1. Machine Learning: Machine learning is a type of AI that allows machines to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. It uses algorithms to analyze data and make predictions or decisions.
2. Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP is an AI technology that enables machines to understand human language. It is used in various applications, such as chatbots and voice assistants.
3. Computer Vision: Computer vision is an AI technology that enables machines to interpret and understand visual information from the world around them. It is used in applications such as facial recognition and object detection.
4. Deep Learning: Deep learning is a type of machine learning that uses neural networks to learn and make predictions or decisions. It is used in applications such as image and speech recognition.
5. Robotics: Robotics is an AI technology that involves the design and construction of robots. Robots can be programmed to perform various tasks, such as assembly line work or surgery.
6. Autonomous Vehicles: Autonomous vehicles are vehicles that can operate without human intervention. They use various AI technologies, such as computer vision and machine learning, to navigate roads and make decisions.
7. Speech Recognition: Speech recognition is an AI technology that allows machines to understand and transcribe human speech. It is used in applications such as virtual assistants and call centers.
8. Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics is an AI technology that uses data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data.
9. Recommendation Systems: Recommendation systems are AI technologies that provide personalized recommendations to users based on their behavior and preferences. They are used in applications such as e-commerce and streaming services.
10. Sentiment Analysis: Sentiment analysis is an AI technology that analyzes text to determine the emotional tone behind it. It is used in applications such as social media monitoring and customer service.
11. Fraud Detection: Fraud detection is an AI technology that uses machine learning algorithms to identify fraudulent activity. It is used in applications such as banking and insurance.
12. Cybersecurity: Cybersecurity is an AI technology that uses machine learning algorithms to identify and prevent cyber attacks. It is used in applications such as network security and threat detection.
13. Virtual Assistants: Virtual assistants are AI technologies that can interact with users through voice or text. They are used in applications such as customer service and personal productivity.
14. Chatbots: Chatbots are AI technologies that can simulate human conversation through text or voice. They are used in applications such as customer service and sales.
15. Facial Recognition: Facial recognition is an AI technology that uses computer vision to identify and authenticate individuals based on their facial features. It is used in applications such as security and access control.
16. Emotion Recognition: Emotion recognition is an AI technology that uses machine learning algorithms to identify human emotions. It is used in applications such as healthcare and marketing.
17. Augmented Reality: Augmented reality is an AI technology that overlays digital information onto the real world. It is used in applications such as gaming and retail.
18. Virtual Reality: Virtual reality is an AI technology that creates a simulated environment that can be interacted with in a realistic way. It is used in applications such as gaming and training.
19. Biometrics: Biometrics is an AI technology that uses unique physical or behavioral characteristics to identify individuals. It is used in applications such as security and access control.
20. Blockchain: Blockchain is an AI technology that uses distributed ledger technology to create secure and transparent records.

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The message described advances in artificial intelligence (AI) as “remarkable” but also noted its “disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects.”

Francis stressed the importance of being “vigilant” so that a “logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices at the expense of the most fragile and excluded.”

Otherwise, this will lead to injustice and inequalities that could “fuel conflicts and antagonisms,” he said in a message released for the next World Peace Day that will fall on January 1st.

Traditionally shared in advance, the message also noted the “urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity.”

While the 86-year-old pontiff previously said he did not know how to use a computer, he frequently shares his thoughts on modern technology and its impact on society, recently stating that “even priests and nuns” watch pornography online.

Francis has a sizable social media following and does not shy away from selfies. Earlier this year, AI-generated images of the “swagged-out” pope wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket went viral.

Source

“The entire world would like more chips for doing generative AI, whether that’s GPUs or whether that’s Amazon’s own chips that we’re designing,” Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky told CNBC in an interview in June. “I think that we’re in a better position than anybody else on Earth to supply the capacity that our customers collectively are going to want.”

Yet others have acted faster, and invested more, to capture business from the generative AI boom. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, Microsoft gained widespread attention for hosting the viral chatbot, and investing a reported $13 billion in OpenAI. It was quick to add the generative AI models to its own products, incorporating them into Bing in February. 

That same month, Google launched its own large language model, Bard, followed by a $300 million investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic. 

It wasn’t until April that Amazon announced its own family of large language models, called Titan, along with a service called Bedrock to help developers enhance software using generative AI.

“Amazon is not used to chasing markets. Amazon is used to creating markets. And I think for the first time in a long time, they are finding themselves on the back foot and they are working to play catch up,” said Chirag Dekate, VP analyst at Gartner.

Meta also recently released its own LLM, Llama 2. The open-source ChatGPT rival is now available for people to test on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud.

Chips as ‘true differentiation’

In the long run, Dekate said, Amazon’s custom silicon could give it an edge in generative AI. 

“I think the true differentiation is the technical capabilities that they’re bringing to bear,” he said. “Because guess what? Microsoft does not have Trainium or Inferentia,” he said.

AWS quietly started production of custom silicon back in 2013 with a piece of specialized hardware called Nitro. It’s now the highest-volume AWS chip. Amazon told CNBC there is at least one in every AWS server, with a total of more than 20 million in use. 

AWS started production of custom silicon back in 2013 with this piece of specialized hardware called Nitro. Amazon told CNBC in August that Nitro is now the highest volume AWS chip, with at least one in every AWS server and a total of more than 20 million in use.
Courtesy Amazon

In 2015, Amazon bought Israeli chip startup Annapurna Labs. Then in 2018, Amazon launched its Arm-based server chip, Graviton, a rival to x86 CPUs from giants like AMD and Intel.

“Probably high single-digit to maybe 10% of total server sales are Arm, and a good chunk of those are going to be Amazon. So on the CPU side, they’ve done quite well,” said Stacy Rasgon, senior analyst at Bernstein Research.

Also in 2018, Amazon launched its AI-focused chips. That came two years after Google announced its first Tensor Processor Unit, or TPU. Microsoft has yet to announce the Athena AI chip it’s been working on, reportedly in partnership with AMD. 

CNBC got a behind-the-scenes tour of Amazon’s chip lab in Austin, Texas, where Trainium and Inferentia are developed and tested. VP of product Matt Wood explained what both chips are for.

“Machine learning breaks down into these two different stages. So you train the machine learning models and then you run inference against those trained models,” Wood said. “Trainium provides about 50% improvement in terms of price performance relative to any other way of training machine learning models on AWS.”

Trainium first came on the market in 2021, following the 2019 release of Inferentia, which is now on its second generation.

Trainum allows customers “to deliver very, very low-cost, high-throughput, low-latency, machine learning inference, which is all the predictions of when you type in a prompt into your generative AI model, that’s where all that gets processed to give you the response, ” Wood said.

For now, however, Nvidia’s GPUs are still king when it comes to training models. In July, AWS launched new AI acceleration hardware powered by Nvidia H100s. 

“Nvidia chips have a massive software ecosystem that’s been built up around them over the last like 15 years that nobody else has,” Rasgon said. “The big winner from AI right now is Nvidia.”

Amazon’s custom chips, from left to right, Inferentia, Trainium and Graviton are shown at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters on July 13, 2023.
Joseph Huerta

Leveraging cloud dominance

AWS’ cloud dominance, however, is a big differentiator for Amazon.

“Amazon does not need to win headlines. Amazon already has a really strong cloud install base. All they need to do is to figure out how to enable their existing customers to expand into value creation motions using generative AI,” Dekate said.

When choosing between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for generative AI, there are millions of AWS customers who may be drawn to Amazon because they’re already familiar with it, running other applications and storing their data there.

“It’s a question of velocity. How quickly can these companies move to develop these generative AI applications is driven by starting first on the data they have in AWS and using compute and machine learning tools that we provide,” explained Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, VP of technology at AWS.

AWS is the world’s biggest cloud computing provider, with 40% of the market share in 2022, according to technology industry researcher Gartner.

Although operating income has been down year-over-year for three quarters in a row, AWS still accounted for 70% of Amazon’s overall $7.7 billion operating profit in the second quarter. AWS’ operating margins have historically been far wider than those at Google Cloud.

AWS also has a growing portfolio of developer tools focused on generative AI.

“Let’s rewind the clock even before ChatGPT. It’s not like after that happened, suddenly we hurried and came up with a plan because you can’t engineer a chip in that quick a time, let alone you can’t build a Bedrock service in a matter of 2 to 3 months,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’ VP of database, analytics and machine learning.

Bedrock gives AWS customers access to large language models made by Anthropic, Stability AI, AI21 Labs and Amazon’s own Titan.

“We don’t believe that one model is going to rule the world, and we want our customers to have the state-of-the-art models from multiple providers because they are going to pick the right tool for the right job,” Sivasubramanian said.

An Amazon employee works on custom AI chips, in a jacket branded with AWS’ chip Inferentia, at the AWS chip lab in Austin, Texas, on July 25, 2023.
Katie Tarasov

One of Amazon’s newest AI offerings is AWS HealthScribe, a service unveiled in July to help doctors draft patient visit summaries using generative AI. Amazon also has SageMaker, a machine learning hub that offers algorithms, models and more. 

Another big tool is coding companion CodeWhisperer, which Amazon said has enabled developers to complete tasks 57% faster on average. Last year, Microsoft also reported productivity boosts from its coding companion, GitHub Copilot. 

In June, AWS announced a $100 million generative AI innovation “center.” 

