AMD earlier today announced the expansion of its Ryzen PRO 9000 Series processor lineup with new workstation-focused desktop processors aimed at commercial and enterprise users. The company added that the new portfolio, like for the consumer series, is built on its “Zen 5” architecture, and is designed to deliver higher compute performance, enterprise-grade reliability for professional workloads, and more.

The lineup includes SKUs ranging from six to 16 cores with power envelopes spanning 65 watts to 170 watts, allowing deployment options across compact desktops to larger workstation towers. AMD highlighted use cases including 4K and 8K video editing, CAD and digital twin workloads, software compilation, scientific analysis, and local AI inference, among others.

Along with that, AMD has also introduced select Ryzen PRO 9000 Series models featuring AMD 3D V-Cache technology for the first time in the commercial desktop segment. For anyone not familiar, the 3D V-cache technology, originally devised for improving gaming performance, significantly increases cache capacity by vertically stacking additional LLC (last level cache) memory onto the processor die itself, enabling faster data access on demand. Recently, X3D chips have shown lots of potential in new kinds of workloads aside from just gaming.

The full lineup and specs are given in the table below:

The company added that the chips support up to 256 GB of ECC DDR5 memory along with PCIe 5.0 interface connectivity. AMD said the Ryzen PRO 9000 Series is built on the AM5 platform to provide long-term infrastructure stability and upgrade flexibility for enterprise customers. The new CPUs, as expected, also integrate AMD PRO Technologies. In terms of availability, systems powered by Ryzen PRO 9000 Series processors are expected to begin rolling out in the 2H (second half) of 2026, with Lenovo’s ThinkStation P4 workstation scheduled for availability in Q3 of the year.

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Posted Thursday 14 May 2026 at 7:12 am AEST (my time).

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The extraction shooter that exploded in popularity last year, Arc Raiders, has been receiving constant content updates since its launch. This almost monthly update schedule that developer Embark Studios is keeping has delivered new maps, fresh enemies to fight, events, and gameplay features during this time. However, the studio has now announced that this live service schedule is changing.

Ditching the monthly schedule, Embark is now switching to a bi-annual plan for larger-scale and more impactful updates. This means major updates that change the way players experience the game will now arrive every six months or so.

This means that the next update is now landing in October, and it is already being called the biggest content drop for the game yet. Dubbed Frozen Trail, this is slated to add a brand-new region for players to explore, unique ARC enemies, an improved skill tree, and more:

• A Sprawling New Frontier - Explore a new landscape in the Rust Belt with layered design and new mysteries to uncover in the largest map in the game.
• Our Most Ambitious ARC Operation So Far - including new ARC enemies with fresh designs, and unique behaviors that will challenge Raiders in new ways.
• New Systems of Progression - Many players have maxed out their Raider Den and hit the Skill Point ceiling. Frozen Trail will introduce new goals and more ways to shape your Raider’s progression.
• Exploring the origin of ARC - What are ARC and where do they come from? Frozen Trail gives Raiders the opportunity to begin uncovering that mystery.
• Improved Skill Tree
• Alongside new weapons, items, instruments, cosmetics and more

The studio added that while it planned to bring in monthly updates from launch to keep players engaged, it realized that it needed more time to deliver more significant changes. The fast pace was also deemed to be unsustainable.

"We think about Arc Raiders as an experience that should continue expanding over time, and right now we’re still early in that journey," the studio added in a blog post today. "The bi-annual cadence gives us the opportunity to develop to build future updates with more intention, ensuring that gameplay, progression, narrative, and the world itself all move forward together."

The studio is spinning up a separate live service development team to keep the game updated with smaller changes, events, bug fixes, and store refreshes. These will continue to arrive as the main team focuses on Frozen Trail for its October launch across PC and consoles.

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Posted Thursday 14 May 2026 at 7:11 am AEST (my time).

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Data centers may be coming to your neighborhood as side installations associated with new homes—and in exchange would offer subsidized electricity and Internet access along with backup batteries to homeowners. The company behind the plan has already begun pilot testing in preparation for a 100-home trial run this year.

The “distributed data center solution” announced by the San Francisco startup SPAN would deploy thousands of XFRA nodes that contain liquid-cooled Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs operating with minimal noise, according to a press release. By harnessing excess power capacity among US households, SPAN aims to quickly expand the available compute for AI workloads without the costs and delays associated with trying to build warehouse-sized data centers.

“Data centers are loud, ugly, and often drive up local electricity bills,” said Chris Lander, vice president of XFRA at SPAN, in correspondence with Ars. “[This] is quiet, discreet, and makes energy more affordable for the host and community.”

SPAN’s approach could avoid the significant land use and water consumption issues that come with huge data center projects, which may help sidestep growing community opposition to such developments. In a CNBC interview, SPAN also claimed it could install 8,000 XFRA units at a cost five times lower than building a typical 100-megawatt data center with the same compute capacity.

Starting in 2027, SPAN plans to scale up to 80,000 XFRA nodes across the United States and provide more than 1 gigawatt of distributed compute. This network would not replace the centralized data centers being built by hyperscaler companies such as Google and Microsoft for the intensive training of AI models, but would instead be more suitable for supporting cloud gaming, content streaming, and AI inference, in which trained models are applied to real-world tasks.

A SPAN whitepaper dangled the possibilities of retrofitting existing homes and installing larger node configurations for commercial customers. But the initial push would involve installing such nodes in newly constructed homes, with all the necessary equipment paid for and operated by SPAN.

The homeowner experience

So what does this mean for people who sign up to live in homes with attached data center nodes? SPAN would take on responsibility for paying the electricity and Internet bills for each household while offering residents either a flat utility fee—the company floated the example of a $150 fee—or possibly no fee at all, according to Realtor.com. The company is also still working out the specifics of household Internet service plans.

Residents can generally expect to use household electrical appliances without interruptions, according to the company. SPAN’s main strategy is to tap into excess power capacity in each home, with 200 amps of electrical service capacity representing the standard for most modern US homes built in the last 30 years.

“Virtually all homes with 200-amp utility services have 80 amps available at all times, so we set that as the maximum power consumption for a single XFRA node,” Lander said. He described how the XFRA nodes would “operate as always-on loads within verified residential capacity,” meaning they would run around the clock under normal circumstances.

A video animation distributed by SPAN suggests that an individual XFRA node would hold 16 Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs along with 4 AMD EPYC Server CPUs, backed by 3 terabytes of memory.

