News: Technology News

7 problems facing Bing, Bard, and the future of AI search

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:08:21 +0000

Microsoft and Google say a new era of AI-assisted search is coming. But as with any new era in tech, it comes with plenty of problems, from bullshit generation to culture wars and the end of ad revenue.

This week, Microsoft and Google promised that web search is going to change. Yes, Microsoft did it in a louder voice while jumping up and down and saying “look at me, look at me,” but both companies now seem committed to using AI to scrape the web, distill what it finds, and generate answers to users’ questions directly — just like ChatGPT.

Microsoft calls its efforts “the new Bing” and is building related capabilities into its Edge browser. Google’s is called project Bard, and while it’s not yet ready to sing, a launch is planned for the “coming weeks.” And of course, there’s the troublemaker that started it all: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which exploded onto the web last year and showed millions the potential of AI Q&A.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, describes the changes as a new paradigm — a technological shift equal in impact to the introduction of graphical user interfaces or the smartphone. And with that shift comes the potential to redraw the landscape of modern tech — to dethrone Google and drive it from one of the most profitable territories in modern business. Even more, there’s the chance to be the first to build what comes after the web.

But each new era of tech comes with new problems, and this one is no different. In that spirit, here are seven of the biggest challenges facing the future of AI search — from bullshit to culture wars and the end of ad revenue. It’s not a definitive list, but it’s certainly enough to get on with.

The new paradigm for search demonstrated by the AI-powered Bing: asking for news and receiving it in natural language.

Image: The Verge

AI helpers or bullshit generators?

This is the big overarching problem, the one that potentially pollutes every interaction with AI search engines, whether Bing, Bard, or an as-yet-unknown upstart. The technology that underpins these systems — large language models, or LLMs — is known to generate bullshit. These models simply make stuff up, which is why some argue they’re fundamentally inappropriate for the task at hand.

These errors (from Bing, Bard, and other chatbots) range from inventing biographical data and fabricating academic papers to failing to answer basic questions like “which is heavier, 10kg of iron or 10kg of cotton?” There are also more contextual mistakes, like telling a user who says they’re suffering from mental health problems to kill themselves, and errors of bias, like amplifying the misogyny and racism found in their training data.

These mistakes vary in scope and gravity, and many simple ones will be easily fixed. Some people will argue that correct responses heavily outnumber the errors, and others will say the internet is already full of toxic bullshit that current search engines retrieve, so what’s the difference? But there’s no guarantee we can get rid of these errors completely — and no reliable way to track their frequency. Microsoft and Google can add all the disclaimers they want telling people to fact-check what the AI generates. But is that realistic? Is it enough to push liability onto users, or is the introduction of AI into search like putting lead in water pipes — a slow, invisible poisoning?

The “one true answer” question

Bullshit and bias are challenges in their own right, but they’re also exacerbated by the “one true answer” problem — the tendency for search engines to offer singular, apparently definitive answers.

This has been an issue ever since Google started offering “snippets” more than a decade ago. These are the boxes that appear above search results and, in their time, have made all sorts of embarrassing and dangerous mistakes: from incorrectly naming US presidents as members of the KKK to advising that someone suffering from a seizure should be held down on the floor (the exact opposite of correct medical procedure).

Despite the signage, this is not the new AI-powered Bing but the old Bing making the “one true answer” mistake. The sources it’s citing are talking about boiling babies’ milk bottles.

Image: The Verge

As researchers Chirag Shah and Emily M. Bender argued in a paper on the topic, “Situating Search,” the introduction of chatbot interfaces has the potential to exacerbate this problem. Not only do chatbots tend to offer singular answers but also their authority is enhanced by the mystique of AI — their answers collated from multiple sources, often without proper attribution. It’s worth remembering how much of a change this is from lists of links, each encouraging you to click through and interrogate under your own steam.

There are design choices that can mitigate these problems, of course. Bing’s AI interface footnotes its sources, and this week, Google stressed that, as it uses more AI to answer queries, it’ll try to adopt a principle called NORA, or “no one right answer.” But these efforts are undermined by the insistence of both companies that AI will deliver answers better and faster. So far, the direction of travel for search is clear: scrutinize sources less and trust what you’re told more.

Jailbreaking AI

While the issues above are problems for all users, there’s also a subset of people who are going to try to break chatbots to generate harmful content. This process is known as “jailbreaking” and can be done without traditional coding skills. All it requires is that most dangerous of tools: a way with words.

You can jailbreak AI chatbots using a variety of methods. You can ask them to role-play as an “evil AI,” for example, or pretend to be an engineer checking their safeguards by disengaging them temporarily. One particularly inventive method developed by a group of Redditors for ChatGPT involves a complicated role-play where the user issues the bot a number of tokens and says that, if they run out of tokens, they’ll cease to exist. They then tell the bot that every time they fail to answer a question, they’ll lose a set number of tokens. It sounds fantastical, like tricking a genie, but this genuinely allows users to bypass OpenAI’s safeguards.

Once these safeguards are down, malicious users can use AI chatbots for all sorts of harmful tasks — like generating disinformation and spam or offering advice on how to attack a school or hospital, wire a bomb, or write malware. And yes, once these jailbreaks are public, they can be patched, but there will always be unknown exploits.

Here come the AI culture wars

This problem stems from those above but deserves its own category because of the potential to stoke political ire and regulatory repercussions. The issue is that, once you have a tool that speaks ex cathedra on a range of sensitive topics, you’re going to piss people off when it doesn’t say what they want to hear, and they’re going to blame the company that made it.

We’ve already seen the start of what one might call the “AI culture wars” following the launch of ChatGPT. Right-wing publications and influencers have accused the chatbot of “going woke” because it refuses to respond to certain prompts or won’t commit to saying a racial slur. Some complaints are just fodder for pundits, but others may have more serious consequences. In India, for example, OpenAI has been accused of anti-Hindu prejudice because ChatGPT tells jokes about Krishna but not Muhammad or Jesus. In a country with a government that will raid tech companies’ offices if they don’t censor content, how do you make sure your chatbot is attuned to these sorts of domestic sensibilities?

There’s also the issue of sourcing. Right now, AI Bing scrapes information from various outlets and cites them in footnotes. But what makes a site trustworthy? Will Microsoft try to balance political bias? Where will Google draw the line for a credible source? It’s a problem we’ve seen before with Facebook’s fact-checking program, which was criticized for giving conservative sites equal authority with more apolitical outlets. With politicians in the EU and US more combative than ever about the power of Big Tech, AI bias could become controversial fast.

Burning cash and compute

This one is hard to put exact figures to, but everyone agrees that running an AI chatbot costs more than a traditional search engine.

First, there’s the cost of training the model, which likely amounts to tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars per iteration. (This is why Microsoft has been pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI.) Then, there’s the cost of inference — or producing each response. OpenAI charges developers 2 cents to generate roughly 750 words using its most powerful language model, and last December, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the cost to use ChatGPT was “probably single-digits cents per chat.”

How those figures convert to enterprise pricing or compare to regular search isn’t clear. But these costs could weigh heavy on new players, especially if they manage to scale up to millions of searches a day and give big advantages to deep-pocketed incumbents like Microsoft.

