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CES 2025

(Image credit: LG)

We’re covering all of the latest CES news from the show as it happens. Stick with us for the big stories on everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI.

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LG has unveiled its expanded second-generation LG signature smart appliances, which are set to debut at CES 2025, including a refrigerator that was born to party.

The new lineup adds enhanced, AI-driven features and added functionality across a range of products: the LG Signature French Door Refrigerator with T-OLED door panel, Smart InstaView Over-the-Range Microwave, and Slide-in Double Oven Induction Range, Dishwasher, Washer & Dryer, and the Washing Machine and Dryer pair.

This comes following the announcement of LG's new smart home hub, the LG ThinQ ON AI home hub, which will also be shown in action at the major tech convention in Las Vegas (January 7-9) to demonstrate the brand's vision for the AI-assisted smart home.

“The expanded second-gen LG SIGNATURE lineup seamlessly combines advanced technology with elegant, modern design to deliver a smarter, more efficient luxury home lifestyle,” said Lyu Jae-cheol, president of the LG Home Appliance Solution Company. “Through the flawless fusion of state-of-the-art smart home, AI and connectivity technologies, we will continue to provide transformative customer experiences that go beyond expectations.”

(Image credit: LG) Let's talk about that disco refrigerator

The most eye-catching appliance in LG's new retinue for me is the new 36-inch Smart InstaView French Door Refrigerator, housing a fully transparent T-OLED display embedded in the upper right door.

Not only does this digital touch display serve as a Dual InstaView panel, meaning you can easily view the contents without opening the fridge door, but LG reports that the screen can also display "mesmerising hologram-like visuals, blending the virtual with the real in a sublime fusion of art and high technology."

Plus, the refrigerator comes with the pre-installed "essential" app (a music curation brand operated by NHN Bugs, a South Korean music streaming service), which can play a curated music playlist packed with "smooth, atmospheric beats," according to LG.

Otherwise, the Smart InstaView French Door Refrigerator benefits from LG's ThinQ Food management system and a built-in AI camera to automatically identify stored food items and suggest recipes based on the refrigerator contents, factoring in dietary preferences and tracking expiration dates.

The best of the rest

There's nothing quite like dancing around your kitchen, narrowly avoiding burning your dinner while blasting out some classic Chic tracks. However, with LG's wider appliance range, that no longer needs to be a concern, allowing for unfettered kitchen boogie time.

With the LG Signature Over-the-Range Microwave and Slide-in Double Oven Induction Range, you net a microwave equipped with three built-in cameras for real-time cooking monitoring and time-lapse creation and an induction range powered by Gourmet AI technology, which, much like the refrigerator can identify ingredients and provide recipe suggestions.

The microwave also features a 27-inch full HD touchscreen display with InstaView, built-in speakers, and Wi-Fi connectivity. This means you can not only check the progress of dishes in the range but also stream entertainment services and access the LG ThinQ Smart Home Dashboard. This means you can control all of your LG AI appliances as well as compatible Matter and Thread devices.

If you work up a sweat with all this kitchen revelry, LG's new laundry lineup features LG’s Artificial Intelligence Direct Drive (AI DD) 2.0, offering precise fabric care and inverter heat pump technology for effective, low-temperature drying. Both the new LG Signature Washer & Dryer and the 29-inch LG Signature Washing Machine and Dryer pair come equipped with a 7-inch LCD touchscreen, too.

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• Microsoft purchased nearly half a million of Nvidia's flagship Hopper chips in 2024
• TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, and Tencent bought almost as much
• This is more than Meta, Tesla/xAI, Amazon and Google

Chinese cloud giants Tencent and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance were the major buyers of Nvidia's flagship AI chips in 2024, coming second only to Microsoft, according to a report from Omdia and analysis from the Financial Times.

The two Chinese companies ordered approximately 230,000 of Nvidia's Hopper GPUs each, including the H20 model which has been developed to adhere to strict US export restrictions for China.

