Bosch is the latest recipient of (preliminary) CHIPS and Science Act funding. The company signed a non-binding agreement with the US Commerce Department and could receive up to $225 million in funding.Lest you think Amazons gruff crime solver somehow got a piece of the action, Bosch is also a German multinational corporation that makes just about everything under the sun. (That even includes a stink-removal machine!) The company recently accelerated its silicon development, buying TSI Semiconductors in 2023 and finalizing the deal early this year. But instead of focusing on cutting-edge silicon for computers, phones and AI, Bosch specializes in chips for the auto industry.The company plans to use the funds on the Roseville, CA facility it acquired in the TSI deal. The company will invest up to $1.9 billion to convert the plant into one that spits out silicon carbide (SiC) semiconductors, which are used to boost the efficiency of EV driving and charging. Bosch expects the first 200mm wafers to come off the line there in 2026.The Roseville investment enables Bosch to locally produce silicon carbide semiconductors, supporting US consumers on the path to electrification, Paul Thomas, president of Bosch in North America and Bosch Mobility Americas, wrote in a statement.Boschs Roseville, CA silicon plantBoschIn addition to boosting Americas primacy in the chip industry, the CHIPS Acts other goal is job creation. The White House says the proposed funding would create up to 1,700 jobs, including 1,000 in construction and 700 in manufacturing, engineering and R&D.Todays agreement catalyzes nearly $2 billion of private investment and the creation of over 1,700 jobs, while investing in a critical technology relied upon on by our defense and auto industry, wrote Natalie Quillian, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff.In November, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the worlds leading advanced chip maker, was the first to have its CHIPS Act grants (to the tune of $6.6 billion) finalized. Other recipients include Intel (although its funding was recently cut), HP, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, Texas Instruments and Rocket Lab.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/bosch-signs-agreement-for-up-to-225-million-in-chips-act-funding-211031263.html?src=rss

Googles NotebookLM made a pretty big splash with its AI-generated podcast feature Audio Overviews, and before the year is out the app is getting another upgrade. As part of a larger redesign of Googles AI notebook tool, Audio Overviews are now interactive.After generating an Audio Overview based on the sources youve uploaded, Google says youll be able to play the recording in a new Interactive mode (BETA). Clicking Join at any point in that new playback screen will get the AI hosts to call on you to ask a question, which theyll answer live while youre listening back. Google cautions that the feature is still experimental and that hosts might pause awkwardly or introduce new inaccuracies while answering questions, but it seemed to work well in a brief test. I was able to create a NotebookLM project trained on articles about NotebookLM, and while asking a question did seem to slow the whole Overview down, the AI hosts were able to smoothly incorporate an answer into the rest of the show.Alongside these new expanded features, NotebookLM is getting a bit of a visual overhaul. The interface is now split into three sections, a Studio panel where AI-generated content like Audio Overviews, study guides, and FAQs live, a central Chat panel for asking questions about your sources to Googles AI, and a Sources panel on the left for managing what sources NotebookLM pulls from. Its a pretty clean setup, and being able to collapse a panel when youre not using it keeps things from getting cluttered.Google is also using these updates as a way to introduce its first pass at monetizing NotebookLM. A new NotebookLM Plus premium subscription is available to Google Workspace and Cloud customers as a Gemini add-on, and will give you the ability to generate up to 20 Audio Overviews per day, create up to 500 AI notebooks, and add up to 300 sources per notebook. That translates to an additional $20 per user per month for Workspace subscribers. Starting next year, NotebookLM Plus benefits will also be rolled into the Google One AI Premium subscription.GoogleNotebookLM started as an internal Google experiment called Project Tailwind, but quickly blossomed into one of the more reasonable applications of Googles Gemini AI model thanks to its grounding in sources you upload, rather than the web and whatever scraped material Gemini was originally trained on. Its capable of working with anything from web articles to YouTube videos, but its Audio Overviews have proven to be one of its most popular features.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/googles-notebooklm-audio-overviews-will-now-let-you-call-in-with-a-question-210700150.html?src=rss

CISA has proposed new security requirements to protect sensitive data from foreign adversaries.

Moves are now underway to start production on the iPhone 17 Air, which is apparently replacing the iPhone 16 Plus.