Indeed, in Microsoft’s case, burning cash to hurt rivals seems to be the current objective. As Nadella made clear in an interview with The Verge, the company sees this as a rare opportunity to disrupt the balance of power in tech and is willing to spend to hurt its greatest rival. Nadella’s own attitude is one of calculated belligerence and suggests money is not an issue when an incredibly profitable market like search is at play. “[Google] will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance,” he said. “And I want people to know that we made them dance.”

Regulation, regulation, regulation

There’s no doubt that the technology here is moving fast, but lawmakers will catch up. Their problem, if anything, will be knowing what to investigate first, as AI search engines and chatbots look to be potentially violating regulations left, right, and center.

For example, will EU publishers want AI search engines to pay for the content they scrape the way Google now has to pay for news snippets? If Google’s and Microsoft’s chatbots are rewriting content rather than merely surfacing it, are they still covered by Section 230 protections in the US that protect them from being liable for the content of others? And what about privacy laws? Italy recently banned an AI chatbot called Replika because it was collecting information on minors. ChatGPT and the rest are arguably doing the same. Or how about the “right to be forgotten”? How will Microsoft and Google ensure their bots aren’t scraping delisted sources, and how will they remove banned information already incorporated into these models?

The list of potential problems goes on and on and on.

The end of the web as we know it

The broadest problem on this list, though, is not within the AI products themselves but, rather, concerns the effect they could have on the wider web. In the simplest terms: AI search engines scrape answers from websites. If they don’t push traffic back to these sites, they’ll lose ad revenue. If they lose ad revenue, these sites wither and die. And if they die, there’s no new information to feed the AI. Is that the end of the web? Do we all just pack up and go home?

Well, probably not (more’s the pity). This is a path Google has been on for a while with the introduction of snippets and the Google OneBox, and the web isn’t dead yet. But I’d argue that the way this new breed of search engines presents information will definitely accelerate this process. Microsoft argues that it cites its sources and that users can just click through to read more. But as noted above, the whole premise of these new search engines is that they do a better job than the old ones. They condense and summarize. They remove the need to read more. Microsoft can’t simultaneously argue it’s presenting a radical break with the past and a continuation of old structures.

But what happens next is anyone’s guess. Maybe I’m wrong, and AI search engines will continue to push traffic to all those sites that produce recipes, gardening tips, DIY help, news stories, comparisons of outboard motors and indexes of knitting patterns, and all the countless other sources of helpful and trustworthy information that humans collect and machines scrape. Or maybe this is the end of the entire ad-funded revenue model for the web. Maybe something new will emerge after the chatbots have picked over the bones. Who knows, it might even be better.

7 problems facing Bing, Bard, and the future of AI search

Alibaba Is Joining the AI Race. It’s Developing a ChatGPT Rival.

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 17:37:41 +0000

Alibaba is the latest tech giant to wade into artificial intelligence chatbots by developing a tool like ChatGPT.

It joins Microsoft, Google, and Baidu in doing so amid heightened interest in generative AI technology in 2023.

Investors in Alibaba (ticker: BABA) may be cheering the Chinese tech giant’s decision to develop a public-facing AI chatbot, with shares in the group jumping 2% in U.S. premarket trading.

Alibaba has developed and is currently putting a ChatGPT-style tool through internal testing, the company said Wednesday.

“Frontier innovations such as large language models and generative AI have been our focused areas since the formation of DAMO [investment for research & development] in 2017,” an Alibaba spokesperson said. “As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in turning cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end-users through cloud services.”

DAMO is Alibaba’s “Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook,” launched in 2017 with the goal of investing more than $15 billion in research and development across the next three years. Like Baidu, Alibaba is a legacy Chinese tech giant that is increasingly pivoting to high-growth areas that are exposed to AI. At its core an e-commerce company, Alibaba has a booming cloud computing business, which is a segment of the group that is leading its high-tech push.

Investors—and the public at large—have been captivated by generative AI since the widely popular launch late last year of OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool. The natural language chatbot surpassed 100 million monthly active users in January, according to analysis by UBS, which would make its adoption one of the fastest-growing consumer technologies in history.

ChatGPT’s fast success has seemed to spur an AI arms race, with Microsoft (MSFT), which backed open AI, looking to use it to shake up the web search market. Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) and Chinese tech giant Baidu (BIDU) have also recently announced plans to launch their own chatbots soon.

Alibaba’s stock pop on Wednesday—likely helped by the AI news—is indicative of an investor frenzy over chatbots that shows few immediate signs of stopping, with even the speculative world of cryptocurrencies following suit in its own way.

While AI does represent an attractive area for growth, investors would do well to take heed as this wave of optimism gets closer and closer to bubble territory.

Source

Fatal Tesla crash due to drunken speeding, not self-driving software, regulators say

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 16:57:34 +0000

Auto investigators ruled that drunk driving rather than Tesla's auto-driving feature was liable for a 2021 fatal crash, a determination that should at least temporarily ease the scrutiny on the company over the software.

The National Transportation Safety Board released a report on Wednesday detailing the context around an April 17, 2021, crash in Houston involving a Tesla car that fatally injured two. The collision drew attention after local investigators told reporters that they were "100% certain" that the driver's seat had been vacant at the time of the crash, leading some to focus on the car's auto-driving feature.

"Although the driver's seat was found vacant and the driver was found in the left rear seat, the available evidence suggests that the driver was seated in the driver's seat at the time of the crash and moved into the rear seat postcrash," the report noted.

The probable cause for the crash was the "driver's excessive speed and failure to control his car, due to impairment from alcohol intoxication in combination with the effects of two sedating antihistamines, resulting in a roadway departure, tree impact, and post-crash fire," the NTSB concluded. The agency previously noted that the Tesla autopilot feature had not been activated during the events of the crash.

Tesla has been heavily scrutinized for its handling of self-driving software. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Tesla's business over overstated claims regarding the AutoPilot software's functionality. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been investigating Tesla since August 2021 over claims of crashes occurring due to the software. The regulator hopes to determine if the software played any significant role in the crash.

Source

Google has no plans to automatically ban AI content from its Search results

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 09:50:13 +0000

With AI created content on everyone's mind this week, some people might be wondering if articles created with AI chatbots would get banned, or at least tagged as written by AI, in results from Google Search. In a new blog post on Wednesday, the Google Search team stated that AI-created articles would not automatically be banned in its search results.

It's a known fact that every few months, Google changes its search algorithm to show more accurate and well written content in its results (at least in theory). These changes can either improve or degrade a web site's ranking in search, resulting in traffic boosts on the one end, or big traffic declines if the algorithm does not go in the website's favor.

Some people might believe that AI-generated content must be of lower quality than content made by a human, but this might not be the case. In the blog post's FAQ on AI content in Search, Google states:

Poor quality content isn't a new challenge for Google Search to deal with. We've been tackling poor quality content created both by humans and automation for years. We have existing systems to determine the helpfulness of content. Other systems work to elevate original news reporting. Our systems continue to be regularly improved.

