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Arguably, the best time to get new audio gear is … well, Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, just because the shopping event to end all shopping events (and our collective sanity) is over, it doesn’t mean there are no deals left. We’ve found a ton of sales on WIRED-tested headphones, earbuds, and gaming headsets. They’ll make great presents, whether for a loved one or yourself.

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Headphone Deals

Sony WH-1000XM5

Photograph: Sony

These are our favorite overall headphones, hands-down. The WH-1000XM5 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) have incredible noise-canceling capabilities, they’re comfortable to wear for long periods, and they offer up to 30 hours of battery life. Sony’s processing and drivers also deliver some of the best sound quality of any headphones we’ve tested. This price matches what we saw during Black Friday.

The Px7 S2 headphones from Bowers and Wilkins (9/10, WIRED Recommends) have memory-foam-filled leather and high-quality plastic that make them unbelievably comfortable. While the noise cancellation isn’t quite as robust as on other headphones we’ve tested, the sound quality is impeccable. These headphones have been fluctuating in price a bit recently and slowly trending downward, so they’re not usually much more expensive than this, but besides a few outliers, this is still among the lowest prices we’ve seen.

If you’re looking for headphones for children, you probably don’t need to spend a ton of cash. These headphones from Belkin have a focus on durability testing, so your little ones are less likely to break them, and they’re cheap enough that it’s not a major loss if they manage to pull it off. They also have a volume limiter to protect your little one’s ears.

Wireless Earbud Deals

Google Pixel Buds Pro

Photograph: Google

This price matches what we saw on Black Friday. They’re our favorite wireless headphones for Android users. The Pixel Buds Pro (9/10, WIRED Recommends) come in multiple colors, have solid noise cancellation, and fit comfortably in most ears. They can last for seven hours of playtime with noise canceling on, which is one more hour than Apple’s comparable buds.

The Galaxy Buds2 Pro (9/10, WIRED Recommends) are another great Android alternative to AirPods if you stick to the Samsung side of the ecosystem. They have dual-driver arrays that give them a little better sound than the Pixel Buds, and the microphones deliver a better call experience in our experience. This deal is a few dollars lower than we saw during Black Friday, but the price keeps fluctuating.

The Sony LinkBuds (8/10, WIRED Recommends) are designed to let you continue to hear the world around you while still listening to your music. They’re sort of the opposite of noise-canceling earbuds. They have tiny holes in the center of each driver so you can hear whether a very different kind of driver is about to run you over with their car before it happens. They’re great for walking around in the city or anywhere you need to be aware of your surroundings. They were $10 cheaper during Black Friday.

Anker Soundcore Space A40

Photograph: Anker

The Space A40 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) from Anker are surprisingly good for their price, even before a sale. They have solid noise cancellation, pair with multiple devices, and come with a wireless charging case. They’ve never dipped lower than this.

These are our favorite earbuds for working out, partially thanks to their substantial IP68 rating, which essentially means they are “dust-tight” and can be submerged in a few meters of water without taking damage. A “few meters of water” does sound like what I lose in sweat working out, so that’s great. This is the lowest price we’ve tracked.

Gaming Headset Deals

HyperX Cloud III

Photograph: HyperX

We’ve been practically fawning over the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless (10/10, WIRED Recommends) and its 300-hour battery life. However, right now, its little sibling, the Cloud III (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is on a better sale. It gets 120 hours of battery life which somehow feels like a disappointment, but it’s still four times longer than most competing gaming headsets. I charged this headset before Black Friday and haven’t had to plug it in since. It’s currently a few dollars more expensive at Amazon, and you have to click a coupon to get the deal, so check Target for stock first.

The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro is a sleek gaming headset that produces excellent sound, but its distinguishing feature is the desktop DAC, which lets you adjust volume, mix game audio and chat, and apply a wide array of EQ options right from a box on your desk. The wireless option blew us away, but the wired version is currently on the best sale. Kind of. This one fluctuates in price so much that a chart of its sales looks like the headphone has a cardiac arrhythmia, but it’s currently on the low end of the cycle, so now’s the time to buy.