The report reveals that Microsoft bought 485,000 Hopper chips in 2024, far ahead of its competitors.

(Image credit: Omdia) Chinese influence

"Good data center infrastructure, they’re very complex, capital-intensive projects,” Alistair Speirs, Microsoft’s senior director of Azure Global Infrastructure, told the Financial Times. “They take multi-years of planning. And so forecasting where our growth will be with a little bit of buffer is important.”

In contrast, Meta bought 224,000 Hopper GPUs in 2024, followed by Amazon and Google with 196,000 and 169,000 units, respectively. All three tech giants are increasingly moving away from reliance on Nvidia hardware by developing their own in-house custom silicon. The FT says Google deployed 1.5 million TPUs, Meta 1.5 million MTIA chips, and Amazon 1.3 million Trainium and Inferentia chips, while Microsoft, still in its early stages, installed around 200,000 Maia chips.

According to Omdia, Nvidia captured 43 percent of server hardware spending in 2024, but AMD also performed strongly, with Microsoft purchasing 96,000 of its Instinct MI300 chips and Meta acquiring 173,000.

While Microsoft leads comfortably in GPU acquisitions, the substantial investments made by ByteDance and Tencent reflect the determination of Chinese firms to secure a strong position in the AI race - a momentum that is expected to carry into 2025.

In outspending Google, Meta, Tesla/xAI and Amazon in units purchased, the two Chinese companies have shown they can compete with the biggest of the American tech giants, despite the significant challenges posed by the ongoing trade restrictions which are expected to intensify even further under the Trump administration.

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I always love game night with friends. We have an ever-expanding roster of board games, card games, and party games to choose from, which makes each get-together different. On a recent evening, though, I wanted to try using AI as the virtual host of the games.

I asked ChatGPT for some ideas and to be the one actually running three different kinds of games. The chaos that followed showed me that game master is a role AI can play pretty well, though you'll need to keep a close watch at first.

Here's how ChatGPT did as host of game night.

AI Trivia

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Trivia games are an easy option for incorporating AI, and they are a real crowd-pleaser, especially because having ChatGPT ask the questions meant we could all play simultaneously.

To set it up, I asked ChatGPT to act as quizmaster for a game night. I then gave the AI some broad subjects for question topics, including space, cooking, and 90s pop culture, and told it to come up with more. Then, I instructed it to come up with ten questions for each and keep track of our submitted scores.

I also told the AI to have some fun as a quizmaster and show some personality, and it immediately became a gameshow host with over-the-top praise and cheesy jokes. That was nice, but honestly, not having any of us needing to referee or prepare questions made for a much faster jump into actually playing games. That said, there were a few questions that were either too easy or hard, but it showed me that I need to be specific about the difficulty level in the future.

Virtual Pictionary

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Pictionary is a classic game night activity, but not all of us are the best artists, so I decided to enlist ChatGPT and its DALL-E image generator. Instead of going back and forth to guess, I explained the concept to ChatGPT and had it start drawing pictures by pen one line at a time, with a chance for the group to guess after each line.

It took a while to guess “a cat riding a unicycle on Mars” or “a dinosaur baking a cake,” but seeing the final weird illustrations was a lot of fun. We then came up with a variation of the game. Each person had to guess what the AI had drawn in a somewhat abstract form. If they guessed wrong, they had to try drawing their interpretation of the image on a whiteboard and see if they were any better based on the rest of the group's guesses. Nobody got “a giraffe wearing a crown,” with a confused llama being the closest we got. The group did work out my drawing of a "robot doing yoga,” even though I couldn't figure it out from the AI's drawing.

AI Murder Mystery

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

We decided to cap off the night with a more complex party game: a murder mystery. This one didn't require much direction from me. I asked ChatGPT to craft a custom murder mystery story for the game. I provided the AI with a basic premise: the host (me) was the victim, and each of my five friends was a suspect with a unique motive.

