Techmeme
January 5, 2026, 11:05 PM

Top News

Stevie Bonifield / The Verge:
Nvidia launches the Vera Rubin platform, saying it will offer dramatic reductions in inference and training costs compared to Blackwell, across six new chips  —  The Rubin GPU boasts five times more AI training compute power than Blackwell. … Nvidia is kicking off 2026 …
Larry Dignan / Constellation Research:
Nvidia announces the Alpamayo family of AI models, tools, and datasets for AVs, and details a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz on its first full-stack AV effort  —  Nvidia outlined its Alpamayo open AI models and datasets to bring reasoning to autonomous vehicles.
Lauren Goode / Wired:
Hyonhee Shin / Bloomberg:
Boston Dynamics unveils a new iteration of its Atlas humanoid robot designed to work in Hyundai's plants starting in 2028, including at a factory in Georgia  —  Hyundai Motor Co.'s Boston Dynamics unit unveiled the latest iteration of a humanoid robot designed to work in the carmaker's …
Will Knight / Wired:
Boston Dynamics partners with Google DeepMind to integrate Gemini Robotics models into Atlas robots, boosting their object-manipulation capabilities and more  —  Google DeepMind and Boston Dynamics are teaming up to integrate Gemini into a humanoid robot called Atlas.
Rich Woods / XDA Developers:
Dell brings back XPS branding with the new XPS 14 and 16 laptops, which address some complaints about the previous XPS design but lack dedicated GPU support  —  It feels like only a year ago that Dell killed all branding on its laptops, telling journalists we were wrong when we almost universally told them they were crazy.
Jake Roach / Tom's Hardware:
Niki Tonsky / tonsky.me:
Apple's macOS Tahoe adds icons to every menu item, resulting in menus that are hard to use and go against the long-standing Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines  —  accompanied by explanation:  —  Fast forward to 2025.  Apple releases macOS Tahoe.  Main attraction?
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Amazon unveils a Fire TV UI redesign with rounded corners, 20 app slots, and Alexa+ built in, and launches a $899+ Ember Artline TV series with colorful frames  —  Amazon is rolling out a Fire TV redesign that puts more focus on the content, while also simplifying the navigation and layout.
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge:
Michael Justin Allen Sexton / PCMag:
Intel details its 2nm 18A-process Panther Lake chips, showing major performance gains; laptops with Panther Lake Core Ultra Series 3 chips will debut on Jan. 27  —  Intel's 2-nanometer “18A” chip foundry has fired up at last, churning out the newest Core Ultra Series 3 processors for laptops and mini PCs, also known as “Panther Lake.”
Cameron Faulkner / The Verge:
Xreal partners with Asus to unveil ROG Xreal R1 gaming glasses with 1080p micro-OLED displays and a 240Hz refresh rate, launching in H1 2026  —  Doubling the standard refresh rate won't come cheap, and we don't know yet how much Xreal is going to charge. … Xreal is having a big CES.
Elissa Welle / The Verge:
Jeremy White / Wired:
Lego unveils the Smart Play platform, with a brick powered by a custom chip that connects to compatible minifigures and tags for interactive lights and sounds  —  The new sensor-packed Smart Play Brick will land this spring as part of a special Star Wars collection.
Rebecca Szkutak / TechCrunch:
AMD unveils Ryzen AI 400 Series AI PC chips with 12 CPU cores, claiming 1.3x faster multitasking and 1.7x faster content creation than rivals  —  AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su kicked off her keynote at CES 2026 with a message about what compute could deliver: AI for everyone.
Terrence O'Brien / The Verge:
Google plans to add Nano Banana and Veo support into Gemini on Google TV, letting users generate AI videos, modify family photos, and more, first on TCL TVs  —  You'll also be able to ask for custom ‘deep dives’ on subjects, complete with narration and interactive elements.
Shakeel Hashim / Transformer:
Why Claude Code is much more than a coding agent: it is a general-purpose AI agent that can do almost anything a user can on a computer, with impressive results  —  It's a general-purpose AI agent.  And it's already a pretty good knowledge worker  —  Over the holiday break, the news spread like wildfire.

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New York Times:
Satya Nadella / sn scratchpad: