Tech Roundup: Lenovo Legion Go S, Meta Content Moderation Shift & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Meta takes a leaf out of X's playbook by ending its third party fact-checking program across Facebook, Instagram and Threads and moving to a Community Notes model starting in the U.S.; to phase back in "civic content," in what appears to be a reversal of earlier decisions against recommending political content, and lift restrictions on "topics that are part of mainstream discourse," like immigration, gender identity and gender, and focus on "illegal and high-severity violations" in areas like terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams.
• The U.K. government plans to make it a crime to create and share sexually explicit deepfakes; says "perpetrators to face up to two years behind bars under new offences for taking an intimate image without consent and installing equipment to enable these offences."
• Apple plans an update "in the coming weeks" that will make it clearer to users when Apple Intelligence is summarising notifications following reports of the error-prone nature of the technology and its pattern of generating inaccurate news alerts.
• Google adds Text Fragment feature to its PDF reader to make it easier to share specific parts of long PDFs with others; previews changes coming to Google TV, including adding Gemini, more natural voice commands, and deeper YouTube integration.
• Meta says it's testing an "Imagine Yourself" feature that automatically generates AI images of a user and puts them into that user's feed.
• Samsung announces new Galaxy Book5 Pro and Book5 360 laptops with Intel Arrow Lake Core Ultra processors; schedules its next Galaxy Unpacked event for January 22 to unveil Galaxy AI updates and the Galaxy S25 smartphones.
• HDMI Forum unveils the HDMI 2.2 spec, with better audio sync and up to 96Gbps bandwidth for resolutions like 12K at 120Hz.
• The Connectivity Standards Alliance announces that Apple, Google and Samsung will accept its Matter certification for their own "Works With" programs; comes over a month after Matter launches its 1.4 spec, including "enhanced multi-admin" and updates to energy management support, including adding heat pumps, home batteries and solar panels.
• Dell rebrands its PC lines as Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max, each with Base, Plus and Premium tiers, killing names like XPS, Inspiron, and Latitude.
• Chipmaker AMD unveils the high-end Ryzen 9 9950X3D and 9900X3D CPUs, featuring clock speeds up to 5.7GHz, 144MB of cache, and up to 64% faster performance than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K; debuts Ryzen AI Max+, a laptop chip with new integrated memory and 16 Zen 5 CPU cores.
• Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon X Platform, a chip to bring AI features to PCs starting at US$ 600, as Intel launches Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200U, 200H and 200HX laptop CPUs (none of the CPUs meet the AI performance requirements for Microsoft's Copilot+).
• Nvidia unveils Project Digits, a "personal AI supercomputer" with a new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip that it claims can run models up to 200 billion parameters in size; shares Cosmos World Foundation Models, a family of world models that can generate "physics-aware" videos, and
• Microsoft shows a Bing search result page that mimics Google Search UI when a user searches for "Google" or "Yandex" on Bing while not signed into a Microsoft account, as part of what appears to be its ongoing efforts to try and keep people using Bing instead of switching to Google.
• Amazon Ring announces a new partnership with fire safety brand Kidde to launch smart smoke and carbon monoxide alarms that connect to the Ring app via Wi-Fi and send alerts when the alarms are triggered.
• The U.S. Department of Defense adds WeChat's parent Tencent, artificial intelligence firm SenseTime and lithium-ion battery maker CATL to a blocklist of companies with alleged ties to China's military, likely making it difficult for the companies to do business in the U.S. (Chinese drone maker DJI, which got added to the list in 2022, has said U.S. Customs is blocking its drone imports and filed a lawsuit in October 2024 claiming the designation has resulted in "lost business deals, been stigmatised as a national security threat, and been banned from contracting with multiple federal government agencies.")
• LG and Samsung announce plans to integrate Copilot AI assistant to their 2025 smart TV lineups.
• Meta stops selling the Quest Pro, just over two months since the company discontinued the high-end VR headset.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims "we are now confident we know how to build AGI [artificial general intelligence] as we have traditionally understood it" and that "we believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents 'join the workforce' and materially change the output of companies."
• Asus unveils the 2025 Asus XG Mobile, a US$ 1,200+ portable docking station with the world's first Thunderbolt 5 eGPU.
• Lenovo announces the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC, a laptop featuring a 14-inch screen that can extend vertically to 16.7 inches; debuts the Yoga Slim 9i, the first Windows laptop with a camera hidden under the display panel, and the Legion Go S, the first authorized third-party handheld to run Valve's Arch Linux based SteamOS operating system, alongside a Windows version.
• Reddit unveils Reddit Pro Trends, which allows companies to see what users are discussing about "virtually anything" on Reddit.
• Razer unveils an "AI gaming copilot" called Project Ava that helps gamers by taking thousands of pictures of their screen and telling them how to play in real-time.
• Stock image services Getty Images and Shutterstock announce a merger to create a new US$ 3.7 billion company; aims to "offer a content library with greater depth and breadth for the benefit of customers, expanded opportunities for its contributor community and a reinforced commitment to the adoption of inclusive and representative content."
• A new investigation finds that Meta has been restricting content with LGBTQ-related hashtags from search and discovery under its "sensitive content" policy aimed at restricting "sexually suggestive content"; says "these search terms and hashtags were mistakenly restricted."
• Chipmaker NXP agrees to buy Austrian automotive software developer TTTech Auto for US$ 625 million in cash to build out its products for software-defined vehicle makers.