OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside of ChatGPT "in the coming weeks." In a blog post published Friday, the company said adult users in the US of its free and Go tiers (more on the latter in a moment) would start seeing sponsored products and services appear below their conversations with its chatbot. "Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from the organic answer," OpenAI said, adding any sponsored spots would not influence the answers ChatGPT generates. "Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you."
OpenAI says people won't see ads appear when they're talking to ChatGPT about sensitive subjects like their health, mental state of mind or current politics. The company also won't show ads to teens under the age of 18. As for privacy, OpenAI states it won't share or sell your data with advertisers. The company will also give users the option to disable ad personalization and clear the data it uses to generate sponsored responses. "We’ll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that’s ad-free," OpenAI adds. Users can dismiss ads, at which point they'll be asked to explain why they didn't engage with it.
Users will be able to ask follow-up questions about sponsored content.
OpenAI
"Given what AI can do, we're excited to develop new experiences over time that people find more helpful and relevant than any other ads. Conversational interfaces create possibilities for people to go beyond static messages and links," OpenAI said. However, the company was also quick to note its "long-term focus remains on building products that millions of people and businesses find valuable enough to pay for."
To that point, OpenAI said it would also make its ChatGPT Go subscription available to users in the US. The company first launched the tier in India last August, marketing it as a low-cost alternative to its more expensive Plus and Pro offerings. In the US, Go will cost $8 per month — or $12 less than the monthly price of the Plus plan — and offer 10 times higher rate limits for messages, file uploads and image creation than the free tier. The subscription also extends ChatGPT's memory and context window, meaning the chatbot will be better at remembering details from past conversations. That said, you'll see ads at this tier. To go ad-free, you'll need to subscribe to one of OpenAI's more expensive plans. For consumers, that means either the Plus or Pro plans.
According to reports, OpenAI had been testing ads inside of ChatGPT since at least the end of last year. As companies continue to pay a high cost for model training and inference, all chatbots are likely to feature ads in some form.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-is-bringing-ads-to-chatgpt-192831449.html?src=rss
After a tumultuous 2025 that saw it lose around 4,000 employees, NASA finally has an operating budget for 2026, and one that largely preserves its scientific capabilities. On Thursday, the Senate passed an appropriations bill funding NASA, alongside the National Science Foundation and a handful of other federal agencies.
Going into the appropriations process, the president called for a 24 percent year over year reduction to NASA's total operating budget. As part of that plan, the White House wanted to reduce the Science Mission Directorate's funding by nearly half, a move that would have forced NASA to cancel 55 ongoing and planned missions, including efforts like OSIRIS-APEX. The bill effectively rejects President Trump's plan, reducing NASA's total operating budget by just 1.6 percent year over year to $24.4 billion.
Per the new appropriations, NASA's science budget will stand at $7.25 billion, 1.1 percent less relative to fiscal 2024, while shuffling the remaining funds to focus on different priorities. For instance, the House and Senate allocated $874 million (+8.7 percent) for the agency's heliophysics work; planetary sciences, which oversees missions like New Horizons, was cut to $2.5 billion (-6.5 percent) compared to 2024. At the same time, NASA's STEM engagement office, which the president proposed eliminating, escaped unscathed with its funding maintained at parity.
"It's almost everything we had been asking for, and it's very encouraging to see a House and Senate run by the president's own party agreeing that we need to keep investing in things like NASA science," says Casey Dreier, chief of policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit founded by Carl Sagan that advocates for the exploration and study of space. "It contains very clear and direct language that not only is this funding made available to these projects, but that it will be spent on the initiatives that Congress states."
Lawmakers also rejected Trump's effort to scuttle the Space Launch System after its third flight. NASA's heavy-lift rocket is billions of dollars over budget, but remains — as of now — the only spacecraft ready to ferry astronauts to the Moon. Compared to the rest of NASA, the fate of the SLS was never really in doubt. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) secured funding for the rocket as part of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. "I've been saying for a long time you should never underestimate the political coalition behind the SLS, and I think that was very much validated this year," says Dreier.
