More money has been invested in AI than it took to land on the moon. Spending on the technology this year is projected to reach up to $700 billion, almost double last year’s spending. Part of the impetus for this frantic outlay is a conviction among investors and policymakers in the United States that it needs to “beat China.” Indeed, headlines have long cast AI development as a zero-sum rivalry between the U.S. and China, framing the technology’s advance as an arms race with a defined finish line. The narrative implies speed, symmetry, and a common objective.

But a closer look at AI development in the two countries shows they’re not only not racing toward the same finish line: “The U.S. and China are running in very different lanes,” says Selina Xu, who leads China and AI policy research for Eric Schmidt, the tech investor, philanthropist and former Google chief, in New York City. “The U.S. is doubling down on scaling,” in pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) Xu says, “while for China it’s more about boosting economic productivity and real-world impact.”

Lumping the U.S. and China onto a single AI scoreboard isn’t just inaccurate, it can impact policy and business decisions in a harmful way. “An arms race can become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Xu says. “If companies and governments all embrace a ‘race to the bottom’ mentality, they will eschew necessary security and safety guardrails for the sake of being ahead. That increases the odds of AI-related crises.”

Where’s the Real Finish Line?

As machine learning advanced in the 2010s, prominent public figures such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk warned that it would be impossible to separate AI’s general-purpose potential from its military and economic implications, echoing Cold War–era frameworks for strategic competition. “An arms race is an easy way to think about this situation even if it’s not exactly right,” says Karson Elmgren, a China researcher at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, a think tank in San Francisco. Frontier labs, investors, and media benefit from simple, comparable progress metrics, like larger models, better benchmarks, and more computing power, so they favor and compound the arms race framing.

Artificial general intelligence is the implied “finish line” if AI is an arms race. But one of the many problems with an AGI finish line is that by its very nature, a machine superintelligence would be smarter than humans and therefore impossible to control. “If superintelligence were to emerge in a particular country, there’s no guarantee that that country’s interests are going to win,” says Graham Webster, a China researcher at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California.

An AGI finish line also assumes the U.S. and China are both optimizing for this goal and putting the majority of their resources towards it. This isn’t the case, as the two countries have starkly different economic landscapes.

When Is the Payoff?

After decades of rapid growth, China is now facing a grimmer reality. “China has been suffering through an economic slowdown for a mixture of reasons, from real estate to credit to consumption and youth unemployment,” says Xu, adding that the country’s leaders have been “trying to figure out what is the next economic driver that can get China to sustain its growth.”

Enter AI. Rather than pouring resources into speculative frontier models, Beijing has a pressing incentive to use the technology as a more immediate productivity engine. “In China we define AI as an enabler to improve existing industry, like healthcare, energy, or agriculture,” says AI policy researcher Liang Zheng, of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people.”

To that end, AI investment in China is focused on embedding the technology into manufacturing, logistics, energy, finance, and public services. “It’s a long-term structural change, and companies must invest more in machines, software, and digitalization,” Liang says. “Even very small and medium enterprises are exploring use of AI to improve their productivity.”

China’s AI Plus initiative encourages using AI to boost efficiency. “Having a frontier technology doesn’t really move China towards an innovation-led developed economy,” says Kristy Loke, a fellow at MATS Research who focuses on China’s AI innovation and governance strategies. Instead, she says, “It’s really important to make sure that [these tools] are able to meet the demands of the Chinese economy, which are to industrialize faster, to do more smart manufacturing, to make sure they’re producing things in competitive processes.”

Automakers have embraced intelligent robots in “dark factories” with minimal human intervention; as of 2024, China had around five times more factory robots in use than the U.S. “We used to use human eyes for quality control and it was very inefficient,” says Liang. Now, computer vision systems detect errors and software predicts equipment failures, pausing production and scheduling just-in-time maintenance. Agricultural models advise farmers on crop selection, planting schedules, and pest control.

