In this week's newsletter: We've become so used to digitally downloading games now that it's easy to forget how novel it once was, thanks to places like Xbox 360's Marketplace Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThe Xbox 360 digital store is the latest to go offline, following the Wii U and 3DS store shutdown in March. It shut down on Monday, taking about 220 games with it, according to analysis by Video Games Chronicle. Preservation activists at the Video Game History Foundation even made a funeral cake.Microsoft is definitely the best of the major companies when it comes to backwards compatibility and game preservation - despite those 220 lost games, a huge percentage of the Xbox 360's back catalogue can still legally be played on later consoles. And it is remarkable that the Xbox 360 Marketplace lasted almost 20 years (the console was released in late 2005). It wasn't the first digital store on a console, but it was the first one I ever used, and I assume the same was true for a lot of British players - the Xbox 360 was the most popular console of its generation in this country. In retrospect, the Marketplace was astonishingly ahead of its time. Continue reading...
Set in the year between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Outlaws follows Kay, an ambitious street thief as she plots a giant heist. We meet the gang behind the gangAbout 10 minutes into the latest preview build of Star Wars Outlaws, Ubisoft's forthcoming open-world adventure, lead character Kay Vess enters Mirogana: a densely populated, worn-down city on the desolate moon of Toshara. Around us is a mix of sandstone hovels and metallic sci-fi buildings, crammed with flickering computer panels, neon signs and holographic adverts. Exotic aliens lurk in quiet corners, R2 droids glide past twittering to themselves. Nearby is a cantina, its shady clientele visible through the smoky doorway, and just to the side is a dimly lit gambling parlour.As you explore, robotic voices read out imperial propaganda over public address systems and stormtroopers patrol the streets, checking IDs. At least as far as this lifelong Star Wars fan is concerned, these moments perfectly capture the aesthetics and atmosphere of the original trilogy. Like A New Hope itself, it's a promising beginning. Continue reading...
CMA to consider whether deal with AI startup is a potential merger, which could prompt full investigationThe Competition and Markets Authority has begun a preliminary investigation into a partnership between Google and the AI startup Anthropic, marking the latest in a string of investigations into deals between big tech companies and smallerAI ones.Google invested $2bn (about 1.56bn) into Anthropic in 2023, shortly after signing a cloud computing agreement with the startup, which develops the Claude LLM and chatbot. Continue reading...
by Eleni Courea Political correspondent on (#6PKEW)
Watchdog reprimands Electoral Commission for not being up to date with security updates before hack in August 2021The UK's election watchdog has been reprimanded over online security lapses that allowed the personal information of 40 million voters to be hacked.The Information Commissioner's Office said the Electoral Commission had not kept its servers up to date with the latest security updates before the data breach, which occurred in August 2021 but was not identified until October 2022. Continue reading...
The ChatGPT maker is betting big, while Google hopes its AI tools won't replace workers, but help them to work better Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereWhat if you build it and they don't come?It's fair to say the shine is coming off the AI boom. Soaring valuations are starting to look unstable next to the sky-high spending required to sustain them. Over the weekend, one report from tech site the Information estimated that OpenAI was on course to spend an astonishing $5bn more than it makes in revenue this year alone:If we're right, OpenAI, most recently valued at $80bn, will need to raise more cash in the next 12 months or so. We've based our analysis on our informed estimates of what OpenAI spends to run its ChatGPT chatbot and train future large language models, plus guesstimates' of what OpenAI's staffing would cost, based on its prior projections and what we know about its hiring. Our conclusion pinpoints why so many investors worry about the profit prospects of conversational artificial intelligence.In this paper, we argue against the view that when ChatGPT and the like produce false claims, they are lying or even hallucinating, and in favour of the position that the activity they are engaged in is bullshitting ... Because these programs cannot themselves be concerned with truth, and because they are designed to produce text that looks truth-apt without any actual concern for truth, it seems appropriate to call their outputs bullshit.Part of what's tricky about us talking about it now is that we actually don't know exactly what's going to transpire. What we do know is the first step is going to be sitting down [with the partners] and really understanding the use cases. If it's school administrators versus people in the classroom, what are the particular tasks we actually want to get after for these folks?If you are a school teacher some of it might be a simple email with ideas about how to use Gemini in lesson planning, some of it might be formal classroom training, some of it one on one coaching. Across 1,200 people there will be a lot of different pilots, each group with around 100 people. Continue reading...