This might be one of the most … ostentatious designs for a gaming headset (which is saying something), but it earns the right to show off, thanks to its incredible sound. JBL’s spatial audio implementation is one of the best we’ve tested. The included software can track the position of your head to adjust audio based on where you’re turning, and even turn the volume all the way down if you turn away from your computer. We already like these headphones, but they’ve been pretty pricey in the past. Right now, they’re at the lowest price we’ve ever tracked.

SteelSeries Arctis 7+

Photograph: SteelSeries

The Arctis 7+ (8/10, WIRED Recommends) headphones from SteelSeries have a solid 30-hour battery life, comfortable ear cups, and most notably a low-profile USB-C adapter. This makes it pretty easy to plug into a variety of portable gadgets, from your phone or tablet to a Switch or other gaming handheld.

We normally feature a lot of headphones that offer some powerful customization or tweaks that can help you deliver audio the way you want. These studio headphones from Beyerdynamic go in the opposite direction. They’re designed to deliver audio exactly the way the audio engineers designed it. Which, for a lot of games, can already be pretty incredible as is. If you’re something of a purist (or, like me, want headphones you can use for gaming and video or audio editing), these are great.

The European Union today agreed on the details of the AI Act, a far-reaching set of rules for the people building and using artificial intelligence. It’s a milestone law that, lawmakers hope, will create a blueprint for the rest of the world.

After months of debate about how to regulate companies like OpenAI, lawmakers from the EU’s three branches of government—the Parliament, Council and Commission—spent more than 36 hours in total—thrashing out the new legislation between Wednesday afternoon and Friday evening. Lawmakers were under pressure to strike a deal before the EU election campaign starts in the new year.

“The EU AI Act is a global first,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on X. “[It is] a unique legal framework for the development of AI you can trust. And for the safety and fundamental rights of people and businesses.”

The law itself is not a world-first, China’s new rules for generative AI went into effect in August. But the EU AI Act is the most sweeping rulebook of its kind for the technology. It includes bans on biometric systems that identify people using sensitive characteristics such as sexual orientation and race, and the indiscriminate scraping of faces from the internet. Lawmakers also agreed that law enforcement should be able to use biometric identification systems in public spaces for certain crimes.

New transparency requirements for foundational models were also included, if they meet certain criteria. “The AI Act sets rules for large, powerful AI models, ensuring they do not present systemic risks to the Union,” says Dragos Tudorache, member of the European Parliament and one of two co-rapporteurs, leading the negotiations.

Companies that don’t comply with the rules can be fined up to seven percent of their global turnover. The rules are not expected to take effect in full until 2025.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Casgevy uses the Nobel Prize-winning technology Crispr to modify patients’ cells so that they produce healthy hemoglobin instead. The Crispr system has two parts: a protein that cuts genetic material and a guide molecule that tells it where in the genome to make the cut.

To do this, a patient’s stem cells are taken out of their bone marrow and edited in a laboratory. Scientists make a single cut in a different gene, called BCL11A, to turn on the production of a fetal form of hemoglobin that typically shuts off shortly after birth. This fetal version compensates for the abnormal adult hemoglobin. The edited cells are then infused back into the patient’s bloodstream.

A total of 45 patients have received Casgevy in a clinical trial. Of the 31 patients followed for two years, 29 have been free of pain crises for at least a year after receiving a single dose of their own edited cells.

Until now, the only cure for sickle cell has been a stem cell transplant from a closely related donor, but this option is only available to a small fraction of people. Transplants can also involve life-threatening risks and don’t always work.

The first commercial patients to get Casgevy likely won’t be treated until early next year. It takes a few weeks to collect patients’ cells, edit them, and perform quality control checks before the cells are ready for infusion. “It takes a little bit of time to treat the patients,” Kulkarni says. “But we don’t want to waste any time—and patients don’t want to waste any time, because they’ve been waiting for this for a while.”

