Rivian is planning to launch a hands-free driving assistant system for its electric R1T and R1S vehicles later this year, followed by an “eyes-off” version in 2026, reveals Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe in a press roundtable interview according to a post on Rivian Forums and reported by Electrek. The first part of the system sounds like it will work similarly to Ford’s Blue Cruise or GM’s Super Cruise software, which are Level 2 assistants that only work on highways fully mapped by each manufacturer.

It’s unclear if current Gen 1 and Gen 2 Rivian vehicles will support the upcoming hand-free assistant software or if it will come to upgraded models or the upcoming R2 SUV.

Gen 2 vehicles already come with exclusive features like matrix headlights and an upgraded light bar that can change colors, which Scaringe says could be used as an indicator to let others know a Rivian is operating autonomously, according to a Rivian Forum user. Gen 2 vehicles also come with a newer Rivian Autonomy Platform, which might mean Gen 1 vehicles aren’t going to get some of the upcoming advanced ADAS features.

Currently, Rivian trucks have available “Driver Plus” advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) that work similarly to Tesla’s standard Autopilot software in that they enable lane keeping and auto speed up / slow down on highways. However, like other Level 2 systems, you still need to pay attention to the road.

In an email to The Verge, Rivian’s product communications manager, Courtney Richardson, confirms Scaringe’s comments about the upcoming ADAS upgrades in the interview yesterday. Richardson says there are no further details to add at this time. Currently, only Mercedes-Benz ships a Level 3 autonomous system that works in some states in the US, which allows drivers to look away from the road.

The massive $100 billion Stargate joint venture will reportedly be powered, at least in part, by solar and batteries.

The renewable power installations will be built by SoftBank-backed SB Energy, according to a report from Bloomberg, though they’re unlikely to be the venture’s sole source of energy. Stargate is a partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank Group, which promises to build a slew of new data centers to drive artificial intelligence applications. 

The growth in cloud computing and AI in recent years has sent developers and tech companies scurrying to secure power. The U.S. Department of Energy expects that data centers could consume as much as 12% of all power produced in the U.S. by 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023. The looming crunch could leave 50% of new data centers underpowered by 2027.

Nuclear power has emerged as a darling of data center developers and tech companies. Google signed a 500-megawatt deal with nuclear startup Kairos, and Microsoft is restarting one of the shuttered reactors at Three Mile Island. Data center operator Switch announced an agreement in December with Oklo, the Sam Altman-baked small modular reactor company, for 12 gigawatts of capacity.

But nuclear’s recent history has been beset by cost overruns and delays. The fresh crop of nuclear startups were largely founded to overcome those hurdles by modularizing and mass producing reactor components. If all goes as planned, the approach could speed approvals and construction of new nuclear plants. 

But despite progress, none of the startups has yet to complete a reactor, and the first of their commercial reactors aren’t expected to come online until 2030, doing little to ease the near-term energy shortage. Natural gas power plants, another possible source for data centers, will also take years to build.

Solar and wind farms are much quicker to stand up. Compared with nuclear and natural gas plants, they can be completed in about half the time, according to one study of 50 years worth of power plant projects. More recent estimates suggest that the average time to completion for a solar power plant is around 18 months. Because of their inherent modularity, they can start producing power before the bulk of the project is complete.

The longest part of any solar project is permitting and interconnection, when the facility is connected to the grid. For data centers, grid connections can be optional — many could take power directly from the source. And given the apparent urgency of Stargate, it’s possible that permitting could be sped along, too, leaving solar as the likely frontrunner for the first data centers.

Back in August 2023, Meta revealed an ‘all-in-one’ AI translation model capable of understanding close to 100 different languages.

Dubbed SeamlessM4T (Massively Multilingual and Multimodal Machine Translation), this is Meta’s attempt at creating a ‘universal translator’ akin to the Babel Fish in Douglas Adams’ classic sci-fi series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Apple released new figures Friday, highlighting user adoption of iOS 18. Released in public form back in September 2024, the mobile operating system is now installed on 68% of compatible devices. That number jumps to 78% on iPhones released in the last four years.

