Another tidbit just dropped following Wednesday’s Samsung Unpacked event. This one comes courtesy of Adobe, which notes that the new Galaxy S25 line will be the first handsets to support the Content Credentials standard, aimed at labeling AI-generated content as such.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) group — of which Samsung is now officially a part — describes the standard as a “nutrition label for digital content.” The information presented includes how the content was generated and edited, as well as if any generative AI technologies were used in the process.

The standard arrives amid increasing concern around AI’s ability to propagate fake news and other misinformation. In addition to its presence in still images, it will be extended to include video, audio, and documents.

Content Credentials can be found in an image using Adobe’s Content Authenticity tool, which is now in beta.

Along with Samsung and Adobe, the C2PA includes some top names from media, social media, AI, and hardware, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, BBC, Meta, Sony, Publicis, and Truepic.

The Galaxy S25 line is now up for preorder and set to start shipping February 7.

TL;DR: Get the Ashampoo WinOptimizer 27 lifetime license for just $15.99 to boost your PC’s speed, protect sensitive data, and fix errors.

In any professional environment, system performance matters. Ashampoo WinOptimizer 27 offers one-click solutions to keep your Windows PC fast, clean, and secure — without recurring subscription fees.

Whether you’re managing large datasets, running resource-intensive software, or just ensuring your system remains stable during critical tasks, this tool can help. For just $15.99 (reg. $55), unlock a lifetime license to a powerful suite of tools designed to optimize, protect, and prolong your PC’s lifespan.

It’s common sense that your PC’s performance directly impacts productivity. Laggy systems, unnecessary files, and unaddressed privacy vulnerabilities slow down workflows and increase security risks. WinOptimizer 27 offers more than 30 optimization modules to help your system operate at peak performance.

This tool isn’t just for casual users — IT professionals, developers, and business owners can benefit from its automated cleanup, advanced diagnostics, and privacy protection features.

The Crash Analyzer module identifies system crashes and their causes, providing actionable insights to prevent future issues. Meanwhile, the Privacy Traces Cleaner helps secure sensitive data, especially when working with client information or proprietary business data.

One of the features that professionals can lean into is Process Prioritization. WinOptimizer automatically allocates system resources to your most important tasks; this means that whether you’re rendering videos, compiling code, or running data analysis, the tool adjusts your PC’s performance to match your workload. Plus, the Live Tuner speeds up application launches, allowing you to save time and avoid downtime.

The tool also offers SSD optimization to prolong your solid-state drive’s lifespan, which is crucial for professionals relying on fast storage solutions. Additionally, with the Tuning Assistant, you get custom optimization profiles that fit your exact needs, whether you’re focusing on gaming, development, or general office work.

Don’t miss trying out the Ashampoo WinOptimizer 27 lifetime license while it’s on sale for just $15.99 (reg. $55).

Prices and availability are subject to change.

Samsung has just unveiled its new Galaxy S25 series smartphones at its Galaxy Unpacked event, alongside a slew of brand-new AI features coming to its devices, such as the handy Now Brief. You can check out our coverage here at TechRadar.com including our hands-on thoughts with the new Samsung Galaxy S25, Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus, and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and find out more about everything announced via our Galaxy Unpack event liveblog.

But if you want us to truly unpack everything Samsung just revealed, as well as what we think this event means for Samsung as a whole in 2025, then you’ll need to watch our brand-new Samsung Unpacked January 2025 special episode of the TechRadar podcast.

As avian influenza rages through birds and dairy cattle across the United States, Georgia has become the latest state to detect the virus in a commercial poultry flock, and on Friday, it halted all poultry sales to mitigate further spread of the disease. Nationally, egg prices are soaring—if you can find them at all in your local grocery store.

The ongoing outbreak in animals has also led to at least 67 human cases of bird flu, with all but one causing mild illness. Earlier this month, a person in Louisiana died after being hospitalized with severe bird flu in December. It’s the country’s first recorded death attributed to H5N1.

The US has previously licensed three H5N1 vaccines for humans, but they’re not available commercially. The government has purchased millions of doses for the national stockpile in case they’re needed. But even as the outbreak spread, federal health officials under President Joe Biden were hesitant to deploy them. Experts say the decision comes down to risk, and currently, the risk of H5N1 remains low. Rolling out a vaccine to farm workers and others at higher risk of infection would be a more targeted tactic, but even that measure may be premature. Now, with a changeover in federal health leadership imminent as President Donald Trump begins his second term, the decision rests with the new administration.