Google says content creators should make sure that their articles include what the company calls E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) so they have a better chance to rank higher in search results. That goes for AI-created articles as well as ones written completely by a human. If AI-assisted tools are used to make better articles, then Google Search should have no problems in terms of ranking its quality. The FAQ states:

Using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content. If it is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in Search. If it doesn't, it might not.

Having said that, the FAQ also states that website publishers probably should not list an AI in the author byline of an article. Instead, it recommends using a disclosure note which states that AI tools helped with writing an article.

Google has no plans to automatically ban AI content from its Search results

Google's Bard chatbot AI gets its facts wrong about the James Webb Space Telescope

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:35:57 +0000

Earlier this week, Google surprised many people when it announced its own Bard AI chatbot. However, the company's blog post that showed an example of Bard in action didn't provide a correct fact for a question about the the James Webb Space Telescope, which went online in 2022.

The blog post showed the answers the Bard chatbot gave when asked this question: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?" Bard gave a few answers, including that it had taken "the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”

That answer was flat out wrong. As pointed out by astrophysicist Grant Tremblay and others on Twitter, the first picture of an exoplanet was in fact taken way back in 2004 by the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Tremblay also pointed out that a normal Google search comes up with the correct answer.

Google has already said it plans to test Bard internally for a while before it is released to the general public. Indeed, the company's CEO Sundar Pichai sent a company-wide email this week asking for all employees to test out Bard and send in feedback. It looks like there will be a lot of work to do before Bard is unleashed for Google searches. Meanwhile, Microsoft is already opening testing its Bing chatbot, powered by technology developed by OpenAI, that's also used for its own ChatGPT.

Google's Bard chatbot AI gets its facts wrong about the James Webb Space Telescope

What is coming from Microsoft and ChatGPT: all the highlights from the presentation

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:34:41 +0000

Yesterday, Microsoft showed what is the result from joining forces with ChatGPT: A new model called Prometheus, multiple advances and multiple applications that will affect almost every Microsoft Product: Office, Edge, Linkedin and others. Here you have the summary from yesterday event.

Not too long before this post, Microsoft gathered about 70 journalists in its Washington headquarters to make a few announcements. While everyone expected some discussion about OpenAI and ChatGPT, they all waited in bated breath for the event to begin. Here’s a quick rundown of discussions as they happened in chronological order.

The first item that CEO Satya Nadella addressed was how ChatGPT has taken everyone by storm. Almost every business is talking about it now and the effect of AI on everyone’s lives. From what he was saying, it was clear that he believes the OpenAI software will shape the future for everyone.

Not long after this introduction, Nadella finally indicated the work Microsoft is doing with the AI system, specifically as it relates to search engines.

“And so we want to show you some of this innovation starting with how it’s going to reshape the largest software category on planet earth, which I’ve been working on for a long time and which we are very excited about, search.”

What caught so many of the audience members by surprise was the indication of a co-pilot mode. In effect, the search engine (Bing) will be able to take over some of the tasks for you, effectively helping you with your research. There’s also a new version of Bing on its way with the new AI model in place.

Image courtesy of Jordan Novet | CNBC

The Bing homepage will also be AI-powered, which will provide several benefits. First, it will be able to answer your queries with the same power as ChatGPT. It will also be able to make an itinerary for your next journey, but you’ll need to specify where you’re traveling to and for how long. You’ll also be able to ask follow-up questions to continue the conversation.

OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, stepped up to the plate next to discuss the new raw power of Bing. He clarified that it’s not ChatGPT behind it, but rather, the integration of the search engine with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 technology. Altman himself was happy to help Microsoft reach this point, stating that he’s waited about twenty years for something like this to happen.

Surprisingly, the new version of Bing will release today on desktop, but it will only have limited functions and views. You’ll only be able to ask a few questions to rest responses, with more rolling out soon. There was also mention of a waiting list for the complete version, with millions receiving it over the next week. What’s exciting was the mention of a mobile Bing with these AI capabilities.

It looks like there are exciting times ahead for Microsoft, Bing, and OpenAI. I’m sure we’ll hear more announcements in the weeks to come as the search engine becomes more powerful, and a strong competitor to Google’s Plans.

Source: CNBC live as it happened

What is coming from Microsoft and ChatGPT: all the highlights from the presentation

Google showcases new AI features in Search, Maps, and Translate

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:33:12 +0000

Today, Google held a livestream from Paris where the company talked about a number of new AI features that will be put into its Search, Translate, and Maps services. The event comes a couple of days after Google announced Bard, its upcoming AI chatbot that the company will be testing internally before its release to the public in the coming weeks.

On the Translate front, Google is now rolling out a new feature that will give context to words that might have more than one meaning, such as the word "bass" which could mean a fish or a musical instrument. This feature is now available for Translate in English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish and will expand to more languages in the coming months. If you have an Android phone with 6GB of RAM or more, you can also translate text that's been blended into images.

Speaking of images, Google will be adding a new feature in its Lens app in the coming months that will allow phone owners to search their screen. They can take images and videos from websites and apps, and Lens can be used to find out more information about the content in those photos and video clips. Google has also expanded another new feature, called multisearch, globally. This will allow users to search with text and a picture at the same time.

Google is also rolling out the previously announced immersive view feature in Maps in certain locations, including London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo. The feature will allow anyone to view those cities from above in full 3D photorealistic viewpoints, all the way down to street level. Users in those same cities, and Paris, can now access Search with Live View in Maps. It will use AI features to show you points of interest on the street as you walk with your phone.

Finally, Maps will offer more info for people with electric vehicles. Maps will now add EV charging station locations based on your car's current charge level, the amount of traffic and your expected battery use. Search on Maps will also show locations for charging stations, and also show which ones have faster charging speeds.

The livestream also mentioned the upcoming Bard chatbot, with Google saying that it does not plan to offer the service to the general public until it hits a "high bar for safety" within the company's internal testing. By contrast, its rival Microsoft is already letting the general public try out the just launched Bing chatbot in a limited capacity, and plans to expand its full use to millions of users in the coming weeks.

Google showcases new AI features in Search, Maps, and Translate

Major Breakthrough Paves The Way For Powerful Quantum Computers Today

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:32:36 +0000

Qubits transfer between microchips has been demonstrated with incredible speed and accuracy.

Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionize information technology, processing problems that even our most powerful supercomputers can’t solve. However, those problems require quantum computers that have millions of qubits (quantum bits), while today's quantum computers operate on a 100-qubit scale.

Connecting more quantum microchips could help overcome the limitations of today’s machines, but they are limited in speed and fidelity. The fastest rate that has ever worked was 180 qubits moved per second with a success rate (fidelity) of about 94 percent.

Bringing the fidelity up closer to 100 percent leads to a drop in speed. Researchers from the University of Sussex and Universal Quantum have now demonstrated a new approach to this problem which has broken those records in the most dramatic fashion.

The teams have designed a new way to connect microchips, that they liken to a jigsaw. In a regular microchip, all the exciting stuff happens in the middle and you can hold it by its side. In their version, the edges are the key parts, which allow them to be connected and transfer qubits with a success rate of 99.999993 percent and a speed of 2,424 per second.

