The holidays haven’t even kicked off, but we’re already looking to next year when, almost immediately, some of the Engadget team will head to Las Vegas for tech’s biggest annual conference. The pitches from companies, both legit and unhinged, are already filling our inboxes and spam tabs, so what are we excited about?
With over 60 million PS5s sold, Sony is so far dominating this generation of game consoles. Four years since the PlayStation 5 debuted, the company has rounded out its gaming lineup with the refined PS5 Slim (both with and without a disc drive) and the more powerful (and expensive) PS5 Pro.
The Game Awards delivered. While the games I thought deserved to win did so (Astro Bot! Balatro! Metaphor!), we got some wildcard trailers, like an entirely new game from Last of Us studio Naughty Dog. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet takes place thousands of years in the future, and it stars bounty hunter Jordan A.
After a particularly lean week for tech news, yesterday exploded. We’ve got Google’s next-generation AI model, Gemini 2.0, a barrage of games to intrigue us in 2025, MasterClass is going AI and, finally, Apple’s most headline-grabbing AI tricks and features broke cover, built into the latest iOS update.
Users in 48 US cities can now buy a new Hyundai car from a local dealership through Amazon. Just like buying a car from a dealership, inside Amazon Autos you can browse by make, model, trim, color and features. And! Finance options! Whee!
In its own heady blog post, Google debuted Willow, its latest quantum chip. It was flanked by hyped headlines that suggest something akin to the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A new image generator called Aurora briefly opened for testing for some Grok users, and the tool’s results shared on X appeared far more realistic than X’s previous image generators. It was a brief debut, though. By Sunday afternoon, Aurora was gone. For a short time, there was a Grok 2 + Aurora (beta) option in Grok’s model selection menu, which is now replaced by Grok 2 + Flux (beta).
Google DeepMind has just revealed Genie 2, a world-modelling AI capable of creating 3D worlds and sustaining those environments for significantly longer. Genie 2 isn’t a game engine. It’s a diffusion model that generates images as the player (either a human being or another AI agent) moves through the world the software is simulating. All it needs to start is a single image prompt either generated by AI or from a real-world photo.
Apple has wrapped up all your listening stats in a bow with its annual recap of your entire year in music streaming. This time, you can view the full Replay experience in the Apple Music app via the home, new and search tab — yes, no need to go to a microsite for your vital listening statistics.