Meta is reportedly planning to launch a smartwatch later this year, four years after shelving plans for an earlier wearable, according to The Verge. The new device is expected to include health tracking and AI features, arriving ahead of mixed reality glasses, code-named Phoenix. This news comes amidst a flurry of activity in the tech world, with advancements in AI and new hardware releases from various companies.
Alibaba unveiled its new Qwen 3.5 model earlier this week, timed to coincide with the Lunar New Year, VentureBeat reported. The model, which packs 397 billion total parameters but activates only 17 billion per token, is claiming benchmark wins against Alibaba's own previous flagship, Qwen3-Max, a model the company itself acknowledged exceeded one trillion parameters. This release marks a meaningful moment in enterprise AI procurement, according to VentureBeat. For IT leaders evaluating AI infrastructure for 2026, Qwen 3.5 presents a different kind of argument: that the model you can actually run, own, and control can now trade blows with the more expensive models.
Anthropic also made waves with the release of Claude Sonnet 4.6 on Tuesday, as reported by VentureBeat. The model delivers near-flagship intelligence at mid-tier cost, landing squarely in the middle of an unprecedented corporate rush to deploy AI agents and automated coding tools. The model is a full upgrade across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design, and features a 1M token context window in beta. Pricing holds steady at $3.15 per million tokens, the same as its predecessor, Sonnet 4.5. "That pricing detail is the headline that matters most," VentureBeat noted.
In the gaming world, SteelSeries' Arctis GameBuds earbuds are currently on sale at Best Buy for $160, a $40 discount from their usual price, according to Wired. While most gamers prefer over-ear headsets, these earbuds have special features that help them bridge the gap. The Arctis mobile app has a huge variety of sound profiles.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have developed Group-Evolving Agents (GEA), a new framework that enables groups of AI agents to evolve together, sharing experiences and reusing their innovations to autonomously improve over time, VentureBeat reported. In experiments on complex coding and software engineering tasks, GEA substantially outperformed existing methods. This addresses the challenge of creating AI agents that can adapt to dynamic environments without constant human intervention.
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