More importantly, it appears the Goddard Space Flight Center will be safe from further damage. Over the summer, the future of the facility, known for its work on projects like the James Webb Space Telescope, was put in jeopardy. By some estimates, the campus has lost a third of its staff due to workforce cuts, and dozens of buildings, including some 100 laboratories, have been shut down by management. One of the casualties was NASA's largest library, which houses irreplaceable documents chronicling the history of the space race. As part of a "consolidation" effort, many of those documents will be thrown out.
Under the appropriations bill, the Senate has directed NASA to “preserve all the technical and scientific world-class capabilities at Goddard.” It has also instructed the agency to ensure employees of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies are able to continue their work with "minimal disruption." The New York-based office, one of America's leading climate labs, was sent into limbo last spring after the Trump administration moved to shut it down.
The bill also provides a lifeline for NASA's to bring back samples of Martian dirt collected by the Perseverance rover. Congress has effectively cancelled the official program tied to that ambition, the Mars Sample Return (MSR), but has set aside $110 million for the agency to continue developing technologies for future science missions to the Red Planet. MSR advocates have argued the mission could lead to significant scientific discoveries, but Dreier notes the program was "ripe for cancellation" after it became mired in mismanagement.
"I worry MSR now has this stink of bloat, excess cost and threat of overruns that are really going to make it challenging to restart this without having a dramatically different approach," says Dreier, adding that deciding what to do with mission will likely be top of mind for the agency's new administrator, Jared Isaacman.
The 2026 budget leaves NASA with fewer resources. Even in areas where Congress allocated the same amount of funds as it did in 2024, the agency will need to do more with less due to inflation. Compared to the absolute blood bath that would have been Trump's proposed budget, a marginal funding cut is the best case scenario given the circumstances, but the circumstances remain less than ideal.
"There will be another presidential budget request coming out in the next couple of months," Dreier said. "They could do this all over again if they wanted to."
In the immediate future, NASA and its employees are at least protected from the potential fallout of another impending government shutdown. Congress has until January 30 to fully fund the federal government, and as of earlier this week, it has yet to find a way forward on appropriations for agencies like the Department of Labor.
Correction 9:05PM ET: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Casey Dreier’s surename as Drier. We regret the error.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/senate-passes-minibus-bill-funding-nasa-rejecting-trumps-proposed-cuts-231605536.html?src=rss
YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed is reporting that ASUS has stopped producing the RTX 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB due to the ongoing memory crunch. In its most recent video, the channel states ASUS “explicitly” told it the RTX 5070 Ti is “currently facing a supply shortage.” As a result, the company has “placed the model into end of life status,” and no longer plans to produce it.
Hardware Unboxed also spoke to retailers in Australia, who told the channel the 5070 Ti is “no longer available to purchase from partners and distributors,” adding they expect that to be the case throughout at least the first quarter of the year. The 5060 Ti 16GB “is almost done as well," with ASUS stating it no longer plans to produce that model going forward either. Both GPUs are 16GB models, making them more expensive to manufacture in the current economic climate. And while there might be some hope of the 5070 Ti and 5060 Ti 16GB returning later this year, the channel suggests both are unlikely to make a comeback.
“Demand for GeForce RTX GPUs is strong, and memory supply is constrained. We continue to ship all GeForce SKUs and are working closely with our suppliers to maximize memory availability,” a NVIDIA spokesperson told Engadget. ASUS did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.
After uploading its video, Hardware Unboxed published a clarification. “ASUS did not tell us that NVIDIA said the RTX 5070 Ti has been discontinued. ASUS told us there is very little supply of the 5070 Ti, so their own 5070 Ti products (e.g, the Prime and TUF Gaming) have been put into end of life status,” the channel said. “With retailers also unable to source 5070 Ti SKUs from any AIB, this effectively makes it a dead product.”
The AI boom has created an insatiable demand for RAM and other computer components from data center infrastructure companies. In response, many memory manufacturers have shifted their production lines to focus on high bandwidth memory for those clients at the expense of their regular offerings, leading to dramatically increased prices among consumer RAM kits, GPUs and SSDs. In December, Micron Technology announced it would wind down its consumer-facing Crucial brand to focus exclusively on providing components to the AI industry.