As for the remaining iPhones out there, 19% are running iOS 17, and 13% are using an earlier version. Similarly, 19% of iPhones released in the last four years are  currently running iOS 17.

The figure drops to 5% with earlier iOS builds — understandable, given the overall percentage of those devices that shipped with either iOS 17 or 18, along with early adopters’ propensity to keep their devices running the latest OS updates. As 9 to 5 Mac points out, the figures presented are similar to those Apple issued in 2024 around iOS 17 adoption.

The company’s small model approach to generative AI, Apple Intelligence, was the marquee feature for iOS 18. That arrived with the operating system’s first major update, 18.1, with additional features arriving with 18.2. The current public version is 18.2.1. Of course, Apple Intelligence has had some stumbles out of the gate, including one that required the company to roll back News notification summaries.

iPadOS 18’s adoption figures, meanwhile, are markedly lower than its mobile counterpart. Currently, 53% of all iPads are running iPadOS 18. That figure jumps to 63% for those released in the last four years.

• QNAP said it addressed six flaws in its Hybrid Backup Sync tool
• The flaws stemmed from rsync, an open-source file syncing tool
• Users are advised to update their HBS immediately

QNAP has addressed half a dozen vulnerabilities affecting its Hybrid Backup Sync (HBS) software.

In a security advisory, the company noted the vulnerabilities were discovered in rsync, an open source file synchronization tool used to transfer and sync files between systems. It supports local and remote operations via SSH, and minimizes data transfer with incremental updates. Many backup solutions use rsync, including Duplicity, Bacula, Rclone, and others.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expects to spend as much as $65 billion on AI in 2025 as part of a “massive effort” to further the company’s AI ambitions. Part of the plan includes a Louisiana data center that Zuckerberg says “is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” he wrote on Threads today.

The announcement reads like a response to the big AI data center news touted by competitors earlier this week. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump joined OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison as they announced Project Stargate, a $500 billion joint venture that will build sprawling AI data centers in Texas and other parts of the country. City documents seen by Bloomberg suggest the Texas data center will be as big as New York’s Central Park.

Zuckerberg said he expects to end the year with over 1.3 million GPUs, while “significantly” growing the company’s AI team. “This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg wrote. “In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D [research and development] efforts.”

In the days leading up to the TikTok ban in the U.S. on Sunday, U.S. users flooded the Chinese app RedNote, which offered a similar experience to their favorite short-form video app. The app, which is listed in the U.S. App Store under its Chinese name Xiaohongshu, quickly became the No. 1 free app in the U.S. But after Trump paused the ban, use of RedNote in the U.S. rapidly declined. By Monday, RedNote had lost over half its daily active users in the U.S. after reaching a high of 32.5 million daily actives on the day of the ban.

According to digital market intelligence company Similarweb, RedNote’s daily active users in the U.S. declined by 54% on Monday when enforcement of the ban was put on hold. President Trump offered TikTok a 75-day extension of the deadline, allowing TikTok more time to negotiate a deal that would keep it alive in the U.S.

App intelligence provider Sensor Tower saw a similar trend as the week continued. Per its estimates, the average U.S. mobile daily active users for RedNote from January 20 to 22 declined by roughly 17% compared with the week prior (January 13 to 19).

TikTok users had originally joined RedNote en masse to send a message to lawmakers and Meta alike. According to one report, also citing Sensor Tower data, some 700,000 U.S. users flocked to RedNote within two days as the ban deadline approached. By Thursday, Similarweb said that RedNote had reached 3.4 million daily active users across iOS and Android in the U.S., a 133.8% week-over-week increase.

The U.S. users joining RedNote were signaling that the government’s fears of the “national security threat” poised by a Chinese-owned app with access to U.S. users’ personal data was not a concern to them. In addition, they wanted to demonstrate that would rather join another Chinese app than return to Instagram to use Reels.

There were several reasons why so many U.S. TikTok users made this decision. Some found the ban hypocritical, given that Meta had profited off their user data for years, many said in their videos, while others simply didn’t care if China had their data or not.

As one popular TikTok sound put it, “You’re telling me the Chinese government has access to all of my personal data and what they chose to do with that information is psychologically manipulate me via algorithmic content into reading smutty books about fairies.”