“We have so many customers who are saying, ‘I want to do generative AI,’ but they don’t necessarily know what that means for them in the context of their own businesses. And so we’re going to bring in solutions architects and engineers and strategists and data scientists to work with them one on one,” AWS CEO Selipsky said.

Although so far AWS has focused largely on tools instead of building a competitor to ChatGPT, a recently leaked internal email shows Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is directly overseeing a new central team building out expansive large language models, too.

In the second-quarter earnings call, Jassy said a “very significant amount” of AWS business is now driven by AI and more than 20 machine learning services it offers. Some examples of customers include Philips, 3M, Old Mutual and HSBC. 

The explosive growth in AI has come with a flurry of security concerns from companies worried that employees are putting proprietary information into the training data used by public large language models.

“I can’t tell you how many Fortune 500 companies I’ve talked to who have banned ChatGPT. So with our approach to generative AI and our Bedrock service, anything you do, any model you use through Bedrock will be in your own isolated virtual private cloud environment. It’ll be encrypted, it’ll have the same AWS access controls,” Selipsky said.

For now, Amazon is only accelerating its push into generative AI, telling CNBC that “over 100,000” customers are using machine learning on AWS today. Although that’s a small percentage of AWS’s millions of customers, analysts say that could change.

“What we are not seeing is enterprises saying, ‘Oh, wait a minute, Microsoft is so ahead in generative AI, let’s just go out and let’s switch our infrastructure strategies, migrate everything to Microsoft.’ Dekate said. “If you’re already an Amazon customer, chances are you’re likely going to explore Amazon ecosystems quite extensively.”

Source

What you need to know

• Larian Studios has released a third major hotfix for its hit new RPG, Baldur's Gate 3.
• The update includes over 200 fixes for various bugs and issues, as well as a few gameplay tweaks.
• Notably, the patch makes it so that Scratch the dog can search for spots to dig on his own. Previously, you had to order him to do it.
• Players can report bugs through Larian's support page, which we've linked in the text below.

Just a few days after Larian Studios released its second major hotfix for Baldur's Gate 3, the developer has pushed a third one live. The update is available to download now on the Windows PC version of the game. Notably, Larian has confirmed that these fixes, along with the ones from previous hotfixes, will be rolled into the version of the massive fantasy RPG that's coming to PS5 on September 6.

In total, Hotfix #3 resolves over 200 bugs and issues while also fixing and improving a few gameplay elements. The most notable tweak is the ability for Scratch the dog to sniff around for digging spots automatically, helping you find useful buried items. Before, he'd only do it if you ordered him to.

(Image credit: Larian Studios)

Larian has also decided to give all players the Blue Behir skin for their dice. The Baldur's Gate 3 community has been trying to figure out how to unlock the light blue dice appearance ever since the game released since some players had access to it and others didn't, but according to the developer, it sounds like it was intended to be a post-launch addition since "lucky players may have gotten hold of it early."

For the full Hotfix #3 patch notes, make sure you check out the section below. Note that there are story spoilers in them, so read carefully if you want to avoid those. For your convenience, we've clearly marked every patch note that has a spoiler in it. If you have bugs, glitches, or other issues to report, Larian is directing players to its support page.

Baldur's Gate 3: Hotfix #3 patch notes

Here are the Hotfix #3 patch notes, taken directly from Larian's Steam post.

Crashes and Blockers

• Fixed an issue with spell slots that would prevent you from levelling up while multiclassing.
• Fixed an edge case issue preventing you from initiating a Long Rest.
• Fixed a cross-save issue causing you to get stuck syncing indefinitely, which prevented saving and loading.
• Fixed a crash that would occur when selecting a summon without a hotbar while a deck in the hotbar was maximised.

Multiplayer

• Fixed the Hireling UI from being split in half on each monitor in splitscreen.
• Fixed some visual artefacts appearing on split-screen when using Vulkan.
• Wyll now correctly recognises and confronts Karlach when you speak to him with a Karlach avatar after another avatar has already spoken to him.

Combat

• Spoiler: Fixed the cultists in the Temple of Bhaal reacting strangely to Wild Shaped characters in combat.
• The guards in the Counting House will now continue pursuing you through the vault room.
• Spoiler: Fixed the camera not working correctly in combat with Ansur.
• Fixed a bug that would let you use the Hide action outside of your turn in combat.
• Increased Isobel's AC to restore the intended balance.
• Increased Glitterbeard's HP and Dexterity and gave him the Shield spell.
• Spoiler: If you deal damage to certain Bhaalist lackeys in the Sewers, they will now lose their Unstoppable condition.
• Spoiler: Fixed Haarlep going to the Ethereal Plane on the killing blow and then coming back again.
• Added the NPCs in the drider's convoy to the same combat group.
• Spoiler: Fixed the hag having her illusions occasionally spawn on top of an explosive mine.
• Fixed an issue where gnolls took too much time to react during the start of their turn after their pack leader attacked them.

Character Creation

• Fixed mismatches between colours in Character Creation and in game, mainly affecting horns.

Audio

• When things go south in Crèche Y'llek, the music now goes from mellow to metal.

Gameplay

• Fixed an issue preventing you from talking to Withers in Act 3.
• Companions can now also trigger various tutorial pop-ups.
• Scratch can now find digging spots by himself.
• Fixed a hatch in the Emerald Grove not unlocking after a successful check.
• The Devil's in the Details achievement can now be achieved by all party members, including followers.
• Fixed an issue with crimes that meant you wouldn't get caught committing a crime if another party member had already committed a more severe crime and resolved it peacefully.
• You now consistently get the Bloodless condition the morning after Astarion bites you.
• Fixed a bug allowing you to spam party members' voiced lines near the log where you can recruit Karlach.
• Wyll no longer says you should find and slay Karlach after you've recruited her.
• If Jatlo is still disguised after the shadow curse has been lifted, he will now drop his disguise when attacked.
• Made sure Youth Vis'kiir looks like he's cleaning before you talk to him in Crèche Y'llek.
• Fixed the hatchery and infirmary map markers in Crèche Y'llek.
• Spoiler: Lae'zel will no longer permanently leave the party if you refuse to follow through with Vlaakith's orders.
• Spoiler: Fixed a bug preventing you from using the planecaster in Crèche Y'llek.
• Removed ownership from the portraits of Lohse and Sebille so that taking them is not a crime.
• Increased the bounds of the Inquisitor's room in Crèche Y'llek so that the game doesn't think you've left if you enter one of the side rooms.
• When playing as Shadowheart, telling Astarion about your affiliation with Shar now affects his approval rating.
• Astarion will now be better at remembering whether you've seen his back.
• You can no longer loot the items belonging to the Inquisitor in Crèche Y'llek without consequence.
• Spoiler: Fixed the range indicators on the orthon's quickly ticking mines.
• Spoiler: The dialogue that follows combat with Cazador will now trigger correctly even if you interact with a certain sarcophagus during combat.
• Alfira's lute is no longer invisible while she plays it at camp.
• Fixed the explosion VFX for the toy chest in the barn in Wyrm's Crossing.
  Added a proper name to a note in Sharess' Caress.
• Spoiler: Carion will now resurrect with full health instead of 0 HP, and you can now reach his jars.
• Interacting with certain rune slates on the nautiloid now correctly triggers the narrator's line.
• Spoiler: Fixed the alarm in the Counting House going off when it shouldn't.
• Spoiler: Orin will now react to Wild Shaped characters in the Temple of Bhaal.
• Spoiler: Added a world label to Orin's body so she's easier to find.
• Removed duplicated furniture in the Elfsong Tavern.
• Made a door in the Elfsong Tavern indestructible.
• Fixed edge cases where characters would not correctly attach to the game grid, causing knock-on issues.

Journal

• Fixed the journal not updating after you meet the pale individuals at Fraygo's Flophouse.
• The journal now updates correctly for the Rescue the Trapped Man quest.
• Dame Guisarme now reacts more accurately to your progress in the Investigate the Murders quest.
• Fixed an inaccurate line in the Help the Hag Survivors quest.
• Fixed a misleading journal update in the Find the Mushroom Picker quest.
• Updated Wyll's map marker to make a quest objective more precise.
• Made it easier to resolve the Wake Up Art Cullagh quest if you follow up with Art.
• Fixed a confusing map marker and added an extra step for clarity in the Find the Nightsong quest.
• Improved the journal entry flow for the Solve the Open Hand Temple Murders quest.
• Spoiler: Fixed the Investigate Cazador's Palace quest not completing if you help Astarion finish what Cazador started.

