The OnePlus summer launch event featured five product launches, led by two Nord 5 series smartphones. The game-focused Nord 5 features a 144Hz OLED display that measures 6.83 inches and has three sensors, including a 50-megapixel selfie camera, all powered by Qualcomm’s tier two Snapdragon 8S Gen 3. Slightly smaller, the budget-built Nord CE5 has a slower MediaTek Dimensity 8350 Apex chipset and lesser specs all around. There are also three new products designed to enhance the OnePlus connected experience, including the OnePlus Watch 3 43mm, OnePlus Buds 4 and the OnePlus Pad Lite. Currently, only the Buds 4 and Watch 3 43mm are planned for release in the U.S. Continue reading OnePlus Reveals New Phones, Watch, Buds, Android Tablet

China’s Baidu has added AI and voice features to its Ernie search engine and as of June 30 officially made its generative Ernie large language model open source in a direct challenge to OpenAI and Anthropic as well as local Chinese rival DeepSeek. “This isn’t just a China story. Every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry,” University of Southern California Associate Professor of Computer Science Sean Ren told CNBC. Baidu is also giving the Ernie mobile app more chatbot-like functionality, enabling it to help with drawing, writing and travel tasks. Continue reading Baidu Delivers AI Updates to Search, Open-Sources Ernie 4.5

Xiaomi AI Glasses are the Beijing-based company’s first smart glasses to include a camera. Equipped with a 12MP Sony IMX681 point-of-view camera that captures 2K video at 30 fps, the new glasses also support real-time live-streaming and first-person video calls. Notable features include a 263mAh battery that Xiaomi says delivers 8.6 hours of mixed use and an electrochromic shaded lenses option that allows the wearer to control the tint. The clear-lens model starts at $280, while those with grayscale electrochromic shaded lenses start at $380. Colored electrochromic lens models begin at $420. Continue reading Xiaomi AI Glasses Tout Electrochromic Lenses and a Camera

TikTok is reporting that TikTok Shop’s U.S. sales have increased 120 percent in 2025 compared to the same period last year. However, this announcement was made as reports surfaced that TikTok owner ByteDance is disappointed that the U.S. performance of TikTok Shop is falling far short of its original tenfold growth goal to $17.5 billion in 2025. The company reportedly moved to “drastically lower that objective” prior to touting its performance this month. Meanwhile, President Trump recently extended the deadline for ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok, pushing the cutoff to September 17. Continue reading TikTok Shop’s U.S. Sales Improve but Still Fall Short of Goals

China’s Manus AI has unveiled a text-to-video generator it says can transform “prompts into complete stories — structured, sequenced, and ready to watch. With a single prompt, Manus plans each scene, crafts the visuals, and animates your vision,” the company announced last week. Manus generated buzz in March for its agentic approach to AI, and now it is putting that autonomous technology to work on generative AI, promising story generation within minutes. Last month, the firm that developed Manus, Butterfly Effect, reportedly secured $75 million in funding led by U.S.-based Benchmark for a nearly $500 million valuation. Continue reading Manus AI Takes an Agentic Approach with Its Video Generator

Bytedance-owned social video platform TikTok is improving ways in which users can customize their For You feed, letting them increase emphasis on subjects of interest with Manage Topics and adding AI-powered Smart Keyword Filters to suppress content they don’t want to see. While the social platform has featured keyword filters for some time, the new filters are smart enough to catch a broader range of unwanted content. Users can now include up to 200 filtering keywords and let AI do the rest “to capture additional videos featuring similar words, synonyms and slang variations” that reduce unwanted content in the For You feed. Continue reading TikTok Adds Features Letting Users Fine-Tune ‘For You’ Feed

DeepSeek-R1-0528 is here, and this latest iteration is generating almost as much stir as the initial open-source R1 reasoning model did in January. The Chinese startup, owned by quantitative analysis firm High-Flyer Capital, is touted by one media outlet as “near parity in reasoning capabilities with proprietary paid models such as OpenAI’s o3 and Google Gemini 2.5 Pro.” Promised are stronger capabilities in complex reasoning centered on math, science, business and coding, along with improved features for developers and researchers. As with the earlier release, the DeepSeek-R1-0528 is available under the MIT License, which supports commercial use and allows customization. Continue reading DeepSeek’s New Update Heightens Rivalry with U.S. AI Firms