Today, the FDA also approved a second type of gene treatment for sickle cell, called Lyfgenia. This therapy does not use Crispr to cut the genome, but instead adds a therapeutic gene to cells so they can produce healthy hemoglobin. Made by Bluebird Bio of Somerville, Massachusetts, it also involves modifying patients’ cells outside the body. In a two-year trial, pain crises were eliminated in 28 out of 32 patients between 6 and 18 months after treatment with Lyfgenia.

The FDA has put a black box warning on Lyfgenia—an indication of severe safety risks—since some patients who were treated with it have developed blood cancer. The agency says patients receiving it should be monitored for the rest of their lives.

Alexis Thompson, chief of the division of hematology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says these new gene therapies will be transformative for patients. “I can now talk to parents about the possibility of their child perhaps being cured of sickle cell,” she says “A few years ago, I wouldn’t dare have that conversation with a family.”

Steven Johnson has written 13 books, on topics ranging from a London cholera outbreak to the value of video games. He’s been a television presenter and a podcast host. He’s a keynote speaker who doesn’t have to call himself that in his LinkedIn profile. And for over a year now, he’s been a full-time employee of Google, a status that’s clear when he badges me into the search giant’s Chelsea offices in New York to show me what his team has been creating.

It’s called NotebookLM, and the easiest way to think of it is as an AI collaborator with access to all your materials that sits on your metaphorical shoulder to guide you through your project. NotebookLM was soft-launched to a select group earlier this year but is now available to all as an “experiment”—that’s Google’s low-risk way to see how the app behaves and how we behave with the app.

Johnson found his way to Google by way of a lifelong obsession with software as a “a dynamic thought partner,” a tool to speed up and enhance the creative process. When he was in college he became obsessed with HyperCard, Apple’s software that broke knowledge into chunks and allowed you to navigate an information-space through links. It anticipated web navigation before the web existed. “I fought mightily to turn HyperCard into that dream tool, but it wasn’t quite ready,” he says. He eventually became an enthusiast of Scrivener, a combination word processor and project organizer popular with book authors. (I am a fan too.)

When Johnson got access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator in 2021, he recognized that AI could level up a new generation of thought tools. Oh, wait, he said to himself, this thing that has always been in the back of my mind is now going to be possible. Scenarios unthinkable even a year before were suddenly on the table. Johnson didn’t yet know that Google not only had similar large language models, but was already working on a project very much in line with his thinking. In May 2022, a small team in the experimental Google Labs division cold-emailed Johnson. They set up a meeting via Starline, a Google Labs project that allows for eerily intimate in-person meetings. “I basically had a conversation with a hologram who said, ‘You know, this thing you’ve been chasing your whole life? We can finally build it,’” Johnson says. He became a part-time adviser to the small team, at first sharing the workflow of a professional writer. “Here’s four or five engineers, here’s an actual author, let’s just watch him,” is how Google Labs head Josh Woodward sums up the process. Eventually Johnson got involved in the development of the product itself and was sucked in to the point of accepting a full-time gig. His title at Google Labs is editorial director.

NotebookLM, originally called Project Tailwind, starts by creating a data set of your source material, which you drag into the tool from Google Docs or the clipboard. After the app has digested it all, you can then ask NotebookLM questions about your material, thanks to Google’s large language model technology—partly powered by its just-released upgrade Gemini. The answers reflect not only what’s in your source material but also the wider general understanding of the world that Gemini has. A critical feature is that every answer to your queries comes with a set of citations reporting where exactly the information came from, so users can check the accuracy of its output.

Google is not the only company envisioning products that let people create custom data sets to explore with LLMs. At OpenAI’s developer day last month, the company introduced personalized mini-GPTs that can be tuned to a specific task. Woodward acknowledges a “core similarity.” But he argues that NotebookLM focuses more on enhancing a workflow, and is geared to provide superior accuracy in its outputs. Also, he says that the OpenAI products have more of a personality, while NotebookLM is designed to have no such pretensions.