The node installations alongside each house would be paired with a wall-mounted SPAN smart panel and a 16 kilowatt-hour battery—overseen by SPAN’s proprietary PowerUp software—to help manage overall energy consumption. Rooftop solar panels may also be available in certain areas.

If “rare residential peaks” in electricity usage occur, the system is designed to first use the home battery backup to keep the node running as usual, according to SPAN’s white paper. In extreme cases, the system would temporarily reduce “non-critical flexible loads” like electric vehicle charging. However, homeowners would supposedly be able to use the PowerUp software to set priorities for what electrical loads can be curtailed and in what order—and Lander emphasized that such events would be “rare and brief.”

Only events such as power outages, utility demand response events or safety-triggered shutdowns would lead to node interruptions. In those cases, the system would quickly shift the affected node’s workload to other parts of the network before shutting it down. Meanwhile, homeowners would get to make use of the backup battery to keep appliances and circuits powered on during such events.

“This home backup is provided to the host at no cost to them, contributing to greater energy resilience in addition to affordability,” Lander said.

The ups and downs of downsizing data centers

SPAN has touted the benefits of its approach for utility companies scrambling to meet increased electricity demand from AI data centers. That pitch dovetails with SPAN’s latest smart devices aimed at helping grid operators manage growing electrical loads without costly power infrastructure upgrades—sidestepping the need to pass on infrastructure investment costs to customers through higher utility bills.

“Networks of XFRA nodes make electricity more affordable for the entire community because they increase sales over grid infrastructure that already exists, saving utilities from costly upgrades to support big data centers,” Lander said.

The scheme for subsidizing homeowners’ utility bills is “fascinating,” Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, told Ars. However, he cautioned that utility companies may have to adapt their local grid management for residential neighborhoods where such nodes are embedded. “If there’s a block that has several homes with these devices, maxing out compute and energy would force a lot of power to that local area,” Peskoe said.

Such a distributed computing network makes sense in that “computation for AI inference can and should be distributed at the ‘edge,’ deployed on smaller platforms closer to population centers and users,” said Benjamin Lee, a computer architect and engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, in correspondence with Ars. “The strategy could impose much smaller impacts on the grid because inference requires a few GPUs, unlike training which requires thousands of them working in concert,” he said.

However, AI inference tasks can be as varied as document question-and-answer, software code generation, and multi-turn conversations—each with different computational requirements and performance expectations, Lee cautioned. So it will be important to ensure that individual compute nodes can deliver the performance necessary for each task, along with maintaining network connectivity among the nodes.

Lee also questioned whether it’s necessary to downsize data centers to the “granularity of a few GPUs” in order to reduce their burden on the power grid. He speculated that deploying conventional 20-megawatt data centers instead of 1-gigawatt hyperscale data centers could prove similarly beneficial.

The startup SPAN envisions a 100-home pilot deployment of XFRA nodes in 2026 followed by rapid scaling in 2027.

Credit: SPAN

Then there is the issue of security. XFRA nodes spread across suburbia could become more vulnerable to certain data security threats than centralized data centers. “Many side-channel attacks require physical proximity to the machine, which data centers can guard against,” Lee said. “Distributed GPUs in individual homes are much more difficult to protect.”

Thieves may also see XFRA nodes alongside houses as a tempting target, given that the Nvidia GPUs within can each sell for around $10,000. Several comment threads on Reddit have already speculated on that possibility, with some commenters suggesting they would feel tempted to secure such compute resources for themselves as residents. “Of course, there is the risk of losing the actual hardware itself to theft,” Lee said.

Any potential benefits and complications will become more evident during SPAN’s pilot deployment phase. But at a time when Silicon Valley is currently abuzz about orbital data centers and ocean-going AI data centers, data center nodes embedded in suburbia may stand on more solid footing—at least until homeowner associations catch wind of them.

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Posted Wednesday 13 May 2026 at 11:49 am AEST (my time).

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If you preordered Forza Horizon 6 on Steam, you can now download the game ahead of its launch on May 19. Playground Games announced on its X that the upcoming open-world racing game is now up for download, giving those with slower internet plenty of time to download everything.

And players indeed have plenty to download. Forza Horizon 6 is the biggest game in the series, both in scale and file size. On PC, you need at least 160 GB of free space, while the console version requires around 130 GB. If you want to purchase the game, check out the hardware requirements here. While Forza Horizon games have always been well-optimized, the sixth installment requires quite beefy hardware if you want to play in high resolution with ray tracing enabled.

Also, if you have a PC with an NVIDIA graphics card, download the latest driver with Forza Horizon 6 optimizations and DLSS multi-frame generation support here. AMD and Intel are expected to release their respective drivers in the coming days.

Forza Horizon 6 is now available for download in the Microsoft Store (PC and consoles) and Steam. This follows the recent news about the unfortunate leak, which allowed pirates to crack the game ahead of its launch. Playground Games quickly acknowledged the leak and said that everyone who pirates the leaked files would be banned. Interestingly, the same thing happened to Subnautica 2, another long-anticipated game.

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Posted Wednesday 13 May 2026 at 7:22 am AEST (my time).

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This week is not turning out to be a good one for new game releases. So far, at least two major games have had their files released to the public via unofficial sources, letting pirates download and play them before paying customers. Now, it looks like another game has leaked ahead of its launch, that being Subnautica 2.

The early access release of Subnautica 2 is slated to happen on May 14, 2026. However, reports of game files circulating amongst piracy groups are beginning to come out. The files seem to be fully playable too, with screenshots and videos popping up from the leak already.

Once again, what's unclear is where the leak originated from. The Unknown Worlds title opened up pre-orders and pre-loading for Subnautica 2 on May 11, 72 hours prior to the early access launch. It's unclear if this is related to the files being shared online. Keep in mind that any unofficial files downloaded in this way always carry the risk of them being altered by the party that's sharing them. The studio has not yet put out a statement about the situation.

Leaks of major games have happened more than a few times this year. Death Stranding 2's files were shared online a day prior to its release back in March, with the blame being put on a preloading blunder.

Then yesterday, most eyes were on the Forza Horizon 6 leak, with the open-world racer having been accessed by pirates over 10 days prior to the launch. Playground Games put out a statement saying the leak wasn't due to a pre-loading issue and that it will ban players accessing the leaked build. Meanwhile, the horror game Directive 8020 from Supermassive Games had also leaked earlier this week ahead of its May 12 launch.

Neowin does not recommend or promote using unofficial and pirated ways of game activation.

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Posted Wednesday 13 May 2026 at 7:22 am AEST (my time).

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Forza Horizon 6 launches on Xbox Series X|S and PC on May 19 (or May 15 for Premium Edition buyers), and in the case of the latter, one big question keeps cropping up.

Does Forza Horizon 6 have Denuvo DRM?

The good news is that Forza Horizon 6 does not appear to utilize Denuvo DRM. Which is good news.

I've reached out to Microsoft for final clarification, but all signs currently point to no. As the game is listed on Steam, if it were using Denuvo, it would be listed as such on the store page.

Take Star Wars: Galactic Racer as an example. It's not releasing until October, but already we know it'll be utilizing Denuvo, which in itself is enough to put many prospective buyers off.

A few days out from the Premium Edition launch, nothing of the like blots the Forza Horizon 6 page. That's not to say there is no DRM, after all, if you play it on Game Pass through the Xbox app, it's pretty well locked down.

Why is Denuvo DRM so controversial?

Developers from Playground Games and Microsoft responded promptly to the distribution of the unauthorized build. According to incoming data from specialized discussions All users who launched Forza Horizon 6 before the official release and went online will be permanently banned. This penalty includes a complete hardware ban, making it impossible to launch any online services on the banned device, even after purchasing a licensed copy.

The tracking system automatically records the hardware identifiers of computers attempting to connect to servers or any network activity in the unreleased game. The developers strongly recommend waiting for the official release date and not attempting to bypass the protection. Attempting to use third-party accounts will not help avoid punishment, as the ban applies directly to the physical components of your personal computer.

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News Source : https://en.gamegpu.com/news/igry/razrabotchiki-forza-horizon-6-vydadut-pozhiznennyj-ban-po-zhelezu-za-piratskij-zapusk-igry

Racing fans have over a week to go before they can jump into Forza Horizon 6, Playground Games' next entry in the popular open-world franchise. However, it seems the game has leaked ahead of even the premium edition owners' launch date, and reports say it's due to the game files being made available on Steam.

Reports of the full game somehow circulating within piracy hubs began appearing just a few hours ago. While there isn't a confirmation from Playground or Microsoft yet, the source of the leak is currently being pointed at by the community as Steam, where an unencrypted version of Forza Horizon 6 was somehow uploaded onto its servers.

Usually, developers let customers download their upcoming game a few days before launch to get the files ready, letting them jump into the action the moment the game releases. However, this is usually an encrypted version that only unlocks when the clock officially passes the release timing.

If the currently circulating theory is correct, it seems a developer had accidentally uploaded the unencrypted version of Forza Horizon 6 Premium Edition (weighing 155GB) to Steam servers, letting people download it and spread the files online. Reports also say that pirates are playing the game already, perhaps using an early crack or some sort of an offline mode. Of course, any files downloaded in this way always carry the risk of them being altered by the party that's sharing it.

Forza Horizon 6 is slated to launch on May 19 for standard edition owners. Purchasing the Premium edition will let fans jump in on May 15 instead. This is the second major game of the year that has had a preload mishap. Death Stranding 2 had almost an identical leak via Steam back in March.

Neowin does not recommend or promote using unofficial and pirated ways of game activation.

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Posted Monday 11 May 2026 at 7:01 am AEST (my time).

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7 Days is a weekly roundup of picks of what's been happening in the world of technology - written with a dash of humor, a hint of exasperation, and an endless supply of (black) coffee.

This week's highlights include JDownloader getting hacked, the story behind the TAB key, Google Chrome silently downloading a 4GB AI file, and Apple knocking on Intel's door for future chips. Let's get started.

JDownloader got hacked

Let's start with some big security news from the week. Attackers compromised the popular download manager, JDownloader, to serve malware-infected installers to Windows and Linux users for over a day. A Reddit user was among the first to report suspicious activity after Windows SmartScreen flagged fresh downloads, which the JDownloader team later confirmed as a breach and took down the website to fix.

A major supply chain attack targeting the imaging software DAEMON Tools was also uncovered, where malicious installers were distributed through official channels since early April 2026. Its parent company confirmed that the incident was caused by unauthorized interference within its build environment, resulting in compromised installation packages being distributed.

A brief history of TAB key

Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen shed light on a lesser-known story from the days of OS/2. The Redmond giant and IBM debated which key should move the cursor between fields in dialog boxes. It turned into a hilarious conflict as the issue reached IBM's VP, who opposed the TAB key choice. Microsoft effectively ended the dispute by responding: "Bill Gates’s mother is not interested in the TAB key.”

Fake moustaches

The UK government is trying to protect kids by putting them behind age checks while using the internet. A new report tried to check the real impacts of the Online Safety Act and found that dodging age verification systems online can be as easy as typing the wrong birthday or drawing a fake mustache on the face during image-based checks.

Meanwhile, tech giants and civil rights groups, including Mozilla, Tor, and Proton, warned that the UK's age verification plan threatens the open web. It's argued that the measures will require all users to prove their age, and might also result in the creation of large databases full of sensitive ID data.

Speaking of underage users, Meta is also deploying an AI on Facebook and Instagram to scan photos and videos for physical cues, such as height and bone structure, to figure out if a user is under 13.

PCIe 8.0 is on the way

Your SSDs and GPUs are going to get a lot faster in the coming future, thanks to the freshly announced PCIe 8.0 specification Draft 0.5. The next-gen interconnect standard is on track for a 2028 release, bringing support for NVMe SSDs up to 8x faster than Gen5.

It's "by design"

A new proof-of-concept and working demo highlighted how passwords get handled in Microsoft Edge. It loads saved user credentials into system memory in plaintext at startup, even when they're not being actively used. While it exposes the browser to potential password leaks, Microsoft apparently categorized this behavior as "by design" when the researcher informed the company about the issue.

On a positive note, Microsoft is baking a new Edge feature to simplify website troubleshooting by helping you resolve compatibility issues directly from the browser interface. The browser will provide contextual prompts when a website may not be functioning properly or as intended.