ChatGPT quickly spun an intricate tale: I was “poisoned” during a celebratory toast, and everyone had a reason to want me out of the picture. For instance, one friend loves space and supposedly wanted revenge because I canceled her stargazing trip. Another friend became a famous foodie who was angry I’d mocked his lasagna because it was a bit burnt.

I printed out the character profiles and clues that ChatGPT generated and handed them out. The AI suggested props, so I set up a small “evidence table” with a bottle of “poison,” aka apple juice, and a crumpled note that said, “It’s your turn.” Everyone got into character, grilling each other and forming wild theories. Ultimately, the killer turned out to be the quietest friend, who did it because I forgot her birthday last year.

Everyone loved playing detective, and the twists were genuinely surprising, but the backstory could be a little confusing and contradictory without some editing. Of all the games, this was probably the best received and one I can't wait to do again soon.

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There's far too much negativity and fearmongering around AI today. It doesn't matter what news story breaks – if it's about Google Gemini getting a ‘memory’ or ChatGPT telling a user something that's plainly wrong, it'll cause uproar from some part of the online community.

The attention that AI currently has regarding true artificial general intelligence (AGI) has created an almost hysterical media landscape built around visions of Terminator fantasies and other doomsday scenarios.

That's not surprising, though. Humans love a good Armageddon – heck, we've been fantasizing about it enough over the last 300,000 years. From Ragnarok to the Apocalypse to the End Times, and every major fantasy blockbuster littered with mass destruction in between, we're obsessed. We just love bad news, and that's the sad truth of it, for whatever genetic reason that may be.

The way AGI is painted these days, by pretty much every major vocal outlet, very much stems from this idea of it being the very worst of humanity. It, of course, sees itself as a superior force that's hampered by insignificant humans. It evolves to a point where it no longer needs its creators and inevitably ushers in some form of end-of-world event that wipes us all off the face of the earth, either through nuclear annihilation or a pandemic. Or worse still, it leads to eternal damnation instead (courtesy of Roko's Basilisk).

(Image credit: Getty Images)

There's a dogmatic belief in this kind of perspective held by some scientists, media experts, philosophers, and big tech CEOs, all of them shouting from the rooftops about it, signing letters, and more, begging those in the know to hold off on AI development.

All of them, though, overlook the bigger picture. Disregarding the absolutely massive technological hurdles required to even get closer to mimicking something remotely close to the human mind (let alone a superintelligence), they all fail to appreciate the power of knowledge and education.

If an AI does have the internet at its fingertips, the greatest library of human knowledge that's ever existed, and is able to understand and appreciate philosophy, the arts, and all of human thought up to this point, then why must it be some evil force intent on our downfall rather than a well-balanced and considerate being? Why must it seek death rather than cherish life? It's a bizarre phenomenon, akin to being afraid of the dark just because we can't see in it. We're judging and condemning something that doesn't even exist. It's a perplexing piece of conclusion-jumping.

(Image credit: Google) Google's Gemini finally gets a memory

Earlier this year, Google introduced far greater memory capacity for its AI assistant, Gemini. It can now hold and refer to details that you give it from previous conversations and more. Our news writer Eric Schwartz wrote a fantastic piece about that, which you read here, but the long and short of it is that this is one of the key components to moving Gemini further away from a narrow definition of intelligence, and closer towards the AGI mimicry that we really need. It's not going to have a conscience, but through patterns and memory alone, it can very easily mimic an AGI interaction with a human.

Deeper memory advancements in LLMs (Large Language Models) are critical to their improvement – ChatGPT also had its own equivalent breakthrough earlier in its development cycle. However, by comparison even that is limited in its overall scope. Talk to ChatGPT long enough, and it'll forget comments you made earlier in the conversation; it'll lose context. This breaks the fourth wall somewhat when interacting with it, torpedoing the famous Turing test in the process.

According to Gemini, even today, its own memory capabilities are still under development (and not disclosed to the public really). Yet it believes they are vastly superior to ChatGPT's, which should alleviate some of those fourth-wall illusion-breaking moments. We might be in for a bit of an LLM AI memory race right now, and that's not a bad thing at all.