Hypnospace Outlaw's creative director Jay Tholen returns with a sequel that promises more tongue-in-cheek fun for people old enough to remember GeoCitiesIt's been five years since Hypnospace Outlaw, Tendershoot's brilliantly wacky 90s internet simulator, and this spiritual sequel was announced two years ago. In the intervening time, with tech moguls snapping up social media giants, Reddit getting monetised (and in effect, censored) against the wishes of its user base, and the ever-growing presence of AI, the millennial generation's yearning for the algorithm-free wild west days of the early internet has only become more intense. At least that's how creative director Jay Tholen feels.I thought it was already bad then, but I didn't know how bad it could get," Tholen says on the current state of the world wide web.Dreamsettler will (hopefully) be released in 2025, on PC and Xbox Series X. Continue reading...
Doctored campaign video featuring US vice-president reposted by Tesla chief executive watched 128m timesKamala Harris's election campaign has accused Elon Musk of spreading manipulated lies" after the Tesla chief executive posted a doctored video featuring the vice-president on his X account.Musk reposted a manipulated Harris campaign video on Friday evening in which a fake Harris voiceover says: I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire," and that anyone who criticises her is both sexist and racist". Continue reading...
In this uniquely absurd mishmash of adventure and dating game, you are a house looking for love on an island of eligible bachelor padsNavigating the perils of the contemporary dating scene is a formidable task for any singleton. How much do you really have in common with this stranger? Do you share the same values? Can you be vulnerable enough to let them in? With Building Relationships, game developer Tanat Boozayaangool considers all of these pressing questions, while asking one more - what if you were also a house?Yes, the title of this dating adventure game is to be taken literally. In Building Relationships, you play as the latest eligible bachelorx pad" on an island of romantic opportunity. Your main goal is to crack on with its other citizens, which include himbo tents, blunt houseboats, and a windmill, for good measure. Millie (the windmill) is pretty flirty, and it comes out of nowhere sometimes," says Boozayaangool. People are either really into it or not at all."Building Relationships will be released on PC; release date TBC Continue reading...
For the twin photographers, this spontaneous shot captures the timeless pleasures of a day by the seaConey Island beach and boardwalk is such an iconic fixture in so many people's New York summers," Mariel Tyler says of the location of this iPhone photograph. She and her twin sister, Katherine, make up the Tyler Twins, professional photographers who specialise in celebrity portraits, events and concerts. Past subjects include Jay-Z, Whoopi Goldberg and Lady Gaga.Mariel took this image in 2015. Normally when we shoot professionally, we pass the camera back and forth. Whoever is not shooting is directing. We rarely remember, or care, who took what shot. It's always a joint effort," Mariel says. This shot was entirely spontaneous. The work I do with my sister often has to be more thought out, so it's nice to shoot without expectations sometimes. On this occasion, Katherine was on a work trip in LA but, ironically, had taken photos of Santa Monica pier earlier that day." Continue reading...
Social media platform uses pre-ticked boxes of consent, a practice that violates UK and EU GDPR rulesElon Musk's X platform is under pressure from data regulators after it emerged that users are consenting to their posts being used to build artificial intelligence systems via a default setting on the app.The UK and Irish data watchdogs said they have contacted X over the apparent attempt to gain user consent for data harvesting without them knowing about it. Continue reading...
Prototype, initially launching with select publishers and users, set to challenge Google's dominance of online searchOpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google's dominance of the online search market.SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a potential wider rollout, the company announced on Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate the search features into ChatGPT, rather offer a standalone product. Continue reading...
National Cyber Security Centre warns of global hacking effort to obtain nuclear and defence intelligenceNorth Korean state-backed hackers have mounted a campaign to obtain secrets related to nuclear materials, military drones, submarines and shipbuilding in the UK and US, as intelligence agencies warned of a global cyber-espionage campaign" targeting sensitive industries.A joint notice from the US, UK and South Korea warned that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was using state-backed attackers to further the regime's military and nuclear ambitions. It added that Japan and India had also been targeted. Continue reading...