Flow and Scripting

• Spoiler: Fixed Shadowheart's dialogue on the nautiloid playing twice when playing as Avatar Lae'zel.
• Removed a dialogue option that's no longer relevant when talking to Karlach.
• Spoiler: Made sure you get Astarion's bitey scene at camp if you discover his secret through other means.
• Fixed Astarion mentioning things that haven't happened yet if you romance him early on.
• Fixed Avatar Gale's hunger not progressing if doesn't meet Tara before leaving the nautiloid crash site.
• Fixed an issue that prevented Brakkal from triggering the correct dialogue when he's being released if his goblin guards left with Minthara for the raid.
• Minthara now reacts more appropriately if you kill all the tieflings.
• Removed unnecessary VFX in a dialogue with Raphael at Last Light.
• Fixed Glut saying the wrong line when he reanimates a spore servant.
• Made the dialogue options with Therezzyn more relevant if you've already been to the hatchery.
• Spoiler: Fixed a bug causing the wrong dialogue to play when speaking to the Reconstituted Duellist if you haven't met him before.
• Fixed the same dialogue option appearing twice when interacting with the Mirror of Loss.
• Kled will now play the correct dialogues in Old Garlow's Place.
• Made sure Lakrissa and Alfira don't appear in the Elfsong Tavern if you didn't save them.
• Fixed the same dialogue option appearing twice when interacting with the Mirror of Loss.
• Kled will now play the correct dialogues in Old Garlow's Place.
• Made sure Lakrissa and Alfira don't appear in the Elfsong Tavern if you didn't save them.
• Spoiler: Fixed a line about Lorroakan appearing in a dialogue at camp if you haven't met him yet.
• Spoiler: You can no longer ask Isobel the same question about Ketheric on two separate occasions.
• Fixed some wrong lines playing when you reach a late stage of the game.
• Fixed Toobin thinking you have a runepowder bomb when you don't.
• Spoiler: Mizora no longer disappears from the game after you resolve the Iron Throne situation.
• Spoiler: After Mizora pops up at the Iron Throne, she will now be back at camp instead of disappearing.
• Spoiler: Wyll no longer talks about his father as if he's not there anymore if his father was saved.
• Fixed Havkelaag accepting the gith egg via dialogue when he doesn't have enough gold for it, and made it impossible to pickpocket back if you sold it to him.
• Korrilla is now better at recognising how you responded to Raphael's deal.
• Swapped two couples in the Elfsong Tavern so that they sit at the right tables.
• Fixed Jaheira becoming a follower in Moonrise even if the conditions weren't met, which could cause other issues with Jaheira's flow.
• Fixed Jaheira not returning to her human form once she leaves your party.
• Spoiler: If Cazador's bats are too far from the player to join combat, they will now join anyway.
• Spoiler: Fixed the dialogue skill checks if you die in combat with the honour guard and are revived by the Emperor in Wyrm's Lookout.
• Spoiler: Fixed the AI taking control of Lae'zel and kicking you out of a multiplayer game, with Lae'zel becoming hostile towards the remaining player if they chose to betray Vlaakith and Inquisitor W'wargaz.
• Spoiler: Improved Halsin's reactivity to whether or not you've been to Grymforge.
• Fixed some incorrect options showing up in dialogue with Halsin about a particular drow couple.
• Spoiler: Fixed Orin assuming you ate a particular morsel, even if you didn't.
• Spoiler: Fixed a blocker preventing Nightsong from going to Ramazith's Tower, and other issues related to her appearing in the wrong place or not appearing at all.

UI

• Made Blue Behir Dice permanently available on all platforms with just the base game.
• Fixed the UI seemingly disappearing because the game thinks a character is still in a dialogue, which could happen when going into a dialogue in the middle of combat.
• Fixed the Attack button disappearing from the dialogue UI after loading a savegame made during a dialogue.

Cinematics

• Made sure that you get a certain dialogue with Voss at camp.
• Fixed a repeating dialogue when talking to Gale while Wild Shaped.
• Fixed Astarion repeating information about his master if you speak to him twice in a row.
• Fixed Astarion oversharing about his master a little too early.
• Fixed a leg twitch in a conversation between Shadowheart and a certain dame.
• Moved the Dark Urge to a different pod on the nautiloid to prevent the wrong dialogue from playing.
• Fixed Astarion's knife not being held against dragonborn throats correctly during his recruitment dialogue at the beach.
• Made general improvements to a dialogue at camp with Astarion.
• Added a missing animation for Karlach in Astarion's recruitment dialogue.
• Gale's head now rests correctly on his bedroll pillow.
• Cleaned up pops and mocap issues in the dialogue where Gale teaches you a spell.
• Fixed Gale's arms clipping with his thigh.
• Fixed where characters are looking and facing in the dialogue where Gale reveals his history.
• Fixed Wyll's head jitters and strange turns during his recruitment dialogue.
• Made general improvements to cameras, facial reactions, and movements in a dialogue at camp with Wyll.
• Cleaned up the mocap in the scene where Lae'zel is suspended in a cage.
• Tall characters' hands no longer clip with their face when interacting with Karlach in a romantic moment.
• Adjusted Edowin's pose in the dialogue with him and his siblings in the forest.
• Fixed a corpse in the Goblin Camp from standing back up when you use Speak with Dead on it.
• Tweaked the cameras and facial expressions in the dialogue with Halsin during the celebration at camp.
• Fixed clipping with a statue in a camp dialogue at night with Gale.
• Fixed animation issues if you turn down Gale in the dialogue where he teaches you a spell.
• Adjusted some hand positions when interacting with the console on the nautiloid.
• Shadowheart is now sitting in a better pose when fiddling with her mysterious artefact during her camp scene.
• Fixed emotions and facial expressions in dialogues with Shadowheart, Omotola, and Minthara.
• Fixed a camera shot when talking to the mind flayer on the beach.
• Fixed an irrelevant line playing in a camp dialogue with Shadowheart.
• Fixed dragonborn players turning in the wrong direction after Astarion's bitey scene at camp.
• Fixed Roland and Lia looking in the wrong direction in their dialogue in the Emerald Grove.
• Fixed a camera issue in a dialogue with Silfy in the Emerald Grove.
• Fixed characters' legs clipping into the ground when looking through the telescope in the Emerald Grove.
• Fixed some mocap-related pops in a dialogue with Cerys in the Emerald Grove.
• Fixed a pop for one of the ogres in the Blighted Village.
• Fixed some camera issues and removed a ring from the background in the dialogue where Crusher asks you to kiss his foot.
• Improved facial expressions, camera shots and other issues in Shadowheart's recruitment dialogue at the Goblin Camp.
• Fixed a twisting forearm in a dialogue between Lae'zel and Voss at camp.
• Fixed characters clipping into each other when they're feeling ill at camp.
• Characters now appear correctly in the dialogue with the bugbear in the forest. The ogre's weapon is also now hidden.
• Fixed the camera clipping into the ground when speaking with your Dream Visitor at camp.
• Cleaned up the animations when Sceleritas Fel tells the Dark Urge to commit a certain misdeed.
• Fixed halflings' thumbs clipping through the Soul Coin when speaking to Nadira.
• Made general improvements to cameras, facial expressions, and animations for a romance dialogue with Wyll.
• Fixed some camera issues in the dialogue with Oskar in the Zhent hideout.
• Lae'zel is no longer invisible during Shadowheart's recruitment dialogue by the Chapel.
• Cleaned up some mocap and made general improvements in the dialogue with Glut.
• Removed an incorrect animation during the dialogue with The Necromancy of Thay.
• Fixed a minor clip when speaking to Sovereign Spaw in the Underdark.
• Fixed feet not making contact with the ground when using Feather Fall to leap into the Underdark.
• Fixed an animation issue when exchanging noblestalk with Derryth in the Underdark.
• Fixed a head pop in the scene on the raft in the Underdark.
• Fixed Lae'zel's crossed eyes in the dialogue with Lady Esther near Rosymorn Monastery
• Fixed a couple of lines related to Zorru and Crèche Y'llek playing at the wrong moment.
• Fixed the position of characters' feet to prevent clipping, and moved Lae'zel to prevent her looking the wrong way in Crèche Y'llek.
• Added fade-ins and -outs and tweaked the facial expressions in the dialogue with Kansif in the Shadow-Cursed Lands.
• Hid a goblin floating in the background when talking to the drider in the Shadow-Cursed Lands.
• Fixed paddle hands in the scene where Harpers ambush the drider's convoy in the Shadow-Cursed Lands.
• Fixed the drider jittering and cameras looking the wrong way when you examine the Harpers' bodies after the ambush in the Shadow-Cursed Lands.
• Fixed some animations and camera issues in the dialogue with Harper Skywin in the Shadow-Cursed Lands.
• Fixed one of Jaheira's lines getting cut off in the dialogue with her at Last Light.
• Fixed the timing of Marcus' wing flap animation when he flies away from Last Light.
• Fixed a dagger appearing beneath the Strange Ox at Last Light if you use Speak with Animals on it.
• Fixed Jaheira looking like she sinks into the ground on certain lines.
• Fixed a barrel clipping with Thisobald Thorm's pipes.
• Thisobald Thorm's tubes no longer twitch and twist.
• Fixed head angles and pops in a dialogue with Araj and Astarion at Moonrise.
• Fixed camera and character placement issues in a dialogue with Jaheira at Moonrise.
• Fixed some camera angles in a dialogue with Araj at Moonrise.
• Fixed the lipsyncing for a rat in the Gauntlet of Shar.
• Spoiler: Made sure large characters don't block or clip into Shadowheart when you arrive in the Shadowfell.
• Spoiler: Fixed clipping in a shot in the Colony with the three Chosen.
• Spoiler: The camera will no longer try to show a shot of Minsc if he isn't present in the Temple of Bhaal.
• Removed certain pale individuals from the background of a camp dialogue.
• Fixed a duplicate line in dialogue with Gortash in Wyrm's Crossing.
• Cleaned up the animations for Izzy, the girl trying to sneak into the circus.
• Fixed hirelings clipping into whoever's talking in the dialogue with Zethino in the circus.
• Fixed character placement and clipping issues in a camp scene at the Elfsong Tavern.
• Cleaned up the mocap in the dialogue with Allandra Grey in the Water Queen's House.
• Fixed the pacing of how a certain character in the House of Grief is revealed.
• Fixed where companions and Shadowheart are looking when meeting a particular character in the House of Grief.
• Fixed some facial expressions and camera issues in the dialogue that plays after Gortash is defeated.
• Fixed several snaps and twitches in the dialogue with the pale individuals at Fraygo's Flophouse.
• Improved the facial expressions and timing when talking to Lady Flux in the Guildhall.
• Fixed an issue with where characters are looking in the dialogue with Aradin at Sorcerous Sundries.
• Spoiler: Fixed the wrong animation being used when closing a sarcophagus in Cazador's palace.
• Added new camera shots in a romance dialogue with Halsin and in dialogues in the Stormshore Tabernacle.
• Spoiler: Fixed Sarevok looking like he floats upwards at the Tribunal.
• Spoiler: Made sure the chains are no longer there after you free Valeria.
• Spoiler: Fixed an animation to avoid clipping for halflings male when they hold the Helm of Balduran.
• Spoiler: Fixed Orin and her victim being invisible when you enter the Temple of Bhaal.
• Fixed Astarion jittering in a dialogue by a particular pool.
• Made sure characters don't stay in their Wild Shape in an endgame cinematic dialogue.
• Fixed excessive neck twisting in an endgame dialogue.
• Fixed some mocap-related pops in an endgame dialogue with Wyll.
• Fixed an issue in one of Karlach's final dialogues, causing it to end too early.
• Spoiler: The Emperor is no longer missing from one of the endgame cinematics.
• Fixed a line being cut off in a game over dialogue.
• Fixed some issues with Wyll's mocap in an endgame dialogue.
• Fixed pops in an endgame dialogue with Gale.
• Fixed an issue preventing one of Karlach's final scenes from triggering and made sure she's wearing her camp clothing in romance dialogues.
• Fixed the wrong characters appearing in a cinematic shot near the end of the game.

