Kidde has become the best-known name in the world of smart smoke detectors—a relatively low bar given how few people know the brand of their smoke detector. Still, you’ll find Kidde recommended by reviewers and customers across the internet with surprising enthusiasm, which has only increased since the brand started collaborating with Ring and Amazon, making it an easy add-on to Alexa-powered smart homes.

Until now, if you wanted a Kidde smart smoke alarm connected to your other devices, one that would send you alerts by Ring app, you could only choose a hardwired model. Anyone who wanted something battery-powered from Kidde along the lines of the now-discontinued Google Nest Protect had to skip the smarts.

At the CES trade show in January, Kidde announced its first battery-only smart smoke alarm, once again in collaboration with Ring. The Kidde Ring Smart Smoke + CO Alarm has been available for preorder since the announcement, but as of today is fully available to buy.

Kidde

Ring Smart Smoke Alarm, AA Battery Powered

Advertisement

How It’ll Work

Kidde’s Ring Smart Smoke + CO Alarm will use two AA batteries (included in the box). It’ll come with a mounting bracket for installation, and you can choose to mount it wherever you see fit, thanks to the battery flexibility. Kidde recommends not installing a smoke detector within six feet of heating appliances, less than four inches from an A-frame type ceiling, or in areas like garages or near things like lights, fans, vents, windows, and anything that could directly expose it to the weather.

Once it’s installed, you can connect it to your Wi-Fi and the Ring app. You won’t need any additional Ring technology—no hub is required, even though you’ll find one in most Alexa speakers these days—to have it work with the Ring app. Ideally, you’d already have an app and be a Ring user if you’ve chosen this smoke detector, but if you haven’t, make sure to get the app and set up your account.

Third-Party Smoke

Both Amazon and Google have chosen to partner with brands instead of making their own in-house smoke detectors. Google now partners with First Alert for a smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarm replacement after discontinuing the Google Nest Protect, and Ring both has this partnership with Kidde and can work with Z-Wave models from First Alert too.

It’s not a surprising move from Google, which has been moving to make less of its own hardware and instead place its smarts in other brand’s products. Amazon usually likes to make its own massive range of hardware, so it’s worth noting that if Amazon isn’t making this device itself, there’s a reason. It may be a poor investment to maintain such a specific line of products, or maybe because it’s hard enough to do well that the company would rather leverage someone else’s tech. Whichever reason—maybe both—if you’re shopping for a new smart smoke alarm, Kidde’s newest model is one to consider, especially if you have an Alexa household.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

Mallory Triano discusses her role in securing key technical talent for the financial sector and the importance of collaboration with educational and workplace institutions.

The global head of campus recruiting at investment firm Millennium Management, Mallory Triano is responsible for creating a recruitment pipeline of skilled students and graduates – particularly those with engineering and technology qualifications. 

She has found that in the investment management sphere, AI skills are largely being used to enhance decision-making, simplify workflows and redefine team expectations. “As a result, firms are evolving their hiring strategies to meet the demands of this new era,” she told SiliconRepublic.com. 

“AI-native talent is increasingly important as these individuals are comfortable applying AI in their daily roles and are not held back by traditional ways of working. For our firm, this means doubling down on early-career talent who are using AI regularly in both their personal and professional lives.”

Triano’s experience has led her to believe that Ireland has emerged as a strong environment for “cultivating early-career AI talent”, due in part to a vibrant and collaborative technology ecosystem that includes leading universities and established financial services infrastructure. 

She said: “The expansion of our AI-focused internship programme in Ireland is an acknowledgement of this trend and demonstrates our commitment to investing in early-career talent from leading Irish universities.”

Noting the importance of partnership between educational facilities and organisations in creating opportunities for students to access careers in the finance and fintech spaces, Triano explained that industry and academic collaboration can help bridge the gap between academic excellence and real-world experience. 

She finds internship programmes are an ideal example of this, where firms can partner with universities and career centres to ensure students are aware of professional development opportunities.

“In finance, internships are often the primary pathway to full-time employment for recent graduates and provide opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience while learning from industry experts.”

The four Cs

Of the skills students and graduates looking to move into this space should prioritise, Triano emphasised the importance of strong technical proficiency, alongside what she referred to as the four Cs: creativity, curiosity, critical thinking and commercial awareness.

“These skills allow professionals to thrive in AI-driven workplaces, collaborate across technology and business teams, and apply AI effectively to evolving business challenges.

“AI is here to stay and it’s an opportunity for early-career talent to show that innovation can come from every level of an organisation,” she added. 

“For those who can ask the right questions and critically evaluate AI outputs, they can contribute immediately while continuing to build the domain expertise that will always be an important foundation for working in a technology role.”

To that point, Triano finds that there are a range of diverse and exciting opportunities for technologists within finance. However, there are barriers.

For example, she said the larger challenge is often the level of awareness. People may not have an in-depth understanding of the alternatives that exist outside of the traditional definition of Big Tech, she explained. 

She said: “Never has this been more true than today with rapid advances in AI. In my view, early-career talent will play a critical role in shaping the future of our industry, not in spite of AI, but because of it.”

Triano’s opinion that there is opportunity in the air for professionals, as a response to AI advancements, is supported by a recent report published by professional networking platform LinkedIn. 