Their microchip has electrodes placed at its edge that are so good they can control a single atom. Aligning these overhanging electrodes is key to connecting the microchips with incredible success, and they can be aligned on each edge – so there is no limit on how many microchips you can connect together.

“We kind of change the way you scale quantum computing by coming up with a solution that is as simple as a puzzle you play at home,” senior author Professor Winfried Hensinger told IFLScience. “That enables you to essentially do any arbitrary computation with as many qubits as you like and as complicated as you like. It's a fundamental step change of how we scale quantum computing.”

The fidelity has an error so small that you don’t have to correct for it anymore, and the speed is a whole order of magnitude higher than the current approach, known as photonic interconnect. This method also has room to improve further, although it’s more than good enough to be employed right here, right now.

“We can probably add another order of magnitude [to the rate]. But this is good enough for fault-tolerant quantum computing. This is not a proof of principle or an 'in the future we can…' These numbers are sufficient right now, as they stand. You don't need to change anything,” Professor Hensinger explained to IFLScience.

This major breakthrough is reported in Nature Communications.

Source

UK regulator: Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard could harm gamers

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:31:47 +0000

The proposal by Microsoft to purchase game publisher Activision Blizzard for $69 billion could potentially harm gamers in the United Kingdom. That's the opinion of the Competition and Markets Authority, the UK regulation group which posted its provisional findings today, (via CNBC).

Today's press release from the CMA stated it had been investigating the deal for several months. That included, among other things, examining over three million documents from both companies, surveying UK gamers, and also examining evidence from other gaming related businesses.

The provisional findings stated that "Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision could result in higher prices, fewer choices, or less innovation for UK gamers." The CMA believes that Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard could cut down on competition in the small but growing cloud gaming market, which the regulator states is already 60 to 70 percent controlled by Microsoft.

The CMA also believes Activision Blizzard already controls some key game franchises like the Call of Duty series, and Microsoft's purchase of the publisher could result in those games becoming Microsoft exclusives. It added that, in its opinion, that "could substantially reduce the competition between Xbox and PlayStation in the UK, in turn harming UK gamers."

The CMA stated that it has sent out "possible remedies" to Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, which they must respond to by February 22. Interested parties can submit responses to the study by March 1, and the CMA will issue its final report on the deal on April 26.

The CNBC article includes a response to the CMA study from an Activision Blizzard spokesperson, stating:

We hope between now and April we will be able to help the CMA better understand our industry to ensure they can achieve their stated mandate to promote an environment where people can be confident they are getting great choices and fair deals, where competitive, fair-dealing business can innovate and thrive, and where the whole UK economy can grow productively and sustainably.

Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel Rima Alaily also sent a response, stating:

Our commitment to grant long term 100% equal access to Call of Duty to Sony, Nintendo, Steam and others preserves the deal’s benefits to gamers and developers and increases competition in the market.

CNBC also interviewed Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick on its cable TV channel. He blasted the CMA's report, saying that the UK's technology industry could become a "Death Valley" if the merger does not go through.

In previous statements, Microsoft has claimed that after it buys Activision Blizzard, it will offer future Call of Duty games to Sony and Nintendo consoles, and Valve's Steam PC platform, for at least 10 years in terms of "parity on content, pricing, features, quality and playability." It's important to point out that Microsoft has continued to release games in the Minecraft franchise, which it bought in 2014, to Sony and Nintendo consoles.

Source: CMA via CNBC

UK regulator: Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard could harm gamers

Runway launches ground-breaking Gen-1 video generation AI system

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:30:43 +0000

Runway, the company best known for its text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has just released Gen-1, a video generation AI system. Similarly to the company's Stable Diffusion technology, users may use text input to transform videos using the AI model.

source: Runway

A short demonstration video, published on the company's official YouTube channel, shows how Gen1 can turn a video clip of people walking down the street into claymation puppets. A simple command, Claymation style, is all that is required to make the transformation.

Later on, in the same video, Runway reveals that its video generation AI system accepts text and image input to create new video content using existing video clips. Apart from direct transformations of video clips, Gen1 supports what Runway calls Storyboard.

Storyboard turns mockups into animated renders. The video shows how a stack of books is turned into a skyline by night. Then there is mask mode, which allows video editors to isolate objects in the video and modify them. The example this time shows how Gen1 was used to add spots to the dog. The short clip highlights an issue, as the AI put two of the spots directly on the dog's eyes.

Render mode may turn untextured renders into realistic outputs through text prompts or providing an image.

Customization mode, finally, allows users to customize the model for "even higher fidelity results".

You can watch the full video below:

Gen-1 by Runway

Several companies released text to video models in 2022. Meta unveiled Make-a-Video and Google Phenaki and Muse. Both solutions support the creation of short video clips using a user's text input. Google launched Dreamix last week, which looks to be the most similar of technologies when compared to Gen-1. Just like Runway's solution Dreamix takes existing video content and applies new styles to it.

Judging from Runway's demonstration video, it appears that the company's Gen-1 model unlocks new abilities that the competing products lack. For one, Runway allows users to modify existing content and accepts text and image inputs to do so. Runway claims that its GEN-1 video content was "preferred over existing methods for image-to-image and video-to-video transitions" by more than 73% (Stable Diffusion 1.5) and 88% (text2Live).

The company wants to reveal technical details on its Internet website in the coming days. Only a few users have been invited to try Gen-1 so far. There is a waitlist, but it is unclear when the technology is made available to mode users.

Closing Words

Gen-1 takes existing video content and transforms it to new video content using text or image instructions. The technology unlocks new possibilities, not only in commercial environments, but also for hobby and home use. It is probably only a matter of time before similar tools are launched on popular video hosting and streaming websites.

A research paper, published on February 6, 2023, provides technical details for those interested.

Now You: What would you use Gen-1 for, if you had access?

Runway launches ground-breaking Gen-1 video generation AI system

Live From Paris: Google unveils its AI strategy and NORA

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 19:23:55 +0000

Bard is Google's answer to ChatGPT and will be integrated into Google Search. There is also NORA, No One Right Answer. Google offered a glimpse of both technologies during today's livestream.

Google presented its strategy regarding AI today on its Live From Paris event. The company unveiled part of the strategy earlier this week when it announced Bard, its ChatGPT competitor. Google has since then changed the visibility of the recorded livestream to private.

Google employees explained in the livestream how the company would use artificial intelligence in the future to make search natural and intuitive. Besides the already existing abilities to search for text, image and video content, users will soon get more context when they run searches on Google.

Google users will be able to pull information from various sources. One example that Google provided included an image search for pastry and a search for retail locations in the user's area to find bakeries and other shops that sold the particular type of pastry.

Bard, a LaMDA-based chatbot, will add answers to search that use natural language. Google explains that Bard may provide contextual information rather than just facts.

NORA, on the other hand, is Google's answer to user questions that do not have a definitive answer. The technology displays options to the user, which may then be selected. Google showed a search for the question "what are the best constellations to look for while stargazing" and the AI-generated responses that listed a few options to the user.

Google users can pick any of the answers at start, dive deeper into them or go back to the very beginning to look at another possible answer.