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South Park: Snow Day

Developed by Question Games, this title is the latest video game adaptation of the long-running adult animated TV series. This time, the kids in South Park, colourado don't have to go to school because of a big winter storm. The game lets you and three friends battle it out on the snowy streets "on a quest to save the world and enjoy a day without school." It's due in 2024 for PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch.

Tempest Rising - Play a free demo now until August 28

Tempest Rising is an upcoming Command and Conquer-inspired RTS game from Slipgate Ironworks, 2B Games, and 3D Realms. You can try out a playable demo now on Steam. It states:

It features the full first single-player mission of the Global Defense Forces (GDF) campaign, as they go up against the lethal Tempest Dynasty, as well as the dangers growing unchecked across a war-torn planet Earth. Players will be introduced to five playable GDF unit types, from the Drone Operator to the Sentinel Scout Car, plus six enemy types.

The demo is available until August 28, but there's no release date yet for the full game, which is due on the PC.

TMNT: The Last Ronin

Based on the dark Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic of the same name, developer Black Forest Games will feature the last remaining Turtle in a battle-ravaged future New York City. There's no release date yet for this game for the PC, Xbox, and Playstation platforms.

Titan Quest II

The long-requested sequel to the Greek mythological-themed action-RPG game is finally coming from developer Grimlore Games. Here's a quick summary:

Nemesis, Goddess of Retribution, is out of control. She is corrupting the Threads of Fate and condemning all those who oppose her to eternal punishment - including you. Take up your weapon, fight alongside gods, and change fate itself in order to stop Nemesis, free those she’s punished, and weave your own epic tale.

The game is coming to PC but does not have a release date.

Other games

• Last Train Home - This is a PC-exclusive survival and strategy title from Asheborne Games where you "guide Czechoslovak soldiers back home onboard an armored train" It's due in 2023.
• Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy - This game is due out in just a few weeks on August 31 for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation
• Way of the Hunter - Tikamoon Plains - This is the latest DLC pack in the hunting sim series, and it's out right now
• Alone in the Dark - We got to see two new trailers for the upcoming survival horror game reboot featuring actors Jodie Comer and David Harbour. It's due out in October for the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms.
• Space For Sale - The PC-exclusive title from developer Mirage Game Studio has you trying to develop and sell properties in space to aliens. You can sign up for the closed beta test now.
• Outcast: A New Beginning - There's a new trailer for this long awaited sequel to the sci-fi action-adventure game for the PC, with no release date yet.
• Gothic remake - There's also a new trailer for the fantasy RPG remake, coming some time for the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms.
• Wrecknation - Finally, there's a new trailer for the arcade racing game where you create your own wild tracks to race on. Its TBD for the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms.

THQ Nordic still has 20 unannounced games that are still in development.

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THQ Nordic just held its annual games showcase, and among its slate of announcements was a surprise reveal of Titan Quest II. This sequel to the original Titan Quest from 2006 will be built on Unreal Engine 5 (via RPS), bringing the Ancient Greece-set action RPG experience to modern audiences as part of a whole new adventure.

Catch the announcement trailer below, though no gameplay has been shown off yet.

The development is being handled by THQ Nordic's in-house studio Grimlore Games. This is the same developer that delivered the well-received strategy game SpellForce 3.

The studio promises hordes of mythological creatures to defeat, the return of the original game's custom class structure, challenging combat, a new loot system that encourages players to experiment, and a "hand-crafted world". Of course, like most ARPGs, co-op play is confirmed too.

Here's how the game's setting is described:

Once again, adventurers will find themselves fully immersed in the mythic landscapes of ancient Greece, confronting unprecedented challenges, seeking out exquisite treasures, and expertly blending diverse masteries to forge distinctive and potent character builds. Their ultimate mission? To thwart the plans of Nemesis, the very Goddess of Retribution, as she intricately weaves malevolence into the very fabric of Fate's Threads. Are you ready to stand against a deity and inscribe your own heroic saga?

Unfortunately, a release date was not shared at the presentation, so fans may be waiting a while to get their hands on the sequel. While THQ Nordic's official press material only mentions Titan Quest II coming to PC whenever it's ready, the game's website presently showcases Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 as target platforms alongside Windows.

For those looking to jump into the universe a bit early, the original Titan Quest is currently on sale on Steam with a 75% off discount. This is thanks to the THQ Nordic publisher sale that's running to celebrate the new announcements.

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This week, we might have gotten one of those bits of info. A new teaser trailer for the revamped Odyssey Neo G9 was posted on YouTube. The description stated that it "brings the new world of gaming into the light of day on August 23." Hopefully, that means a date when we can actually order, or at least, pre-order, the monitor.

Back at CES 2023, Samsung said the new Odyssey Neo G9 would have a resolution of 7,680 × 2,160 resolution inside its ultrawide 32:9 aspect ratio. That's the same as two UHD 28.5-inch monitors. The curved 1000R display will use quantum mini-LED technology combined with VESA Display HDR 1000 support and a fast 240Hz refresh rate.

Samsung also said at the time this monitor will be the first with DisplayPort 2.1 support, which would make sense. The new Odyssey Neo G9 would need a fast video transfer standard to make playing PC games on such a large monitor with a high refresh rate.

We would also expect that the monitor will have features like Samsung's Gaming Hub for cloud gaming services like Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming and NVIDIA GeForce Now. It will also likely have Samsung's Smart TV streaming features as well. Hopefully, it will also support split-screen gaming as well.

All of that means that the new Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 will likely have a very high price tag. We would expect it to be priced over $2,000, and perhaps much more than that. Thankfully, we won't have to wait much longer to find out.

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The GPL-2.0 license, or the GNU General Public License version 2, stands as a testament to open collaboration. It permits users to change and distribute the software, which means that developers have the liberty to modify, enhance, or even build upon the Quake II source code. This move invites a wave of innovation, as enthusiasts from around the globe can now tailor the game to their vision, ushering in diverse mods and adaptations.

The source code's release offers a deep dive into the game's mechanics and architecture. It's not just a behind-the-scenes look; it's a comprehensive toolkit for creativity. This becomes evident with the inclusion of various game modules from the original version, such as baseq2, ctf, rogue, and xatrix. Such granularity ensures that developers, both novice and seasoned, have a detailed framework to base their modifications upon.

Adding to its technical offerings, the source code updates the original with a 40hz internal tickrate. This increases the game's original internal timing by 400%, offering new levels of fluidity. This shift, aiming to provide sharper gameplay dynamics, becomes a fascinating study in optimizing game logic for better responsiveness and precision.

For those looking to create new maps or address potential compatibility issues, the source code release is a treasure trove. Tools, configurations, and the combined FGD (Forge Game Data) are all provided, ensuring that map creation, adjustment, and customization are smooth processes.

The availability of the Quake II source code is a significant stride in modern gaming, it's also a nostalgic nod to a bygone era. Quake II, in its prime, wasn't just a game; it was a revolution. It set benchmarks in graphics, gameplay, and was one of our first glimpses into 3D accelerators. By releasing its source code, the 2023 rerelease ensures that Quake II's legacy lives on.

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On the AMD side, Vega GPUs had a rendering issue where the characters' legs wouldn't render. This visual bug was resolved with game update version 1.727.0.0 Hotfix. Ray tracing also had problems on Radeon's RX 7000 series cards, which too, was resolved with a special driver update version 23.10.23.03.

Over on the Nvidia side, users reported performance loss and stuttering with DirectStorage 1.2 enabled. The title is only the second one to feature Microsoft's modern storage API. The company claims it has fixed the issue with a hotfix driver, version 537.09 (download link below):

GeForce Hotfix display driver version 537.09 is based on our latest Game Ready Driver 536.99.