30 years ago, the founding editors of WIRED knew that technology would change our world, but they likely had no idea how it would be transformed. They had no idea that in a few short years, all of us would be seamlessly interconnected, capable of communicating and working together in real-time, carrying tiny supercomputers in our pockets. One thing they did know was that tech would change everything: It would bring us together as much as it would drive us apart, and like any human innovation, it had the power to cause as many problems as it solves.

And problems we have. Climate catastrophes, new diseases, crumbling infrastructure, wealth inequality, cyber threats, geopolitical conflicts, and threats to global democracy are just some of the things now shaking people’s confidence in a better tomorrow. But human ingenuity is always a cause for hope, and every generation brings new thinkers, activists, entrepreneurs, and builders to work on the world’s biggest challenges.

That’s why we’re hosting LiveWIRED, a one-day event in San Francisco that brings together business leaders, activists, experts, and leaders in multiple fields to discuss technology’s role in our changing world, and what the next 30 years will look like. We will also celebrate WIRED’s 30th anniversary in style, by showcasing the people, technologies, and possibilities that inspire us—and, we hope, will inspire you.

Join us on December 5 in San Francisco for a packed program of panels, activations, and activities featuring some of the most influential people in tech, business, science, and entertainment as we explore technology’s impact on our past, present, and future—and dig into solutions and our optimistic vision for the next 30 years.

Following two years of preproduction, game developer 10 Chambers finally announced its new heist game—Den of Wolves—Thursday during the 2023 Game Awards. Set in 2097 in a highly corrupt city located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it is, according to narrative director Simon Viklund, the kind of game “where you’re supposed to feel like a badass.” For Viklund, who also serves as the game’s composer (he did the compositions for PayDay: The Heist and PayDay 2, too), that means “the music needs to, like, [grunt noise].”

True to its name, Den of Wolves’ fictional city is a place where basically anything is legal as long as it is done in the pursuit of supercharged innovation and groundbreaking technology. Imagine PayDay meets Cyberpunk 2077 set in a metropolis that’s a mixture of Venice and Hong Kong. The concept is quite different from 10 Chambers’ previous work with horror game GTFO, but it structurally plays to the studio’s core strength: four person co-op games.

A lot is on the line as the studio works on its second release. 10 Chambers received an investment from Chinese tech and entertainment conglomerate Tencent to build this game and expand from a small staff of around 10 people to nearly 100. Viklund emphasizes that the game will have a highly detailed environment but that gamers should not expect an open-world experience. The overall vibe, Viklund adds, pulls from a litany of sci-fi and thriller movies, like Heat and Judge Dredd (the Stallone one, not the 2012 reboot).

While he enjoyed working on horror game music for GTFO, Viklund is excited to move away from that genre and back to a PayDay-esque heist experience. “My wheelhouse is this power fantasy type of music,” he says. Never played that franchise before? Give “Razormind” from PayDay 2 a listen any morning you forget your coffee at home and need a quick jolt of adrenaline.

So, what can players expect from the music in Den of Wolves? “So, there’s going to be elements, of course, that are similar to PayDay,” says Viklund. “But I’m keen on taking it somewhere else in terms of tempo. Making it heavier, slower paced.” He also looks forward to incorporating different elements of percussion inspired by the Pacific Ocean setting.

Since the game is still in early development and won’t be released for a while, WIRED did not see any actual game footage during a recent preview event 10 Chambers held for the title. Similar to the launch of GTFO, the company plans to release the game at first to players through Steam early access. Den of Wolves doesn’t have a release date yet, but PC gamers can anticipate receiving it before their console counterparts.

Fans of GTFO may be disappointed that their game’s content updates are ending, but Viklund points to 10 Chambers’ first game as critical for building the company’s confidence around design. “It was very freeing to be able to have a project where we could have that ‘fuck it—we’ll just do it’ sort of attitude,” he says. This type of confidence is a driving force behind 10 Chambers’ decision to develop something fresh for players rather than relying on a franchise concept that already exists.