OpenAI on Friday posted screenshots showing that Elon Musk, one of its co-founders, pushed for the company to have a for-profit structure as far back as 2017.

Shares of Broadcom popped more than 24% Friday, pushing the company's market cap beyond $1 trillion for the first time.

The Academy has announced 19 finalists for the 2025 Visual Effects Oscar, including a combination of the biggest blockbusters and those yet to come. These include such contenders as Wicked, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and Gladiator II alongside such upcoming titles as Mufasa: The Lion King and Better Man. Warner Bros stands first with four: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Dune: Part Two, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. The Fall Guy, Twisters, and Wicked represent Universal Pictures. The lineup of Paramount Pictures will have Better Man and Gladiator II.Other notable entries are, of course, Deadpool & Wolverine from Marvel Studios; Civil War by A24 and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire from Sony Pictures. The ones worth looking out for include Nosferatu and Megalopolis.Shortlist voting is December 9, to narrow down the 19 contenders to 10 by December 17. Nominees for the five categories for the 97th Academy Awards will be announced on January 17, 2025.Heres the full list of finalists:The post 2025 Oscars: Visual Effects Finalists Announced appeared first on Vfxexpress.

Theres a reason the newest edition of Spotify Wrapped is always a highly anticipated eventeven when it reminds you that Bluey was your most listened to artist in 2024. We love to reflect on who weve been over the past year and use that information to plan the upcoming year. (First order of business for 2025: Get the kids a separate music account.) Though we happily look through the year-in-review lists about our entertainment consumption, few of us take the time to look back at our financial choices. But a quick spending inventory of 2024 can be one of the best ways to set yourself up for a financially successful 2025and it doesnt have to be a chore.Heres what you can do in about an hour to save thousands of bucks in 2025.Plug your 2024 budget leaksYou may not realize that money has been trickling out of your hands all year, which can add up to a significant amount of wasted dough. To make sure you only pay for things you want in 2025, take a few minutes to curate your subscriptions and your inbox.Cancel unused subscriptionsThe modern world allows us to subscribe to everything from meal planning kits to streaming services to news sitesbut do you know all of the subscriptions you are paying for?These easily-overlooked charges, known as gray charges, are usually for services you have completely forgotten you signed up for. In many cases, consumers sign up for a free trial and forget to cancel before the trial period ends. These charges are perfectly legaland perfectly infuriating.Conducting a spending inventory by going through your credit card and banking statements to identify and cancel gray charges is a worthwhile use of an afternoon. But you can also use one of the many apps that will do it for you and save yourself some time.Get advertisements out of your emailTheres a reason online retailers give you a discount in exchange for your email address: a constant stream of cool new products in your inbox will earn them far more than the discount is worth. You may think youre making a money savvy choice by signing up for the newsletter to get the discount, but youre really agreeing to daily temptation.Say no to the advertising in your mail. As part of your spending inventory, take ten minutes to unsubscribe from all the retailer emails you receive and give yourself (and your email) a clean slate for the new year.While youre at it, commit to unsubscribing from retail newsletters in the future the minute youve claimed your 10% discount. You dont need their clutter.Review your 2024 spendingIt used to be that only the meticulously organized had any hope of figuring out where their money went over the course of a year. Unless you kept a color-coded spreadsheet to track every penny you spent, there was no way of knowing your spending habits.Thankfully, we have robots to keep track of this stuff for us now! No matter who you bank with, you can rest assured that your financial institution has an online tool designed to help you see your spending habits and complete your spending inventory.Take a few minutes to look up your 2024 spending on your bank and credit card websites. You can usually find this feature under Tools and it may be called something like Spending Summary, Spend Analysis, or Spending Report.Typically, these spending summary tools will break down your spending by category, telling you how much you have spent on each one by the dollar amount and percentage of your total spending.Once you get over the sticker shock (yes, you really did spend that much on DoorDash), you can start using this information to help you plan ahead for 2025.Conduct a spending post-mortemStarting with your largest spending category and working your way down, ask yourself the following questions:Why did I spend money in this category this year?Quickly list the circumstances behind the spending in this category. For example, maybe you attended seven weddings this year, which is why your travel expenses were so high. Or maybe you had a new job that required an updated wardrobe, leading to higher than usual spending on clothes.The important thing is to think through what you know or remember about your spending habits in each categoryand its okay if you dont know.How can I budget for this category in 2025?Divide the total amount you spent on the category by 12 to determine your average monthly spending. Is that monthly average an amount you can easily fit into your budget?For example, perhaps you spent $3,000 to go on vacation in 2024. Money felt tight at the time and you definitely spent more than you realized for the trip. But $250 per monthor $125 per paycheckseems much more manageable.If this describes your highest spending category, consider starting a savings account for that kind of spending. You can set up an automatic transfer of the monthly average spending into the savings account and have money already set aside for next years spending.How can I cut my spending on this category in 2025?If you simply spent too much on a category in 2024, that knowledge can help motivate you to reduce your purchases in that category. But you can also adopt other savings hacks, such as:Remove your payment information from your favorite shopping sites. Just having to get up to find your credit card can be enough to keep you from making an unplanned purchase. Check which sites you spent the most money on and delete your credit card information.Make yourself wait 24 hours before making any purchases. This may only be necessary in your highest spending categories if thats where youre most likely to make impulse purchases.Refrain from any purchases in your highest spending category for a month. This can be especially helpful for anyone who was horrified to see how much they have spent on dining out. Forcing yourself to avoid spending money in restaurants and coffee shops for an entire month can help you recalibrate your habits.Make 2025 your money yearTaking one hour to complete a spending inventory may not be nearly as riveting as learning that you listened to a total of 137 hours of Baby Shark in 2024, but it will position you to create a wealthier 2025.Start by cancelling your unused subscriptions and unsubscribing from every retail newsletter you receive. That will help prevent your 2024 budget leaks from following you into the new year.From there, use your banks online tools to create a spending summary for the past year.With that summary in hand, conduct a post-mortem to figure out why you spent what you did in each category, if you can afford to budget for the same amount in the new year, and plan for category-specific spending cuts.All together, these tasks wont take much more than an hour to complete, and you can sail through the end of the year feeling good about your mad financial skills.