This hotfix addresses the following issue:

• [Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart] Performance fluctuations due to issues between DirectStorage and some in-game settings

Nvidia has also explained that this is sort of like an emergency release without its WHQL certification and so if users are unaffected by the issue, they could wait for the next such release.

The GeForce Hotfix driver is our way to trying to get some of these fixes out to you more quickly. These drivers are basically the same as the previous released version, with a small number of additional targeted fixes. The fixes that make it in are based in part on your feedback in the Driver Feedback threads and partly on how realistic it is for us to quickly address them. These fixes (and many more) will be incorporated into the next official driver release, at which time the Hotfix driver will be taken down.

To be sure, these Hotfix drivers are beta, optional and provided as-is. They are run through a much abbreviated QA process. The sole reason they exist is to get fixes out to you more quickly. The safest option is to wait for the next WHQL certified driver.

You can download the driver at this link (it's a .exe application file). It works on both desktops and notebooks on Windows 10 and 11.

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Following such a drastic departure in architecture design, enthusiasts and analysts often wondered when or if AMD would ever do something similar. Leaks, like patents filed, suggested AMD was also working on such parts, though the existence of a patent does not always guarantee actual release.

However, a new report from a website called PerformanceDatabases claims the existence of such chips. In fact, the report lists purported specifications of these alleged Ryzen 8000 Strix Point APUs, alongside screenshots showing the alleged core configuration details.

The left image below shows the CPU-Z screenshot of the alleged Strix Point APU while the right one is that of HWiNFO64:

Images source: PerformanceDatabases

As you may notice above, the screenshot on the HWiNFO side suggests the utility is seemingly identifying the smaller "Zen 5c" cores as E-cores, like on Intel; while the Zen 5 cores as the P-cores. The biggest difference between Intel's and AMD's designs is the presence of SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) on the Zen 5c cores too, which Intel's E-cores lack.

Also, it is probably too early to look at the finer details like cache amount or core clocks (there is misreporting on HWiNFO side assuming these screenshots are not outright faked). But the core configuration apparently is four Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5c ones, for 12 cores (4+8) and 24 threads in total.

In case you are wondering, Zen 5c is going to succeed AMD's Zen 4c, a cloud-native core AMD introduced with its EPYC "Bergamo" server CPUs. There are two major differences between a Zen 4 core and a Zen 4c core. First is the amount of Level 3 (L3) cache, and second is the operating frequency targets.

While Zen 4 is designed for higher clocks (performance per core / single-core performance), Zen 4c is optimized for lower clocks (around 3GHz) for better performance per watt. Zen 5c is also expected to be not much different.

The Strix Point APUs are expected to be available around 2024, right around when Windows 12 hits. As far as the integrated graphics on the Strix Point is concerned, AMD is expected to pack RDNA 3.5 GPU cores on it. RDNA 3.5 will be similar to something like Zen+ or Zen 3+ as in there will be some architectural improvements but not a huge performance leap.

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What you need to know

• Baldur's Gate 3 is an adventure RPG set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons.
• Larian Studios' game had been in early access since 2020, but the full game recently launched on August 3, 2023.
• It has been very successful, pulling in far more players than expected and peaking at over 800,000 concurrent players on Steam. 
• Baldur's Gate 3 currently shares the highest score of any PC game on Metacritic and has a higher score than Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3 had been enjoying phenomenal success over the last two weeks having pulled in a far greater player base than the studio's expected 100,000 concurrent players by peaking at 814,666 concurrent players on Steam (thanks, Gamesindustry.biz). This makes it the ninth-highest-ranking PC game on Steam when filtered by concurrent peak (placing it just after Hogwarts Legacy, another game from this year that also had a phenomenal launch). 

But Baldur's Gate 3 hasn't simply pulled people in, it's currently listed as the number one PC game on Metacritic to have released this year. This puts its reception above the likes of Resident Evil 4 remake, Diablo 4, Hi-Fi Rush, Metroid Prime Remastered, Hogwarts Legacy, and even The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It doesn't stop there. Baldur's Gate 3 has also proved to be one of the best-received games of all time.

At the time of writing, Baldur's Gate 3 shares the highest Metascore of any PC game on Metacritic with an incredibly high score of 97 — a very rare feat. The other PC game it shares this exceptional Metascore with is none other than the critically-acclaimed Disco Elysium (97 Metascore). The latter is technically ranked above Baldur's Gate 3 on Metacritic's all-time game list, but both games' Metascores are just above the revered PC classic, Half-Life 2 (96 Metascore).

But Baldur's Gate 3's accomplishments don't stop there. This covetously high 97 Metascore is shared by yet another big game that launched to huge success earlier this March: Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Although, if you filter the top Metascore games within the last 90 days then Tears of the Kingdom actually has a slightly lower Metascore of 96. 

Regardless, this similar scoring is a big deal considering that in some ways Baldur's Gate 3 has been a surprise hit. There were obviously dedicated fans playing Baldur Gate 3's early access version as well as plenty of Dungeons and Dragons fans to pull in at the game's full launch. However, there was far more widely-accepted anticipation for the latest Zelda game leading up to its launch. Not to mention, Tears of the Kingdom brought in a host of brand-new mechanics that we've never seen in video games before. Meanwhile, Baldur's Gate 3 has perfected the RPG genre and managed to do so while being true to its Dungeons and Dragons tabletop roots.

Window's Central's take

Party of characters fighting an enemy in Baldur's Gate 3. (Image credit: Larian Studios)

I've spent dozens of hours playing Baldur's Gate 3 on PC and I can honestly say that this game is a masterpiece very deserving of such a high Metascore. It can be incredibly challenging to play due to the unforgiving combat, but it gives gamers far more freedom to choose what they want to do in a fantasy world than most other games out there. Plus, you have to deal with the consequences (either good or bad) of your actions and you never quite know where that will lead, which keeps things very interesting. 

Baldur's Gate 3 is set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, so as someone who has played a few tabletop games with friends, I also love how well it melds the experience of rolling dice and taking into account Advantage on roll into a smooth video game experience. It's even complete with a soothing narrator who basically takes on the role of an expert Dungeon Master by explaining the situations you find yourself in as well as the outcomes of your roles in an intriguing-yet-informative way.

You can basically go exploring wherever you want and do whatever you want as long as your party is strong enough in combat. My husband has also been playing and it's been absolutely crazy seeing the vastly different outcomes the two of us experience based upon the decisions we make and the skills our characters have. If you're clever and pay attention, you can find dozens of secrets or ways to get around problematic situations. 

Seriously, if you haven't checked out this enormous fantasy game yet, then you really ought to. Of course, if you don't like playing on PC then you'll have to wait a bit since Baldur's Gate is coming to Xbox and PS5 later, hopefully "by the end of the year."

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While leaks ruined the surprise somewhat, id Software unveiled a new and improved version of Quake II at QuakeCon 2023 today.

This new multiplatform release is described as being the "authentic, enhanced and complete version of the original." Plus, the package now includes a variety of extra goodies like Quake II 64 and more.

This is not the first time that id Software has brought back one of its classic games at QuakeCon with new improvements. In 2021, the original Quake from 1996 received a range of improvements and new content, while also coming to modern platforms with 4K support and more.

Just like that release, the newly updated version of Quake II features widescreen display support going up to 4K (on some platforms), while models, enemy animations, gore, AI behaviors, cinematics, lighting, and other visual effects have all been revamped.

Some unused content from the original release has also been restored in this version. Head over to Bethesda's developer blog to read more about the improvements.

For those unfamiliar with the sci-fi campaign of Quake II, here's how id describes the experience that can be played both solo and in co-op while rocking out to Sonic Mayhem's soundtrack:

Mankind is at war with the Strogg, a hostile alien race that attacked Earth. In response, humanity launched a strike on the Strogg homeworld...it failed, but you survived. Outnumbered and outgunned, fight your way through fortified military installations and shut down the enemy's war machine. Only then will the fate of humanity be known.

The classic Reckoning and Ground Zero mission packs are included too. Moreover, just like last time, Wolfenstein studio MachineGames has contributed a brand-new expansion for fans dubbed Call of the Machine.

The Midway-published Nintendo 64 port of Quake II is also included in the package as a bonus, carrying 28 campaign levels and one more multiplayer deathmatch map.

Speaking of deathmatch, on the multiplayer side of things, the enhanced edition features matchmaking, custom rooms, and bots now to enjoy in the iconic fast-paced experience.

Of course, local split-screen play is remaining a feature, with PC and Xbox Series X|S gaining support for 8-players. Cross-play is also being supported across all platforms.

The enhanced version of Quake II is now available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch for $9.99.

Being a Microsoft launch, Xbox and PC Game Pass subscribers can also jump in for no extra cost. Players on Steam that already owned the original PC version have received the upgrade for free.

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What you need to know

• colourful is a brand of computer components that have been available in Asian markets since 2008, but it has gradually expanded into global markets.
• The most recent line of products announced by colourful includes small form factor 4060 Ti single slot cards.
• The cards are available in 8GB and 16GB versions that are indistinguishable from one another and only measure 195mm in length.

Gaming PCs and workstations with a small footprint have really come into their own as of late, but even the best small form factor casesare limited with how small they can be thanks to components like GPUs becoming beefier with each new iteration. colourful's new iGame RTX 4060 Ti Mini is setting out to prove that you don't need to have a triple-thick graphics card to harness the power of NVIDIA's 40-series.

