It’s been a relatively quiet week in tech following CES, the TikTok ban and the Galaxy S25 launch that stole our attention throughout the first three weeks of January.
This week was a tumultuous one for smartwatch fans. Old-school wearable brand Pebble announced that it would be stepping back onto the scene, while Garmin’s GPS outage caused many runners to face off with a stubborn blue triangle.
Meanwhile, Sony announced the end of several physical media formats, including MiniDiscs, MiniDV cassettes and Blu-ray discs for recording.
Stay on this page to learn who we named our winners and losers this week.
Winner: DeepSeek
DeepSeek is our winner after the Chinese tech company took the AI world by storm with its eponymous DeepSeek chatbot.
DeepSeek is based on the DeepSeek-R1 large-language model, which claims to produce comparable responses to more established LLMs, including the GPT-4o and OpenAI o1 reasoning LLMs developed by OpenAI for its own ChatGPT AI chatbot.
DeepSeek has already surpassed ChatGPT in the Apple and Google app stores as the number one free app, with the chatbot gaining significant attention for its free business model for end users and open-source LLM for developers.
The chatbot also made headlines for the part it played in plunging Microsoft, Google and Nvidia’s stock value, with the latter in particular dropping by one-sixth of its former value, as reported by the BBC.
This happened when investors heard that DeepSeek had managed to spend just $6m training the DeepSeek-R1 model using a mix of Nvidia A100 chipsets and cheaper chips once the former were banned from being exported to China by the US. Not only is this less than DeepSeek’s US-based competitors had spent on their LLMs, but it also suggests that Nvidia’s high-end chipsets might not be as necessary as AI companies had thought they were.
It’s only good news for AI fans, with OpenAI having now fought back by making its o1 model free for all Microsoft Copilot users, and so removing the need for users to pay $20/month on ChatGPT Plus or even Copilot Pro to access the LLM (via The Verge).
Loser: Sony
This week, Sony announced that it would be removing PS4 games from its PlayStation Plus subscription service.
In a PlayStation Blog post shared on Wednesday, the company cited the fact the majority of subscribers have the current-gen console as the reason for the change.
“As many of our players are currently playing on PS5 and have shifted toward redeeming and accessing PS5 titles from the Monthly Games and Game Catalog benefit, PlayStation Plus is also evolving with this trend and will focus on offering PS5 titles through the Monthly Games and Game Catalog benefit starting January 2026”, wrote Sony in the blog post.
As you can see, this change will affect both the Monthly Games and the PlayStation Plus Game Catalogue, relegating any leftover PS4 titles to the Classic Catalogue with the occasional appearance in the Monthly Games and Game Catalogue.
Thankfully, this won’t have any impact on the Monthly Games players have already redeemed. PS4 games will also continue to be available in the Game Catalogue until they leave as part of Sony’s monthly refresh.
Interestingly, none of these changes appear to be coming into effect until January 2026, giving you a full year to save up the funds to upgrade to the PS5 if you haven’t already. This could be the perfect excuse to order the new PS5 Pro, given it’s now been more than four years since the PS5 first landed in stores.
However, any PlayStation Plus users still content with their PS4s will be sad to hear that their console’s days are numbered (at least, as far as the subscription service is concerned).