The Norwegian browser company behind Opera is working on an AI-powered version with agentic powers. Called Opera Neon, users can chat using the browser’s native integrated AI agent that will search the web, get answers and provide context for webpages. To do this, Opera Neon draws on previously showcased Opera tech called Browser Operator, which automates routine web tasks like form completion, hotel bookings and even some shopping functions. “Neon performs these tasks locally in the browser, preserving users’ privacy and security,” according to Opera. The company, which has been around since 1996, was acquired by a Chinese consortium in 2016. Continue reading Agentic Browser Opera Neon Available Soon via Subscription

Nvidia has teamed up with Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX to establish what they’re predicting will be Europe’s largest AI data center complex. The partners have also reached out to French firms with a goal of creating a 1.4 gigawatts capacity campus near Paris. The announcement was made at the Choose France Summit in Versailles in a joint statement with investment firm Bpifrance SACA and regional AI startup Mistral AI. On a related note, Cisco chose France as the location for one of its Global AI Hubs, planting a flag for the development of energy-efficient, AI-ready infrastructure. Continue reading Nvidia, Cisco Plan Massive AI Data Center Projects in France

Nvidia is joining forces with Foxconn to build Taiwan’s first supercomputer. Foxconn, the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics, will implement the system through its subsidiary Big Innovation Company, which specializes in advanced tech solutions for enterprise. The supercomputer will leverage 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, providing “orders-of-magnitude faster performance, compared with previous-generation systems,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in his Computex keynote. Huang also announced a new initiative that will let companies build semi-custom chips and talked-up desktop supercomputers in the works with Acer and Asus. Continue reading Nvidia, Foxconn Plan to Build an AI Supercomputer in Taiwan

The new smartphone lineup from Chinese manufacturer Honor will include AI image-to-video capabilities developed in partnership with Google Cloud. The Honor 400 series will let users generate videos from static photos, according to the company. Google recently added support for Veo 2, which generates videos at up to 4K, for Gemini Advanced subscribers, and Honor says its new phones will have Veo 2 baked into the operating system, beating Google’s own Pixel phone to the punch. The Huawei spin-off is set to launch the 400 series May 22. Continue reading Google Veo 2 Video Generator Coming to New Honor Phones

Disney revenue hit $23.6 billion during the recent quarter, a 7 percent increase year-over-year, with net income vaulting to $3.28 billion, up from a $20 million loss during the same period last year. The results outperformed on the top and bottom lines, sending shares surging by about 10 percent on Wednesday morning. Disney’s strong fiscal second quarter was propelled by better-than-expected Disney+ subscriber growth of +1.4 million subscribers and energetic overall performances in Entertainment as well as Experiences. The icing on the earnings cake was news of a new theme park planned for Abu Dhabi, announced by CEO Bob Iger. Continue reading Disney Reports Strong Quarter, Announces New Theme Park

Apple reported revenue increased 5 percent to $95 billion in Q1, beating Wall Street analysts’ expectations. Net income was up by nearly 5 percent, to $24.8 billion, from the January-to-March period in 2024, and iPhone sales increased by 2 percent, helped by demand for the more affordably priced 16e model. Services were particularly strong, with $26.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from $23.9 billion year-over-year, also beating analysts’ expectations. But it isn’t exactly business as usual. CEO Tim Cook said tariffs will increase costs by $900 million in the June quarter. Continue reading Apple Quarter Beats Expectations, But Tariff Concerns Loom

Amazon’s growth contracted in Q1, with revenue up 9 percent compared to 13 percent a year ago. That was good enough to outperform Wall Street forecasts, with overall sales increasing to $155.7 billion, compared with $143.3 billion in Q1 2024. In addition, Amazon Web Services sales grew by nearly 17 percent to $29.3 billion. Yet Amazon share price fell by up to 4.3 percent after hours, a reflection of a Q2 forecast the company says could be affected by newly imposed tariffs. “Obviously, none of us know exactly where tariffs will settle, or when,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts on the Q1 earnings call. Continue reading Amazon Reports Strong Quarter, Braces for Impact of Tariffs

China’s Alibaba Group has released a Qwen3 LLM series said to be at the leading edge of open-source models, nearly achieving the performance of proprietary models from AI competitors OpenAI and Google. Alibaba says Qwen3 offers improvements in reasoning, tool use, instruction following and multilingual abilities. The Qwen3 series features eight new models — two that are mixture-of-experts and six built on dense neural networks. Their sizes range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. The size and scope of the Alibaba slate maintains China’s accelerated AI pace in the wake of DeepSeek’s game-changing debut. Continue reading Alibaba Touts Advance in Open-Source AI with Qwen3 Series