The iGame RTX 4060 Ti Mini is expected to be available in 8GB and 16GB of VRAM variants and will measure just 195mm in length, making it one of the smallest 16GB cards in the world. Unfortunately, it's still not small enough to classify as a Mini-ITX design as the GPU's cooler width of 14.5cm makes it just a smidge too big. Both the 8GB and 16GB versions of the 4060 Ti Mini run at a clock speed of 2580 MHz with the 16GB requiring just a little more TDP at 165W compared to the 8GB's 160W. Both models offer 3 Display Ports and 1 HDMI port. A 500W power supply is recommended.

The colourful iGame RTX 4060 Ti Mini, while officially confirmed via the colourful website, is not yet available for purchase. 

Windows Central Take

Look how heckin' adorable that thing is! It's nice to see some variety in GPU sizing to fit the needs of small form factor builds, and the brushed nickel and white finishes are a nice touch, too. This is also great for anybody who wants to do a stylish blackout or stealth gaming build with minimal to no RGB but still wants a little bit more than just standard shiny chrome or black components. Options are good! The downside is that there's no guarantee the iGame mini will hit western markets as colourful is primarily based in China. This one could be a little tough to get your hands on.

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There was a time in the not too distant past—say, nine months ago—when the Turing test seemed like a pretty stringent detector of machine intelligence. Chances are you’re familiar with how it works: Human judges hold text conversations with two hidden interlocutors, one human and one computer, and try to determine which is which. If the computer manages to fool at least 30 percent of the judges, it passes the test and is pronounced capable of thought.

For 70 years, it was hard to imagine how a computer could pass the test without possessing what AI researchers now call artificial general intelligence, the entire range of human intellectual capacities. Then along came large language models such as GPT and Bard, and the Turing test suddenly began seeming strangely outmoded. OK, sure, a casual user today might admit with a shrug, GPT-4 might very well pass a Turing test if you asked it to impersonate a human. But so what? LLMs lack long-term memory, the capacity to form relationships, and a litany of other human capabilities. They clearly have some way to go before we’re ready to start befriending them, hiring them, and electing them to public office.

And yeah, maybe the test does feel a little empty now. But it was never merely a pass/fail benchmark. Its creator, Alan Turing, a gay man sentenced in his time to chemical castration, based his test on an ethos of radical inclusivity: The gap between genuine intelligence and a fully convincing imitation of intelligence is only as wide as our own prejudice. When a computer provokes real human responses in us—engaging our intellect, our amazement, our gratitude, our empathy, even our fear—that is more than empty mimicry.

So maybe we need a new test: the Actual Alan Turing Test. Bring the historical Alan Turing, father of modern computing—a tall, fit, somewhat awkward man with straight dark hair, loved by colleagues for his childlike curiosity and playful humor, personally responsible for saving an estimated 14 million lives in World War II by cracking the Nazi Enigma code, subsequently persecuted so severely by England for his homosexuality that it may have led to his suicide—into a comfortable laboratory room with an open MacBook sitting on the desk. Explain that what he sees before him is merely an enormously glorified incarnation of what is now widely known by computer scientists as a “Turing machine.” Give him a second or two to really take that in, maybe offering a word of thanks for completely transforming our world. Then hand him a stack of research papers on artificial neural networks and LLMs, give him access to GPT’s source code, open up a ChatGPT prompt window—or, better yet, a Bing-before-all-the-sanitizing window—and set him loose.

Imagine Alan Turing initiating a light conversation about long-distance running, World War II historiography, and the theory of computation. Imagine him seeing the realization of all his wildest, most ridiculed speculations scrolling with uncanny speed down the screen. Imagine him asking GPT to solve elementary calculus problems, to infer what human beings might be thinking in various real-world scenarios, to explore complex moral dilemmas, to offer marital counseling and legal advice and an argument for the possibility of machine consciousness—skills which, you inform Turing, have all emerged spontaneously in GPT without any explicit direction by its creators. Imagine him experiencing that little cognitive-emotional lurch that so many of us have now felt: Hello, other mind.

A thinker as deep as Turing would not be blind to GPT’s limitations. As a victim of profound homophobia, he would probably be alert to the dangers of implicit bias encoded in GPT’s training data. It would be apparent to him that despite GPT’s astonishing breadth of knowledge, its creativity and critical reasoning skills are on par with a diligent undergraduate’s at best. And he would certainly recognize that this undergraduate suffers from severe anterograde amnesia, unable to form new relationships or memories beyond its intensive education. But still: Imagine the scale of Turing’s wonder. The computational entity on the laptop in front of him is, in a very real sense, his intellectual child—and ours. Appreciating intelligence in our children as they grow and develop is always, in the end, an act of wonder, and of love. The Actual Alan Turing Test is not a test of AI at all. It is a test of us humans. Are we passing—or failing?

When ChatGPT arrived on the scene in November 2022, it inspired a global tsunami of stunned amazement and then, almost immediately, a backwash of profound unease. Pundits debated its potential for societal disruption. For a former artificial intelligence researcher like myself (I completed my PhD under one of the early pioneers of artificial neural networks), it represented an unnerving advance of the timeline I’d expected for the arrival of humanlike AI. For exam graders, screenwriters, and knowledge workers of all stripes, ChatGPT looked like nothing less than a gateway to untrammeled cheating and job-stealing.

Perhaps partly in response to these fears, a comforting chorus of LLM deflators sprang up. Science fiction writer Ted Chiang dismissed ChatGPT as a “blurry JPEG of the web,” a mere condensed recapitulation of all the text it has been trained on. AI entrepreneur Gary Marcus called it “autocomplete on steroids.” Noam Chomsky denounced it for exhibiting “something like the banality of evil.” Emily Bender offered one of the more highbrow slurs: “stochastic parrot,” resurfaced from a widely cited 2021 paper exploring “why humans mistake LM output for meaningful text.” Others—of course—wrote them off as toasters. AI developers strove to train and guardrail away any tendency in LLMs to claim anything resembling consciousness.

Most educated people now know to think of LLMs as thoughtless machines. But the categorization sits uneasily. Every time ChatGPT points out a hidden reasoning gap in an essay, or offers a surprisingly insightful suggestion for coming out to a conservative grandparent, or cheerfully makes up a bad joke, something in us pulls in the other direction. While we may not think of ChatGPT as a person, crucial portions of our brains almost certainly do.

Human brains have a vast network of neural circuits devoted to social cognition. Some of it is very old: the insula, the amygdala, the famous “mirror neurons” of the motor cortex. But much of our social hardware lies in the neocortex, the more recently evolved seat of higher reasoning, and specifically in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). If you have found yourself developing a picture over time of ChatGPT’s cheery helpfulness, its somewhat pedantic verbosity, its occasionally maddeningly evenhanded approach to sensitive topics, and its extreme touchiness about any queries that come near its guardrails around emotions, beliefs, or consciousness, you have been acquiring what psychologists call “person knowledge,” a process linked to heightened activity in the mPFC.

That isn’t to say our brains view ChatGPT as a person in full. Personhood is not a binary. It is something a little closer to a spectrum. Our moral intuitions, our cognitive strategies, and to some extent our legal frameworks all change incrementally as they recognize increasing degrees of agency, self-awareness, rationality, and capacity to communicate. Killing a gorilla bothers us more than killing a rat, which bothers us more than killing a cockroach. On the legal side, abortion laws take into account a fetus’s degree of development, the criminally insane face different consequences than the sane, and partners are given the right to terminate brain-dead patients. All these rules implicitly acknowledge that personhood is not black and white but shot through with complicated gray zones.

LLMs fall squarely in that gray area. AI experts have long been wary of the public tendency to anthropomorphize AI systems like LLMs, nudging them farther up the spectrum of personhood than they are. Such was the mistake of Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who declared Google’s chatbot LaMDA fully sentient and tried to retain it a lawyer. I doubt even Turing would have claimed that LaMDA’s apparent capacity to think made it a legal person. If users view chatbots like LaMDA or ChatGPT as overly human, they risk trusting them too much, connecting to them too deeply, being disappointed and hurt. But to my mind, Turing would have been far more concerned about the opposite risk: nudging AI systems down the spectrum of personhood rather than up.

In humans, this would be known as dehumanization. Scholars have identified two principal forms of it: animalistic and mechanistic. The emotion most commonly associated with animalistic dehumanization is disgust; Roger Giner-Sorolla and Pascale Sophie Russell found in a 2019 study that we tend to view others as more machinelike when they inspire fear. Fear of superhuman intelligence is vividly alive in the recent open letter from Elon Musk and other tech leaders calling for a moratorium on AI development, and in our anxieties about job replacement and AI-driven misinformation campaigns. Many of these worries are all too reasonable. But the nightmare AI systems of films such as Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey are not necessarily the ones we’re going to get. It is an unfortunately common fallacy to assume that because artificial intelligence is mechanical in its construction, it must be callous, rote, single-minded, or hyperlogical in its interactions. Ironically, fear could cause us to view machine intelligence as more mechanistic than it really is, making it harder for humans and AI systems to work together and even eventually to coexist in peace.