“At the moment, from the point of view of severity and ease of transmission, it does not seem like an imperative to get a vaccine out to protect humans,” says William Schaffner, a physician and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

So far, no person-to-person spread of H5N1 has been identified, but health officials are monitoring the virus for any genetic changes that would make transmission among people more likely. Most bird flu infections are related to animal exposures. Of the 67 known human cases in the US, 40 have been linked to sick dairy cattle and 23 are associated with poultry farms and culling operations. In the other four cases, the exact source isn’t known.

In the US, human cases have been mild, with many of them causing only conjunctivitis. In some cases, people have had mild respiratory symptoms. Aside from the Louisiana patient, all the individuals who tested positive for H5N1 recovered quickly and never needed to be hospitalized. Historically though, H5N1 has been fatal in around 50 percent of cases. Since 2003, a total of 954 cases of human H5N1 have been reported to the World Health Organization, and about half of them died. Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China have reported the highest number of human bird flu deaths.

Those numbers come with a few caveats. For one, many of those deaths occurred in places where people live very close to the sick poultry. “In those circumstances, the thinking is that they likely got a very large dose of the virus,” Schaffner says.

Plus, the case fatality rate—the proportion of infected people who die from the disease—only takes into consideration known cases, and some cases of H5N1 are no doubt going undetected in part because bird flu symptoms are similar to other respiratory viruses. In the US, language barriers among farm workers, lack of testing, and a reluctance among workers to report that they’re sick are also factors. “We probably miss more cases than we detect, and we’re much more likely to detect a case that’s severe,” says Shira Doron, chief infection control officer for Tufts Medicine in Boston and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center.

One in 10 game developers lost their job in 2024. That’s according to the results of the annual Game Developers Conference state of the video game survey. The survey sampled over 3,000 developers and covered a number of topics including industry layoffs and what kind of games developers are working on.

Prolific layoffs have ravaged the industry over the last two years making the question of their impact on developers one of the most important in the survey. In addition to 10 percent of developers losing their jobs, 41 percent of respondents said they had been impacted by layoffs in some way, either by being laid off directly or seeing coworkers or colleagues in other departments let go. The survey also noted that the number of people impacted is potentially much higher because of the students and graduates who reported having a difficult time simply getting a job in the industry at all.

When asked what reason companies gave for layoffs, 22 percent said restructuring while 18 said declining revenue. 19 percent gave no reason at all. Developers, though, have their own ideas about why layoffs keep happening. In an analysis of responses to what developers think the reason behind layoffs is, the majority were general statements about the industry’s over-expansion during the pandemic. Companies acquired workers and studios in hopes of meeting a level of demand for games that dried up as covid restrictions loosened. However, some developers believe the reason for layoffs is much simpler. Companies like Microsoft and Sony still reported growing revenues despite multiple rounds of layoffs and studio closures. It’s no surprise then that 13 percent of respondents attributed layoffs to corporate greed.

In addition to layoffs, the last few years have also seen the failure of a number of high-profile, big-budget, live-service games. While there has been some success in that area with new games like Marvel Rivals, it’s generally tough to launch a live-service game that can compete with the overbearing likes of Fortnite, Roblox, and Call of Duty. 2024 was also the year that Balatro, Animal Well, and Astro Bot dominated headlines and award lists suggesting a greater appetite for those kinds of smaller-scoped, single-player experiences. It’s interesting, and perhaps concerning then, that according to the survey, over 30 percent of AAA developers are working on a live-service game.

When it asked developers their thoughts on live-service games the survey answered, “One of the biggest issues mentioned was market oversaturation, with many developers noting how tough it is to break through and build a sustainable player base.”

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

OpenAI is making gains at the expense of its chief rivals.

On Tuesday, the company announced the Stargate Project, a new joint venture involving Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, Oracle, and others to build AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the U.S. Stargate could attract up to $500 billion in funding for AI data centers over the next four years, should all proceed according to plan.

The news was surely to the chagrin of OpenAI competitors like Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI, which will see no comparable enormous infrastructure investment.

xAI intends to expand its data center in Memphis to 1 million GPUs, while Anthropic recently signed a deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, to use and refine the company’s custom AI chips. But it’s difficult to imagine that either AI company can outpace Stargate, even, as in the case of Anthropic, with Amazon’s vast resources.