In healthcare, AI tools triage patients, interpret medical images, and assist diagnoses; Tsinghua is even piloting an AI “Agent Hospital” where physicians work alongside virtual clinical assistants. “In hospitals you used to have to wait a long time, but now you can use your agent to make a precise appointment,” Liang says. Many such applications use simpler “narrow AI” designed for specific tasks.

AI is also increasingly embedded across industries in the U.S., but the focus tends toward service-oriented and data-driven applications, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to handle unstructured data and automate communication. For example, banks use LLM-based assistants to help users manage accounts, find transactions, and handle routine requests; LLMs help healthcare professionals extract information from medical notes and clinical documentation.

“LLMs as a technology naturally fit the U.S. service-sector-based economy more so than the Chinese manufacturing economy,” Elmgren says.

Competition and cooperation

The U.S. and China do compete more or less head-to-head in some AI-related areas, such as the underlying chips. The two have grappled to gain enough control over their supply chains to ensure national security, as recent tariff and export control fights have shown. “I think the main competitive element from a top level [for China] is to wriggle their way out of U.S. coercion over semiconductors. They want to have an independent capability to design, build, and package advanced semiconductors,” Webster says.

Military applications of AI are also a significant arena of U.S.–China competition, with both governments aiming to speed decision-making, improve intelligence, and increase autonomy in weapons systems. The U.S. Department of Defense launched its AI Acceleration Strategy last month, and China has explicitly integrated AI into its military modernization strategy under its policy of military-civil fusion. “From the perspective of specific military systems, there are incremental advantages that one side or the other can gain,” Webster says.

Despite China’s commitment to military and industrial applications, it has not yet picked an AI national champion. “After Deepseek in early 2025 the government could have easily said, ‘You guys are the winners, I’ll give you all the money, please build AGI,’ but they didn’t. They see being ‘close enough’ to the technological frontier as important, but putting all eggs in the AGI basket as a gamble,” Loke says.

American companies are also still working with Chinese technology and workers, despite a slow uncoupling of the two economies. Though it may seem counterintuitive, more cooperation—and less emphasis on cutthroat competition—could yield better results for all. “For building more secure, trustworthy AI, you need both U.S. and Chinese labs and policymakers to talk to each other, to reach consensus on what’s off limits, then compete within those boundaries,” Xu says. “The arms race narrative also just misses the actual on-the-ground reality of companies co-opting each other’s approaches, the amount of research that gets exchanged in academic communities, the supply chains and talent that permeates across borders, and just how intertwined the two ecosystems are.”

Sharp has unveiled its Celerity High-Speed Oven at KBIS 2026 and introduced a new “Golden Heater” system that aims to reduce cooking times significantly while maintaining the texture and browning expected from a conventional oven.

The 30-inch wall oven combines the Golden Heater with True European Convection and inverter-controlled microwave power, creating a hybrid cooking approach that blends radiant heat, circulating air and microwave energy in one cavity.

Sharp states that the system can cook a whole chicken up to three times faster than a conventional oven, reflecting a broader industry push toward time-saving appliances that merge multiple cooking technologies.

Hybrid ovens have gained traction as households prioritise speed and versatility over single-function appliances, especially in kitchens where space constraints limit the number of dedicated cooking devices.

It’s becoming somewhat of a theme that machine-generated content – whether it’s code, text or graphics – keeps pushing people to their limits, mostly by how such ‘AI slop’ is generally of outrageously poor quality, but as in the case of [Vincent Driessen] there’s also a clear copyright infringement angle involved. Recently he found that Microsoft had bastardized a Git explainer graphic which he had in 2010 painstakingly made by hand, with someone at Microsoft slapping it on a Microsoft Learn explainer article pertaining to GitHub.

As noted in a PC Gamer article on this clear faux pas, Microsoft has since quietly removed the graphic and replaced it with something possibly less AI slop, but with zero comment, and so far no response to a request for comment by PC Gamer. Of course, The Internet Archive always remembers.