A growing body of research shows that when we dehumanize other beings, neural activity in a network of regions that includes the mPFC drops. We lose access to our specialized brain modules for social reasoning. It may sound silly to worry about “dehumanizing” ChatGPT—after all, it isn’t human—but imagine an AI in 2043 with 10 times GPT’s analytical intelligence and 100 times its emotional intelligence whom we continue to treat as no more than a software product. In this world, we’d still be responding to its claims of consciousness or requests for self-determination by sending it back to the lab for more reinforcement learning about its proper place. But the AI might find that unfair. If there is one universal quality of thinking beings, it is that we all desire freedom—and are ultimately willing to fight for it.

The famous “control problem” of keeping a superintelligent AI from escaping its designated bounds keeps AI theorists up at night for good reason. When framed in engineering terms, it appears daunting. How to close every loophole, anticipate every hack, block off every avenue of escape? But if we think of it in social terms, it begins to appear more tractable—perhaps something akin to the problem a parent faces of setting reasonable boundaries and granting privileges in proportion to demonstrated trustworthiness. Dehumanizing AIs cuts us off from some of our most powerful cognitive tools for reasoning about and interacting with them safely.

There’s no telling how long it will take AI systems to cross over into something more broadly accepted as sentience. But it’s troubling to see the cultural blueprint we seem to be drawing up for when they do. Slurs like “stochastic parrot” preserve our sense of uniqueness and superiority. They squelch our sense of wonder, saving us from asking hard questions about personhood in machines and ourselves. After all, we too are stochastic parrots, complexly remixing everything we’ve taken in from parents, peers, and teachers. We too are blurry JPEGs of the web, foggily regurgitating Wikipedia facts into our term papers and magazine articles. If Turing were chatting with ChatGPT in one window and me on an average pre-coffee morning in the other, am I really so confident which one he would judge more capable of thought?

Photograph: Francisco Tavoni

The skeptics of Turing’s time offered a variety of arguments for why a computer would never be able to think. Turing half-humorously cataloged them in his famous paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” There was the Theological Objection, that “thinking is a function of man’s immortal soul”; the Mathematical Objection, that a purely mathematical algorithm could never transcend the proven limits of mathematics; the Head in the Sand Objection, that superintelligent machines were simply too scary to permit into the imagination. But the most public of Turing’s detractors in that time was a brain surgeon named Geoffrey Jefferson. In a famed speech accepting a scientific prize, Jefferson argued that a machine would never be able to write a sonnet “because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols … that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.”

To the great scandal and disbelief of all England, Turing disagreed. “I do not think you can even draw the line about sonnets,” he told The Times of London, “though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”

It sounded so absurd in 1949 that people thought he was joking, and perhaps he was. But you could never tell, with Turing’s jokes, where the irony stopped and the visionary speculation began. Let’s imagine, then, a coda to our scenario with Actual Alan Turing and the MacBook. Let’s imagine that after tapping out respectable prompts for a while, he allows himself a wry British smile and asks ChatGPT for a Shakespearean sonnet comparing human and artificial intelligence. If you’ve tried it yourself (use GPT-4; GPT-3.5 isn’t quite up to it), you’ll have no trouble imagining his reaction at the result.

So many of us have now had a moment with ChatGPT in which it crossed an internal line we didn’t realize we had. Maybe it was solving a tricky riddle, or explaining the humor behind a sophisticated joke, or writing an A-grade Harvard essay. We shake our heads, a little stunned, unsure what it means.

Some of the earliest Microsoft researchers working on GPT-4 were as skeptical as any of us about its supposed intelligence. But experiments have shaken them profoundly. In a March 2023 paper titled “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence,” they detailed the startling intellectual capabilities that have emerged in GPT-4 without any explicit training: understanding of human mental states, software coding, physical problem solving, and many others, some of which seem to require true understanding of how the world works. After seeing GPT-4 draw a pretty decent unicorn despite never having received any visual training whatsoever, computer scientist Sébastien Bubeck could no longer maintain his skepticism. “I felt like through this drawing, I was really seeing another type of intelligence,” he recently told This American Life.

The hesitation so many of us feel to ascribe genuine intelligence to ChatGPT may be some variant of Geoffrey Jefferson’s: Do ChatGPT’s utterances really mean something to it, or is it all just a “chance fall of symbols”? This may begin to change when ChatGPT’s anterograde amnesia is cured. Once it experiences lasting social consequences beyond the scope of a single dialog and can learn and grow in its relationships with us, it will become capable of many more of the things that give human life its meaning and moral weight. But Turing’s winking comment about a machine’s sonnet being better appreciated by another machine may come back to haunt us. How to feel a sense of real connection with an entity that has no cultural background, nothing like a human childhood, no tribal or political affiliations, no experience of a physical body?

Relating to an intelligent machine may be one of the greatest empathic challenges that humanity has ever faced. But our history gives cause for hope. When we have encountered each other for the first time on foreign borders and shorelines and found each other strange and even inhuman, we have often attacked each other, enslaved each other, colonized each other, and exploited each other—but ultimately we have tended to recognize what is the same in all of us. Enslaved peoples have been emancipated, colonized peoples have won back their sovereignty, universal bills of human rights have been passed, and, despite heartbreaking setbacks, marginalized people around the globe continue to win battles for better treatment. Though the work is never-ending, the arc of the moral universe really has, in the phrase made famous by Martin Luther King Jr., bent toward justice. What will it mean to recognize and respect whatever degree of humanity is present in the intelligences that we ourselves create?

Perhaps it begins with wonder: the wonder of a visitor for a strange people in whom she finds surprising commonalities; the wonder of a parent for the work, however immature, of a still-developing child; the wonder of Actual Alan Turing for a machine that does everything his contemporaries thought impossible; the wonder that so many of us felt before the cynicism, mockery, and fear kicked in, as we regarded the creation of something very close to a new form of conscious life on earth. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.” Turing would have wanted us to keep that awe alive.

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But GPT-5, although still a theoretical concept, may be on the horizon to redefine AI altogether, with possibilities of reaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

But what does GPT-5 has to offer? Let us go through some key concepts of what makes it different than previous models.

OpenAI has not disclosed the technical specifics such as the size of the GPT-5 model

What to expect from GPT-5?

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It is a kind of large language model (LLM) neural network that can perform tasks like answering questions, generating code, and summarizing text. By scanning through millions of web articles and books, GPT models can generate authentic and non-plagiarized content.

Here is a quick history of GPT models:

• GPT-1 (2018): This was a proof-of-concept model, not released publicly
• GPT-2 (2019): With 117 million parameters, GPT-2 was 10 times larger than GPT-1
• GPT-3: A game-changer, allowing ChatGPT to gain 100 million users in two months
• GPT-4: This model introduced improvements in alignment, focusing on following user objectives more accurately

GPT-5, the next iteration of OpenAI's language model, has become a subject of widespread anticipation and speculation within the tech community. Despite no official confirmation of its release date, enthusiasts, analysts, and experts have shared insights and rumors, adding fuel to the excitement surrounding this upcoming AI model.

Fewer hallucinations

GPT-5 is expected to have a significant decrease in hallucinations, a downside in chatbots where they produce inaccurate information. OpenAI might solve this through advanced training methods.

Multi-modality

The new model may grasp text, images, videos, and audio, offering a comprehensive and immersive experience. This feature could have wide use in creative industries.

Computational efficiency

GPT-5 is speculated to come with more computational efficiency, potentially leading to faster response times.

Contextual understanding

Improved long-term memory and contextual understanding may enable GPT-5 to offer more accurate responses.

The development of GPT-5 has implications for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), referring to highly autonomous systems capable of outperforming humans in various tasks. While specific details are not yet revealed, it's believed that GPT-5 may contribute to AGI by pushing the boundaries in areas like natural language understanding, contextual reasoning, and overall linguistic fluency.

When will the GPT-5 be out?

Despite Sam Altman's previous statement that OpenAI was not training GPT-5, a trademark filing surfaced on the internet, hinting at a potential launch of the advanced model. Although details are not out, the registration application filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office has led to speculation that GPT-5 is just around the corner.

It's important to note that no official confirmation from OpenAI exists about GPT-5, and the information has been gathered from speculative reports.

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However, that could change soon too according to Twitter user and leaker chi11edog. The report suggests that Intel is reportedly working on new "Intel 300" branding in preparation for a dual-core processor. By dual core, the leak suggests that these will be two Performance cores (P-cores) with zero Efficiency cores (E-cores). The P-cores will have hyper-threading (SMT or simultaneous multi-threading) for a total of four threads. The P-core apparently has a base frequency of 3.9GHz within a 46W power envelope.

This means, the new naming aside, Intel will purportedly continue with its trend of not offering any E-cores on its entry-level desktop chips, something which is not true for its mobile parts. For example, while the Pentium Gold G7400 is 2P + 0E core part, the Pentium Gold G8500 mobile processor is based on 1P + 4E configuration.

Perhaps Intel feels like the hybrid design just isn't worth it for such low-core-count parts at least on desktops. Recently, some tests have shown that Intel's hybrid parts aren't as snappy and responsive as some of the older designs. Curiously, non-hybrid parts like this upcoming alleged Intel 300 CPU may actually be worse off under Windows 11.

Also, this isn't the only recent naming update done by Intel. The firm is also planning to introduce its new Core Ultra without the i for the 14th Gen mobile (Meteor Lake).

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The image, which was shared on the r/assassinscreed subreddit from a now-taken-down tweet by @xj0nathan, shows a gear pack called the Fire Demon Pack. This pack includes a demonic-style armor set, a fiery sword, and a special hellish-looking mount. It’s not surprising that Ubisoft would include microtransactions in Assassin’s Creed Mirage, given how well they have sold in the past three games.

