• Syntilay has launched AI-designed, 3D-printed shoes.
• The footwear was designed with a mix of Midjourney and Vizcom AI
• The $150 shoes use smartphone foot scans for a fully customized fit.

If you like Crocs but wish they had more of a science-fiction backstory, you’re in luck. A startup company named Syntilay is using AI and 3D printing to produce a new line of shoes. The futuristic footwear is available now for $150 a pair. These slides aren’t cheap, but innovation rarely is.

Syntilay uses a mix of AI tools supplemented by human artistry to create its shoes, which look more than a little like a deep sea fish at first glance. The designers relied on Midjourney to develop the basic shape of the shoe. After that, a human artist refined the idea with a sketch for inspiration uploaded to Vizcom AI, which produced a 3D model based on the sketch. AI then helped design and embed textures and patterns into the shoe design, completing their look.

YouTube celebrity MrBeast — real name Jimmy Donaldson — is in talks to join a number of bids for TikTok’s U.S. operations. But he hasn’t chosen one exclusively yet.

First, on Monday, the CEO of Employer.com, Jesse Tinsley, said MrBeast is part of an all-cash bid for TikTok that he’s leading. This was also repeated in a press release put out by the law firm representing Tinsley’s group.

But MrBeast’s spokesperson Matthew Hiltzik told the AP on Wednesday that even though Donaldson is in “ongoing discussions” with multiple bidders, he has no “exclusive” agreements with any of them. Employer.com declined to comment.

Updated January 23, 2025: Post-publication, an Employer.com spokesperson told TechCrunch that “clearly MrBeast is in high demand, for great reasons. Jesse and his team would love to see MrBeast be a part of whichever bid ultimately wins, and greatly values the shared support that MrBeast has shown across the board.”

That same day, real estate billionaire Frank McCourt, who is leading a different group’s $20 billion bid for TikTok, told Axios that MrBeast is going to be a part of his bid.

However, MrBeast is only in talks with McCourt’s group and the parties have not entered into an official agreement, a spokesperson told Axios and also confirmed to TechCrunch.

At this stage, it appears that MrBeast is keeping his options open. 

While MrBeast is certainly wealthy, with $85 million in earnings in the first 10 months of 2024 according to Forbes, it is his celebrity and operational experience as a creator that has attracted multiple bidders.

That could even mean running TikTok U.S. if a purchase goes through. “MrBeast the *future* CEO of TikTok,” posted Employer.com’s CEO Jesse Tinsley on Wednesday. 

There are multiple other bids floating around that MrBeast could well be in talks with.​​ Perplexity and Oracle have been brought up as potential buyers.

MrBeast himself hasn’t publicly commented on which side he’ll choose yet. “The leading groups who are all credible [sic] bidding on Tik Tok have reached out for us to help them, I’m excited to partner/make this a reality,” he posted on Wednesday.

“Big things cooking,” he wrote.

• Apple has joined the board of the Ultra Accelerator Link consortium
• The link is a key technology that binds GPUs, not unlike synapses on neurons
• UALink is emerging as the biggest rival to Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink

Back in June 2024, we reported how a number of big tech names had banded together to form the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group, a strategic move aimed at reducing Nvidia‘s dominance in the AI accelerator market.

Directly competing with Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink technology, UALink seeks to develop a new industry standard for high-speed, low-latency communication for scale-up AI systems in data centers. It already has the backing of Intel, AMD, Google, Microsoft, Meta, HPE, Cisco, and Broadcom, but now Apple has joined the UALink board too.

Added support for DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation for GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards, which boosts FPS by using AI to generate up to three times per traditionally rendered frame – enabled with GeForce RTX 50 Series on January 30th. DLSS 4 also introduces faster single Frame Generation with reduced memory usage for RTX 50 and 40 Series. Additionally, you can now choose between the CNN model or the new Transformer model for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, DLSS Super Resolution, and DLAA on all GeForce RTX graphics cards today. The new Transformer model enhances stability, lighting, and detail in motion.

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance is planning to build what could become the world’s largest data center in Jamnagar, India, with a capacity of three gigawatts to capitalize on surging AI demand.

The facility would dwarf the current largest data center, Microsoft’s 600-megawatt site in Virginia, Bloomberg reported Friday. The project could cost between $20 billion to $30 billion, the report added.

Ambani raised more than $25 billion in 2020 from a group of investors including Meta, Google, Silver Lake, General Atlantic, KKR, Mubadala and PIF to fund the growth of Reliance’s retail and telecom ventures that now dominate the country. Reliance is India’s most valuable company.

Ambani aims to power the facility primarily with renewable energy from an adjacent green energy complex that will produce solar, wind and hydrogen power.

Ambani is buying chips from Nvidia for the data center, the report added. Nvidia and Reliance announced a partnership to build infrastructure for AI applications in India in October.