For around $340, actor Elijah Wood can record you a personalized video wishing you happy birthday. John McGinley, best known for his role in medical TV show Scrubs, will give you a lengthy pep talk for around $475. Priscilla Presley will record a clip talking about everything from Christmas shopping to Graceland for around $200.

These celebrities all use the video-sharing platform Cameo to quickly snap homemade videos for fans who pay them for the honor. They can be seen celebrating anniversaries, lightly roasting people, or offering advice. This summer, however, some videos have been weaponized by an unknown Russian group, which has crudely edited the clips and used them as part of its wide-ranging information warfare tactics against Ukraine.

At least seven seemingly unaware celebrities, including those listed above, have had their Cameo videos manipulated by pro-Russian actors to appear as if they are criticizing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, according to new Microsoft research published today. The altered Cameo videos were shared on social media then heavily reported on by Russian government-owned or controlled newspapers and TV channels, the research says.

The videos started appearing in July and follow similar patterns. “It’s at a regular interval,” says Clint Watts, the general manager of Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, which published the research in an update on Russian information and cyber activities. “It’s a different actor or actress popping up saying a very similar script,” Watts says.

The videos often see the celebrity talking to “Vladimir” and saying they should get help with possible substance abuse. The videos are later edited to appear as if the celebrity were addressing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky—the Kremlin has consistently pushed disinformation calling Zelensky an addict. The videos can have emoji, links, and social handles added to them before they are shared on social media.

The seven celebrities Microsoft highlights are actors Elijah Wood, John McGinley, Dean Norris, Kate Flannery, and Priscilla Presley; musician Shavo Odadjian; and boxer Mike Tyson. There is no suggestion that the celebrities knew their videos would be edited or manipulated in this way.

“I just want to make sure you are getting help,” Wood, the former Lord of the Rings actor, appears to say in the video. The manipulated video has a Ukrainian flag, a social media handle for Zelensky, and a link to a drug and alcohol research center, and has been made to look like it appeared on Instagram. The video has several jarring cuts throughout and is evidently altered. “I hope you get the help that you need. Lots of love, Vladimir, take care,” Wood seemingly says at the end of the footage. In another video, Kate Flannery, who starred in The Office, appears to say, “You need to go to the rehab,” and that Vladimir deserves a good life.

Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even promised in 2019 that the data privacy protection would roll out by default across all of the company’s chat apps. In practice, though, it was a wildly ambitious goal fraught with technical and political challenges, and Meta has only been able to move toward it in gradual, incremental steps. But this week the company is finally starting its full rollout.

“It’s been a wild ride,” says Jon Millican, a senior staff software engineer within Meta’s messenger privacy team. “I suspect this is the first time that something’s been end-to-end encrypted with all of the constraints that we’re working with. It’s not just that we’re migrating people’s data, but it’s actually that we’re having to fundamentally change a bunch of the assumptions that they work with when they’re using the product.”

Meta has had to stake out a position as a committed proponent of end-to-end encryption amid pressure from law enforcement and victim advocacy groups that the privacy feature—which makes data unintelligible everywhere except on the devices of the sender and recipient—limits necessary oversight and impedes crucial police investigations. Meanwhile, the company has spent the past four years, not to mention the better part of a decade, developing the technology to retrofit two massive communication platforms—Messenger and Instagram chat—such that they could still offer the features and general experience users expect under the technical constraints and usability challenges of end-to-end encryption.

“I understand that many people don’t think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform—because frankly, we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy-protective services, and we’ve historically focused on tools for more open sharing,” Zuckerberg memorably wrote in his 2019 treatise. But he added that there was a clear desire from users to have access to private and secure encrypted communication services. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about,” he wrote.