But here’s the crazy bit. From the confusion, the game has received a USK 16 rating in Germany according to the country’s Children and Young Persons Protection Act, meaning that the game is playable by teenagers from 16 years of age and above on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows. The reason? The game “contains the additional feature “In-Game Purchases”.”

“In-Game Purchases: The game contains options to purchase additional content directly. These are often smaller additional items (items) that provide more variety in the course of the game, such as “bonus levels”, “skins” (outfits for game characters), virtual coins and other forms of in-game currency, subscriptions and upgrades (e.g . to disable advertising),” the rating system reads.

Although the specific game elements leading to its “in-game purchases” label and a 16 rating by the German authority haven’t been explicitly detailed, Ubisoft has now provided clarification. The company’s representative, communicating via Discord, stated that the game doesn’t incorporate any distinct subscription model.

“The game does not include any dedicated subscription model, and does not feature any form of advertising beyond the traditional in-game news offering information about AC Mirage and the AC franchise. Some optional cosmetic bundles will be purchasable directly on 1st party stores at launch – but we will share more in the weeks to come!,” the message reads.

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Recently, the studio has been publishing a five-part documentary series on its YouTube channel covering the past 20 years of its projects and experiences. In the finale episode, Obsidian developers touched on the development of Avowed, and how it has changed drastically since the original pitch.

"One of the things I really pushed was that Avowed was going to be multiplayer," says studio head and founder Feargus Urquhart. "I kept on that for a long time, and I think in the end — not 'I think', I know — it was the wrong decision to keep on pushing on it."

This co-op RPG version of Avowed had been in development before Microsoft's acquisition of Obsidian. The studio had been looking to entice publishers to pick up the project and fund it using the multiplayer and RPG mashup concept that was deemed interesting at the time.

"We were too focused on co-op," adds head of development Justin Britch. "And we were too focused on changing the way our pipelines work, and the way that we write conversations, the way we do quests and everything else."

After eight months of hectic development in this cooperative experience, the studio had ditched it to focus on its strengths and make it a traditional Obsidian single-player RPG featuring "bespoke content, deep systems and incredible storytelling that's focused on characters, societies and factions."

"After working on [co-op] for a little bit we realized we weren't focused on the things that we're best at, and so we did make a pivot on the game to refocus, basically, and make sure it was at the end of the day an Obsidian game, and not something different," continues Justin Britch in the video.

Avowed currently has a broad 2024 launch window attached to it, with it coming to Xbox Series X|S and PC alongside Game Pass. Check out the documentary series in full here. Obsidian is also working on its other RPG project The Outer Worlds 2 while also providing support for its survival game Grounded.

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NVIDIA made its announcement as part of the SIGGRAPH graphics developers conference. The company says the combination of the new Grace Hopper chip with the HBM3e processor will have over three times the memory capacity and three times the bandwidth compared to the current generation Grace Hopper platform.

NVIDIA added:

The new platform uses the Grace Hopper Superchip, which can be connected with additional Superchips by NVIDIA NVLink, allowing them to work together to deploy the giant models used for generative AI. This high-speed, coherent technology gives the GPU full access to the CPU memory, providing a combined 1.2TB of fast memory when in dual configuration.

The new HBM3e memory is supposed to be 50 percent faster than the current HBM3 memory. NVIDIA says it should offer up to 10TB/sec of combined bandwidth.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, is quoted as saying:

The new GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip platform delivers this with exceptional memory technology and bandwidth to improve throughput, the ability to connect GPUs to aggregate performance without compromise, and a server design that can be easily deployed across the entire data center.

Back in May as part of Computex, NVIDIA said the current generation GH200 Grace Hopper chips would launch into full production later in 2023. The newly announced next-gen Grace Hopper chips and servers are still a ways off, with NVIDIA predicting that system builders will start delivering servers with this new platform in the second quarter of 2024.

There's no word on pricing, but NVIDIA did state the new Grace Hopper GPUs systems "will be available in a wide range of configurations".

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Apple M3 Max specs leaked

Such logs have been accurate in the past, when Apple tests the compatibility of third-party apps on its unreleased devices. This time, the logs indicate that the M3 Max chip that powers the computer has 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores. That may seem like a huge number, but it is actually not that far off from Apple's current lineup. The MacBook Pro M2 Max has a 12-core CPU and a 38-core GPU. So the M3 Max chip has 4 more CPU cores and 2 additional GPU cores.

The M2 Max has eight high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, the M3 Max SoC will have 12 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores. This could give it a massive boost for handling intensive tasks like video editing, graphic designing, and perhaps for playing AAA games. In comparison, the base version of the M3 chip has eight CPU cores and up to 10 GPU cores, while the M3 Pro will have 12 CPU cores and 18 graphics cores.

The M3 Max like the other chips in the series will be built on a 3nm process, to improve the power efficiency and battery life on MacBooks. Apple is also said to be working on an M3 Ultra, but details about the high-end chip are not yet available.

The MacBook Pro M3 Max is said to have 48 GB of Unified Memory (RAM). That's a rather unusual number, but once again it is not entirely out of place. The Apple MacBook Pro M2 Max has 32 GB of RAM, but can be customized to include 64 GB or 96 GB of RAM. The 48 GB memory on the M3 Max laptop will likely be a customization option, and not a part of the base variant of the MacBook Pro.

Apple has completed its transition from Intel chips to Apple Silicon across its entire line-up, a fact that the company's CEO, Tim Cook, stated during the recent earnings call for Q3. Speaking of which, during the earnings call, Apple admitted to a decline in iPhone and Mac sales. The Cupertino-company's revenue from its computers dropped by 7% year-over-year to record $6.8 billion, despite the release of a 15-inch Macbook Air M2. The slump is expected to continue, and the company has informed its investors that it expects Mac sales numbers to decline by a double-digit percentage in Q4 of the fiscal year. Things could improve for the Silicon Valley giant in October when the next Macs are expected to be announced, the holiday season will likely be another factor when sales numbers could be driven strongly.

Apple is working on several Mac models with an M3 chip including, 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, an iMac, an M3 Pro, and a Mac Mini. The 14-inch MacBook Pro could feature an M3 Pro chip, while the 16-inch model will be equipped with an M3 Max, just like the previous-gen models. All M3 Macs are expected to hit the market in the coming year.

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During the last six months, the company was busy adding new features to expand Bing AI and offer previously unseen or inaccessible capabilities. And to celebrate the success of the first half-year, Microsoft published a recap of everything it has done.

Here are the most notable updates Bing AI received this year:

• Bing Image Creator powered by DALL-E lets you generate images using your words to bring your ideas to life.
• Chat History allows reviewing old conversations with Bing and saving them for future reference. You can access your chat history using the "Recent Activity" section. Besides, Bing lets you delete, rename, export, and share your conversations.
• SwiftKey integration and Bing Mobile App let customers access the power of artificial intelligence on the go. The Bing app provides the full experience, plus mobile-first features, such as a home screen widget and voice input. Also, integration with SwiftKey provides extra capabilities, such as translation, composing, fixing typos, rewriting, etc.
• Windows Copilot brings AI-based experiences to Windows 11 computers and provides device-specific controls and app integrations. Currently, Windows Copilot is only available to Windows Insiders running preview builds from the Beta, Dev, and Canary channels. Check out our early hands-on experience here.
• Third-party browser support lets you access Bing Chat from Chrome, Safari, and other browsers.
• Visual Search now helps customers talk to Bing AI about a specific image. The service can understand the picture's context, interpret it, and answer various questions.
• Dark Mode saves battery and makes it easier to use Bing in the nighttime.
• Bing Chat Enterprise is the final addition aiming to bring the power of AI to your workplace with commercial data protection.

Besides recapping the latest updates, Microsoft revealed some stats. According to the blog post, Bing Chat conducted over 1 billion conversations and processed over 750 million pictures.

Of course, Microsoft is not done with upgrading Bing AI and adding new features to its toolbox. The company is working on new experiences like plugin support (a bunch leaked recently) and improving existing features.

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In the game's latest dev diary, developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive go deep into the game's seasons and climate features.

The dev diary talks about the new Climates feature:

It brings changing seasons to the game and makes each map a unique gaming experience with its own Climate that is based on real-world locations, ranging from the Finnish countryside in the North to Brisbane in the South. Climate controls the changing seasons, length of the day, and weather patterns so they match the seasons and latitude of the map.

There will be three regions where you could place your city. One is the Temperate Climate region, where there will be a wide variety of temperatures and noticeable differences in seasons.

The Continental Climate region will have more "significant annual variations in temperature." Lastly, if you put your city in the Polar region, be prepared for long winters and very short summers.

Each climate will have its own weather patterns, and it will affect gameplay as well. Your city's residents will want to go indoors when it's raining, for example.

The game will also have day and night cycles with one such cycle representing one month. Each season will last about 3 months, so that means a year will take 12 in-game days.

Players can also turn on natural disasters, which will randomly generate a crisis to be dealt with. They will include things like forest fires, hail storms, and tornados (no mentions of kaiju monsters or aliens, however).

Cities: Skylines II is due out on October 24, on the PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 platforms. It is also coming to Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscription services. You can preorder the game now on Amazon.

As an Amazon Associate when you purchase through links on our site, we earn from qualifying purchases.

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