Its golfs boldest new venture. And it likely would never have gotten out of the gate without a mighty shove from the man who upended the sport thirty years ago: Tiger Woods.Mike McCarley, CEO and Founder TMRW Sports [Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi]Mike McCarley was a sports television executive with impressive bona fideshed overseen marketing and communications for telecasts of the Olympics and the Kentucky Derby (for TV sports pioneer Dick Ebersol)but his passion was golf, evidenced by his decade as president of golf and global strategy at NBC Sports, where he also ran the Golf Channel. In 2021 he founded a company called TMRW (pronounced Tomorrow) Sports, which he thought could revolutionize golf by combining three huge forces in popular culture: professional athletes, technology, and television.Enter Tiger. McCarley got a meeting with the golf legend to pitch his idea for a brand new kind of sports platform made for the 21st Century: TGL, where two teams comprised of four elite PGA players would compete in an indoor arena, going head-to-head for fifteen holes on an epic, high-tech simulator and stadium green. Forget Top Golf on steroids; this is more like Top Golf on gene doping. Woods, as is his custom, was thoughtful, inquisitive, and direct.At the end of the 90 minutes, McCarley recalls, he looked at me and said, I completely understand the technology. I think the game is ready for this. I know the players are ready for this. He then looked McCarley square in the eye. If I commit to doing this, he asked, will you commit to doing it, too?For McCarley, it was the equivalent of a putt dropping in to win a major. TGL was happening.[Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi]Re-inventing golf for primetimeEven amid the muscular swagger of contemporary professional sports, TGL is an audacious idea: a new, made-for-television, six-team league where PGA golfers will compete live, in prime-time matches televised on ESPN and ESPN+ over 12 weeks until a winning team earns the SoFi Cup and pockets the $9 million in grand prize cash. (The total SoFi Cup Purse across all teams for the launch season is $21 million.) Comfy money for a couple of loose rounds with your buds, but it seems clear the purse is not whats motivating players. A chance to chart the future of the sport very much is.The very idea of TGL may strike a certain kind of golf purist as sacrilege: here is a golf match played indoors, in front of 1,500 fans who will be encouraged to make noise, with swirling kleig lights and a bombastic, lets get ready to rumble vibe. Players will face a 40-second shot clock, and each will be micd up, so fans in the arena and at home can hear some good old-fashioned (albeit PG-rated) trash talk. All players will also be able to hear, and respond to, the ESPN announcers in the booth.[Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi]Players hit tee shots into a five-story screen, with holes created by some of the countrys top course designers and translated digitally. Once players land a shot within 50 yards of the pin, a Skymark light from the ceiling marks the exact spot of the ball in the GreenZone. From there, players hit off synthetic turf, navigating bunkers with real sand until they land on the green. Set on a grass turntable about the size of an NBA court, the green contains nearly 600 actuators that allow for surface modifications. Every TGL hole has a unique design. Augusta, this is not.The biggest part of our audience, I hope, are people who dont watch golf, but theyre sports fans who love to root for a team, and their team beating the other team, says Andrew Macaulay, TMRW Sports CTO. The former Topgolf CTO, hes responsible for every bell and whistle aiming to turn the gentlemens game into a hybrid of NBA playoff and Metallica concert. Its all tied in to get that level of sports fan, and I think theyre going to bring their experience with other team sports that all work that way. The ultra-traditionalists, he says, will tune in just to hate it. Well still get them watching.[Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi]Whos playing, whos notTGL had a lot of wind at its back in its launch, much of it provided by its partnership with the PGA Tour and, more specifically, Woods and Rory McIlroy, who signed on as co-founders. The six founding teams, each aligned with a major U.S. city, are comprised of 24 pros, including some of the games biggest draws: Woods and McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffle, to name just a few. But TGL failed to sign two of the biggest, world number-one Scottie Scheffler and three-time major winner Jordan Spieth, and its PGA deal meant players who defected to rival LIV Golf, including marquee names like Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau, were not eligible to join.And wasnt it the flashy LIV Tour that was supposed to reinvent the sport with brash braggadocio? Three years later, it still hasnt. As Joel Beall warned in a column for Golf Digest skeptically previewing TGL, For all the things that golf does well, cool is not one of them.Au contraire, argue the players. Im a fan of golf too, right? says McIlroy. Like Im a player, but I grew up being a fan of the game, and I want the game to continue to do well and try to bring new people into it. For the golfers, you could argue that this has been a great time for us because weve never played for more money. But for the fans, its been a pretty frustrating and confusing time. I think hopefully what TGL will do is give fans another way to watch their favorite players, but also, give them a up close and personal experience.[Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi]High-profile partnersSuccessfully launching a new sports league takes a bold idea (check) and the right talent (check), but it also takes the right television partner and deep pockets. TGL signed a deal with ESPN; its primary sponsor is SoFi, the financial services firm that anted up $625 million for naming rights to its glittering NFL stadium in Los Angeles. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto was on the hunt for sports exposure in prime time in winter, when the NFL was out of season; the company had a deal with U.S. Open winner Wyndham Clark, but with sponsorships already snapped up for golfs majors, finding the right opportunity proved elusive. Until TGL.Its not entirely brand new: its leveraging a platform of familiarity, Noto says of the new league. The SoFi Center is an almost 250,000-square foot arena in Palm Beach Gardens, a site selected to make it easy for PGA players70 percent of whom live in the sunshine stateto participate during the tours Florida swing. So then its really a bet on the technology and the authenticity of it, which weve done a significant amount of diligence on.[Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi]High-profile investorsTGL has attracted a starry roster of team investors and owners, a list that includes Jimmy Fallon, Derek Jeter, and Steph Curry as well as Shohei Otani, Josh Allen, Alex Ohanian, and Serena Williams. Its clearly banking on lots of Instagram shares and Tik Toks from these investors, whose total social media followers exceed 100 million. Its team ownership groups are similarly high-profile, and include sports tycoons like Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen.But while TGL principals are happy to relay any number of data points about why the new league will succeed, what they will not relay is any information about its finances, which remains as elusive as McIlroys next major win. How much did it cost to build its new stadium? What are TGLs operating costs? How much did ESPN, which will begin airing the matches January 7th, pay for television rights, and for how long? Ask these questions and you get silence. McCauley will only reveal that the initial investment is in the hundreds of millions of dollars.In the end, it will come down to whether TGL can turn the polite, country club sport of golf into a raucous good time that Gen Z cant wait to watch. Time will tell. But at least this much we know: Theyre coming out swinging.