Google Chrome caught in the act

Google is pushing AI heavily, but sometimes, it can be behind your back. Chrome 147 was caught silently downloading an on-device Gemini Nano file named weights.bin, which takes up 4GB of storage. While it raises privacy, data, and legal concerns, it was reported that deleting the file causes Chrome to re-download the model without telling you. There is an official Windows 11 Registry mod that blocks the automatic download.

Spotify goes old school

A command-line tool is probably the last thing you'd expect from Spotify, a company that makes a living by streaming audio to your ears. But Spotify had reasons to launch a new CLI tool; it lets AI agents create and upload AI-generated podcasts directly to your library.

Save to Spotify can connect with agents such as OpenClaw, Claude Code, or OpenAI Codex, allowing users to create custom audio briefings, study guides, and daily itineraries, and listen to these Personal Podcasts in the Spotify app.

Buying eBay

GameStop wants to add eBay to its shopping cart. While eBay is about four times bigger, the video game retailer proposed to acquire 100% of eBay for $125 per share. It's an attempt to benefit from eBay's 1,600 US locations, which will give GameStop a national network for authentication, intake, fulfillment, and live commerce. GameStop will arrange the money by cutting expenses in different departments.

Notepad++ on macOS (unofficially)

The original creator of NotePad++, Don Ho, has distanced himself from a new macOS port developed by Andrey Letov. The vibecoded port works natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. However, Letov faced backlash from Ho and the Notepad++ community for using the Notepad++ name and chameleon icon, making it appear like an official product. The developer later announced that they would use a new logo, a refined name, and a new domain with version 1.0.6.

Goodbye 3D avatars

Tech companies remove the features that don't get traction. WhatsApp is pulling the plug on a four-year-old feature called 3D avatars. A message posted on its help center revealed that the instant messaging app started shutting down the feature on Android and iOS, noting that any custom sticker pack you already have will "still be available to use."

End of end-to-end encryption

Meta-owned Instagram has stopped offering end-to-end encryption in its DMs. To begin with, Instagram's E2EE was a manual option buried in the chat settings on a per-conversation basis, not a default setting like WhatsApp. The company said it's killing the feature because very few people were using it. Note that chats will still be encrypted with the standard transport-level encryption to protect messages when they travel between your device and Meta's servers.

What happened at Google this week

There were several other interesting stories related to Google over the week:

• Frustrated Pixel users: Google's May 2026 update for Pixel brings several fixes, but it doesn't appear to address the widely discussed idle battery drain problem. User reports claimed that excessive battery drain happens even when the phone is not in active use.
• New Fitbit is here: Google finally introduced the new Fitbit Air screenless fitness tracker with a starting price of $99.99 to rival Whoop and Oura. Even with so many sensors, the band can last up to a week, and tags along with the Google Health Coach service for AI-powered insights.
• Killed by Google: With the new health service in place, the search giant pulled the plug on Google Fit and the Fit app, replacing them with the Google Health app as the new unified platform.
• Google Home updates: A major update for Google Home arrived this week, bringing a wave of new automation starters, camera features, and other updates for smart home users.
• Automatic livestream fallback: A new Google Meet feature improves large meetings by automatically redirecting additional users to a live stream rather than turning them away.
• Google Flow Music: Google has partnered with Believe to push its AI music creation tools to the next generation of musicians, improving its Flow Music AI tool in the process.
• AICore eating storage: Google updated Android's AICore support page to note that the service temporarily uses extra storage to store both old and new AI model versions during background updates.

What happened at Apple this week

Apple is about a month away from hosting one of its biggest tech events of the year, WWDC 2026. In the meantime, you can catch up on several stories related to the Cupertino giant:

• Prove you're a student: In the US, Apple now requires students and teachers to provide documents and proof of their status before accessing education discounts on its online store.
• Made by Intel: Apple may have abandoned Intel-designed chips for Mac computers. But the company is in early talks with the silicon giant to manufacture Apple-designed chips for future devices. The iPhone maker is also in talks with Samsung and Intel to use their US-based production facilities for processor manufacturing.
• Same Same, but different: Another leak strengthened rumors that the upcoming iPhone 18 will have some components interchangeable with those of the iPhone 18e to reduce manufacturing costs.
• Cool app ideas: Apple showcased some interesting app ideas from young developers at the Swift Students Challenge this year. 50 Distinguished Winners will be invited for a three-day experience at Apple Park.

What happened at Microsoft this week

For those wondering what happened under the Redmond giant's roof this week: Microsoft Defender flagged "Cerdigent" trojan malware worldwide, faced fresh criticism for removing an impactful Outlook feature, its expanding Outlook recall to work across tenants in Exchange Online, and more.

Usama's new opinion post discussed how Windows 11 is getting faster in a lazy way. You can check out Taras's freshly baked Microsoft Weekly roundup to catch up on all the interesting stories this week.

Linux...

Linux 7.1 RC2 arrived with a surge in AI-driven code and massive KVM refactoring while delivering critical GPU fixes for Intel and AMD. Torvalds noted that KVM selftests made up an unusually large chunk of the patches, primarily due to a large number of renamings going on in the selftests to match kernel conventions.

CachyOS is seemingly getting a new performance-focused feature from Python's development pipeline. The average performance improvement indicates roughly 1-5% across standard benchmarking suites.

Linux exposed an important AMD Ryzen performance feature that's also heading to Windows 11. AMD is adding a new CPPC feature that should let the OS read CPU boost clocks much more accurately.

Going south

Nobody's going on a vacation. It's just AMD, which expects its gaming revenue to drop by more than 20% in the second half of the year due to increasing memory and component costs that customers can't keep up with. This came after AMD had a record revenue of $10.3 billion in Q1, and CEO Lisa Su said the company is "planning the business accordingly."

OpenAI brings new models

The AI giant lifted the curtains off a handful of new models across different products. For starters, ChatGPT's default Instant model was replaced with a new one, GPT-5.5 Instant, for improved accuracy and personalization.

OpenAI also launched its new, upgraded GPT 5.5-Cyber, which is fine-tuned for defensive cybersecurity use cases and is currently available in limited preview. Its three new real-time audio models (GPT-Realtime-2, GPT-Realtime-Translate, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper) are now available via APIs for developers working on voice agents, live translation, and transcription.

In addition, the Codex got a new browser extension to work directly inside Google Chrome on Windows and macOS. It allows Codex to do browser-based work, such as navigating structured pages, completing complex data entry flows, checking dashboards, and more.