$10 UberEats vouchers sent to people who helped after global IT outage are flagged as potential fraudAn attempt by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to thank workers who tackled the recent global IT outage with a $10 UberEats voucher hit a stumbling block after Uber flagged the gesture as potential fraud.CrowdStrike confirmed that it sent the $10 voucher to teammates and partners" who helped customers affected by a faulty software update it issued. Continue reading...
This cutesy and surprisingly intuitive brain teaser pushes the idea of the sliding-block puzzle to the very limitsFor Jemma, her whole life feels like a puzzle. Left on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, she has never felt as if she fitted in, and is desperate to see what the world looks like outside her small town, which nobody ever leaves. More pertinently, whenever she moves, the whole world moves along with her - like sliding tiles, like a series of conveyor belts. It really is a puzzle getting her from A to B.Each scene in Arranger: A Role Puzzling Adventure is its own sliding-block puzzle, where you must think two or three steps ahead to move Jemma and the objects around her in the right directions. Some things, such as rocks and robot birds covered in purple static, don't move alongside her, but everything else does. So you have to transport swords towards monsters that stand in the way, keys towards doors, bananas towards shy orangutans. Unless her way is blocked, when Jemma hits the end of a vertical or horizontal row she rematerialises at the other end, adding another layer of spatial logic. Continue reading...
Research commissioned by Google estimates 31% of jobs would be insulated from AI and 61% radically transformed by itAlmost two-thirds of British jobs could be enhanced" with AI, Google has claimed, with only a tiny proportion at risk of being phased out" entirely.Instead of worrying about job losses caused by AI, the focus needed to be on making sure the millions of Britons who could work in smarter and faster ways with AI tech got the support to use it, the company said. Continue reading...
This beautiful-looking action game is based on Journey to the West, the great Chinese novel - but its own journey to release has hit a bump in the roadWhen Chinese developer Game Science revealed its debut console game Black Myth: Wukong last year, it immediately caused a stir. Inspired by the great 16th-century Chinese novel, Journey to the West, the action-packed footage featured the titular mythological monkey Sun Wukong battling Buddhist-folklore demons and sword-wielding anthropomorphic foxes in lusciously rendered forests. Smartphone games are inordinately popular in China, but console game developers are still few and far between, and the excitement for Wukong in Game Science's homeland reached fever pitch. Within 24 hours, the trailer racked up 2m views on YouTube and more than 10m on Chinese video sharing site Bilibili, much to its creators' shock and delight. One excited fan even broke into the developer's office, desperate for more info on the game.After playing Wukong for an hour and half in a London hotel suite, watched nervously by several Game Science employees, I can confirm that - somewhat miraculously - this stunning Chinese mythological twist on Dark Souls delivers on that showy trailer, marrying fluid-feeling combat with reflex-testing difficulty and the expensive filmic sheen of something like God of War. As I sprint through Wukong's dense jungle, ducking and dodging through its deadly array of flora and fauna, I come face to face with everything from gi-wearing toads to nightmarish, gigantic-headed infants. Unlike many of its brutally challenging, FromSoftware-inspired peers, the difficulty in Wukong feels expertly judged. My simian avatar met a grizzly end more times than I'd care to admit, but I persevered. Eventually I defeated enough foes to unlock new abilities. Soon I can perch atop my staff mid-attack, giving me an edge against its murderous mythological monsters. I can buzz around the forest as a stealthy cicada, summon flames with my glaive, and eventually topple a snarling, lorry-sized werewolf atop a crumbling temple. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Charlie Lindlar, Hollie Richardson on (#6PFNB)
Hipster ornithologist Matt Spracklen makes birds cool, while Elizabeth Day introduces an an insightful how-to series. Plus: five of the best podcasts about ancient history Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereTom Slick: Mystery Hunter
Banking and healthcare firms, major airlines expected to suffer most losses, according to insurer ParametrixThe global technology outage sparked by CrowdStrike's faulty update will cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn, insurers estimated, as the cybersecurity firm vowed to make changes to prevent it from happening again.The projected financial losses exclude Microsoft, the tech giant whose systems suffered widespread failures in the crash. Continue reading...