What’s probably most vexing is that the ripped-off diagram isn’t even particularly good, as it has all the hallmarks of AI slop graphics: from the nonsensical arrows that got added or modified, to heavily mutilated text including changing ‘Time’ to ‘Tim’ and ‘continuously merged’ into ‘continvuocly morged’. This makes it obvious that whoever put the graphic on the Microsoft Learn page either didn’t bother to check, or that no human was involved in generating said page.

It definitely gives a dystopian ‘Dead Internet’ vibe where the fruits of past labor are being cynically regurgitated and spat out in the form of AI slop that bears little resemblance to the original, and should send real humans either running off in abject terror or fall over in uncontrollable laughter.

Even if this output was the result of [Vincent]’s original graphic getting scraped and shoved struggling and screaming into a diffusion model’s training dataset, there are so many dead giveaways that it was based on this original: from the text blurbs, to the use of the label ‘feature branches’ that’s retained in the reproduction even though the second feature branch has been trimmed.

All of this raises many uncomfortable questions about copyright in the context of both large language models and diffusion models, with cases like these making it clear that sometimes substantial elements of copyrighted works are being reproduced nearly verbatim. Depending on the associated copyright license, this can result in very expensive copyright infringement lawsuits, with some of these already working, or having worked their way through various courts pertaining to primarily stock images and books.

And to think that all that Microsoft would have had to do here was to check with [Vincent] for the license on the graphic if they had wanted to use it. As [Vincent] indicates, he would have been more than happy to do so if a backlink and credit was provided. This obviously is the human way to do things, where a human contacts a fellow human being to inquire about their thoughts on a topic, or peruses the works by fellow humans to find something to their liking prior to contacting said human with a usage question.

In this era of ‘just ask the machine’ by mashing in a query on a prompt, it would seem that this particular case will be far from the last one. The cynical take here is that the value of human output has been reduced to mere training data for the content machines, but maybe Microsoft will surprise us here with a tearful apology and real actions to prevent such events from ever happening again.

CPL’s report found that nowadays, salary may no longer be the most pressing concern for professionals.

Dublin-headquartered HR company CPL has published the results of a recent survey in which it discovered that currently, employees prize high-quality leadership almost as much as they value compensation. 

The organisation spoke with 1,600 age-diverse men and women, collecting data in mid-2025, to build a broader picture of the preferences and attitudes of professionals. 

CPL’s Salary Guide for Ireland 2026 found that while compensation and benefits continue to be the top priority for 35pc of contributing employees, 24pc of professionals said that leadership and culture are the most important factors to consider when choosing an employer.

Breaking down the elements that make up the leadership and culture category, employees were found to specifically value culture, values and ethics (27pc), work environment (25pc) and leadership behaviours (24pc). The report stated: “CPL’s findings reinforce that leadership quality remains a critical driver of employee attrition.”

Burgeoning benefits

Among the benefits of key importance to professionals, CPL’s research found that flexible working has evolved from a perk to a critical component of employee packages. After financial remuneration, flexibility ranked as the second most important benefit at 26pc. 

The research indicated that 70pc of participating employees now utilise some form of flexible working, with CPL noting that previous studies indicate that one in four candidates would not proceed with a job opportunity if it lacked opportunity for flexible work. 

A healthy work-life balance also matters to professionals, as 40pc said it was an experience priority. 21pc noted meaningful and stimulating work contributes to their overall happiness. The report said that while not yet surpassing compensation in importance, “work-life balance, when considered alongside flexible working, represents a core pillar of any successful talent strategy”.

CPL’s research also indicated that there is an incoming ‘workforce evolution’ of sorts, prompted by limited-company growth. The report noted that in Ireland, a country that experienced near-record limited company incorporations in 2025, growth and hiring is stalling. 

It said: “This growth reflects layoffs and slower permanent hiring for experienced professionals, prompting many to establish their own businesses providing specialist services across technology, life sciences and financial services. 