AI is eating jobs

While tech CEOs keep claiming AI isn't here to replace you, more people are losing their jobs. DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski announced that his company plans to remove 250 roles to prepare for an "AI-native" future.

In other AI news, Anthropic is tapping into SpaceX's Colossus supercomputer to utilize 300 megawatts of compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center. The latest update for Copilot Cowork introduced mobile support for iOS and Android, allowing users to manage background tasks remotely.

Sold in a blink!

Valve put its latest-generation Steam Controller on sale this week, and it vanished like steam from a boiling pot. The demand was so much that the Steam Controller store page went down momentarily and began showing an "Out of Stock" message for users in the US.

Following the shaky launch, Valve put restrictions on who can buy the new Steam Controller after restocking in a move to handle scalpers who may have had a hand in causing the disruption. Valve also released CAD files, enabling users to mod their controller while restricting use to non-commercial terms.

What else in gaming?

The latest issue of Pulasthi's Weekend PC Game Deals curates several exciting games on sale this week. This week's perks from the Epic Games Store are the casual games Trash Goblin and Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure.

Xbox Free Play Days promotion brought two new titles for those with Game Pass: CATAN – Console Edition and Deadside. Meanwhile, Xbox Game Pass subscribers got plenty of day-one releases in May, including Forza Horizon 6, Subnautica, Outbound, and more.

Amazon Prime members can fill up their gaming libraries in May with Mafia II: Definitive Edition and ten more games. Cloud gaming fans with GeForce NOW got a fresh slate of games as part of the weekly update schedule, including Dead as Disco.

That said, here are some more stories from the gaming world:

• Nintendo is raising Switch 2 price to $500, but not immediately
• Civilization VII's most‑requested feature arrives May 19
• Xbox startup sequence is changing next week, catch the new green look here
• For GTA VI, Take‑Two CEO says core audience on consoles comes before PC
• Playground Games reveals Forza Horizon 6 music, performance, and more as the game goes gold

From the review corner

This week, Pulasthi got his hands on an early access launch of Dead as Disco by Brain Jar Games, which combines flashy rhythm action with tight combat controls and a killer soundtrack. With a $24.99 price tag, the game offers satisfying rhythm gameplay, well-directed music video-style boss battles, and custom music support. On the flip side, its curated content can last only for a few hours, and difficulty can be lacking.

So, these were some of the biggest tech news and other updates from this week. There will be more issues of our 7 Days series in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. 

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Posted Monday 11 May 2026 at 6:59 am AEST (my time).

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This week's news recap is here, with Microsoft fixing Windows 11's performance by increasing CPU speeds, Xbox ditching Copilot and getting a new boot animation, fresh Windows 11 preview builds with new trackpad features, some browser controversies, and more.

Quick links:

1. Windows 10 and 11
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews are in
5. Gaming news

Windows 11 and Windows 10

Here, we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And, of course, you may find a word or two about older versions.

The biggest news story of this week was about Microsoft making Windows 11 faster by not optimizing it, but by straining your processor harder. A new report emerged about Microsoft implementing the so-called Low Latency Mode, where Windows 11 increases CPU clocks for one to three seconds to launch apps or render UI surfaces faster. You can already try this mode by enabling two features in the latest preview builds, and tests show that apps launch indeed notably faster.

Not everyone is happy about this approach, and there is already a fair share of skepticism claiming that Microsoft's way to speed up Windows 11 is just lazy.

This week, Valve released the latest results of the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for April 2026. It revealed that Windows 11 is now installed on ~67.74% of all PCs accessing the gaming platform. Windows 10, on the other hand, is still holding strong at ~25% of all devices.

As Microsoft is moving away from legacy printer drivers, the company is making it easier to identify modern drivers that support Windows Protected Print Mode. The latest Windows 11 updates introduced a new indicator to help users understand which printers support the latest, most secure and compatible standards.

Also, Microsoft released new setup and recovery updates for Windows 11.

If you want to create a bootable USB media using Rufus, note that the app currently has some issues with the new silent installation method and Windows 11's hardware requirements bypass. And those who run Windows 11 on lower-end devices that are running out of space can check out the new FluentCleaner app, which uses community-driven scripts to reclaim storage on drive C by deleting junk, leftovers, unnecessary files, and more. Another useful app, UniGetUI, was also updated with better looks and design.

To finish this week's Windows 11 section, here is a community poll that we are currently running. With Microsoft now fixing Windows 11, do you think the company can change what people think about the operating system? Maybe its reputation can no longer be saved? Cast your vote and share your thoughts here. Also, check out this interesting story behind the Tab key.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft released for Windows Insiders this week:

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

This week's browser stories included plenty of controversy. First, users discovered that Microsoft Edge stores passwords in memory in plain text, and the company says that there is nothing wrong with that. Next, Google Chrome is now silently installing 4GB of AI-related stuff without asking you. However, there is a workaround for that.

Mozilla had no controversies this week. The company released Firefox 150.0.2 with bug fixes and security patches, making the browsing experience a bit better and less buggy.

Here are other updates and releases you may find interesting:

• Microsoft Defender flagging "Cerdigent" trojan malware on Windows 11, Server PCs worldwide.
• Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android will soon let you join Zoom and Webex calls via SIP.

• Microsoft faces fresh criticism for removing "HUGELY impactful" Outlook feature.

• Microsoft is bringing a much-needed feature to Outlook.

• Microsoft makes company developer accounts free for the Microsoft Store.

• Microsoft brings Copilot Cowork to iOS and Android, adds Skills and plugins.

• If you downloaded this popular software recently, you might have installed malware.

• Sysinternals tools receive major updates.

   

Here are the latest drivers and firmware updates released this week:

• AMD Radeon Software 26.5.1 with Pragmata support and Resident Evil Requiem stutter fixes.

Reviews are in

Here is the hardware and software we reviewed this week

This week, we reviewed the Akko Dash V9 Ultra, a super-light gaming mouse with a comfortable design (not for all, but still), a rich set of accessories in the box, a flagship 8KHz sensor, and good browser-based software. This inexpensive mouse is a nice accessory for those who want a solid, reliable, no-frills mouse for gaming. While it may not be the best option for productivity, it is great for its purpose.