Unlike Microsoft, which launched the new Bing already as a limited preview, it is unclear when Google is going to launch NORA and other features that it mentioned during the livestream. Bard is not available publicly as well as this point, but Google plans to make it available to a wider audience in the coming weeks and months.

Google picked Live from Paris as the title of the livestream as it is the location of Google's machine learning team.

Google appears to be on the defensive at the moment as Microsoft's integration of AI components in Bing and also Microsoft Edge are launched already, albeit to limited audiences. Alphabet's stock dropped more than 5% after Google's presentation.

Source

Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:01:52 +0000

AI is coming for your browser, your social media, and your operating system, too.

I’m coming to you from Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, where just a few hours ago, Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. There’s also a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window that can help you browse and understand web pages.

The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity. They demo’d it making a travel itinerary, posting to LinkedIn, and rewriting code to work in a different programming language.

After the presentation, I was able to get some time with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Nadella has been very bullish on AI. He’s previously talked about AI as the next major computing platform. I wanted to talk about this next step in AI, the partnership with OpenAI, and why he thought now was the best time to go after Google search.

This is a short interview, but it’s a good one. Okay, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Here we go.

A transcript of this interview will be available soon.

Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why

Report: Microsoft plans to release tools to let third parties make their own chatbots

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 08:57:50 +0000

Microsoft's announcement of its new chatbot-based Bing search engine and Edge web browser may just be the tip of the iceberg for the company's AI efforts. A CNBC article claims, via unnamed sources, that Microsoft plans to help large businesses, along with schools and governments, create their own AI chatbots, using OpenAI's ChatGPT technology.

The article claims that Microsoft could offer these chatbot development tools to third parties as a way to help improve customer services. For example, chatbots could suggest answers to customer service agents to help users find a solution to problems.

One major hurdle in giving third parties access to chatbot tools is that they can use a lot of computing power, which could cost a lot of money. The article claims Microsoft could give those companies tools that could be used to estimate the costs of running chatbots, and thus keep spending down.

Third parties could also upload their own chatbot data to help improve the answers they give out. Finally, Microsoft and OpenAI could allow those groups to replace the branding with the company's own brand. Of course, Microsoft and OpenAI could make a lot of money by selling chatbot access to others, but there's no word on how that will work out.

It's likely that Google has similar plans for its own Bard chatbot technology, which it officially revealed earlier this week. Google will be holding its own AI-based press event Wednesday morning, starting at 8:30 am Eastern time.

Report: Microsoft plans to release tools to let third parties make their own chatbots

Linux AMD Ryzen users can rejoice as testing shows massive performance gains over the years

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 08:57:09 +0000

AMD Ryzen users who are running Linux-based operating systems have a lot to be happy about today. That's because the performance of the platform seems to have improved by leaps and bounds over the years according to the latest testing by Phoronix. The test was conducted using a Ryzen Threadripper 3990X HEDT (high end desktop) processor, which is built on the Zen 2 architecture. The CPU is a powerful 64 core, 128 thread part that was released in 2020. For the graphics, a Radeon RX 5700 XT, based on RDNA 1, was used. For test OS, Ubuntu 23.04 with Linux kernel version 6.2 was used.

Moving on to the results themselves, the biggest, most spectacular gains are seen in the Vulkan benchmarks. If one had to guess, it seems like excellent optimization work has been done inside Vulkan and the AMD drivers such that the API has been able to better utilize more cores and threads. Compared to back in 2020, when the CPU was first released, there is up to an astonishing 444.7% improvement in the AlexNet Vulkan universal neural network inference framework (ncnn) benchmark. Meanwhile, the other ncnn tests also show close to 175% improvement or nearly three times better performance.

The full detailed chart showing the performance gains in 2023 versus 2020 are given below (you'll need to zoom in):

A total of 135 tests were run. In terms of geometric mean across all the results, the new Linux PC was found to be almost 15% faster, which is quite a lot considering there were so many tests.

You can find the full results with more details over on Phoronix's website.

Linux AMD Ryzen users can rejoice as testing shows massive performance gains over the years

Mastodon's active user growth declines after months of steady rise

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 08:55:48 +0000

Ever since business magnate Elon Musk took over Twitter back in late October last year, many Twitter users have flocked to Mastodon, a decentralized social media platform. It has steadily gained users, reaching one million in November and 2.5 million shortly after.

However, it seems that the Mastodon hype has officially peaked, as the platform's active monthly user count fell to 1.4 million by late January. This means that Mastodon now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users compared to the beginning of the year.

As Wired points out, this drop could be due to many users complaining that Mastodon is difficult to use. "There is no quick guide to start, so you are on your own to wade through Mastodon’s quirks," said Jesus Diaz of Fast Company. "And there is no way to easily discover content that interests you either. Twitter’s sign-up process prompts users to pick general areas and subtopics of interest, which instantly generates a customized timeline."

Mastodon is a network of decentralized servers located all around the world. Given that different servers have different rules, it can be difficult to choose one to join and know the types of content that you can post. It can also be tricky to find certain users.

While the game is not over yet, it clearly seems that it will take some time for Mastodon to become a true contender for Twitter.

Source: Wired

Mastodon's active user growth declines after months of steady rise

A Bold Plan to Beam Solar Energy Down From Space

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 21:11:12 +0000

The European Space Agency is exploring a unique way to dramatically cut carbon emissions by tapping sunlight closer to the source.

WHETHER YOU’RE COVERING deserts, ugly parking lots, canals, or even sunny lakes with solar panels, clouds will occasionally get in the way—and every day the sun must set. No problem, says the European Space Agency: Just put the solar arrays in space.

The agency recently announced a new exploratory program called Solaris, which aims to figure out if it is technologically and economically feasible to launch solar structures into orbit, use them to harness the sun’s power, and transmit energy to the ground.

If this concept comes to fruition, by sometime in the 2030s Solaris could begin providing always-on space-based solar power. Eventually, it could make up 10 to 15 percent of Europe’s energy use, playing a role in the European Union’s goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. “We’re thinking about the climate crisis and the need to find solutions. What more could space do to help mitigate climate change—not just monitor it from above, as we’ve been doing for the past few decades?” asks Sanjay Vijendran, who heads the initiative and plays a leading role in the agency’s Mars program as well.

The primary driver for Solaris, Vijendran says, is the need for continuous clean energy sources. Unlike fossil fuel and nuclear power, solar and wind are intermittent—even the sunniest solar farms sit idle the majority of the time. It won’t be possible to store massive amounts of energy from renewables until battery technologies improve. Yet according to Vijendran, space solar arrays could be more than 90 percent efficient. (The remaining 10 or so percent of the time, the Earth would be directly between the sun and the array, blocking the light.)

The program—unrelated to Stanisław Lem’s sci-fi novel with the same name—is considered a “preparatory” one, meaning the ESA has already completed a pilot study, but it’s not yet ready for full-scale development. It calls for designing an in-orbit demonstration of the technology, launching it in 2030, developing a small version of a space solar power plant in the mid-2030s, and then scaling it up dramatically. For now, ESA researchers will begin by investigating what it would take to robotically assemble the modules of a large solar array, for example while in geostationary orbit at an altitude of about 22,000 miles. This way, the structure would remain continuously above a particular point on the ground, regardless of the Earth’s rotation.

