A nerdy father of two, a husband of a beautiful and understanding wife, an engineer who loves anime and tinkering with PCs and games, but most of all, loves God.
Nvidia has mostly been in the news lately for its GeForce RTX 50-series cards and DLSS 4 technology, which is way more than just “fake frames.” But the company has been working in other directions as well, including a recent update to the Nvidia Broadcast app.
In an announcement post (spotted by The Verge), Nvidia outlines two new AI features that were just added in. The one that catches our attention? Studio Voice, which “enhances a user’s microphone to match that of a high-quality microphone.” According to The Verge, a real-world test showed that Studio Voice really does make a mediocre webcam microphone sound close to professional in quality.
The other AI feature in the update is Virtual Key Light, which “relights subjects to deliver even lighting, as if a physical key light was defining the form and dimension of an individual.” Combined, both of these features may let you present yourself in Zoom meetings and video chats in higher quality even with a run-of-the-mill laptop webcam.
To use Studio Voice and/or Virtual Key Light, Nvidia says a GeForce RTX 4080 or 5080 GPU is required. However, The Verge reports that they were able to run Studio Voice on an RTX 3070, so who knows, maybe these are just recommendations, not requirements. (Before you run out an upgrade your GPU, see our reviews of the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090.)
The latest Nvidia Broadcast update also includes Background Noise Removal (for clearer mic sound), Eye Contact (so it looks like you’re always looking at the camera), and Virtual Background (for clearer visual separation between you and your environment).
DeepSeek is having a moment: With the release of its impressive R1 model, the AI company overtook ChatGPT (and every other app) to become the number one free app on both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. If you gave the app a try this week, however, be warned: Your chats may have been exposed.
As reported by The Hacker News, DeepSeek left one of its online databases exposed. While the company has issued a fix, this database is a treasure trove of user information. It contains over one million lines of log streams, which includes chat history, secret keys (used to encrypt and decrypt data), backend information, and other important data.
As of this article, DeepSeek says they are continuing to investigate the issue, despite implementing a fix on Jan. 29.
It isn’t clear if any parties gained access to DeepSeek’s database while it was vulnerable, but the vulnerability allowed for "complete database control," as well as privilege escalation within DeepSeek’s network without any authentication needed.
DeepSeek’s privacy and security policies have been a point of concern as so many users flock to its service. The platform collects a lot of user data, like email addresses, IP addresses, and chat histories, but also more concerning data points, like keystroke patterns and rhythms. Why does an AI app need to not only know what I typed, but how I typed it, too? As DeepSeek is a Chinese company, it stores all user data on servers in China. As such, the company is beholden by law to share any data the Chinese government requests. These practices are among the reasons the United States government banned TikTok.
There’s no evidence this has happened, but the whole situation paints a precarious picture for the popular AI startup. If you do want to try DeepSeek, or if you’re already using it, it’s important to keep these points in mind. Your user data may not be quite so secure with this particular company.
Elon Musk is only one week into his role in President Donald Trump’s new administration, but the US federal government is already rolling out the Twitter playbook to manage its spending and personnel. Just like Musk did when he took over the social media platform, Trump’s team is attempting to drastically reduce the number of government staffers and ensure those who remain are loyal to the president’s agenda.
On Tuesday, federal employees received an email that mirrors the “Fork in the Road” missive sent to Twitter (now X) staff shortly after Musk bought the company in 2022. The email asks federal workers to resign by February 6 if they do not wish to return to the office five days a week and commit to a culture of excellence. Those who choose to resign will continue to get pay and benefits until September, according to the memo.
AI Lab Newsletter by Will Knight
WIRED’s resident AI expert Will Knight takes you to the cutting edge of this fast-changing field and beyond—keeping you informed about where AI and technology are headed. Delivered on Wednesdays.
“The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work,” reads the email, which was later published on the US Office of Personnel Management website. “Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward.”
The news comes as Musk’s minions take over the US Office of Personnel Management, which acts as a human resources department for the federal workforce. Elon Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. The Office of Personnel Management also did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk and his advisors, including Trump’s newly appointed AI and crypto czar David Sacks, used a remarkably similar strategy at Twitter. About a week after the acquisition was complete, Musk laid off half the workforce. Sacks helped advise him on which teams and people would be cut.
About two weeks later, remaining employees received an email with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” Musk said that they would need to be “extremely hardcore” in order to realize his vision for Twitter 2.0. This meant “working long hours at high intensity.” He noted that "only exceptional performance” would receive “a passing grade." Employees were asked to opt into this vision via a web form. Anyone who failed to do so by the following day would receive three months severance, Musk said. Thousands of Twitter employees would later sue, arguing that they were not paid their full severance. Musk ultimately was able to get the suit dismissed.