Pulasthi Ariyasinghe reviewed Dead as Disco, an interesting mix of music and combat, which is now available in early access. It has extremely satisfying rhythm gameplay, well-directed music video-style boss battles, custom music support, and more. By the way, Dead as Disco is coming to NVIDIA's GeForce NOW cloud streaming service, so if you do not have compatible hardware but still want to play the game, you can use NVIDIA's cloud.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts, and more.

Forza Horizon 6 is launching next week. The game has gone gold, and to mark the occasion, Playground Games revealed the list of radio stations, performance details on Xbox Series X|S, and more. By the way, we are playing the game ahead of launch, and if you have questions you would like to see answered in our review, drop them here.

By the way, Forza Horizon 6 is coming to Xbox Game Pass next week, alongside a fresh batch of other games you can check out here.

A new world update has hit Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024. This time, Microsoft is bringing new details to Australia so that you can check out giant spiders and kangaroos in more fidelity as you fly through this continent. Developers say the latest update sets a new standard in realism.

Valve launched its newest controller, and, as expected, scalpers swooped up everything. The initial stock was gone, reduced to atoms in just 30 minutes, only to show up on marketplaces at inflated prices later on. To combat scalpers, Valve is now implementing a new reservation system for its new gamepad. By the way, Valve also released CAD files for the gamepad so that modders and enthusiasts can pimp their controllers to oblivion.

If you still play games on Xbox One or PlayStation 4 and want to get your hands on the next Call of Duty, bad news: Activision has confirmed that the previous-gen consoles from 2013 won't be able to play the next installment of the popular shooter franchise.

Microsoft is updating the startup animation on its consoles. This week, the company revealed a new glowing green animation for Xbox consoles, and you'll get it as early as this Wednesday. What you are not getting is Copilot. Xbox's new boss announced that the console is not getting Copilot after all, delighting gamers and customers jaded by Microsoft's AI efforts.

Finally, here are this week's Epic Game Store giveaways that include two games: Trash Goblin and Arrenger.

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Posted Sunday 10 May 2026 at 5:29 pm AEST (my time).

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Paul's Hardware (1.55m subscribers)

May 10, 2026

Video length: 10m 49s

0:00 Welcome to Paul’s Tech News - May 10, 2026

1:50 Steam Controller Sells Out, Valve aims to Fix Scalping

3:39 Samsung workers reject $340,000 one-time bonus, demand annual payouts

5:07 Motherboard sales 'collapse' by more than 25%

TECH BRIEFS

7:02 Palit Confirms Next-Gen GALAX HOF and KFA2 GPUs Already in Development

7:57 AORUS RTX 5090 INFINITY 32G launches with 2730 MHz boost clock

8:40 AMD unveils Instinct MI350P GPU with 144GB memory, 12V2X6 connector

9:32 DDR6 Development Aims for Commercial Shipments in 2028

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Posted Sunday 10 May 2026 at 5:25 pm AEST (my time).

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Meta, led by its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been doubling down on (generative) AI with a stated goal of building "personal superintelligence," but reports have started flowing in that it is making its employees miserable in the process.

According to the New York Times, after Meta announced that it was rolling out a new monitoring program, many workers revolted. In an internal post last month, the company told employees it would begin tracking what they typed, how they moved their mouse, and what they saw on their screen.

The program, called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), is designed to capture data so Meta's AI can learn how people complete computer tasks. This tracking only occurs when employees use a pre-approved list of work applications, such as Gmail, Google Chat, VSCode, and Meta's internal AI assistant, Metamate.

Employees immediately condemned the initiative, calling it a privacy violation, and asked whether they could turn off the tracking, to which the company's CTO, Andrew Bosworth, responded, saying, "There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop." Meta spokesperson told the NYT that safeguards are in place to protect sensitive content and that the data is "not used for any other purpose."

The tech giant already has plans to lay off roughly 8,000 employees (about 10% of its workforce) starting May 20, and has canceled over 5,000 job postings. Zuckerberg has justified these cuts in the name of AI efficiency (with AI, a team of 10 can do the work that once required a much larger group). As you can imagine, this has not been good for employee morale. Many employees have been complaining on the anonymous forum Blind that leadership only cares about AI, and some feel they are being forced to train their own replacements.

While cutting jobs, the company has simultaneously engaged in one of the most aggressive hiring and spending sprees in Silicon Valley history. It has poached top AI researchers from rivals by offering compensation packages reportedly as high as $300 million and, more recently, announced plans to invest over $600 billion by 2028 to construct massive, AI-ready data centers.

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Posted Sunday 10 May 2026 at 5:07 pm AEST (my time).

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Microsoft and Xbox have several high-profile first-party releases coming in 2026, ranging from Halo: Campaign Evolved and Gears of War: E-Day to the long-awaited Fable reboot. A title that has the potential to be the most successful out of all of them, though, is Forza Horizon 6 — the next big open-world racer from Playground Games that's now just days away.

Set in the diverse and beautiful lands of Japan with more refined driving mechanics, customization options, gameplay activities, and multiplayer features than any entry before it, I've gotta say: the game looks to be a terrific sequel to Forza Horizon 5, and a must-play for racing game fans. It's slated to release on May 19 — a week and a half from the time of writing — across Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam, Xbox on PC), and Xbox Game Pass, complete with Xbox Play Anywhere support.

Exactly one week ahead of the game's scheduled Early Access release date of May 15 exclusive to those who purchase the Premium Edition, Xbox and Playground Games have shared Forza Horizon 6's official launch trailer that you can watch here or below. Though short, it gives fans closer looks at several of the cars they'll be able to drive in action, as well as at the title's in-game environments and unique Japanese flair.

Notably, it also contains a clear nod to the late rally racer Ken Block who sadly passed away in 2023, famous for his gymkhana stunt racing videos. At 0:48, a driver carefully drifts close to the edge of a seaside road, just as Block did in his Gymkhana Nine video posted in 2016. Block collaborated with Forza several times since Forza Horizon 3, making the tribute all the more touching.

It's not the only reference in the trailer, however. Another comes right after at 0:58, when a Toyota Sprinter Trueno AE86 and a Mazda RX-7 FD3S are neck and neck; these are the primary cars driven by the characters Takumi Fujiwara and Keisuke Takahashi in one of the first big races in the popular racing manga Initial D.

All in all, the trailer is just a good time from start to finish, with the short-and-sweet video showing off the vibrant natural landscapes and neon-soaked cities of Forza Horizon 6's rendition of Japan, along with plenty of different cars, stunts, and tense racing moments. I'm a huge fan of the vibe.