ASUS is the first of NVIDIA’s add-in board (AIB) partners to comment on the memory crunch. AIBs are the companies that produce the majority of GPUs you can buy from NVIDIA and AMD. Historically, NVIDIA has provided its board partners with both the die and memory needed to make a graphics cards. However, a recent rumor suggested the company had told it partners they would need to start sourcing memory on their own.
Update 12:55PM ET: Added more context.
Update 2:06PM ET: Added comment from NVIDIA.
Update 6:31PM ET: Added additional comment from Hardware Unboxed.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/asus-has-stopped-producing-the-nvidia-rtx-5070-ti-and-5060-ti-16gb-saying-theyve-reached-end-of-life-162012253.html?src=rss
If you follow Anthropic, you're probably familiar with Claude Code. Since the fall of 2024, the company has been training its AI models to use and navigate computers like a human would, and the coding agent has been the most practical expression of that work, giving developers a way to automate rote programming tasks. Starting today, Anthropic is giving regular people a way to take advantage of those capabilities, with the release of a new preview feature called Claude Cowork.
The company is billing Cowork as "a simpler way for anyone — not just developers — to work with Claude." After you give the system access to a folder on your computer, it can read, edit or create new files in that folder on your behalf.
Anthropic gives a few different example use cases for Cowork. For instance, you could ask Claude to organize your downloads folder, telling it to rename the files contained within to something that's easier to parse at a glance. Another example: you could use Claude to turn screenshots of receipts and invoices into a spreadsheet for tracking expenses. Cowork can also navigate websites — provided you install Claude’s Chrome plugin — and make can use Anthropic's Connectors framework to access third-party apps like Canva.
"Cowork is designed to make using Claude for new work as simple as possible. You don’t need to keep manually providing context or converting Claude’s outputs into the right format," the company said. "Nor do you have to wait for Claude to finish before offering further ideas or feedback: you can queue up tasks and let Claude work through them in parallel."
If the idea of granting Claude access to your computer sounds ill-advised, Anthropic says Claude "can’t read or edit anything you don’t give it explicit access to." However, the company does note the system can "take potentially destructive actions," such as deleting a file that is important to you or misinterpreting your instructions. For that reason, Anthropic suggests it's best to give "very clear" guidance to Claude.
Anthropic isn’t the first to offer a computer agent. Microsoft, for example, has been pushing Copilot hard for nearly three years, despite seemingly limited adoption. For Anthropic, the challenge will be convincing people these tools are useful where others have failed. The fact Claude Code has been universally loved by programmers may make that task easier.
Anthropic briefly made Cowork preview only available to users of its pricey Claude Max subscription. That changed on Friday when the company expanded access to include customers of its $20 per month Pro plan. If you want to try Cowork for yourself, you'll need a Mac with the Claude macOS app installed.
Update 01/16/26 2:30PM ET: Updated to reflect Claude Cowork is now also available to Claude Pro customers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/anthropic-launches-claude-cowork-a-version-of-its-coding-ai-for-regular-people-193000849.html?src=rss
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 for frequent users, the company promises a machine learning system that will develop a "living model" of your world, "understanding context, continuity and personal patterns of over time." In practice, that means Qira can write emails for you, transcribe and translate meetings and provide summaries of things you might have missed. You know, all the usual stuff every company is offering with their on-device assistants.
From a privacy standpoint, Lenovo says Qira employs a hybrid architecture that "prioritizes" on-device processing, and won't collect customer data without the user's permission. "Every aspect of the Lenovo Qira experience is designed to be secure, ethical, and accountable." I asked Lenovo how Qira would interact with Copilot and Gemini on the company's PCs and Motorola smartphones, and if the new assistant would add to the processing load on those devices, but the company has yet to respond to my email. I'll update this article when I hear back.
On paper, creating a dedicated AI assistant for the company's devices is something I'm sure Lenovo executives agreed was a good idea, but when many people aren't even using Copilot, it feels like a misread of what Lenovo users want. In April, reporting from Newcomersuggested Copilot had flatlined at around 20 million weekly users in 2024. By contrast, over that same period, ChatGPT had grown to 400 million weekly users, and as of late 2025, there are 800 million people using OpenAI's chatbot every week.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/lenovo-and-motorola-are-releasing-their-own-on-device-ai-assistant-010000696.html?src=rss
If I were building a new PC today, I'd go for a small form factor mATX or ITX build. With companies like Fractal Design and Lian Li making cases that can fit modern GPUs without sacrificing on thermals, you don't need to settle for the old mid-tower monstrosities of yesteryear. And that's why PNY's new "Slim” model RTX 50-series designs caught my eye. All three variants, covering the 5070, 5070 Ti and 5080, are two slot cards with just a pair of 120mm fans for cooling. As a result, even the largest of the three new models, the 5080, is relatively svelte, coming in at 11.8-inches or 300mm long. That means it can comfortably fit with room to spare in a media PC enclosure like the Fractal Ridge.