Granted, Stargate may not deliver on its promises. Other tech infrastructure projects in the U.S. haven’t. Recall that, in 2017, Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn pledged and subsequently failed to spend $10 billion for a plant near Milwaukee.

But Stargate has more backers — and momentum, from what it seems at this juncture — behind it. The first data center to be funded by the effort has already broken ground in Abilene, Texas. And the companies participating in Stargate have promised to invest $100 billion at the outset.

Indeed, Stargate seems poised to cement OpenAI’s incumbency in the exploding AI sector. OpenAI has more active users — 300 million weekly — than any other AI venture. And it has more customers. Over 1 million businesses are paying for OpenAI’s services.

OpenAI had first-mover advantage. Now it could have infrastructure supremacy. Rivals will have to be smart if they hope to compete. Brute force won’t be a viable option.

News

Microsoft exclusivity no more: Microsoft was once the exclusive provider of data center infrastructure for OpenAI to train and run its AI models. No longer. Now the company only has a “right of first refusal.”

Perplexity launches an API: AI-powered search engine Perplexity has launched an API service called Sonar, allowing enterprises and developers to build the startup’s generative AI search tools into their own applications.

AI speeding the “kill chain”: My colleague Max interviewed the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, Radha Plumb. Plumb said that the Department of Defense is using AI to gain a “significant advantage” in identifying, tracking, and assessing threats.

Benchmarks in question: An organization developing math benchmarks for AI didn’t disclose that it had received funding from OpenAI until relatively recently, drawing allegations of impropriety from some in the AI community.

DeepSeek’s new model: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released an open version of DeepSeek-R1, its so-called reasoning model, that it claims performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain AI benchmarks.

Research paper of the week

Last week, Microsoft spotlighted a pair of AI-powered tools, MatterGen and MatterSim, which it claims could help design advanced materials.

MatterGen predicts potential materials with unique properties, grounded in scientific principles. As described in a paper published in the journal Nature, MatterGen generates thousands of candidates with “user-defined constraints” — proposing new materials that meet highly specific needs.

As for MatterSim, it predicts which of MatterGen’s proposed materials are stable and viable.

Microsoft says that a team at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology was able to use MatterGen to synthesize a new material. The material wasn’t flawless. But Microsoft has released the source code of MatterGen, and the company says it plans to work with other outside collaborators to further develop the tech.

Model of the week

Google has released a new version of its experimental “reasoning” model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. The company claims it performs better than the original on math, science, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks.

Reasoning models like Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental effectively fact-check themselves, which helps them to avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models. As a consequence, reasoning models take a little longer — usually seconds to minutes longer — to arrive at solutions compared to a typical “non-reasoning” model.

The new Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking also has a 1 million token context window, meaning it can analyze long documents such as research studies and policy papers. One million tokens is equivalent to about 750,000 words, or 10 average-length books.

Grab bag

An AI project called GameFactory shows that it’s possible to “generate” interactive simulations by training a model on Minecraft videos and then extending that model to different domains.

The researchers behind GameFactory, most of whom hail from the University of Hong Kong and Kuaishou, a Chinese company that’s partially state-owned, published a few examples of the simulations on the project’s website. They leave something to be desired, but the concept is still an interesting one: a model that can generate worlds in endless styles and themes.

Samsung is already the king of folding phones – and at the first Samsung Galaxy Unpacked of 2025, the tech giant teased its potential next frontier.

During the launch, which saw the reveal of the Samsung Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25 Ultra and Galaxy S25 Plus, Samsung showed off a brief roadmap of its future products – complete with a tri-folding foldable phone.

This is important because, while we MagSafe lovers have made do with MagSafe Android phone cases these past few years, there’s always been a caveat that these cases may not work with all MagSafe products. With Qi2 Ready cases, you can rest easy knowing they’ll work with Qi2 chargers.

It’s worth noting that OnePlus’ latest flagship phone, the OnePlus 13, is not a Qi2 Ready phone, however, OnePlus sells a magnetic case to enable Qi2-like charging. This is the old approach of adding magnetic charging to phones with basic Qi support, and it will not turn your phone into a Qi2 device. While it may feel similar, you may not enjoy faster charging speeds, it will not be as energy efficient, and it’s not guaranteed to work with all Qi2 accessories. Golden says Qi2 Ready phones have “special features built into them” to enable proper Qi2 functionality when paired with a Qi2 Ready case.