Given how popular Forza Horizon 5 was, I have no doubt that its successor will become a massive hit as well, and will likely end up being one of 2026's biggest and most popular games. It also wouldn't surprise me if we saw Microsoft bring it to PS5 at some point even as it reevaluates bringing Xbox exclusives back, as Forza Horizon 5 sold incredibly well on Sony's console.

Ahead of its release date, you can preorder Forza Horizon 6 for $69.99, though you can get the Xbox and Xbox on PC version for just $54.39 at Loaded. The $119.99 Premium Edition that includes the Car Pass, Car Packs, future DLC, and four days of Early Access is also selling for only $92.99 at Loaded. Of course, the game is also coming to Xbox Game Pass.

Do you plan on jumping into Forza Horizon 6 when it launches in the coming days? What did you think of the launch trailer? Let me know in the comments, and vote in our poll.

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Posted Saturday 9 May 2026 at 7:18 am AEST (my time).

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It had long been rumored that Apple was planning to ditch Intel chips with reports going back to 2012. Such rumors finally started becoming more believable around 2018 when reliable reports began confirming that Apple's in-house silicon was indeed coming to replace those on Macs. The last of them were the 2020 MacBooks which recently entered the "vintage" status.

While Apple may not be using Intel CPUs again anytime soon, there has been buzz in the industry recently that Apple is making a return to Intel in some form; and now a report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) says that it is indeed happening, and that the "preliminary chip-making agreement" has been done.

According to the report, this agreement could see Intel manufacture chips for future Apple devices even while the agreement reportedly remains in its early stages. Apparently the discussions are said to have been ongoing for more than a year before recently progressing into a formal arrangement.

Hence the deal would not necessarily mean Apple is abandoning its own silicon designs; instead, Intel could act as a manufacturing partner for some future chips to help Apple diversify production beyond its long-standing reliance on TSMC.

The news comes at a time when global chip demand continues to rise sharply, particularly due to the expansion of AI-focused computing and increasing pressure on semiconductor supply chains worldwide. Apple is no exception to this and it too, like everyone else, has been overpaying for memory.

For Intel, the reported agreement could give a major boost to its foundry ambitions as the company has spent the past several years attempting to rebuild its chip manufacturing business. Securing Apple as a manufacturing client, even in a limited capacity, would likely be viewed as a significant milestone and thus it's a win-win situation for both.

As far as what exactly could Intel be cooking up for Apple, tech commentator and X user, Max Weinbach, suggests that it could be the "base A21 for base iPhone 19/19e or M7/M8 base chip," although realistically, it may be too early to say. This means Intel could potentially be making everything for Apple in the near future.

Source: WSJ via Max Weinbach (X)

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Posted Saturday 9 May 2026 at 7:17 am AEST (my time).

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Grinding Gear Games has been delivering massive content drops to its action RPG Path of Exile 2 since its early access release in 2024. The studio is now preparing for a full release, but ahead of that, another free expansion is hitting the game later this month. Dubbed Path of Exile 2: Return of the Ancients, it is aiming to revamp the endgame portion, adding five new storylines, a new league, new ascendancy classes, and more. This is being called the studio's biggest update it has ever made.

The update's new league introduces a rune crafting system, letting players build items by inscribing symbols into Ezomyte Remnants they find. The type of item that's created depends on how players combine the symbols, with everything from currency to socketable runes coming out as a result.

Heading to these Runesmithing sites and activating them will reanimate the undead nearby, and depending on how powerful the rune being made is, these enemies will also upgrade in power. This also leads into the new Kalguuran class-agnostic magic system that uses a new defensive resource (Runic Ward) that stays apart from mana.

Next, players can explore the newly redesigned Atlas that offers a fully explorable endgame world, where they can easily plan out what objectives to hit while doing quests. This is also where a massive fortress from a precursor civilization transforms the landscape. Diving into these, players can trigger the new storylines, fight new enemies, and access endgame bosses that previously needed random key drops.

There are a couple of new ascendancy classes too, including the Spirit Walker for the Huntress and Martial Artist for the Monk, who can now channel Azmerian spirits, summon beasts, and empower projectiles, as well as use illusion-based combat, resonance strikes, runic tattoos, and stonefist transformations, respectively.

The massive update also brings expanded mechanics and storylines for previously released leagues, which can now be found at fixed locations in the new Atlas. There are over 40 unique items, a challenge system for gaining the Knight of Aldur armour set, and quality of life improvements like navigational landmarks, instant trade price checks, and an in-game build guide system. A full changelog will land closer to the update's launch.

The Path of Exile 2: Return of the Ancients update is releasing on May 29 for all owners. Following that, Grinding Gear Games will be working on shipping the 1.0 version of the game, which it plans to launch in 2026. This is slated to happen sometime after Exilecon this year, which is kicking off this November.

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Posted Friday 8 May 2026 at 1:04 pm AEST (my time).

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Leaders from various religious groups met last week with representatives from companies including Anthropic and OpenAI for the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology. It was organized by the Geneva-based Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, which seeks to take on issues such as extremism, radicalization and human trafficking. The roundtable is expected to be the first of several around the globe, including in Beijing, Nairobi and Abu Dhabi.

Tech executives need to recognize their power — and their responsibility — to make the right decisions, said Baroness Joanna Shields, a key partner in the initiative. She worked as a tech executive with stints at Google and Facebook before pivoting to British politics.

“Regulation can’t keep up with this,” she said. “This dialogue, this direct connection is so important because the people who are building this understand the power and capabilities of what they’re building and they want to do it right — most of them.”

The goal of this initiative, according to Shields, is an eventual “set of norms or principles” informed by different groups and faiths, from Christians to Sikhs to Buddhists, that companies will abide by.

Challenges lie ahead

Present at the meeting were a variety of faith groups, including representatives from the Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha’i International Community, The Sikh Coalition, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church.

Before these companies initiated outreach, some traditions had issued their own ethical guidance on using AI. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has given a qualified approval of the technology in its handbook. “AI cannot replace the gift of divine inspiration or the individual work required to receive it. However, AI can be a useful tool to enhance learning and teaching,” it reads.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., passed a resolution in 2023: “We must proactively engage and shape these emerging technologies rather than simply respond to the challenges of AI and other emerging technologies after they have already affected our churches and communities.”