Meta says that it will take some time for the rollout of full default end-to-end encryption to reach all Messenger and Instagram chat users, and the feature is still only launching for direct messages between two accounts. End-to-end encryption for group chats will continue to be opt-in for now. But these final delays have to do with gradually converting billions of accounts to run the cryptography and encrypted storage schemes that underly the effort. And while the infrastructure is new and had to be painstakingly tailored to Meta’s services, the company says it built the system on the Signal Protocol and thoroughly vetted the implementation both internally and with independent experts. In the lead-up to this announcement, the company did a final round of outreach to privacy groups and cryptographers to show them the documentation and have them test the feature.

“It looks just like Messenger, except that under the hood it has really strong encryption,” says Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins cryptographer who previewed the launch a few weeks ago. “Getting things to work on the web seems like it was the hard part, but they pulled it off.”

The history of artificial intelligence has been punctuated by periods of so-called “AI winter,” when the technology seemed to meet a dead end and funding dried up. Each one has been accompanied by proclamations that making machines truly intelligent is just too darned hard for humans to figure out.

Google’s release of Gemini, claimed to be a fundamentally new kind of AI model and the company’s most powerful to date, suggests that a new AI winter isn’t coming anytime soon. In fact, although the 12 months since ChatGPT launched have been a banner year for AI, there is good reason to think that the current AI boom is only getting started.

OpenAI didn’t have high expectations when it launched the “low key research preview” called ChatGPT in November 2022. It was simply a test of a new interface for its text-generating large language models (LLMs). But the chatbot’s ability to do such a wide range of things, from synthesizing essays and poetry to answering coding problems, impressed and unnerved many people and set the tech industry aflame. When OpenAI added its new GPT-4 LLM to ChatGPT, some experts were so freaked out that they begged the company to slow down.

Evidence was already scant that anyone heeded that alarm call. It’s inconceivable now that Google has upped the ante—and also perhaps changed the rules of the game—by announcing Gemini.

Google had already rushed out a direct response to ChatGPT in the form of Bard earlier this year, finally launching LLM chatbot technology that it had developed earlier than OpenAI but chosen to keep private. With Gemini it claims to have opened a new era that goes beyond LLMs primarily anchored to text—potentially setting the stage for a new round of AI products significantly different from those enabled by ChatGPT.

Google calls Gemini a “natively multimodal” model, meaning it can learn from data beyond just text, also slurping up insights from audio, video, and images. ChatGPT shows how AI models can learn an impressive amount about the world if provided enough text. And some AI researchers have argued that simply making language models bigger would increase their capabilities to the point of rivaling those of humans.

But there’s only so much you can learn about physical reality through the filter of text that humans have written about it, and the hard-to-eradicate limitations of LLMs like GPT-4—such as hallucinating information, poor reasoning, and their weird security flaws—seem to suggest that scaling existing technology has its limits.

Ahead of yesterday’s Gemini announcement, WIRED spoke with Demis Hassabis, the executive who led the development of Gemini and whose previous accomplishments include leading the team that developed the superhuman Go-playing bot AlphaGo. He was predictably effusive about Gemini, claiming it introduces new capabilities that will eventually make Google’s products stand out. But Hassabis also said that to deliver AI systems that can understand the world in ways that today’s chatbots can’t, LLMs will need to be combined with other AI techniques.

Hassabis is in an aggressive competition with OpenAI, but the rivals seem to agree that radical new approaches are needed. A mysterious project underway at OpenAI, called Q*, suggests that the company is also exploring ideas that involve doing more than just scaling up systems like GPT-4.

That fits with remarks made in April by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at MIT, when he made clear that despite the success of ChatGPT, the field of AI needs a big new idea to make significant further progress. “I think we’re at the end of the era where it’s going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” Altman said. “We’ll make them better in other ways.”

Google may have just demonstrated an approach that can go beyond ChatGPT. But perhaps the most notable message from Gemini’s launch is that Google is set on driving toward something more significant than today’s chatbots—just as OpenAI appears to be, too.