Two-child cap | Year-round holly berries | Palace costs | Old technology | Rubber band ballPolly Toynbee says she will eat her hat if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves don't get rid of the two-child cap soon (Starmer will bin the two-child benefit cap and outdo New Labour on tackling poverty - I'll bet on it, 19 July). As a grandad with less hair than he used to have, I have a number of tasteful hats. I'll be keeping the tastiest one for her.
I'm no expert, but knowing my neighborhood's trees and flowers by name makes me feel groundedEighteen months ago, I adopted a dog. Now I'm out on the streets of Brooklyn with my hound mix for at least an hour a day, strolling and wrestling discarded chicken bones from her jaws. You notice a lot when you visit the same few blocks over and over: which avenues are the quietest, or when the rusty scaffolding around a nearby building vanishes overnight.Most of all, I love to admire neighborhood greenery. I'm an adoring fan of the tulips, peonies and dogwood flowers that burst forth in the spring. Yet I quickly realized how limited my plant vocabulary was. Yes, I knew that was a silver birch, because of its papery bark. But what was that taller tree, glossy and looming, or that pale shrub with tiny, ornate leaves? I grew up in Australia, where the vegetation is pretty different from that of the US north-east, and I really hadn't made an effort to learn about the locals. It felt disrespectful, to say the least. Continue reading...
This strange, dark game is an allegory about voyeurism and transactional sex that gives ample space to freak ourselves out - and critics and players can't get enough Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereA man wearing a weird animalistic mask sits slumped in an armchair in a grotty motel room, watching you click a handheld tally counter. He says he will pay you $14,000 if you click until the numbers reset at 10,000 - so that's what you do. Occasionally, he makes polite yet suggestive demands - do it faster, slower, stop, start again - but he doesn't move except to occasionally flex his hands.While you click, using the left mouse button, you wander the room, looking at the paintings on the wall, the detuned TV, the thermostat. But as you edge toward the end number, the man slowly begins to reveal snippets of his life, and the already dark tone of the world grows dimmer by the second. That's it, that's the whole game. Continue reading...
A new exhibition showcases British hobbies, the Rotterdam Architectural Biennial and a South Asian London city mapBoth mending and hobby crafts get the respect they deserve in this month's design news. Check our stories to see where these fine activities get treated as art. We also look at the history of Casio watches and a new future for the Apple Watch. Sign up for the Design Review newsletter to receive more stories like this about architecture, sustainability and craft each month. Continue reading...
Musk said it was not true' that he was planning large monthly donations but said he had created America Pac' and is making lower level' donationsTesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.On Tuesday, Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson's show, where he said the claim was simply not true". I am not donating $45m a month to Trump," he said. Continue reading...
Alphabet reports $84.7bn in revenue, on back of Search and Cloud, up from the same period last yearGoogle's parent company, Alphabet, outperformed analysts' expectations on Tuesday, reporting second-quarter earnings of $1.89 per share, the same as its first quarter results.Alphabet's CEO, Sundar Pichai, touted the results as proof that the company's investments across different areas of its tech empire were seeing positive returns. Continue reading...
Non-interactive cinematic sequences remove control from our hands at games' most emotional moments. Can't players be trusted to take part in stories?At the close of Metal Gear Solid 4, just after Snake pulverises Liquid Ocelot, there is series of cutscenes that never ends. Well, that's not strictly true. It does end - after 71 minutes - it's just that I've never watched that far. I understand that the game's director Hideo Kojima is a committed cinephile who has drawn much of his inspiration from movies, but I don't care. Those are minutes of my life I'll never get back.I also don't care for the 20-minute cinematic sequences dotted through Xenoblade Chronicles or Final Fantasy, or the seemingly hundreds of non-interactive scenes detailing every single plot point in the Assassin's Creed adventures. It's needlessly aggressive to rob the player of agency, then bully them into paying attention for prolonged periods. I think it's time we retired the whole convention. Continue reading...
Israeli company aims for stock market flotation after spurning biggest deal in tech group's historyThe cybersecurity firm Wiz has turned down a $23bn (18bn) takeover bid from Google's parent, Alphabet, spurning what would have been the tech company's biggest ever acquisition and seeking a stock market flotation instead.Alphabet had been in talks with Wiz, founded by alumni of Israel's cyberintelligence unit, as it seeks to catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon in the hyper-competitive cloud services market. Continue reading...