Technically, NVIDIA's reference designs for the 5070 and 5080 are also dual-slot solutions, but most of the company's manufacturing partners produce two-and-half or three slot variants of those cards. And with no Founders Edition version of the 5070 Ti available from NVIDIA, PNY's new take on that GPU will likely find a dedicated fanbase among PC enthusiasts.
PNY says the new cards will arrive in February, with the company planning to offer both standard and overclocked versions of all three models. However, PNY isn't sharing pricing details just yet. That probably has to do with the state of the entire PC industry right now. With the price of most RAM kits doubling and tripling in recent months due to the AI boom, building a new computer has become prohibitively expensive, and all signs point to GPUs getting more costly in 2026. In fact, the memory crunch is so bad that NVIDIA is reportedly planning to bring back the RTX 3060, a GPU from 2021, as a stopgap. Yikes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/pny-is-releasing-slim-sized-nvidia-rtx-gpus-just-as-pc-building-becomes-prohibitively-expensive-183127305.html?src=rss
Jensen Huang took to the CES stage on Monday to share the latest from NVIDIA, and while the presentation was more a refresher of technologies the company has been working on for the past few years, there were a couple of notable announcements.
NVIDIA announced Alpamayo, a family of open-source reasoning models designed to guide autonomous vehicles through difficult driving situations. The centerpiece of the release is Alpamayo 1 , a 10-billion parameter chain-of-thought system NVIDIA says is capable of approaching driving more like a human being would. The model works by breaking down unexpected driving situations into a smaller set of problems before finding the safest path forward. At each step of the way, the model can explain its reasoning.
A sister model named AlpaSim allows developers to do closed-loop training for driving scenarios that are rarely encountered in real life. Huang said the 2025 Mercedes Benz CLA will be the first vehicle to ship with NVIDIA’s entire AV stack, including Alpamayo. "Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous," Huang said.
Following the Alpamayo announcements, a pair of BD-1 droids from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order joined Huang on stage. We saw one join the executive at last year’s CES. After that, Huang turned to Vera Rubin. NVIDIA first announced the GPU architecture in 2024, and now the company has begun production on a super computer that makes use of the new tech. One Vera CPU has 88 custom Olympus cores and 1.5TB of system memory for a total of 227 billion transistors. Meanwhile, one Rubin GPU features 336 billion transistors. Each Vera Rubin supercomputer has a pair of both components.
Following the presentation, NVIDIA held a separate briefing where it announced DLSS 4.5 and G-Sync Pulsar. The latest version of NVIDIA’s upscaling technology was trained on a second-generation transformer model, which should reduce ghosting and shimmering, leading to a more stable image, even when there’s a lot of movement on screen. As part of DLSS 4.5, NVIDIA is also adding support for 6x multi-frame and dynamic generation. The two features will arrive sometime in the spring. The former allows a 50-series GPU to generate five frames for every traditionally rendered frame. The idea here is to allow a powerful GPU like the RTX 5090 to saturate a 4K, 240HZ display with as many frames as possible. Dynamic frame generation, meanwhile, is exactly what it sounds like. DLSS 4.5 can dynamically scale the number of generated frames to fit the scenario. In demanding scenes, your 50-series GPU will generate more frames, while scaling back during less hectic ones so it only computes what it needs.
As for G-Sync Pulsar, it’s the latest improvement to NVIDIA’s flicker reduction technology. By pulsing a display’s backlight, NVIDIA says it can deliver perceived motion clarity relative to 1,000Hz, leading to greater clarity. Those same displays will also ship with the ability to automatically adjust their brightness and color temperature to ambient lighting conditions. Pre-orders for the first batch of G-Sync Pulsar displays will open on January 7.