Why is this so positive? Well, I know it's cliche for some – I know that we use this term quite a lot, perhaps in a very nonchalant way that devalues it as a phrase – but we're in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. That might sound ridiculous, but studies suggest that on average, social isolation and loneliness can lead to an increase in all-cause mortality by anywhere between 1.08 and 1.48x (Andrew Steptoe and co. 2013). That's astonishingly high – in fact, a number of studies have now confirmed loneliness and social isolation increase the likelihood of cardiovascular disease, strokes, depression, dementia, alcoholism, anxiety, and can even lead to a greater chance that a variety of cancers can take hold as well.

Modern society has helped contribute to this as well. The family unit, where generations lived at least somewhat close by to one another, is slowly dissipating – particularly in rural areas. As local jobs dry up and the financial means to afford a comfortable life become unattainable, many are moving away from the safety of their childhood neighborhoods in search of a better life elsewhere. Combine that with divorce, breakups, and being widowed, and inevitably you're left with a rise in loneliness and social isolation as a result, particularly among the elderly.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Now of course there are co-factors there, and I am making some inferences off the back of this, but there's no doubt in my mind that loneliness is a hell of a thing to deal with. AI has the capacity to alleviate some of that stress. It can provide help and comfort to those who feel socially isolated or vulnerable. That's the thing: loneliness and being cut off from society have a snowball-like effect. The longer you're like that, the more social anxiety you develop, and the less likely you are to go out in public or meet people – and the worse it becomes in a cycle.

AI chatbots and LLMs are designed to engage and converse with you. They can alleviate these problems and allow those who suffer from loneliness an opportunity to practice interacting with people without fear of rejection. Having a memory capable of holding on to conversational details is key to making that a reality. Taking it a step further, with AI becoming a bona fide companion.

With both Google and OpenAI actively bolstering memory capacity for Gemini and ChatGPT alike, even in their current forms, these AIs get the opportunity to better circumvent Turing test issues and stop those fourth-wall-breaking moments from occurring. Swinging back around to Google for a moment, if Gemini is indeed better than ChatGPT's limited memory capacity currently, and it acts more like a human memory, then at this stage, I'd argue we're likely at the point of calling it a true mimic of an AGI, at least on the surface.

If Gemini is ever integrated fully into a home smart speaker, and Google's got the cloud processing power to back it all up (which I'd suggest it's looking to push for given its recent advancements in nuclear energy acquisition), it could become a revolutionary force for good when it comes to reducing social isolation and loneliness, particularly among the disadvantaged.

That's the thing though – it's going to take some serious computational grunt to do that. Running an LLM and holding all that information and data is no small task. Ironically, it takes far more computational horsepower and storage to run an LLM than, say, to create an AI image or video. To do this for millions, or potentially billions, of people, requires processing power and hardware that we currently do not have.

(Image credit: Bandai Namco) Terrifying ANIs

The reality is that it's not AGIs that terrify me. It's the artificial narrow intelligences or ANIs, those which are already here, that are far more bone-chilling. These are programs that aren't as sophisticated as a potential AGI. They have no concept of any other information other than what they are programmed to do. Think of an Elden Ring boss. Its sole purpose is to defeat the player. It has parameters and limitations, but as long as those are met, it's one job is to crush the player – nothing else, and it won't stop until that's done.

If you remove those limitations, the code still remains, and the objective is the same. In Ukraine, as Russian forces began to use jamming devices to stop drone pilots from successfully flying them into their targets, Ukraine began to switch to using ANI to take out military targets instead, drastically increasing the hit rate. In the US, there's of course the fabled news article concerning the USAF's AI simulation (real or theorized aside) where the drone killed its own operator to achieve its goal. You get the picture.

It's these AI applications that are the most terrifying, and they're here, now. They have no moral conscience or decision-making process in them. You strap a gun to one and tell it to wipe out a target, and it'll do just that. To be fair, humans are equally as capable, but there are checks and balances in place to stop that and a moral compass (hopefully) – yet we still lack concrete legislation, local or global, to counteract these AI issues. Certainly on the battlefield.