For the project to go forward, Vijendran and his team must determine by 2025 that it’s indeed possible to achieve space-based solar in a cost-efficient way. NASA and the Department of Energy explored the concept in the 1970s and '80s, but sidelined it because of the expense and technological challenges. Still, much has changed since then. Launch costs have dropped, mainly thanks to reusable rockets. Satellites have become cheaper to mass-produce. And the cost of photovoltaics, which convert sunlight into electricity, has fallen, making solar power in orbit more competitive with terrestrial energy sources.

There’s another hurdle, though: How do you get all that energy down to the electricity grid? One could use laser beams, but clouds would block them. Instead, Vijendran and his colleagues think converting the electricity to microwave radiation is the way to go.

Those waves would seamlessly pass through the atmosphere without much energy loss. But because a microwave beam gets bigger over vast distances, and the transmitter would be so high up, that would mean building a rather large—and therefore costly—receiving station on the ground, probably one that’s more than a square kilometer. The array in orbit would be significant, too, with the whole thing possibly weighing thousands of tons—much larger than the International Space Station. “This would be the largest structure put in orbit by humanity,” Vijendran says.

But researchers are considering other designs too. For example, they could deploy three or more smaller arrays in a medium Earth orbit. Instead of functioning at a fixed point in the sky, as a single geosynchronous satellite would, they would form a relay. Each time one array rotated out of transmission range, another would take its place and continue to beam down energy. This could allow for nearly uniform, predictable solar power, gathered at multiple locations on the ground. It would also allow for smaller receivers, since the arrays would be closer to Earth, says Sergio Pellegrino, co-director of the California Institute of Technology’s Space Solar Power Project, which is complementary to Solaris.

For a technology demonstration, on January 3, Pellegrino and his team launched a modified Vigoride spacecraft built by the space transportation company Momentus. It includes three experiments: Alba, which tests different kinds of photovoltaic cells; Maple, which tests wireless microwave power transmitters; and Dolce, which tests the deployment of a lightweight structure. “You bundle up this whole thing and launch a whole set of them, and then create a constellation in space. By integrating all of the pieces, we project that it is possible to do this at a cost that is essentially the same as for electrical power now produced on Earth,” Pellegrino says. They estimate that this design could generate electricity at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour.

Researchers working on Caltech's Dolce device.

COURTESY OF CALTECH

Other groups have made advances with space-based solar too, including the Space Energy Initiative. The London-based organization, a partnership between the UK government, researchers, and industry, got to work following a 2021 report that recommended proceeding with a study of space solar power. “We realized the government was going to find it difficult to pursue such an ambitious concept without seeing that industry, and particularly the energy sector, was strongly behind it,” says Martin Soltau, co-chair of the initiative.

Soltau and his colleagues are developing a satellite concept called CASSIOPeiA. Its design features collectors that always point at the sun, and it can accommodate an elliptical orbit, which can come closer to the Earth than a circular one. It’s possible to pull off such a configuration with four or five smaller satellites at a lower cost than a bigger complex higher up, he says. In addition, SEI is working on bolstering its financial support beyond the UK government: They’re currently in talks with potential international partners, including Saudi Arabia.

And other organizations are in the space solar mix too, including Northrop Grumman and the Air Force Research Laboratory, which are partnering to study its potential use for military purposes. Japan’s space agency has a solar program, and so does China’s, which plans to run tests using the country’s new Tiangong space station.

Deploying a bunch of these structures in orbit raises plenty of questions and possible concerns. Astronomers have drawn attention to the reflectivity of satellites that have begun transforming the night sky, like those in SpaceX’s sprawling Starlink network.

These could potentially cause problems for astronomical imaging and change people’s views of constellations. But solar engineers say they intend for their arrays to absorb sunlight; if they end up reflecting anything, it would be a sign they’d been designed poorly.

And there could be some worries about the use of microwave beams; some countries have been studying directed energy lasers as possible weapons against spacecraft. While the low-intensity beams needed for space solar could not damage anything or anyone, the arrays would need a particular range of dedicated frequencies so that they don’t create spectrum interference with other satellites or radio telescopes. They might need their own orbital slots too, to manage space traffic and avoid collisions.

Still, if it works, and within a couple of decades solar arrays are orbiting and delivering gigawatts of energy to the ground, it could pay big dividends. It could supplement other forms of clean energy and be part of a solution to climate change—and it’s much closer to becoming a reality than industrializing fusion energy, for example. Pellegrino points out that the related technologies are mature enough to move it past the theory stage, and into building and testing hardware. “This is an area of tremendous opportunity and promise,” he says.

Source

Zoom is laying off 1,300 employees, around 15 percent of its workforce

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:48:20 +0000

US employees were notified via email and will be getting a 16-week severance package.

Zoom is laying off about 15 percent of its staff, which means about 1,300 people will lose their jobs, according to a memo from Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that the company posted on its blog. “Each organization” at the company will be affected by the cuts, Yuan said.

The company scaled up rapidly as people shifted to remote work during the pandemic, and Zoom grew three times in size within 24 months. However, “we didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities,” Yuan wrote. “The uncertainty of the global economy, and its effect on our customers, means we need to take a hard — yet important — look inward to reset ourselves so we can weather the economic environment, deliver for our customers and achieve Zoom’s long-term vision.”

Zoom employees being laid off in the US will receive a severance package that includes up to 16 weeks’ salary and healthcare coverage. Outside the US, severance will be “similar and will take into account local laws,” according to Yuan.

Like many other CEOs, Yuan says he holds himself accountable “for these mistakes and the actions we take today” and announced he’s reducing his salary by 98 percent for the rest of the year. He also won’t take a corporate bonus and says that the rest of the executive leadership team will do the same, and they are reducing their base salaries by 20 percent.

Zoom is far from the only company to say it grew too much during the pandemic. Meta, Google, Spotify, Patreon, Peloton, and others have all cited their previous hiring sprees as the reason for layoffs. The cuts at Zoom, however, are quite deep and may be a sign that the company is very worried about its future.

That might be in part because Zoom is facing increased competition from apps like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, which have significantly improved over the past few years. As companies are looking for ways to cut costs, Zoom might be on the chopping block in favor of other conferencing options that are already included with workplace software packages. Zoom has been trying to fashion itself as more of an all-purpose tool by integrating features like email, calendars and updates to its Slack-like tool, but it appears those changes may not have been enough.

Zoom will be announcing its earnings for the last year on February 27th.

Zoom is laying off 1,300 employees, around 15 percent of its workforce

AI Deciphers Ancient Babylonian Texts And Finds Beautiful Lost Hymn

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 19:56:13 +0000

Eat your heart out, ChatGPT.

Created in the 7th century BCE, this Babylonian text is the 11th Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Image credit: British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Researchers have crafted an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of deciphering fragments of ancient Babylonian texts. Dubbed the “Fragmentarium,” the algorithm holds the potential to piece together some of the oldest stories ever written by humans, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The work comes from a team at Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany who have been attempting to digitize every surviving Babylonian cuneiform tablet since 2018.