“We are all shaking our heads in disbelief at how familiar this all feels,” says Yao Yue, a former principal engineer at Twitter. “Except, the federal government and its employees have specific laws in terms of spending, hiring, and firing.”
In this case, federal employees are being asked to send an email with the word “Resign” in the subject line in the next 10 days. “Purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal workers, said in a statement. “This offer should not be viewed as voluntary. Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”
A powerful new open-sourceartificial intelligence model created by Chinese startup DeepSeek has shaken Silicon Valley over the past few days. Packed with cutting-edge capabilities and developed on a seemingly tiny budget, DeepSeek’s R1 is prompting talk of an impending upheaval in the tech industry.
To some people, DeepSeek’s rise signals that the US has lost its edge in AI. But a number of experts, including executives at companies that build and customize some of the world’s most powerful frontier AI models, say it’s a sign of a different kind of technological transition underway.
AI Lab Newsletter by Will Knight
WIRED’s resident AI expert Will Knight takes you to the cutting edge of this fast-changing field and beyond—keeping you informed about where AI and technology are headed. Delivered on Wednesdays.
Instead of trying to create larger and larger models that require increasingly exorbitant amounts of computing resources, AI companies are now focusing more on developing advanced capabilities, like reasoning. That has created an opening for smaller, innovative startups such as DeepSeek that haven’t received billions of dollars in outside investment. “It’s a paradigm shift towards reasoning, and that will be much more democratized,” says Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, a company that specializes in building and hosting custom AI models.
“It’s been clear for some time now that innovating and creating greater efficiencies—rather than just throwing unlimited compute at the problem—will spur the next round of technology breakthroughs,” says Nick Frosst, a cofounder of Cohere, a startup that builds frontier AI models. “This is a clarifying moment when people are realizing what’s long been obvious.”
Thousands of developers and AI enthusiasts flocked to DeepSeek’s website and its official app in recent days to try out the company’s latest model and shared examples of its sophisticated capabilities on social media. Shares in US tech firms, including the chipmaker Nvidia, fell in response on Monday as investors began to question the vast sums being poured into AI development.
DeepSeek’s technology was developed by a relatively small research lab in China that sprang out of one of the country’s best-performing quantitative hedge funds. A research paper posted online last December claims that its earlier DeepSeek-V3 large language model cost only $5.6 million to build, a fraction of the amount its competitors needed for similar projects. OpenAI has previously said that some of its models cost upwards of $100 million each. The latest models from OpenAI as well as Google, Anthropic, and Meta likely cost considerably more.
The performance and efficiency of DeepSeek’s models has already prompted talk of cost cutting at some big tech firms. One engineer at Meta, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, says the tech giant will most likely try to examine DeepSeek’s techniques to find ways to reduce its own expenditure on AI. “We believe open source models are driving a significant shift in the industry, and that’s going to bring the benefits of AI to everyone faster,” a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement. “We want the US to continue to be the leader in open source AI, not China, which is why Meta is developing open source AI with our Llama models which have been downloaded over 800 million times.”
XB-1 took off from the runway at Mojave Air & Space Port near Barstow, California at about 11:21 AM EST. From there, Boom Supersonic’s Chief Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg ascended in the experimental plane to an altitude of 34,000 ft before turning left and beginning its supersonic test. After successfully achieving Mach 1.1 at 11:32 PM EST, Brandenburg continued XB-1 on its deceleration and descent path. At one point, however, XB-1 briefly broke the sound barrier once again.
“Alright, knock it off, knock it off,” someone in Boom Supersonic’s flight control room could be heard joking during the livestream.
XB-1 surpassed Mach 1 yet again a few minutes later before landing 11:54 PM EST after a total flight time of 33.49 minutes. The airspace in which Boom Supersonic complete its test holds historic significance—known as the Bell X-1 Supersonic Corridor, the area is named after the first plane to break the sound barrier in 1947.
Tuesday’s success comes less than a year after the demonstrator aircraft’s debut flight on March 22, 2024. The XB-1 conducted another 10 flights prior to today’s Mach 1 breakthrough. Its most recent took place on January 10, when Brandenburg topped out at Mach 0.95 at an altitude of 29,481 ft (575 knots true airspeed, or roughly 661 mph). Today’s success officially makes Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 the first civil aircraft to ever go supersonic over the continental US.
XB-1 was accompanied by two ‘chase planes’
At almost 63-feet-long, the XB-1 is about one-third the size of Overture, Boom Supersonic’s proposed commercial jet. Overture is intended to seat 64-80 passengers, and complete international trips at speeds as fast as Mach 1.7. That’s around twice the speed of today’s subsonic jets, but slightly slower than the Concorde.