Alas, as soon as you take these Qi2 Ready cases off the phone, the magnetic functionality disappears. This may not be a problem for most people. It’s hard to find recent statistics, but a 2023 YouGov survey found that roughly 68 percent of Americans use a phone case, and a 2017 study put that number at 79 percent. But it does stink for those of us who don’t like using a case. Pour one out for the case-less fiends.

I can recall dozens of times when I’ve had to take my iPhone case off to attach a wireless microphone to the USB-C port or to fit the phone on a gimbal. Removing the case didn’t change anything because iPhones have magnets built in, but this is something that will impact Qi2 Ready phones, and it’s a frustrating limitation.

I think Qi2 Ready phones are an acceptable in-between measure. Considering it’s cheaper than embedding magnets into a phone, I hope it means more budget and midrange smartphones can enjoy Qi2 capabilities.

Still, I worry that this will make things confusing for the average person. New phones will support Qi but not Qi2, but they’ll have Qi2 Ready cases to enable Qi2—my brain hurt just writing that. If they just had native Qi2 support, magnetic charging would work all the time with any Qi2 accessory. Easy peasy.

The good news is that Samsung and Google have committed to releasing official Qi2 Android phones in 2025, so it is on the way, though it does feel bizarre that Samsung may not end up debuting it on its flagship smartphone series.

I’ll make do with a magnetic case (again), but for the love of God, can someone just give me my magnetic Android already?

Google worked with the Israeli military in the immediate aftermath of its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, racing to beat out Amazon to provide AI services, according to company documents obtained by the Washington Post. 

In the weeks after Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, employees at Google’s cloud division worked directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — even as the company told both the public and its own employees that Google only worked with civilian government ministries, the documents reportedly show.

Weeks after the war began, an employee with Google’s cloud division escalated the IDF’s military’s requests for access to Google’s AI technology, according to the Post. In another document, an employee warned that Google needed to quickly respond to the military’s requests, or else Israel would turn to Amazon for its cloud computing needs. In a November 2023 document, an employee thanks a coworker for handling the IDF’s request. Months later, employees requested additional access to AI tools for the IDF. 

Amid this, Google was punishing employees for protesting Project Nimbus, Israel’s $1.2 billion contract for Google and Amazon’s cloud computing services. Google fired 28 employees who staged sit-in protests at the company’s offices in New York and California, some of whom were also arrested during the demonstrations.

At the same time, Google denied that it was working with the Israeli military. “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” Anna Kowalczyk, the external communications manager for Google Cloud, told The Verge in April 2024. “This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” Kowalczyk said.

Google did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

Streaming service Plex has long since grown beyond its original focus of being a home for personal media to offer a more comprehensive solution for discovering, streaming, and sharing content across services, including Plex’s own ad-supported free TV and movies. More recently, the company added social networking features, which it’s today expanding with its rollout of new functionality. Notably, this includes a way to share your Plex profile publicly and tools to let others read your TV and movie reviews and then comment in return.

Plex first introduced social networking in November 2023 when it launched a feature called “Discover Together,” which allowed users to create profiles on the service and then find and follow friends to see what they were watching. (The feature initially received some backlash as some Plex users were unhappy about its opt-out nature. Plex now notes that content flagged as adult won’t appear in users’ Activity fees, which was one of the users’ concerns.)

While it was a shift for the company, offering a more social experience on Plex allows it to better compete not only with other free, ad-supported streamers but also with dedicated social networks for movie and TV reviews like Letterboxd and TV Time, among others.

With today’s release, Plex says users will now be able to share a public URL that points to their profile on the service on watch.plex.tv. By default, users will be findable by others on Plex via the app’s search, unless they’ve already turned this off in their settings.

People who view your user profile will be able to see what you’ve been watching, what’s on your Watchlist, and more. This does not change any of your existing privacy settings, Plex notes.

In addition, Plex users will have the option to make their Ratings & Reviews visible to other users on Plex through a new setting. Here, you can choose between allowing anyone to see these reviews or only those signed in to Plex. You can also choose that your reviews are only visible to Friends or Friends of Friends, or you can make all your Ratings & Reviews private if desired.

Alongside the social networking features, Plex is also launching a preview of its new user interface, initially on Apple TV. The redesign includes updated navigation, more personal media customization, easier feature access, a richer experience with more artwork, and Plex’s various social networking features, the company says in its announcement.

For power users, Plex Pass subscribers (paid users) will gain access to HEVC hardware encoding for better video quality while saving bandwidth. This option was previously in preview mode with select users but is now available to all subscribers.