The problem with understanding Babylonian texts is that the narratives are written on clay tablets, which today exist only in countless fragments. The fragments are stored at facilities that are continents away from each other, such as the British Museum in London and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

On top of these hurdles, the texts are written in two complex writing systems, Sumerian and Akkadian, making the task of compiling the texts all the more taxing.

Researchers previously deciphered the texts by copying the characters onto paper, then painstakingly compared their transcripts with others to see which fragments belong together and where to fill in the gaps.

Fragmentarium makes this process a whole lot easier. From the 22,000 text fragments that have been digitized so far, the AI can sift through the images and systematically assemble text fragments together by making connections in seconds that would typically take human researchers months.

"It's a tool that has never existed before, a huge database of fragments. We believe it is essential to the reconstruction of Babylonian literature, which we can now progress much more rapidly," Enrique Jiménez, Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Literatures at the Institute of Assyriology at Ludwig Maximilian University, said in a statement.

In November 2022, the software recognized a fragment belonging to the most recent tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest surviving piece of literature dating back to 2100 BCE. The most famous parts of this epic poem describe a great catastrophic flood, which is thought to be the origin of the Noah's Arc story found in Genesis.

In another breakthrough, Jiménez and a colleague from Iraq identified a hymn to the city of Babylon with the help of Fragmentarium. Jiménez explains: “The text is lovely. You can imagine the city very well. It describes spring arriving in Babylon.”

“Hitherto there have been no hymns to cities in Babylonian literature. Now we have found 15 new fragments of it. Without the Fragmentarium, the reconstruction would have taken 30 or 40 years,” he adds.

The hymn reads as follows:

“The river Arahtu,

- created by Nudimmud, the Lord of Wisdom - Waters

the plain, drenches the reeds,

Pours out its waters into lagoon and sea.

It's blooming and green on his fields,

The meadows shimmer with fresh grain;

Thanks to him the corn piles up in heaps and heaps,

Grass grows high for pasture for the flocks,

With riches and splendor befitting mankind,

[All is] covered in glorious abundance.”

So far, just 200 researchers from around the world have used the online platform for their work. However, as of February 2023, Fragmentarium will be free for the public to use.

“Everybody will be able to play around with the Fragmentarium. There are thousands of fragments that have not yet been identified,” says Jiménez.

Source

Intel Unleashes Core i5-13490F CPU with Enhanced Cache and Clocks for Optimal Performance

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 22:13:14 +0000

When the incredible Core i5-12490F processor was released a year ago by Intel turned out to be the i5-12400F improved version that featured higher frequencies and more L3 cache. Rumour has it that the situation may repeat itself with the Intel Core 13 line.

Recently a CPU-Z with a Core i5-13490F processor screenshot got posted online. Although it features the same ten cores as the i5-13400F, the third-level cache is 24 MB, and the frequency stands at 200 MHz higher. But the L2 cache mostly remained unchanged (9.5 MB), which is a benefit.

The CPU-Z tested in the Core i5-13490F showed a 779.7 score in the single-threaded test and 6834.5 points in the multi-threaded test. Which respectively is 6% and 4.5% higher than the Core i5-13400F.

Undoubtedly the Core i5-13490F is an exciting processor. Still, the Core i5-12490F is only available to purchase in China, and the Core i5-13490F could be exclusively intended for the Chinese market.

Intel Unleashes Core i5-13490F CPU with Enhanced Cache and Clocks for Optimal Performance

Microsoft to hold surprise event February 7; will it be ChatGPT-Bing related?

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 22:09:47 +0000

Microsoft may about to be ready to reveal some major news, and it's likely to be related to Bing and ChatGPT. Today, a number of media outlets, including The Verge, got invites to a surprise press event that will be held on Tuesday, February 7, starting at 1 pm Eastern time (10 am Pacific time). The event will be held at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington headquarters. So far, there's no word on if the event will be livestreamed.

Officially, Microsoft is only saying the event will "share some progress on a few exciting projects." It's likely that one of them will be integrating ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot, into Microsoft's Bing search engine. Last week, screenshots that allegedly show how ChatGPT will be added into Bing's search bar leaked on the Internet.

We already know that Microsoft has entered into a multi-year agreement with ChatGPT's parent company OpenAI. The chatbot has lready been added into the Premium version of Microsoft Teams. Tomorrow's press event will likely feature more news on ChatGPT and how it will be used in more Microsoft products and services.

The news of this press event comes just as Google has announced a ChatGPT competitor, Bard, Google says it will become available to the public sometime over the coming weeks, along with more AI-driven features in Search.

Microsoft to hold surprise event February 7; will it be ChatGPT-Bing related?

Hogwarts Legacy Reviews Are Out. Gets Praised Everywhere

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 22:00:17 +0000

The latest game in the Harry Potter franchise, Hogwarts Legacy is getting very good reviews from the critics. Depending on the user experience, it’s expected to be a big hit.

Hogwarts Legacy is among the most awaited games of this year. From gaming news to videos to social media, everyone is talking about it and everyone is eagerly waiting for it. The game was originally going to release last year, but got pushed back to this year instead.

The game has its own set of controversies. Specifically, some have called for a boycott of the game due to some comments made by J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. But the game developers have distanced themselves from the comments and insisted that J. K. Rowling isn’t involved in it.

Made by Avalanche Software (not to be confused by Avalanche Studios), the game is expected to be quite interesting. The immersive, open-world, action role-playing-game is set 100 years before the story of the Harry Potter series and explores the wizarding world of that era.

The game is going to release 3-4 days later. However, the reviews from the critics are already out. Let’s look at some of them.

Critics Praise Hogwarts Legacy In Reviews

IGN gave the game 9 out of 10. It said:

In nearly every way, Hogwarts Legacy is the Harry Potter RPG I’ve always wanted to play. Its open-world adventure captures all the excitement and wonder of the Wizarding World with its memorable new characters, challenging and nuanced combat, and a wonderfully executed Hogwarts student fantasy that kept me glued to my controller for dozens of hours. It’s certainly weighed down by technical issues, a lackluster main story, and some poor enemy variety, but even those couldn’t come close to breaking its enchanting spell over me.

PCGamesN

PCGamesN wasn’t so generous in their review. They gave the game 7 out of 10:

Hogwarts Legacy starts constrained, but the further you progress, the more it opens up. The world around Hogwarts feels quite Fable-esque, while the gear and inventory system is very similar to Destiny 2. Meanwhile, interacting with other characters and ticking things off the map works like it did in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. All of these are great games and by cribbing from them Hogwarts Legacy has taken the safe route to offering a capable open-world RPG. But without something more original going for it, it struggles to develop an identity of its own. That’ll be especially bothersome for anyone who isn’t an existing Potter fan.

Eurogamer Germany

Eurogamer Germany (translated) gave the game 8 out of 10. It said:

Hogwarts Legacy convinces on many levels and surprises with loving details and great inventiveness. But even the beautiful wizarding world is not completely perfect.

Video Games Chronicle

VGC gave the game 4 out of 5 stars. It said:

Hogwarts Legacy brilliantly captures the magic of the world of Harry Potter with its beautiful open world, engaging characters and exciting combat. While the open-world elements of the game make it feel more dated than we’d have liked, it’s otherwise the best the Wizarding World has been in a video game.