“This trend signals a structural shift toward self-employment, fractional leadership and contingent workforce models, offering organisations access to critical expertise with greater cost and workforce flexibility.”

Looking for organisational stability and additional career pathways are also priorities, the report indicated, noting that employees are in search of well-structured companies. Organisations’ stability and growth ranked as an important factor for 34pc of contributing employees, followed by organisational structure at 22pc, and mission and purpose at 17pc.

Notably, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability ranked low, at 5pc, suggesting organisations must strengthen their positioning as net-benefit entities. 

CPL said: “Investment in upskilling, reskilling and internal mobility is accelerating as skills shortages make external hiring costly and competitive.

“Employees expect visible career progression, and organisations require resilient workforces to navigate economic and technological change. Those building clear career pathways and investing in learning reduce long-term hiring pressure while retaining critical skills.”

Commenting on the report, Lorna Conn, the CEO of CPL, said: “Ireland’s labour market is undergoing a period of dynamic evolution. While economic and technological pressures continue to reshape how organisations operate, one fundamental truth persists: talent is the key differentiator for growth. 

“This salary guide sits at the intersection of pay, skills, flexibility and leadership, drawing on insights from CPL’s Future of Work Institute, Ireland’s 2026 talent trends and our latest analysis of AI’s impact on the workforce.” 

Looking ahead, the report finds that Ireland’s 2026 talent market will continue to reward organisations that adopt a holistic, long-term approach to the employee experience. 

It said that while “not every organisation can compete on salary alone, those balancing compensation and benefits, career development, innovation, flexible working, and upskilling are best positioned to attract and retain top talent”.

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Sennheiser isn’t chasing trends here. With the new CX 80U earphones and HD 400U headphones, the company is doing something far more practical: updating two of its most accessible wired models for a world that no longer has headphone jacks.

Both products replace the long-running CX 80S and HD 400S, swapping the 3.5mm plug for USB-C and adding integrated digital audio support. The result is a direct, low-latency signal path that works with modern phones, tablets, laptops, handheld gaming devices, and PCs—no dongles required. Both models support up to 24-bit / 96 kHz playback and are class-compliant for plug-and-play use across iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and SteamOS devices.

Sennheiser’s pitch is straightforward: wired still matters, especially for people who want consistent sound quality, zero pairing drama, and something that doesn’t need charging.

According to Christian Ern, Senior Product Manager at Sennheiser, the goal was simplicity without compromise. These are products designed to plug in, work immediately, and stay out of the way while you get on with your day—whether that’s calls, gaming, studying, or music listening.

Sennheiser HD 400U Headphones

The Sennheiser HD 400U ($99.95 at Amazon) is a closed-back, over-ear design that sticks closely to the formula that made the HD 400S popular. It’s compact, folds flat, and leans toward a bass-forward tuning that works well for everyday listening. Passive isolation helps block out background noise in shared spaces, making it a sensible option for home offices, school environments, and travel.

Sennheiser includes a detachable USB-C cable and a storage pouch, which keeps things practical rather than precious. This is not a studio headphone and doesn’t pretend to be one—it’s built for portability, durability, and predictable performance across devices.

What the HD 400U Is Doing Under the Hood

At its core, the Sennheiser HD 400U is a closed-back, over-ear dynamic headphone built for everyday listening rather than studio theatrics. The closed design keeps sound in and outside noise out, which immediately makes it more useful for shared spaces, commuting, and work environments where open-back headphones would be a liability.

The 18-ohm impedance tells you this headphone is easy to drive. Phones, laptops, tablets, and handheld gaming devices don’t have to work hard to get it loud, and there’s no requirement for an external amplifier. Pair that with a 217-gram weight, and you get something that’s comfortable enough for long sessions without feeling flimsy or toy-like.

