Sony's latest mid-range headphones are already a solid deal at their normal price, and now they've received a significant discount. As part of a wider sale on Sony audio, Amazon is offering the WH-CH720N over-ears for $128, or $22 off. That's the best price we've seen, and makes them an easy choice for commuting or studying.

The WH-CH720N headphones sound great despite costing half as much as Sony's flagship WH-1000XM5 model, with strong bass yet clear details and a wide soundstage. They're comfortable for long listening sessions, and the 35 hours of battery life with active noise cancellation (ANC) means you can use them for multiple workdays without plugging in.

There are areas where Sony's cost-cutting is obvious. While the ANC is usually good, it struggles with human voices. The hard plastic construction doesn't feel premium, and you'll lose conveniences like automatic pausing when you remove the headphones or start speaking. You still get multi-device Bluetooth pairing, though, and there's 360 Reality Audio (read: spatial audio) with compatible streaming services. At this price, there's little room to complain — you're getting a lot for your money.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

With the rise of ChatGPT, Bard and other large language models (LLMs), we've been hearing warnings from the people involved like Elon Musk about the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI). Now, a group of high-profile industry leaders has issued a one-sentence statement effectively confirming those fears.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

It was posted to the Center for AI Safety, an organization with the mission "to reduce societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence," according to its website. Signatories are a who's who of the AI industry, including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. Turing Award-winning researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, considered by many to be the godfathers of modern AI, also put their names to it. 

It's the second such statement over the past few months. In March, Musk, Steve Wozniak and more than 1,000 others called for a six-month pause on AI to allow industry and public to effectively catch up to the technology. "Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control," the letter states.

Though AI is not (likely) self-aware as some have feared, it already presents risks for misuse and harm via deepfakes, automated disinformation and more. The LLMs could also change the way content, art and literature are produced, potentially affecting numerous jobs. 

US President Joe Biden recently stated that "it remains to be seen" if AI is dangerous, adding "tech companies have a responsibility, in my view, to make sure their products are safe before making them public... AI can help deal with some very difficult challenges like disease and climate change, but it also has to address the potential risks to our society, to our economy, to our national security." In a recent White House meeting, Altman called for regulation of AI due to potential risks. 

With a lot of opinions floating around, the new, brief statement is mean to show a common concern around AI risks, even if the parties don't agree on what those are.

"AI experts, journalists, policymakers, and the public are increasingly discussing a broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from AI," a preamble to the statement reads. "Even so, it can be difficult to voice concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks. The succinct statement below aims to overcome this obstacle and open up discussion. It is also meant to create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who also take some of advanced AI’s most severe risks seriously."

According to the latest audit from NASA's inspector general, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket designed to take astronauts to the Moon is substantially over budget and far behind schedule. NASA's spending on the Artemis Moon Program is expected to reach $93 billion by 2025, including the $23.8 billion already spent on the SLS system through 2022. That sum represents "$6 billion in cost increases and over six years in schedule delays above NASA’s original projections," says the report.

One of the issues has been integrating older NASA technology with newer systems. "These increases are caused by interrelated issues such as assumptions that the use of heritage technologies… were expected to result in significant cost and schedule savings compared to developing new systems for the SLS," the audit states. "However, the complexity of developing, updating and integrating new systems along with heritage components proved to be much greater than anticipated."

The Artemis Moon mission project was based on the Constellation program, launched in 2005 with the goal of returning to the Moon by 2020. Following its cancellation, the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 mandated construction of the SLS and required the repurposing of existing technology, contracts and workforce from Constellation.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

The best gaming handhelds in 2023

Microsoft's Xbox Elite Series 2 controller is $35 off right now

The best VPN for 2023

ARM's latest CPUs push Android phone makers toward 64-bit only devices

NVIDIA's generative AI lets gamers converse with NPCs

It replies to natural speech, though the responses are... stilted.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology could allow gamers to speak naturally to non-playable characters (NPCs). The company revealed the tech during its generative AI keynote at Computex 2023, showing a demo called Kairos. The dialogue is rather wooden, but feeding voice-based interactions could be an interesting new dynamic in games. It uses NVIDIA NeMo tech for building, customizing and deploying large language models customized with lore and character backstories while using guardrails to protect against inappropriate conversations. It also deploys a speech recognition and speech-to-text tool called Riva, along with NVIDIA's Omniverse Audio2Face "for instantly creating expressive facial animation of a game character to match any speech track." Check out how it looks below.

Continue reading.

Tesla will open its Supercharger network to other EVs in Canada

Nearly 3,000 EV chargers are also coming to apartments and offices.