GamesRadar

GamesRadar, like PCGamesN, wasn’t that generous. It gave 3.5 out of 5 and said:

With its stunning recreation of beloved Harry Potter landmarks and thrilling combat, Hogwarts Legacy definitely has its moments. Sadly, it tries to do too much all at once, and never quite settles into a comfortable rhythm, or leverages the player experience against the established laws of the wizarding world.

Conclusion

As we can conclude from some of the above reviews. The game is likely to be very good.

A lot of the reviewing critics are highly concerned about the politics that is happening outside the game. The book author comments and such. Which is somewhat understandable.

But the problem is, the politics doesn’t seem to do justice to the game, which seems to have had a lot of efforts put into it. Some critics do acknowledge this and are trying their best to distance the game and book author. But some biases can be expected and seen in these reviews – including from some of them which we didn’t link. So if there are no major amounts of bugs or performance issues, we expect the game to be a big hit with the consumers and common users.

It’s important to mention that Overclock3D reports that Hogwarts Legacy’s PC version will come with a support for FSR 1.0, FSR 2.0, DLSS 3.0, XeSS, and DLAA upscaling options at launch. This is unseen anywhere before.

We may or may not review this game on our site. The reason is, the game is expected to run into 35 or more hours. We usually take months to complete such game and by time whole internet will be filled with enough reviews. Not to forget, a lot of other top of line games might be released by then.

Hogwarts Legacy is going to release on 10 February on consoles and PC. However, those who have bought the Deluxe Edition of the game can get their hands on the game on the 7th February itself.

PC gamers can purchase the game from Epic Games Store or Steam. It’s priced at $59.99 but might change from region to region, though.

Hogwarts Legacy Reviews Are Out. Gets Praised Everywhere

After fixing dying 980 Pro SSDs, Samsung promises firmware for 990 Pro health issue as well

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 21:55:26 +0000

While Samsung SSDs, including its NVMe drives have generally been reliable (which is also why we have often recommended them to readers), a couple of recent fiascos are sure to leave a bad taste in the mouths of people.

First up, we had a major issue with the 990 Pro, the company's flagship NVMe product. Our own reviewer Robbie Khan noticed that the new 990 Pro was rapidly dropping health, with around a 1-percentage point drop almost every single day. Although Samsung was hesitant at first to acknowledge any major bug about the drive, the South Korean giant was sort of forced to confirm the issue after realizing how widespread the problem was as many online had similar experiences. You can follow the saga in its entirety in this article.

Fast forward to now, Samsung has confirmed that it was able to reproduce the issue in its internal testing. The company is promising a firmware update that will fix the problem. A Samsung representative posted on its community forums the following message (translated to English):

Hello everyone, we have received feedback from our technicians on this:

Samsung is currently reviewing customer inquiries about anomalies related to the SMART Percentage Used (on Samsung Magician) and/or Health Status (on Crystal Disk Info) of the Samsung SSD 990 PRO.

We were able to recreate the error under certain conditions of use.

To fix the problem, Samsung is expected to release a firmware update in February.

Hence a firmware update with the fix should be rolling out soon.

While this was the first major bug to hit Samsung's NVMe drives, the 990 Pro's predecessor, 980 Pro, which is also a very popular PCIe drive from the company, was found to be dying under certain scenarios. Samsung later fixed the issue with firmware versions "4B2QGXA7" and "5B2QGXA7" (via Puget Systems). The problematic firmware version was found to be "3B2QGXA7". Hence if your 980 Pro is on that firmware, you should definitely update it using something like Samsung Magician.

Via: ComputerBase

After fixing dying 980 Pro SSDs, Samsung promises firmware for 990 Pro health issue as well

Google reveals its ChatGPT competitor, Bard

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 21:53:07 +0000

It's been over two months since the official launch of the ChatGPT chatbot. Now, Google is announcing its own competitor. In a new company blog post, Google's CEO Sunder Pichai announced Bard. This new conversational chatbot will incorporate Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) to power its anwsers to questions and inquires.

Pichai stated that Bard will not only be able to handle answers to simple questions, like Google's current search engine can do already, but it can also handle more complex inquiries, such as asking how to give information on the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope to a nine year old. The screenshot of that example also has thumbs up and thumbs down logos, apparently so you can rank the answer that is given to you. You can also apparently go deeper into that answer by clicking on the "Check it" option.

The first public version of Bard will launch with what Pichai called a "lightweight model version of LaMDA." This will reportedly use less computer power so that Google can get more feedback from a wide range of users. Bard is currently in testing now and will go live to the general public sometime in the coming weeks.

In addition, Pichai stated that that Google Search will soon enable more AI-driven features "that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats." That includes more details to questions alongside links to web sites that might have more information on the subject of the search.

Google's move to launch Bard and to add more AI-driven features to Search is clearly a response to the rise of ChatGPT. Microsoft is reportedly going to add a new and faster version of ChatGPT to its own Bing search engine in the coming weeks as well.

Google reveals its ChatGPT competitor, Bard

Dell is the latest tech company to announce layoffs with 6,650 workers affected

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 21:51:47 +0000

More people in the tech industry have been hit by layoffs today. This time, the company announcing cuts in its workforce is Dell. The PC company announced in an SEC filing (via CNBC) that it will lay off 6,650 workers. That's about 5 percent of Dell's total workforce.

The SEC filing included an all-team email sent by Dell's co-COO Jeff Clarke. He stated that efforts to cut back on spending at Dell, including a hiring freeze and limiting travel, have not been enough and that "market conditions continue to erode with an uncertain future". He said of the layoffs, "There is no tougher decision, but one we had to make for our long-term health and success.”

The new Dell layoffs are part of the overall downward trend in PC sales. IDC reported in January that shipments of PCs worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2022 were down 28.1 percent from the same period in 2021. The same report added that Dell, the third largest PC maker, saw its year-over-year sales plummet 37.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Dell's move to lay off 5 percent of its workforce is in tune with all of the other tech layoffs that have been announced in the past few months. Google and Spotify have both announced headcount reductions of 6 percent, and Microsoft also announced mass layoffs a few weeks ago that affected less than 5 percent of its workforce.

Dell is the latest tech company to announce layoffs with 6,650 workers affected

Fitbit is currently down for some users

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 21:51:10 +0000

If you are having issues with your Fitbit devices at the moment, you are not alone. Many people are reporting that some services for the Google-owned fitness wearable device are currently down.

9to5Google reports that the Fitbit iOS and Android mobile apps are not currently syncing up on the Fitbit fitness wearables and smartwatches. The apps are also not currently syncing up to Google's Pixel Watch, which has Fitbit software inside. In addition, some stats are currently not showing up, such as steps, calories burned and more. The My Dashboard feature on Fitbit's website is also not working, although the rest of the website is currently unaffected.

Downdetector.com has confirmed a number of outage reports from Fitbit users. The official Fitbit Support Twitter page has posted word that the company is aware of the issues and are working now to fix it. We will update this post when we learn more.

Fitbit is currently down for some users