, Waymo, is speeding up its expansion.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A popular internet personality live-posted her own violent home invasion as a group of armed men stormed her home and demanded access to her cryptocurrency accounts. Video game streamer and adult content creator Kaitlyn Siragusa, who goes by the online name Amouranth, was asleep in her Houston home when three men shot through a patio window on Sunday evening, authorities told FOX 26. "I'm being too robbed at gunpoint," Siragusa posted on her X account.

William Phelps was at work when he got the call from the FBI that he had to return home at once. It was December 2023 and his wife, Aurora Phelps, was in big trouble, something to do with a fraud scheme. About a dozen agents turned his apartment upside down looking for evidence in their case, and William Phelps wouldn't see his wife again. That is, until this week, when William came to learn the scope of the allegations against his wife. According to federal prosecutors, Aurora was the perpetrator of a deadly romance scam, connecting with older men on the internet, then drugging them and stealing from their bank accounts.

It's our first chance to see a ton of new products that will debut this year (and some concepts that won't). They include everything from TVs and audio gear to full-fledged robots. The sheer volume of products can be overwhelming, but we've chased down all the cool new stuff at this year's show and highlighted inventions here for you to scroll (with more coverage to come in the next week). Our main takeaway: 2025 is going to be a great year for gadgets. Samsung's Frame TV has long been a favorite of interior designers and people who don't want a giant black void in their room whenever the TV isn't in use. You'll find two big upgrades in Samsung's new versions.

CES (formerly the Consumer Electronics Show) is the biggest tech convention of the year. It helps set the stage for all the wonderful gadgets we're going to see over the next 12 months. However, among all the quadcopters, questionably benevolent robots and devices with fancy flexible screens, there's a lot of small things that go into making CES a one-of-a-kind event. To highlight some of the silly, stupid and occasionally wholesome things we encountered at the show this year, we humbly present the very unofficial Dumb Fun awards for CES 2025. Komatsu's PC01E-2 looks like a children's playground toy, except that it actually works and is really goddam cute.

Friday was the final day of the show -- and team Engadget has departed Las Vegas. Our reporters and editors spent the week scouring endless carpeted convention halls of the CES show floor, braving lines of chain smokers, overcoming nasty colds and sore ankles and fielding thousands of emails a day to find the best and most credible products at the show. It was quite the challenge, as the landscape was dotted with countless contenders. As expected, the vast majority of things we saw this CES had an AI component, with a noticeable uptick in AR glasses, hearing aid earbuds, solar-powered tech, robot vacuums and even emotional support robots. Our team was encouraged to see more growth in tech built to improve the lives of those with disabilities and mobility issues, too. For all the new iterations we saw on traditional tech like laptops, TVs and soundbars, we saw a bevy of wonderfully weird off-beat tech at the show, too.