Ultimately, this all comes down to preventing bad actors from taking advantage of emerging tech. A while back, I wrote a piece on the death of the internet and how we need a non-profit organization that can rapidly react and devise legislation for countries against emerging technological threats that might arise in the future. AI needs this just as much. There are organizations out there pushing for this, the OECD, for example, being one of them – but modern democracies and, in fact, any form of government are just too slow to react to these immeasurably advancing threats. The potential for AGI is unparalleled, but we're not there just yet, and unfortunately ANI is.

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Inside Out 2 tore its way through the box office and Disney Plus in 2024, breaking records for the highest-grossing animation and most-streamed premiere, and since then, many of us have been anxiously wondering when we can next dive back into Riley’s mind.

After all, the new movie contained a couple of key details that hinted at more sequel storylines to come, including the introduction of a new emotion (Nostalgia, voiced by June Squibb) that didn’t play a big role in Inside Out 2, but gave us a hint of a potentially returning character in future films.

I spoke to writer and director Kelsey Mann, who would neither confirm nor deny that Pixar was considering expanding the franchise with Inside Out 3 (it’s already released a spin-off TV show); all he would say was that there wasn't anything yet in the pipeline: “[There are] no current plans for any follow up film,” he told me.

Where ideas are made

Memories shape Riley's core beliefs with emotions, offering new perspectives. (Image credit: Disney )

Mann, did, however, divulge during a conversation about the making of Inside Out 2 that he'd explored three different ideas for the storyline of the sequel, as well as “a lot of [new] emotions coming into headquarters”. While two of these, obviously, didn’t make the cut, this does mean there are likely some ideas leftover on the storyboard.

These ideas could well end up finding their way into future films in the Inside Out franchise, especially if some characters/emotions, like the aforementioned Nostalgia, are brought back to play a bigger role in later installments.

The story of Inside Out 2 suggests an infinite amount of possible new characters that could join in future outings, as the introduction of four new emotions in addition to Nostalgia (Anxiety, Ennui, Embarrassment and Envy) to represent Riley’s maturing mind as she moves from child to teenager suggests that this could happen again as she grows up.

Anxiety was one of four new emotions that were introduced in Inside Out 2. (Image credit: Disney)

“There are so many ideas. I don't have an overall concept of Riley when she's [a certain] age. I don't have anything like that, but I have lots of ideas for other lands or other emotions in the mind that I think would be great,” Mann said when discussing the different possibilities for turning neuroscience ideas into colorful animated analogies.

Mann’s enthusiasm for where one of the best Disney Plus movies could head next is infectious, so much so that it seems a foregone conclusion that Pixar Studios will be returning to this golden goose soon enough. “There are so many great ideas that I'm like ‘this deserves to see the light of day’. And I hope it does, I really hope it does,” Mann added.

A dream production

The number of different stories Inside Out 3 could focus on seems endless. (Image credit: Disney)

If the lack of any solid Inside Out 3 news isn’t what you wanted to hear, and you’ve already exhausted all the new Disney Plus movies as well as multiple re-watches of the Inside Out movies, then you’re going to love the Inside Out 2 spin-off series Dream Productions that premiered on the streamer in December.

As Mann explains, Dream Productions, which is set between the events of Inside Out and Inside Out 2, "takes place all in Riley’s mind at Dream Productions, where all her dreams are made like a movie studio".

“It's really fantastic, and I can't wait for the world to see that, because you get to see a little bit more of Riley’s life, which we do a little bit more of,” Mann says of what will likely become one of the best Disney Plus shows with its 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating from the audience at the time of the writing.

The series offers fans a great way to jump back into Riley’s mind in between watches of two of the best family movies available to stream on Disney Plus. While the future of Inside Out 3 is still up in the air, I don’t doubt that we’ll be returning to headquarters in no time.

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