Sennheiser uses a 9.7mm dynamic driver, tuned to cover the full audible range from 18 Hz to 20 kHz. Translation: you’ll get usable low-end extension without exaggerated sub-bass theatrics, and clean enough treble to keep vocals and dialogue intelligible without fatigue. The low total harmonic distortion (<0.5% at 100 dB) means the sound stays composed even when you turn things up; no strident edges or obvious breakup at higher volumes.

Built for Calls, Meetings, and Everyday Use

The integrated microphone is tuned for practicality, not podcast stardom. With a 100 Hz to 10 kHz frequency range and an omnidirectional pickup pattern, it’s designed to capture your voice clearly during calls and meetings without requiring precise positioning. It won’t isolate your voice like a boom mic, but it does the job reliably for work, gaming chat, and video calls.

CX 80U Earphones

For listeners who prefer something lighter and more discreet, the Sennheiser CX 80U ($39.95 at Amazon) takes the familiar CX 80S in-ear design and gives it the same USB-C digital treatment. The tuning is balanced with a touch of low-end weight, and passive isolation does most of the work when it comes to blocking outside noise.

Three sizes of silicone ear tips are included to help with fit and comfort, whether the earphones are being used for music, calls, or gaming sessions. Like the HD 400U, the CX 80U includes an in-line remote with an integrated MEMS microphone for voice calls and meetings.

What the CX 80U Is Doing Under the Hood

The Sennheiser CX 80U is a wired, in-ear dynamic earphone designed for simplicity, isolation, and consistency across modern devices. Like its predecessor, the CX 80S, it focuses on balanced tuning with enough low-end presence to keep things engaging without smothering vocals or dialogue.

Because this is a USB-C digital earphone, traditional specs like impedance and sensitivity don’t apply in the same way they do with analog models. The digital signal is handled internally, which means volume behavior and power delivery are controlled by the source device rather than varying wildly depending on headphone jacks or dongles.

The stated 17 Hz to 20 kHz frequency response covers the full audible range, delivering usable low-end weight and clean treble without pushing into exaggerated extremes. This tuning works well for music, video, podcasts, and gaming—especially in environments where background noise would otherwise get in the way.

There’s no active noise cancelling here, and that’s intentional. The CX 80U relies on its in-ear fit to passively block outside noise. Three sizes of ear tips are included to help achieve a proper seal, which is critical for both comfort and bass response. Get the fit right, and the earphones do a respectable job of keeping distractions out without introducing digital artifacts or battery requirements.

The Bottom Line

The Sennheiser CX 80U and HD 400U aren’t designed to compete with wireless headphones. They’re built for people who want affordable, wired audio that connects directly to modern USB-C devices without adapters, apps, or batteries. For students, commuters, gamers, and anyone tired of managing dongles, Sennheiser’s USB-C update is about reliability and convenience, not trends.

Pricing & Availability

Both models are available now:

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Formula 1 has been receiving star treatment from Apple for awhile, and now the racing series will literally be getting even bigger. Apple is partnering with IMAX to show five races from the 2026 season. The Miami Grand Prix on May 3, the Monaco Grand Prix on June 7, the British Grand Prix on July 5, the Italian Grand Prix on September 6 and the United States Grand Prix on October 25 will be aired live at select IMAX theaters in the US.

Apple landed a five-year deal for the US broadcast rights to Formula 1 last fall and there’s already a dedicated channel for the car races on Apple TV ahead of the season’s start. It also got the rights for a splashy feature film about the racing league, which amassed more than $630 million at the global box office, including with some IMAX screenings. It’s unclear if IMAX will be paying to host more live F1 races at its theaters in future years, but it should be a fun way for fans to get the most immersive experience possible short of actually attending the racetrack.

Toy Story 5 will be the first Woody-Buzz CGI fable in the film series, where I’ll take a pass. I don’t need to see comedy ensue as the iconic characters run headfirst into the hard reality of tech and childhood.

Pixar and Disney released the first full-length Toy Story 5 trailer on Thursday (February 19), delivering the clearest picture yet of what to expect from this once-groundbreaking but now aging franchise. The movie hits theaters on June 19.