Update 01/06/26 9:30AM: Added information about DLSS 4.5 and G-SYNC Pulsar.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/everything-nvidia-announced-at-ces-2026-225653684.html?src=rss
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. After all, CES is synonymous with vaporware. The good news is the Engadget team has a keen sense for BS. Of the ones we awarded at CES 2025 that haven’t been released, most are coming this year. For the remaining few, we’ll be hunting them down this CES.
ASUS Zenbook A14
An Asus Zenbook A14 sits out a patio table.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
When we saw the ASUS Zenbook A14 at CES 2025, it left us impressed with its lightweight but well-made chassis, beautiful OLED screen and excellent mix of ports. After spending more time with it, the A14's shortcomings became more apparent. In his review of the ultraportable, Engadget's Devindra Hardawar gave the laptop a score of 78, lamenting its poor performance and expensive price tag. In the end, it wasn't quite the Windows MacBook Air competitor he had hoped for initially.
BioLite Backup
The BioLite Backup powers a Galan2 fridge.
Amy Skorheim for Engadget
At CES 2025, BioLite was already taking pre-orders for its automatic home backup power supply. The BioLite Backup didn't arrive in 2025, but if you visit the company's website today, you can reserve one for $100, with final pricing expected to start at $2,000. BioLite says units will start shipping this year.
Jackery Solar Roof
A CES display shows the Jackery XBC solar panels in obsidian.
Jess Conditt for Engadget
Before CES 2025, Jackery was already an established player in the domestic solar power industry, and at the event, it impressed us with its XBC curved solar shingles. They look like regular roof shingles, but Jackery said they would deliver cell conversion efficiency of more than 25 percent.
It's taken longer than anticipated, but Jackery says it now expects the shingles to go on sale in the US "very soon," with pricing likely to range between $1,100 and $1,300 per square meter depending on the customer's design requirements and how they purchase the product. When contacted by Engadget, Jackery also teased a handful of announcements for CES 2026, including updates on devices like the Solar Mars Robot it's been working on for the last little while.
Lenovo Legion Go S
The Lenovo Legion Go S sits on an opaque glass table with a comic book behind it.
Sam Rutherford for Engadget
With the Legion Go S, Lenovo promised two different versions of its new handheld: one running Windows 11, and the other Valve's Steam OS. Unfortunately, the Windows variant arrived first (shortly after CES), and was about as good as expected. However, the wait for the SteamOS model was well worth it. When Engadget's Sam Rutherford finally reviewed it over the summer, he praised it for fast performance, bright display and of course the ease of use offered by SteamOS.
LG OLED evo M5
A man and his dalmatian gaze at a 77-inch LG OLED TV.
LG
LG's OLED TVs are a perennial CES favorite at Engadget, and the company's 2025 slate was no different. The flagship evo M5 model impressed with its 165Hz refresh rate for gaming, better image processing for lower resolution content and a wireless transmission system for video and audio. At $4,300, the set is expensive, but the good news is LG typically does a good job of trickling down features to its more affordable sets, and I'm sure the company will continue to improve on its OLED technology this year.
Moonbird Moonbuddy
A hand holds the Moonbird Moonbuddy. The device has the teddy sleeve on.
Moonbird
The Moonbuddy was one of two "cute" gadgets that made Engadget's best of CES 2025 list. We liked Moonbird's decision to make a screenless meditation and sleep aid for children. The good news is you can buy your kid a Moonbuddy right now, with the device currently discounted to $110.42 as part of Moonbird's end of year sale.
Unfortunately, when Engadget contacted the company to ask about its CES 2026, all it sent us back was a response from "Luna," its automated AI agent. "I don't have specific information about our CES 2026 exhibition plans to share with you right now," the bot told me, adding I should email the address I just emailed to get a response from a human being.
OhSnap MCON
Engadget senior reporter Jessica Conditt holds the OhSnap MCON in her hand at CES 2025. The attached phone displays Minecraft.
Jess Conditt for Engadget
The OhSnap MCON won us over with its simple pitch: it basically had the ability to turn any smartphone into a Xperia Play. Actually accomplishing that feat was more complicated, with components like Hall effect joysticks for added durability increasing the time it took for OhSnap to get the product ready. For that reason, the MCON didn't make it out to consumers in 2025. However, you can preorder one now for about $210, with shipments slated to start this year.
