BYD narrows gap on Tesla, smartwatches could help to stop smoking
Chinese car maker BYD saw its sales jump at the end of last year, as it competes with Tesla to be the world’s best-selling electric vehicle (EV) maker of 2024. The company says it sold 207,734 EVs in December, taking its annual total to 1.76 million, as subsidies and discounts helped attract customers. It comes as Tesla is due to announce its own quarterly sales figures later on Thursday. The US electric car maker maintained a slim lead in EV sales over BYD in the previous quarter but the Shenzhen-based firm has been narrowing the gap. BBC
Have you ever dreamed of flying in an unmanned drone, from city to city? It sounds like the stuff of fantasy, but in China pilotless passenger drones are a reality. You can’t catch them like a taxi just yet. But a company called EHang is waiting for the government to approve a commercial licence to start operating short flights around the city of Guangzhou. EHang’s vice president, He Tianxing, says: “We believe the future must be an era of low altitude, and every city will gradually develop into a city in the sky. Sky News
This year Meta’s Quest app (called Meta Horizon) – which is required to set up the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S headsets – once again rocketed to the top spot of the App Store’s free app chart on Christmas day, and I’m hardly surprised the VR headsets were seemingly the top tech gift of 2024. The Quest success was spotted by Upload VR who noted that this is the third time Meta has achieved this feat – with it doing so in 2021, 2023, and now 2024 (it missed out in 2022, with that being blamed on the controversial Meta Quest 2 price hike).
Elon Musk riding a UFO, “Shrimp Jesus” and tiny children baking impossibly perfect birthday cakes. These are just three examples of bizarre AI-generated imagery that has taken over the internet in the past year. Across Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok, surreal AI images have been plaguing news feeds, typically accompanied by nonsensical captions in broken English. Dubbed “AI slop”, there is no hiding from the manipulated images and videos with their prominence even leading to the Oxford University Press (OUP) naming “slop” as a contender for its word of the year. Telegraph