As the world recovers from the largest IT outage in history, it shows the danger of one point of failure in IT infrastructureA global IT failure wreaked havoc on Friday, grounding flights and disrupting everything from hospitals to government agencies. Over all the chaos hung a question: how did a flawed update to Microsoft Windows software bring large swaths of society to a screeching halt?The problem originated with an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, relied upon by most of the global technology industry, including Microsoft, for its Falcon program, which blocks the execution of malware and cyber-attacks. Falcon protects devices by securing access to a wide range of internal systems and automatically updating its defenses - a level of integration that means if Falcon falters, the computer is close behind. After CrowdStrike updated Falcon on Thursday night, Microsoft systems and Windows PCs were hit with a blue screen of death" and rendered unusable as they were trapped in a recovery boot loop. Continue reading...
There has been disruption at airports around the world, as well as banks, supermarkets and media outlets, after Windows workstations were hit by a 'blue screen of death'. Long queues of passengers formed in airports in the UK, US, India and Spain as some airlines warned of delays and grounded flights
In this week's newsletter: Work, life and parenting mean I can't dive into massive games like I used to, but then I found a hack to making the time I need Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereI miss very few things about being a teenager, but I do miss all the time I had back then to play video games. I got great joy out of binge-playing into the small hours, an opportunity I almost never get now as a busy adult. Aside from covering games for work it feels as if I barely get time to play at all, which explains my affection for games that can be polished off in a couple of evenings, rather than the gigantic, absorbing role-playing games I used to crave. I have pretty much made peace with this. My days of 100-hour epics and/or live-service online games are behind me. They'll be back eventually, when my kids are bigger.But it's been more than two years since Elden Ring came out - a game in my favourite genre, by my favourite director - and I suddenly got very fed up about the fact that I'd barely played it. I've picked away at the game on PS5, but never got out of the (admittedly vast) starting area of Limgrave. I kept hoping that my partner might take the kids away for a weekend, or that I might manage to take a week's holiday during term time, so that I could return to my teenage habits and play it by myself for hours on end. But it's been two years. If I want to play this game - or any massive game - I've got to try to fit it into the life that I actually have, with the job and the two small kids and every other responsibility that gets in the way. Continue reading...
The streamer's surprisingly varied library and ad-supported model has allowed it to start out-performing its far glossier, and more expensive, rivalsThere's a reason so many websites dedicate reams of virtual pages to the question of whether a brand-new movie is on Netflix, and when it might turn up there. For many casual viewers, the biggest streaming site is more or less synonymous with streaming itself; even big brand names like Disney+, no-longer-HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ are basically playing for second place. But at some point, they might need to concede that it's really a battle for third at best: last month, all of those aforementioned glossy non-Netflix services were out-viewed by Tubi.While fancier streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video have been experimenting with ad-supported versions in order to juice revenues (whether from cheaper ad-bearing subscriptions, hoping customers will pay more to avoid ads, or money from the ads themselves), Tubi offers a rotating, ad-supported lineup of movies and TV shows at the unbeatable price of zip. It's a free service that doesn't require so much as a sign-in. (I know this firsthand: I've been a regular Tubi user for years, and have yet to create an actual account.) Tubi combines the excited browsing of the old video store experience, the instant-gratification appeal of Netflix, and the old-fashioned channel-flipping of cable, where everyone once accepted the built-in ad breaks that came with movie-watching. Apparently, viewers don't mind introducing a little retro into their streaming experiences; Tubi is still growing in viewership and ad revenue. In its most recent quarter, the latter was up by 22%. (According to the CEO, the service isn't yet making money, but growth in such a competitive and capricious industry is still notable.) Continue reading...
Apple rolled out a feature highly requested by both disabled users and podcast creators. Why did it take so long?Ren Shelburne was fed up with trying to listen to popular podcast episodes her friends recommended. Shelburne, a photographer with partial hearing loss and an auditory processing condition, remembers struggling to finish a particular episode. It was a specific type of show: too many talking heads, complicated overlapping dialogue and, until recently, no transcription. Those I'm just so lost on because there's just too much going on at once," Shelburne says. She couldn't follow along, so she couldn't discuss the show with her friends. Podcasts are such a big part of pop culture and media at this point. I want to be able to be a part of that conversation."Weekly podcast listenership in the United States has more than quadrupled in the past decade, according to Pew Research. For some, though, the medium still feels inaccessible. Continue reading...