The Jamnagar project comes as OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle this week pledged up to $500 billion for AI infrastructure in the United States through their Stargate Project.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need clues.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

Google is bringing smart home controls in Gemini to everyone. The Google Home extension in the Gemini app is adding a few new features, in addition to letting you adjust your smart lighting, thermostat, speakers, and other compatible devices as long as they’re connected to your Google account.

Google first previewed the extension last November. With it, you can use natural language to control your smart home when interacting with Gemini, such as saying “The sun is too bright in the living room” to close your smart blinds. But now, Gemini can also carry out multiple requests, like “Turn the armchair light on too, but dim the kitchen lamp.” You’ll be able to use the Google Home extension to ask Gemini about the status of your devices too, such as whether you’ve left your porch light on.

Additionally, Google will let you control “non-sensitive” smart home devices, like your lights, from your phone’s lock screen. Other updates include the ability to adjust the volume, pause, and resume media on smart speakers, displays, and TVs within the Gemini app, as well as an updated thermostat control design that matches the one inside Google Home. Gemini will also automatically open the Google Home app for security-related actions for cameras and locks (it previously only linked you).

The launch of the Google Home extension follows a big update to Gemini, which lets it perform more complex tasks across multiple apps. You can try out the integration for yourself by signing into Gemini with the same account you use for Home and turning on the Google Home extension. It launches today but is rolling out “over the coming weeks.”

Tesla has announced that its redesigned Model Y SUV is coming to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in March, with a starting price just shy of $60,000.

The news comes just two weeks after Tesla first revealed the new-look Model Y and said it was coming to China and other Asian markets, also in March. Thursday’s announcement means the company is effectively launching the revamped SUV simultaneously around the globe — a departure from the multiple-month gap between the Asian and North American launch of the Model 3 sedan refresh in late 2023 and early 2024.

The redesigned Model Y is being launched at a crucial time for Tesla, which delivered fewer vehicles in 2024 than it did in 2023. Tesla has repeatedly warned investors that it is in between “two major growth waves” coming off the success of the Model Y, and promised that it will roll out mysterious new models meant to be built on existing production lines. Those models will likely be cheaper than Tesla’s current offerings (which start in the low $40,000 range), but it’s not clear by how much.

CEO Elon Musk has implied that those new models, plus the so-called Cybercab that was teased last October, will help bridge the company’s evolution from an automaker into a robotics and AI player.

But at the same time, Tesla’s vehicle lineup has been aging. Tesla has now refreshed each of its core vehicles — the Model S and 3 sedans, and the Model X and Y SUVs — but has only launched one truly new model in the last four years, the Cybertruck. While it became the best-selling electric truck in the U.S. in 2024, the Cybertruck did little to boost the company’s bottom line last year, and it does not seem to be the runaway hit Musk hoped for.

The new-look Model Y could offer some relief, though it is coming in at a higher price point than the existing versions. The starting price for the so-called “Launch Series” special edition, which is an all-wheel drive variant, is $59,990. That gets buyers a 320-mile range battery and it includes Tesla’s most advanced driver assistance software, which it calls “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” — typically an $8,000 option. The older Model Y currently starts at $44,990 for a 337-mile rear-wheel drive version.

The most noticeable changes to the new Model Y come on the exterior, where the bubbly front fascia has been ditched in favor of a more cinched nose with a thin light bar that stretches across the hood. The rear of the vehicle also now has a light strip that stretches the full width.

Inside the refreshed SUV, Tesla has added a configurable light strip that rims the cabin. There’s a new rear-passenger touchscreen, and some quality-of-life upgrades like powered rear seats and an improved suspension.

• Perplexity AI has released a mobile app for Android
• The Perplexity Assistant offers voice, text, and camera-based interactions for tasks such as booking rides and identifying objects
• The assistant integrates with apps and leverages real-time information and task automation

AI conversational search engine Perplexity is going mobile on the Google Play Store with a new Android app. Peeplexity’s app pitches itself as a kind of digital Swiss Army knife that can manage tasks for you, including making reservations and identifying objects through your phone’s camera. Best of all, the app is free and speaks 15 languages.

By leveraging Perplexity’s own search engine, the assistant can also tap into real-time web information, so it’s not just regurgitating pre-programmed answers. This should, in theory, make it smarter and more versatile than many of its competitors. To juggle all of those abilities, Perplexity can maintain context across multiple tasks. That means it won’t double-book you and will remember what you like and don’t like.

Netflix plans to offer couch co-op and party games that it will stream over the cloud to TVs, co-CEO Greg Peters said as part of the company’s Q4 2024 earnings announcements this week. The company has offered cloud gaming as a beta to a “subset” of subscribers since 2023, so this news from Peters indicates that the company is going to continue to invest in it.

Peters didn’t say exactly when the co-op and party games might be available. But he did say that “we think of this as a successor to family board game night or an evolution of what the game show on TV used to be.”

Netflix will also continue to focus on “more narrative games based on Netflix IP” — Peters says those games are “consistent fan favorites and we’ve got a lot in the library to work with there.”