Roborock Saros Z70
The Roborock Saros Z70 uses its robotic arm to put a handful of socks into a basket.
Karissa Bell for Engadget
The Saros Z70 was one of a handful of robot vacuums that debuted at CES 2025 with a built-in extendable arm, but Roborock's flagship was the one that made the best impression. We didn't end up recommending it in our robot vacuum guide; there are more affordable options that will appeal to a greater number of people. But if you want the latest and greatest, the Saros Z70 is on sale right now for $2,000.
Yukai Engineering Mirumi
A Mirumi robot sticks to a pink purse.
Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget
Of all the gadgets Engadget saw at CES 2025, it's fair to say the Mirumi robot from Yukai Engineering was the only one to steal our hearts. All this cute little charm does is stare at you and move its head around a little until you’ve been tricked into a few moments of happiness, and honestly that was more than enough for us to award it a best of CES award. Right now, you can find Yukai Engineering accepting pre-orders for Mirumi through Kickstarter. The project, which began at the start of December, easily surged past its modest $4,878 goal, raising $267,170 as of the writing of this article. The campaign ends on January 22, so you still have time to secure your Mirumi preorder.
Technics EAH-AZ100 earbuds
A pair of Technics AZ100 earbuds sit on a wooden desk, with an iPhone and a pair of books next to them.
Billy Steele for Engadget
They might have only been a pair of earbuds, but a lot of us left CES really excited about the Technics EAH-AZ100. The reason for that was that they were the debut of the company's new magnetic fluid drivers technology, which promised to deliver even more clarity, detail and bass than the drivers in Technics' already excellent AZ80 earbuds. When Engadget's resident audio guru Billy Steele got a chance to review the EAH-AZ100 a couple of months later, he gave them a score of 85, saying they offered "some of the best sound quality in any of the hundreds of earbuds I’ve tested over the years."
Urtopia Titanium Zero
The Titanium Zero sits at a CES display with other e-bikes nearby.
Daniel Cooper for Engadget
As a cyclist, the Urtopia Titanium Zero was the one product I left CES 2025 excited to see in the real world. If a titanium bike wasn't cool enough already, the Zero's Quark DM1.2 motor offered something actually innovative: a mid-drive motor with more power output than even the best hub motor. Unfortunately, while you can buy plenty of other e-bikes off of Urtopia's website, the Titanium Zero isn't on sale yet. That said, the company plans to showcase the bike, alongside the Quark DM1.2, at CES 2026.
WeWalk Smart Cane 2
A person uses the Wewalk Smart Cane 2 to find their way through a CES booth.
Cheyenne MacDonald for Engadget
The WeWalk Smart Cane 2 won two awards from Engadget during CES 2025, including our coveted best in show nod. At an event where nearly every manufacturer found a way to add AI to their devices, the Smart Cane 2 appealed to us for its thoughtful use of the tech. It offers turn-by-turn navigation and obstacle detection, in addition to a GPT-powered voice assistant to give users a way to access information without also having to juggle their phone at the same time. If you visit WeWalk's website today, there's a "buy now" link for the Smart Cane 2 that leads to a dead end. When Engadget reached out to WeWalk, the company said it would be once again at CES demoing the Smart Cane 2.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/where-are-engadgets-ces-2025-winners-now-194500216.html?src=rss
After a rudderless year and an exodus of around 4,000 employees due to Trump administration cuts, NASA got what may be its first piece of good news recently. On December 17, the Senate confirmed billionaire Jared Isaacman as the agency's new administrator. He now holds the power to rehabilitate a battered engine of scientific research, or steer it towards even more disruption.
Considering the caliber of President Trump's other appointees, Isaacman is probably the best candidate for the job. Outside of being a successful entrepreneur, he has flown fighter jets and been to space twice as part of the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions. One of those flights saw him complete the first commercial space walk, and travel farther from Earth than any human since the end of the Apollo program.