The company’s research found that AI is creating more jobs globally than it is replacing, as in the past two years, employers across the world have created at least 1.3m ‘new collar’ AI‑related job opportunities, including for data annotators, AI engineers and forward‑deployed engineers.

LinkedIn’s data also identified the potential mobility of experts with AI skills, as those with AI engineering talent were found to be eight times more likely to move across borders than the average LinkedIn member.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Ask anyone what Nvidia makes, and they’re likely to first say “GPUs.” For decades, the chipmaker has been defined by advanced parallel computing, and the emergence of generative AI and the resulting surge in demand for GPUs has been a boon for the company.

But Nvidia’s recent moves signal that it’s looking to lock in more customers at the less compute-intensive end of the AI market—customers who don’t necessarily need the beefiest, most powerful GPUs to train AI models, but instead are looking for the most efficient ways to run agentic AI software. Nvidia recently spent billions to license technology from a chip startup focused on low-latency AI computing, and it also started selling stand-alone CPUs as part of its latest superchip system.

Yesterday, Nvidia and Meta announced that the social media giant had agreed to buy billions of dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips to provide computing power for its massive infrastructure projects—with Nvidia’s CPUs as part of the deal.

The multiyear deal is an expansion of a cozy ongoing partnership between the two companies. Meta previously estimated that by the end of 2024, it would have purchased 350,000 H100 chips from Nvidia, and that by the end of 2025 the company would have access to 1.3 million GPUs in total (though it wasn’t clear whether those would all be Nvidia chips).

As part of the latest announcement, Nvidia said that Meta would “build hyperscale data centers optimized for both training and inference in support of the company’s long-term AI infrastructure roadmap.” This includes a “large-scale deployment” of Nvidia’s CPUs and “millions of Nvidia Blackwell and Rubin GPUs.”

Notably, Meta is the first tech giant to announce it was making a large-scale purchase of Nvidia’s Grace CPU as a stand-alone chip, something Nvidia said would be an option when it revealed the full specs of its new Vera Rubin superchip in January. Nvidia has also been emphasizing that it offers technology that connects various chips, as part of its “soup-to-nuts approach” to compute power, as one analyst puts it.

Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at the tech market research firm Creative Strategies, says the move signaled that Nvidia recognizes that a growing range of AI software now needs to run on CPUs, much in the same way that conventional cloud applications do. “The reason why the industry is so bullish on CPUs within data centers right now is agentic AI, which puts new demands on general-purpose CPU architectures,” he says.

A recent report from the chip newsletter Semianalysis underscored this point. Analysts noted that CPU usage is accelerating to support AI training and inference, citing one of Microsoft’s data centers for OpenAI as an example, where “tens of thousands of CPUs are now needed to process and manage the petabytes of data generated by the GPUs, a use case that wouldn’t have otherwise been required without AI.”

Bajarin notes, though, that CPUs are still just one component of the most advanced AI hardware systems. The number of GPUs Meta is purchasing from Nvidia still outnumbers the CPUs.

“If you’re one of the hyperscalers, you’re not going to be running all of your inference computing on CPUs,” Bajarin says. “You just need whatever software you’re running to be fast enough on the CPU to interact with the GPU architecture that’s actually the driving force of that computing. Otherwise, the CPU becomes a bottleneck.”

Meta declined to comment on its expanded deal with Nvidia. During a recent earnings call, the social media giant said that it planned to dramatically increase its spending on AI infrastructure this year to between $115 billion and $135 billion, up from $72.2 billion last year.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition is a tough one, although I got a kick out of the blue group. If you’re struggling with today’s puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta.

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Torso clothing.

Green group hint: Start your engines.

Blue group hint: Team towns.

Purple group hint: Blue Devils.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Upper-body wear.

Green group: Flags in NASCAR.

Blue group: Last words in two-word NFL team locations.

Purple group: Duke players drafted No. 1 in NBA.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words.

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is upper-body wear. The four answers are jersey, pinnie, sweater and tee.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is flags in NASCAR. The four answers are checkered, green, red and yellow.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is last words in two-word NFL team locations. The four answers are (Green) Bay, (Kansas) City, (New) England and (San) Francisco.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Duke players drafted No. 1 in NBA. The four answers are Banchero, Brand, Flagg and Irving.

If you’re a fan after Beats headphones, we’re here to help you make the right choice with this list of the best Beats headphones.

Beats has changed its tune (quite literally) in recent years, changing from the bass-heavy approach of its earlier years to a more neutral and balanced sound. It’s also launched an array of headphones in different forms, so you can now choose from on-ears, over-ears or true wireless earbuds.

We’ve reviewed practically all the Beats headphones out there, so we’re very familiar with the brand and what makes a good Beats headphone. We’ve tested each pair of Beats headphones like we would do with any other pair of headphones.

Our testing process goes through the design to determine how well they fit and how comfortable they are to wear. We’ll test the features they have, carrying out battery drains to see how long they last, test the call quality where necessary, and judge how good the ANC and wireless connection are by taking them out in the world. And of course we’ll test how they sound, judging them against previous Beats headphones.

We put all this effort into testing these headphones to give you insights into their performance, so you can be confident that you’re getting value for money.

If you’re considering other pairs to buy, have a look at our list of the best headphones and best over-ears to the best wireless earbuds and best noise-cancelling headphones.

SQUIRREL_ANCHOR_LIST