The Canadian government revealed Tesla will open access to some of its existing Supercharger network to other brands' EVs. This will start later this year with a pilot route between Ottawa, the capital, and Sudbury. There will be 750 opened stations by the end of 2025, and "at least" 350 of those will be speedy 250kW Superchargers. That performance is important, given the focus on long-distance travel. The government is teaming up with partners to help install nearly 3,000 EV chargers in multi-use residential buildings, offices, public places and fleets. The majority of the chargers will be Level 2 with around 100 faster Level 3 outlets.

Continue reading.

WhatsApp test brings screen sharing to Android phones

It's reportedly rolling out to more users soon.

WhatsApp's newest update takes a page out of work-centric video call platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The messaging app is adding a screen-sharing feature that will record and display the contents of your screen with whoever is on the other end of the video call, according to WABetaInfo. Screen sharing is only available to select Android beta testers right now but should roll out to more users in the coming weeks. However, it might not work on older Android models, bigger group calls or with people who don't have WhatsApp's latest version.

Continue reading.

NVIDIA has revealed G-Sync Ultra Low Motion Blur (ULMB) 2, the second generation of tech it designed to minimize motion blur in competitive games. Compared with ULMB, which it released in 2015, the company says the latest version offers nearly twice as much brightness, along with almost no crosstalk — the strobing or double-image effect that sometimes appears when blur reduction features are enabled.

Motion clarity is largely determined by the monitor's pixel response time. To improve matters, NVIDIA is using "full refresh rate backlight strobing," which builds on the backlight strobing technique from the original ULMB. Although the previous version of the tech improved motion clarity for many, it needed to switch off the monitor's backlight 75 percent of the time. This reduced the brightness of the screen.

With ULMB 2, NVIDIA is able to match the display's refresh rate when it turns the backlight on and off. The aim is to only turn the backlight on when pixels are at the correct color value for each frame. This mitigates crosstalk, as you shouldn't see pixels when they're transitioning to the accurate color.

This approach wasn't really possible with the slower pixel refresh rates of older monitors. ULMB 2 is able to run at the full refresh rate of current displays. On a 360Hz display, each backlight strobe happens every 2.7 milliseconds — a rate that's imperceptible to the human eye.

What this all boils down to is NVIDIA being able to offer more brightness and an effective motion clarity of over 1000Hz. If you use a 360Hz monitor with ULMB 2 on, NVIDIA says you'll get an effective motion clarity of 1440Hz. The company claims that, without ULMB 2, you'd need a monitor that's capable of 1440Hz to get equivalent motion clarity. Given that we've only recentlystarted seeing 500Hz monitors, mass-market 1440Hz displays seem quite a ways off.

NVIDIA offered some brief demos of ULMB 2 in action. In the video below, you'll see what a motorcycle pursuit sequence looks like in slow-motion at 360 frames per second with the feature both off and on.

ULMB 2 is available now as a free update for compatible 1440p, 360Hz G-Sync monitors. Only two such displays are on the market at the minute, NVIDIA says: the Acer Predator XB273U and the ASUS ROG Swift PG27AQN, both of which are 27-inch monitors. The ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP (a 25-inch 1080p, 540Hz display) and the 27-inch AOC AGON AG276QSG G-Sync Monitor are also compatible, and they'll be available soon.

NVIDIA announced ULMB 2 alongside some AI developments at Computex. The company is developing a supercomputer that's designed to help companies build generative AI models. It also showed off tech that will enable players to use their microphones and have somewhat realistic conversations with in-game characters.

ARM just sent a not-so-subtle warning to Android phone makers still hanging on to 32-bit technology. The company has introduced its first lineup of CPU core designs that are exclusively 64-bit — unlike last year, there's no legacy tech for vendors to use. The Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520 don't always represent major leaps in performance, but they're likely to set the pace for Android in the near future.

The Cortex-X4, like the X3, is a performance core aimed at flagship phones. Its updated architecture delivers a 15 percent claimed higher performance, but uses 40 percent less power than its predecessor. That translates to faster app launches and a more responsive interface, according to ARM. We also wouldn't be surprised if this led to improved battery life in games and other intensive tasks.

Meanwhile, the Cortex-A720 is a sequel to the A715 "middle" core that handles most computing chores. While it is faster, the focus is on longevity. ARM claims the A720 is over 20 percent more power efficient than last year's design. Chipmakers can even use a smaller 'entry' version to cut costs or shrink their hardware.

We wouldn't discount the Cortex-A520 efficiency core. While it's ultimately meant for background processing and other low-demand duties, it's reportedly 22 percent more efficient than the A510 it's replacing while managing eight percent better performance. Your phone might last longer even if you aren't a heavy-duty user.