The path to Overture’s commercial debut has faced multiple delays over the years. XB-1’s first flight was originally scheduled for 2021, but required pushbacks to address various engineering and design concerns. Although such issues are common in the aircraft industry, that still means Overture’s proposed 2029 release date likely will be shuffled at least a couple times before a working commercial supersonic plane takes to the skies.
“Historically, the human race has always wanted to go faster,” livestream co-host and former Chief Concorde Pilot Mike Bannister said shortly after XB-1’s pair of supersonic achievements.
A research team from DGIST’s (President Kunwoo Lee) Division of Energy & Environmental Technology, led by Principal Researcher Kim Jae-hyun, has developed a lithium metal battery using a “triple-layer solid polymer electrolyte” that offers greatly enhanced fire safety and an extended lifespan. This research holds promise for diverse applications, including in electric vehicles and large-scale energy storage systems.
Spacecraft powered by electric propulsion could soon be better protected against their own exhaust, thanks to new supercomputer simulations.
Electric propulsion is a more efficient alternative to traditional chemical rockets, and it’s being increasingly used on space missions, starting off with prototypes on NASA’s Deep Space 1 and the European Space Agency‘s SMART-1 in 1998 and 2003, respectively, and subsequently finding use on flagship science missions such as NASA’s Dawn and Psyche missions to the asteroid belt. There are even plans to use electric propulsion on NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station.
The idea behind electric propulsion is that an electric current ionizes (i.e. removes an electron from) atoms of a neutral gas, such as xenon or krypton, stored on board a spacecraft. The ionization process produces a cloud of ions and electrons. Then a principle called the Hall effect generates an electric field that accelerates the ions and electrons and channels them into a characteristically blue plume that emerges from the spacecraft at over 37,000 mph (60,000 kph). Hence an electric propulsion system is also referred to as an ion engine.
According to Sir Isaac Newton‘s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The plume of ions jetting out from the spacecraft therefore acts to provide thrust. It takes a while to build up momentum, however, because, despite moving at high velocity, the ion plume is pretty sparse. The impulse generated is not as immediately forceful as a chemical rocket, but ion engines require less fuel and therefore less mass, which reduces launch costs, and ion engines don’t use up all their fuel as quickly as chemical rockets do.
An Advanced Electric Propulsion System undergoing tests at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. (Image credit: NASA/Jef Janis)
The energy for the electromagnetic fields is often provided by solar arrays, and hence the technology is sometimes referred to as solar electric propulsion. But for missions farther from the sun, where the sunlight is fainter, nuclear power in the form of radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) can also be used to drive the electric propulsion.
Though electric propulsion is now maturing and is being used in a variety of missions, it’s not a perfect technology. One problem in particular is that the ion plume can damage a spacecraft. Although the plume is pointed away from the probe, electrons in the plume can find themselves redirected, moving against the plume’s direction of travel and impacting the spacecraft, damaging solar arrays, communication antennas and any other exposed components. Suffice to say, this isn’t good for the probe.
Get the Space.com Newsletter
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
"For missions that could last years, [electric propulsion] thrusters must operate smoothly and consistently over long periods of time," Chen Cui of the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science said in a statement.
Before solutions can be put in place to protect a spacecraft from these backscattered electrons, their behavior in an ion-engine plume must first be understood, which is where Cui and Joseph Wang of the University of Southern California come in. They’ve performed supercomputer simulations of an ion engine’s exhaust, modeling the thermodynamic behavior of the electrons and how they affect the overall characteristics of the plume.
"These particles may be small, but their movement and energy play an important role in determining the macroscopic dynamics of the plume emitted from the electric propulsion thruster," said Cui.
What Cui and Wang found was that the electrons in the plume behave differently depending upon their temperature and their velocity.
"The electrons are a lot like marbles packed into a tube," said Cui. "Inside the beam, the electrons are hot and move fast. Their temperature doesn’t change much if you go along the beam direction. However, if the ‘marbles’ roll out from the middle of the tube, they start to cool down. This cooling happens more in a certain direction, the direction perpendicular to the beam’s direction."
In other words, the electrons in the core of the beam that are moving fastest have a more or less constant temperature, but those on the outside cool off faster, slow down and move out of the beam, potentially being back-scattered and impacting the spacecraft.
Now that scientists better understand the behavior of the electrons in the ion plume, they can incorporate this into designs for future electric propulsion engines, looking for ways to limit the back-scatter, or perhaps confine the electrons more to the core of the beam. Ultimately, this could help missions powered by electric propulsion to fly farther and for longer, pushed by the gentle blue breeze of its ion plume.