"Perfect is the enemy of the good. Isaacman checks a lot of boxes," says Keith Cowing, a former NASA employee and the founder of NASA Watch, a blog dedicated to the agency. "He's passed every requirement to fly in a spacecraft that American astronauts at NASA are required to pass. He also went out of his way to have a diverse crew, and shove as much science as he could in those missions."
And yet if you're a NASA employee or just someone who cares about the agency's work, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned for its future. When Trump first nominated Isaacman in the spring, the billionaire wrote a 62-page document detailing his vision for NASA. In November, Politicoobtained a copy of that plan, titled Project Athena.
To some insiders, Project Athena painted a picture of someone who, at least at the time when it was written, fundamentally misunderstood how NASA works and how scientific discovery is funded in the US and elsewhere. It also suggests Isaacman may be more open to Trump's NASA agenda than would appear at first glance.
When asked about the plan by Politico, one former NASA official characterized it as "bizarre and careless." Another called it “presumptuous," given many of the proposed changes to the agency's structure would require Congressional approval. In one section, Isaacman recommended taking “NASA out of the taxpayer funded climate science business and [leaving] it for academia to determine.” In another section, he promised to evaluate the “relevance and ongoing necessity” of every agency center, particularly NASA's iconic Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saying the facility and others must increase the “output and time to science KPI.”
A lot has changed since Isaacman first wrote that document. It came before the workforce cuts, before the future of Goddard Space Flight Center became uncertain and before Trump surprised everyone by renominating Isaacman. But during his Senate testimony earlier this month, the billionaire said “I do stand behind everything in the document, even though it was written seven months ago. I think it was all directionally correct.”
He did appear to distance himself from some viewpoints expressed in or inferred by Project Athena, however. Isaacman stated that “anything suggesting that I am anti-science or want to outsource that responsibility is simply untrue.” He also came out against the administration's plan to cut NASA's science budget nearly in half, claiming the proposals would not lead to "an optimal outcome."
One thing is clear, Isaacman is not your typical bureaucrat. "One of the pitfalls of some prior NASA administrators has been that they've shown too much reverence for the internal processes and bureaucratic structure of the agency to the detriment of decision-making and performance," said Casey Drier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and study of space. "Isaacman has positioned himself as the opposite of that. Clearly, that's something that could lead to a lot of political and congressional challenges if taken too far."
Even if Isaacman doesn't follow through on any of the proposals made in Project Athena, there's only so much a NASA administrator — even one sympathetic to civil servants working under them — can do.
"Once a budget request goes out publicly, everyone in the administration has to defend it. Anything he does will have to be internal and private," Drier explains. "He never explicitly criticized the administration during his hearing. He's also coming relatively late in the budget process."
A lot of NASA's future will depend on the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is responsible for implementing the president's agenda across the executive branch. As a direct result of guidance the OMB issued over the summer, NASA awarded 25 percent fewer new grants in 2025 than it did on average between 2020 and 2024.
"The OMB has added layers of requirements that scientists now have to go through to spend the money they've already been allocated. The administration has worked against its own stated goals of efficiency," Drier said. "Isaacman can't solve that himself. He can't tell the OMB what to do. That's going to be a serious challenge."
Looming over everything is the fact NASA still does not have a full-year budget for 2026. Congress has until January 30 to fund NASA and the rest of the federal government before the short-term funding bill it passed on November 12 runs out. "On paper, the official policy of the administration is still to terminate a third of NASA's scientific capability," Drier points out.
There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic. Publicly, both the House and Senate have come out against Trump's funding cuts. And some science missions that were slated to be cancelled, such as OSIRIS-APEX, have been approved for another full year of operations.
What NASA needs now is someone who will, as Drier puts it, "vigorously advocate" for the agency in whatever way they can. It remains to be seen if that's Jared Isaacman.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-finally-has-a-leader-but-its-future-is-no-more-certain-201109072.html?src=rss
Sony's latest console may be a few years old at this point, but it's still got plenty to offer — including some of the best games of this generation. Whether you just got a new PS5 or PS5 Pro, or you've had yours for a little while, you may want to give it a refresh of sorts by investing in some new accessories. Luckily, there are tons to choose from. These are the best PS5 accessories we've come across, plus some of the best games you should try out if you haven't already.
Best PS5 accessories
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/best-playstation-5-accessories-140018902.html?src=rss