Yes, ARM is also paying attention to graphics performance. It's simultaneously launching Immortalis-G720, Mali-G720 and Mali-G620 GPU designs that again offer more performance with a reduced power draw. They notably introduce a deferred vertex shading (DVS) pipeline that uses much less bandwidth (33 percent less in the demanding Genshin Impact), leaving room for more complex scenes and HDR visuals. The Immortalis is said to offer an average 15 percent jump in performance over its predecessor, even as it's 15 percent more efficient. It supports 10 or more cores, while the Mali-G720 supports six to nine cores. The G620 is the budget offering with five cores or less.

ARM hasn't named customers. As virtually the entire mobile industry is built around ARM, though, we'd expect Qualcomm, MediaTek and others to use the new Cortex designs as starting points for their next system-on-chip models. Whether or not Apple uses it isn't clear. Although Apple uses ARM, it hasn't yet made the leap to the newer ARMV9 architecture.

It's safe to say this will influence the Android market, at least. While Apple cut off support for 32-bit hardware and apps with iOS 11's release in 2017, AnandTechnotes that Android has moved relatively slowly, with Chinese brands like Oppo and Xiaomi holding on to 32-bit capable SoCs for a particularly long time. The new ARM range effectively pushes those companies to upgrade — either they use pure 64-bit SoCs or risk being left behind.

Tesla's plan to open up Superchargers is now extending to Canada after the government revealed that the company will open access to some of its existing Supercharger network to other brands' EVs. The effort starts later this year with a pilot route between the capital city of Ottawa and Sudbury. There will be 750 opened stations by the end of 2025, and "at least" 350 of those will be speedy 250kW Superchargers. That performance is important given the focus on long-distance travel — the open charger route will include a very large Trans-Canada Highway stretch between Ottawa and Calgary.

The announcement comes alongside a plan to make EV chargers more accessible in the country. The government is teaming up with partners to help install nearly 3,000 EV chargers in multi-use residential buildings, offices, public places and fleets. Most of them (1,908) will be modest Level 2 chargers, but this will include 100 Level 3 chargers. Funding is going toward five ongoing projects installing as many as 1,328 EV chargers.

The Canadian news comes just as Tesla promised Ford EV drivers access to 12,000 North American Superchargers starting in spring 2024. Ford is also switching to Tesla's open-source charge port standard with 2025 model year cars. This is in addition to previous efforts to open Superchargers in the US and Europe. While this isn't ubiquitous coverage, it could be reassuring if you want a non-Tesla EV but are worried about inconsistent charger quality.

Canada isn't a major EV hub like the US or China, but it's taking steps to make itself an industry cornerstone. Volkswagen will build its first North American EV battery plant in southern Ontario. A deal for a Stellantis EV battery plant is on shaky ground, but could be influential if it goes through. Add the country's existing car manufacturing base and it may play an important role going forward. Not that the nation has much choice — if it's going to ban sales of combustion engine passenger cars by 2035, it needs to foster demand for EVs well in advance.

WhatsApp's newest update takes a page out of work-centric video call platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The messaging app is in the process of rolling out a screen sharing feature that will record and display the contents of your screen with whoever is on the other end of the video call, WABetaInfo reports.

An icon of a phone with an arrow pointing out of it represents the feature and sits alongside longstanding tools like switching cameras, muting and disabling video that appear at the bottom of WhatsApp calls. Once you click the new button, a prompt appears asking if you want to "Start recording or casting with WhatsApp?" alongside a disclaimer that the company will have access to any passwords, photos or payment details you display. If you're okay with that, all that's left is to click "Start now." You can then stop sharing your screen at any time during the call.

Screen sharing is only available to select Android beta testers right now but should roll out to more users in the coming weeks. However, it might not work on older Android models, bigger group calls or with people who don't have WhatsApp's latest version downloaded. If you have an iPhone or iPad and don't feel tied to WhatsApp, Apple baked a similar screen sharing feature into FaceTime calls in January.

NVIDIA has unveiled technology called Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) that would allow gamers to speak naturally to non-playable characters (NPCs) and receive appropriate responses. The company revealed the tech during its generative AI keynote at Computex 2023, showing a demo called Kairos with a playable character speaking to an NPC named Jin in a dystopic-looking Ramen shop. 

The demo (below in 32:9, the widest widescreen I've ever seen) shows the player carrying on a conversation with Jin. "Hey Jin, how are you," the person asks. "Unfortunately, not so good," replies Jin. "How come?" " I am worried about the crime around here. It's gotten bad lately. My ramen shop got caught in the crossfire." 

Yes, the dialogue is a tad wooden; it seems like ChatGPT might have done a better job. Still, the idea is to show that you could just speak into your headset and an NPC will answer in the proper context, making for a more natural interaction than you'd usually get in such a situation. 