A South Australian museum honours the man who changed the way dentistry was done on a global scale'In medieval Europe, barber-surgeons might cut your hair, shave your face, do a bit of blood-letting and tend to a broken limb.They might also pull a tooth out with a pelican" - a crude beak-like shank - or lever it out with an iron tooth key". By the 17th century they might just knock it out with a steel punch elevator. Continue reading...
by Alexi Duggins, Hannah Verdier and Charlie Lindlar on (#6N5G9)
The England defender shares his life story, lessons and secrets to success in a new BBC series. Plus: five of the best tech podcasts Don't get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up herePack One Bag
Max Tegmark argues that the downplaying is not accidental and threatens to delay, until it's too late, the strict regulations neededBig tech has succeeded in distracting the world from the existential risk to humanity that artificial intelligence still poses, a leading scientist and AI campaigner has warned.Speaking with the Guardian at the AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Max Tegmark said the shift in focus from the extinction of life to a broader conception of safety of artificial intelligence risked an unacceptable delay in imposing strict regulation on the creators of the most powerful programs. Continue reading...
An entire generation nurses fond nostalgic memories of the gaudy kids' game that came packed in with Windows Vista. But who actually made it?If you had a PC in the 2010s, you probably owned a copy of Purble Place. The gaudy kids' game came with every copy of Windows Vista and 7. It was a simple, three-title package: Purble Pairs was a basic tile memory game; Purble Shop had the player design a mystery character using logic and deduction; and the last game of Comfy Cakes had kids playing line cook for the Purble Chef while juggling orders on a conveyor belt. And for many online teens, the legacy of these games easily equals that of Minesweeper and Solitaire, the more venerable pack-in games of PCs past.Yet nobody knows who made it. Curious players noted a simple credit to Oberon Games in the game's help menu, but that's all. Despite being installed on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide, the actual creators of the game have lived in obscurity for two decades. Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6MZ0Y)
Bluetooth and wifi noise-cancelling cans aim to dethrone Apple and Bose with ultimate private film experienceThe wifi hifi-maker Sonos has announced its long-anticipated first set of Bluetooth noise-cancelling headphones that aim to be the ultimate private cinema sound system, whether at home or on the road.The Ace look like sleek, understated regular headphones but they have a unique party trick: at the press of a button they can connect to a compatible Sonos soundbar via wifi to produce a full cinema sound experience without waking the rest of your home. Continue reading...
If OpenAI can't keep its own team together, what hope is there for the rest of the industry? Plus, AI-generated slop' is taking over the internet Don't get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article hereEverything happens so much. I'm in Seoul for the International AI summit, the half-year follow-up to last year's Bletchley Park AI safety summit (the full sequel will be in Paris this autumn). While you read this, the first day of events will have just wrapped up - though, in keeping with the reduced fuss this time round, that was merely a virtual" leaders' meeting.When the date was set for this summit - alarmingly late in the day for, say, a journalist with two preschool children for whom four days away from home is a juggling act - it was clear that there would be a lot to cover. The hot AI summer is upon us:The inaugural AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in the UK last year announced an international testing framework for AI models, after calls ... for a six-month pause in development of powerful systems.There has been no pause. The Bletchley declaration, signed by UK, US, EU, China and others, hailed the enormous global opportunities" from AI but also warned of its potential for causing catastrophic" harm. It also secured a commitment from big tech firms including OpenAI, Google and Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to cooperate with governments on testing their models before they are released.A former senior employee at OpenAI has said the company behind ChatGPT is prioritising shiny products" over safety, revealing that he quit after a disagreement over key aims reached breaking point".Leike detailed the reasons for his departure in a thread on X posted on Friday, in which he said safety culture had become a lower priority. Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products," he wrote.I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI", has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.Slop" is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated material up on the web for anyone to view.Unlike a chatbot, the slop isn't interactive, and is rarely intended to actually answer readers' questions or serve their needs. Continue reading...
