Coming soon to roads near you: cars that are smart enough to detect your mood, take your vital signs, and get ever more intelligent via software updates.

These in-development mobility advancements were on display at global automotive supplier Continental AG’s North American headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan, this week. The manufacturer’s tech showcase aligned with a major theme of CES 2025: software-defined vehicles.

At CES, Continental focused on its “commitment to providing a full stack of integrated solutions that empower automakers to develop and deploy next-generation vehicles,” Aruna Anand, president and CEO of Continental Automotive, North America, said in a statement.

The demonstrations of Continental’s mobility tech came on the heels of the company’s announcement that its partnership with autonomous trucking company Aurora to scale the deployment of driverless trucks was expanding to include Nvidia.

Keep reading here.—JG

In the wake of erasing around a trillion dollars of value from stocks earlier this week, the upstart Chinese lab DeepSeek was the elephant in the room during earnings calls from Meta and Microsoft on Wednesday.

Meta execs delivered strong results, and Microsoft beat earnings and revenue expectations but fell short on cloud revenue and a disappointing outlook. But that performance wasn’t the only question on the minds of many analysts attending the call.

For the last couple years, these companies have been spending tens of billions on chips, data centers, and other infrastructure to build out the future of generative AI. CEOs Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Satya Nadella of Microsoft had committed to upping that number even more in the coming year. But will that still hold true in a world where a Chinese lab can seemingly build a similarly performing model with just a small fraction of the resources, then offer it for free or very inexpensively?

Hold steady: Nadella and Zuckerberg both reaffirmed that they intend to stay the course, for now, while attempting to learn lessons from DeepSeek’s efficiency measures. Meta plans capital expenditures of $60 billion to $65 billion in the coming year. Microsoft had previously projected $80 billion, and didn’t mention any changes to that figure.

“I think we’re still digesting. And there are a number of things that they have, advances that we will hope to implement in our systems,” Zuckerberg said in the call. “It’s probably too early to really have a strong opinion on what this means for the trajectory around infrastructure and [capital expenditure] and things like that.”

Keep reading here.—PK

An upstart Chinese AI lab is challenging the Silicon Valley conventional wisdom on what it takes to build a leading AI system.

DeepSeek made headlines in December with an open-source model that performed comparably to similar US AI models, at what the lab said was a fraction of their development cost and time. Then, last week, DeepSeek released a reasoning model, R1, that purportedly performs on par with OpenAI’s landmark o1 reasoning model—at a much lower price.

It’s the latest example of how some Chinese tech companies are seemingly outmaneuvering restrictive chip export rules to produce AI systems that could potentially erode US dominance. Alibaba and ByteDance each released their own models in recent months.

Much of the focus of this competition is around AI reasoning, the ability of generative systems to use logic and problem-solving to elevate their capabilities beyond question-and-answer machines and onto more complex tasks. OpenAI made a breakthrough on this front last September, when it first unveiled its o1 model.

Keep reading here.—PK

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

A fresh start: Have you been getting served posts on social media that feel a little bit…off? You’re not alone, and now you can do something about it. The Washington Post has notes on how to reset the algorithms that dictate what you’re served on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Tiny tech: Yes, humans have cared for their offspring for millennia without tools such as bottle warmers and white-noise machines, but tired parents everywhere know that the limit does not exist for the cost of a product that will ensure your child sleeps for 15 minutes (please omg just 15 more minutes). The Verge rounded up a list of fave tech to occupy babies and kids.