NVIDIA made the demo in partnership with Convai to promote ACE, which can run both in the cloud and locally (on NVIDIA hardware, natch). It uses NVIDIA NeMo for building, customizing and deploying large language models that can be customized with lore and character backstories, while using guardrails to protect against inappropriate conversations. It also deploys a speech recognition and speech-to-text tool called Riva, along with NVIDIA's Omniverse Audio2Face "for instantly creating expressive facial animation of a game character to match any speech track."

The demo was built in Unreal Engine 5 to show off NVIDIA's ray-tracing and other GPU features. The visuals are actually more compelling than the AI dialogue, though it's easy to see how the latter could be improved enormously. NVIDIA didn't announce any games that will use the tech, but Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl and Fort Solis will employ Omniverse Audio2Face. 

If you're in the market for a quality controller without breaking the bank, now might be a good opportunity. Microsoft's Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller in black is 19 percent off, dropping from $180 to $145. Though it's not the lowest we've seen, it's still a decent-sized drop from its retail price. 

The Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 is a solid option for Xbox gamers, regardless of your system of choice, as it's compatible with Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Windows 10 or 11 devices through Xbox Wireless or Bluetooth. There's also an option to connect it with an included USB-C cord. You can swap parts like D-pads and paddles, save up to three unique profiles to the controller and explore button mapping options through the Xbox Accessories app. It also holds up to 40 hours of battery life.

Microsoft's Xbox Wireless Headset is also on sale, down from $100 to $85 — a 15 percent discount. The headphones are compatible across the same systems as Xbox's wireless controller, such as Xbox Series X|S. Additional features include auto-mute, voice isolation and up to 15 hours of battery life. The headphones have sound technologies like Dolby Atmos and Windows Sonic, with volume control dials located on the left earcup.

The wireless headset is still a good $40 more than its wired counterpart, but if free movement is important to you, the discount certainly helps. If you're looking to update all your accessories for the summer, the sale brings the total price of the wireless headset and controller to $230 — saving you $50 overall.

JAXA, Japan’s NASA equivalent, has spent decades trying to make it possible to beam solar energy from space – which seems like technology for a far-future space anime. In 2015, JAXA scientists successfully beamed 1.8 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power an electric kettle 50 meters away, wirelessly. Now, a Japanese public–private partnership will attempt to beam solar energy from space as early as 2025. The project involves deploying into orbit a series of small satellites, which will beam collected solar energy to ground-based receiving stations hundreds of miles away.

While this already seems a huge step up from a kettle 50 meters away, it’s just the start of the challenge. Creating a satellite array that can generate 1 gigawatt of power – or about the output of one nuclear reactor – is estimated to cost around $7 billion with current technologies.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

The best DACs for Apple Music Lossless in 2023

Hitting the Books: Renee Descartes had his best revelations while baked in an oven

Meta’s Quest 3 headset could feature color cameras for more lifelike pass-through video

After a rocky start, Formula E’s Gen3 car is living up to its potential

The best Memorial Day tech sales we could find

Fire pits, wireless headphones and a pizza oven.  

It’s a national holiday, so of course Memorial Day brings a few bargains and deals so you can celebrate those who served in the military by… shopping. Notable deals include $50 off Sony's excellent WH-1000XM5 headphones, Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K Max back at an all-time low of $35 and Apple's iPad Air down to $500.

Continue reading.

Naughty Dog says its ‘Last of Us’ multiplayer game needs more time

The studio has other games in development, including a new single-player title.

One of the most notable omissions from this week's PlayStation Showcase was anything from Naughty Dog. Many (including yours truly) expected the studio to reveal more details about its Last of Us multiplayer game, but we'll need to wait a little longer to hear more.

In a statement posted on Twitter, Naughty Dog said, "We're incredibly proud of the job our studio has done thus far, but as development has continued, we've realized what is best for the game is to give it more time." As such, it now seems unlikely we'll hear much about the game during Summer Game Fest (where Naughty Dog offered a first peek at concept art from the project last year).

Continue reading.

US judge grants final approval to Apple’s $50 million butterfly keyboard settlement

Payouts will start rolling out soon.

Engadget

A US federal court gave final approval to the $50 million class-action settlement over claims Apple knew about and concealed the unreliable nature of keyboards on MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro computers released between 2015 and 2019. Judge Edward Davila on Thursday called the settlement involving Apple’s infamous butterfly keyboards “fair, adequate and reasonable.” Under the agreement, MacBook users impacted by the saga will receive settlements between $50 and $395. More than 86,000 claims for class member payments were made before the application deadline last March, Judge Davila wrote in his ruling. However, Apple won’t have to admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement agreement.

Continue reading.