OpenAI says Sky' is not an imitation of actor's voice after users compare it to AI companion character in film HerScarlett Johansson has spoken out against OpenAI after the company used a voice eerily resembling her own in its new ChatGPT product.The actor said in a statement she was approached by OpenAI nine months ago to voice its AI system but declined for personal reasons". Johansson was shocked" and angered" when she heard the voice option, which sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference," she said. Continue reading...
Letitia James announces victims fund for defrauded investors' in largest settlement the state has ever made with a crypto companyNew York's attorney general has secured a $2bn settlement with the bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Genesis Global over allegations it had defrauded thousands of investors.Genesis, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US in January 2023, received court approval last week to return about $3bn in cash and cryptocurrency to its customers in a liquidation. Continue reading...
Juergens had never acted before she played the fearsome but troubled Senua in Ninja Theory's game - and won a Bafta for it. Now she's back to battle the character's demons in a sequelI hope people can relate to Senua," says actor Melina Juergens, who plays the lead character in Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, the newest game from British developer Ninja Theory. I hope people play it and feel what somebody goes through on a daily basis who suffers from mental health issues - particularly psychosis. [They] come away with an understanding of it, able to empathise with people more."Juergens did not expect to be playing this role for the second time. In fact, she never expected to play it the first time. She was a video editor at the independent games studio when the first Hellblade game, Senua's Sacrifice, was gestating in 2012. They were looking for an actress, but in the meantime they asked me to step in to help out with [performance capture] tech experiments," she tells me. At some point, they asked me to perform a scene. The director really liked it and offered me the role." Continue reading...
by Samuel Gibbs Consumer technology editor on (#6MXYX)
Apple's mid-range tablet gets larger screen option and more power, being pro' enough for mostApple has more options than ever for those after a tablet with different sizes, prices, screens and power, but the iPad Air is fairly simple to understand - it is the premium big-screen iPad for those who don't want to fork out thousands for an iPad Pro.The Air starts at 599 (699/$599/A$999) and is now available in two screen sizes: the original 11in and a larger 13in model for big-screen viewing. That puts it right in the middle of Apple's lineup, with the 10th-gen iPad starting at 349 at the bottom and topped by the new iPad Pro M4 starting at 999. Continue reading...
Jan Leike, a key safety researcher at firm behind ChatGPT, quit days after launch of its latest AI model, GPT-4oA former senior employee at OpenAI has said the company behind ChatGPT is prioritising shiny products" over safety, revealing that he quit after a disagreement over key aims reached breaking point".Jan Leike was a key safety researcher at OpenAI as its co-head of superalignment, ensuring that powerful artificial intelligence systems adhered to human values and aims. His intervention comes before a global artificial intelligence summit in Seoul next week, where politicians, experts and tech executives will discuss oversight of the technology. Continue reading...
The invisible downside to our online lives is the data stored at giant energy-guzzling datacentresIt's been called the largest coal-powered machine on Earth" - and most of us use it countless times a day.The internet and its associated digital industry are estimated to produce about the same emissions annually as aviation. But we barely think about pollution while snapping 16 duplicate photos of our pets, which are immediately uploaded to the cloud. Continue reading...
Town of Grunheide approved the US automaker's plan on Thursday to double the capacity of the site, despite oppositionEnvironmental protesters vowed to keep up the pressure on Tesla after failing to stop plans by Elon Musk's company from expanding its sprawling electric vehicle plant outside Berlin.The town council of Grunheide, guarded by police and plain-clothed security guards, gave the green light on Thursday to the US automaker after a heated, nearly three-hour debate disrupted by heckling and booing from the audience of about 200 people. Continue reading...
Google I/O attendees were redirected to another entrance as protesters denounced company's ties to Israeli military projectsHundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters chained themselves together in front of the entrance to Google's annual developer conference on Tuesday in protest of the tech company's ties to Israeli military projects. Thousands of attendees waiting to enter Google I/O were redirected to another entrance, and the event started on time.Groups including the No Tech for Genocide coalition and other groups from across the Bay Area held a sign reading Google stop fueling genocide". They chanted we won't stop til Nimbus gets dropped," referencing a $1.2bn project supported by Amazon and Google that provides provides artificial intelligence and cloud computing services to the Israeli government. Continue reading...
Technology | The Guardian