(The sound references the fantasy books loved by the readers in TikTok’s sizable “BookTok” community, such as Sarah J. Maas’s “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series. In other words, they didn’t see TikTok as any sort of threat.)

As the TikTokers engaged on RedNote, surprising cultural exchanges began to occur.

Users asked each other about the cost of living in their area, while Chinese and U.S. users alike wanted to know if their government had characterized the other society accurately. U.S. users, for instance, asked about China’s social credit system, while RedNote’s Chinese users asked if it was true that many Americans had to work two jobs to pay their bills. Food, healthcare, and the accuracy of U.S. TV movies and shows, like “Friends,” were among the numerous topics discussed.

However, RedNote’s position as a top app in the U.S. was a trend that isn’t likely to last, at least as long as TikTok is available. For one, RedNote is localized in Mandarin, prompting many to turn to Duolingo to study the language. The language-learning app saw a 216% spike in U.S. usage, it said. However, learning a new language is challenging — and many users may have given up in time.

In addition, unlike TikTok, RedNote is focused on the Chinese market. TikTok benefitted from being a global app — something TikTok itself pointed out when arguing in the Supreme Court about why it would no longer be the same if forced to sell.

Ahead of the ban, TikTok’s U.S. daily active users surged to a record high for the past year, as 106.8 million users on iOS and Android engaged with the app on Sunday.

• The FBI’s missive follows three previous ones in as many years
• Statement is aimed at educating businesses and warding off domestic collaborators
• Suggested remedies include employing endpoint protection on computer systems and checking applications for “typos and unusual nomenclature”

The FBI has claimed North Korean IT workers are extorting US companies which have hired them by leveraging their access to steal source code.

In a statement, the agency warned domestic and international firms employees turned threat actors, “facilitate cyber-criminal activities and conduct revenue-generating activity” using stolen data “on behalf of the regime.”

When the US Food and Drug Administration opened the door for hearing aids to be sold over the counter in 2022, I was all in. Prescription hearing aids are criminally expensive, and several OTC models have proven that you don’t need to visit a hearing aid shop in a mall to get a product that gets the job done. I’ve tested 38 hearing aids to date, and 29 have been available over the counter. All of my favorite hearing aid products have been OTC models. Until now.

Starkey is a major name in the hearing aid business, and it’s not some white-label company that slaps a logo on someone else’s product (an epidemic in this industry). Starkey has been around since 1967, and while it no longer designs or manufactures its own digital signal processing chips, it is intimately involved with hearing aid development—and famously brags that it has outfitted everyone from Ronald Reagan to Mother Teresa with its hearing aids.

Now, with its new Edge AI RIC RT hearing aids, Starkey takes a position at the very top of the heap in product quality and performance thanks in large part to a new audio processor that includes an integrated neural processing unit—just like our laptops and phones. Starkey says this is the only NPU-powered hearing aid line on the market.

Receiver in Canal

There’s nothing particularly inventive about the way the Edge AI RIC RT (which stands for “receiver in canal, rechargeable with telecoil”) looks, built on the classic, teardrop-shaped behind-the-ear design, though it is available in your choice of seven colors. Each aid weighs 2.62 grams, which is competitive for a behind-the-ear hearing aid. (To compare, the Jabra Enhance Select 500 weighs 2.56 grams.) A single button on the back of each aid controls volume: down on the left aid, up on the right aid.

As these are prescription aids, you’ll need an audiologist to fit and tune them. Rather than sending me to a local doctor, Starkey took the unusual step of flying its chief hearing health officer, Dave Fabry, to my home to complete this task. Fabry brought a suitcase full of equipment to re-create what the doctor’s office experience would normally be like, only at my dining table. Afterward, he gave me a training session on the aids and walked me through the My Starkey app, just like a standard audiologist.

Fabry also outfitted me with custom eartips molded to fit the exact shape of my ear canals. (This type of service would be at the discretion of your audiologist.) This is a simple process that involves jamming putty into your ears and waiting for it to harden. This putty can then be used to create a bespoke eartip that fits perfectly—although the usual collection of open and closed eartips in various sizes are also included in the box.