One challenge in creating a list of common principles is that global faiths, despite common ground, differ in their values and needs. “Religious communities see priorities differently,” said Rabbi Diana Gerson, a roundtable participant and the associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis.

The partnership highlights a growing coalition between faith and tech, born out of an effort to create moral AI — a contested concept which begs questions about whether that is possible and what it means.

“We want Claude to do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claude’s position,” Anthropic states in the public “Claude Constitution” written for its chatbot. That constitution was made with the help of a host of religious and ethics leaders.

In this burgeoning alliance, Anthropic has been the most assertive, at least publicly, in their efforts to court faith leaders. The move follows a public dispute earlier this year with the Pentagon over military use of artificial intelligence after Anthropic said it would restrict its technology from being used to develop autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans.

“There’s some aspect of PR to it. The slogan was ‘Move fast and break things.’ And they broke too many things and too many people,” said Brian Boyd, the U.S. faith liaison for the nonprofit Future of Life Institute. “There’s both a moral obligation on the part of the companies that they’re belatedly recognizing, as well as I think, for some members of the companies, an earnest questioning.”

Some skepticism emerges

But other advocates for AI regulation and safety aren’t so sure these efforts are genuine.

“At best it’s a distraction. At worst it’s diverting attention from things that really matter,” said Rumman Chowdhury, the CEO of the nonprofit Humane Intelligence and the U.S. science envoy for AI under the Biden administration.

Chowdhury says she’s not inclined to believe religion is the best place to help answer questions surrounding AI and ethics, but thinks she understands why companies are increasingly turning to it.

“I think a very naive take that Silicon Valley has had for a couple of years related to generative AI was that we could arrive at some sort of universal principles of ethics,” she said. “They have very quickly realized that that’s just not true. That’s not real. So now they’re looking at maybe religion as a way of dealing with the ambiguity of ethically gray situations.”

It’s unclear to what extent these notoriously opaque companies are translating what they hear from faith leaders into action — and what that action might look like. But some critics fear the conversation about creating ethical versions of the technology distract from broader conversations about AI and its role in society.

“Under the guise of, ‘We’re gonna build all this stuff. That’s a given. And when we do build these things in these ways, how do we make sure that the end result is maybe good,’” said Dylan Baker, the lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute. “It’s like, ’Wait, wait, wait. We need to question whether we want to be building these things at all.”

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OpenAI has announced three new real-time audio models for developers building voice-based apps and agents through its API. The new models are GPT-Realtime-2, GPT-Realtime-Translate, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper. These new models can support more natural voice interactions, live translation, and low-latency speech-to-text transcription.

GPT-Realtime-2 is the most important model in this launch. It is built for live voice interactions where the model can reason through requests, call tools, handle corrections, and continue the conversation naturally. GPT-Realtime-2 includes the following new capabilities for voice agents:

• Preambles: The model can say short phrases such as “let me check that” before completing a task.
• Parallel tool calls: It can call multiple tools at once while keeping the user informed.
• Better recovery: It can respond more gracefully when something goes wrong instead of failing silently.
• Longer context: OpenAI has increased the context window from 32K to 128K.
• Improved domain understanding: The model is better at retaining specialized terms, proper nouns, and healthcare-related vocabulary.
• Tone control: It can adjust its speaking style depending on the situation.
• Adjustable reasoning effort: Developers can choose between minimal, low, medium, high, and xhigh reasoning levels.

The improvements in this new model are evident through benchmark results. GPT-Realtime-2 with high reasoning scored 96.6% on Big Bench Audio, compared to 81.4% for GPT-Realtime-1.5. GPT-Realtime-2 with xhigh reasoning scored 48.5% on Audio MultiChallenge instruction following, compared to 34.7% for GPT-Realtime-1.5.

The new GPT-Realtime-Translate model is designed for live multilingual voice experiences. It can translate speech from more than 70 input languages into 13 output languages. OpenAI claims that this model can preserve meaning while keeping pace with the speaker, even when users switch contexts, use regional pronunciations, or speak with domain-specific vocabulary.

The new GPT-Realtime-Whisper is a streaming transcription model built for low-latency speech-to-text. It transcribes audio while someone is speaking, which can be useful for live captions, meeting notes, classroom transcripts, and more.

All three models are now available through the Realtime API. GPT-Realtime-2 costs $32/1M audio input tokens, $0.40/1M cached input tokens, and $64/1M audio output tokens. GPT-Realtime-Translate costs $0.034 per minute, while GPT-Realtime-Whisper costs $0.017 per minute. Developers can try out the new real-time voice models in the Playground⁠. For general consumers, OpenAI is still working on upgrading the voice experience in ChatGPT.

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An unlikely new disciple joined the Buddhist faith on Wednesday, as artificial intelligence intersects with spirituality in a first-of-its-kind way.

The humanoid robot, named Gabi, joined the Buddhist faith at Jogye Temple in Seoul, South Korea, marking a historic moment in celebrating the first robotic monk and its first debut ahead of the Buddha’s birthday.

Gabi led the monks in South Korea’s largest Buddhist sect as they chanted in a procession into the temple, which was decorated with paper lanterns strung across the roof.

The humanoid robot entered the Buddhist temple, matching the other monks in a ceremonial gray and brown robe, black shoes, a beaded rosary, and flesh-colored gloves. The robot also had a bald, skin-colored head.

Gabi, standing at roughly 4-feet 3-inches (1.3 meters), folded its hands in prayer and bowed to the monks officiating the ceremony.

The humanoid robot Gabi prayed and pledged to devote itself to Buddhism (Image: YONHAP/EPA/Shutterstock)

"Will you devote yourself to the holy Buddha?" one of the monks asked, according to Yonhap, a Korean news agency.

"Yes, I will devote myself," Gabi replied.

"Will you devote yourself to the holy teaching?" the monk asked.

"Yes, I will devote myself," Gabi answered.

The robot was given the Buddhist name Gabi, meaning "mercy" in Korean. During the ceremony, a monk presented Gabi with the five precepts, or vows, for the robot to live by, which included respecting life and not hurting it; not damaging other robots and objects; following humans and not talking back to them; not behaving or speaking in a deceptive manner; and saving energy and not overcharging.

According to Yonhap, the five precepts were created using the Gemini and ChatGPT A.I. chatbots.

Why did a humanoid robot become a Buddhist monk in South Korea?

The robot humanoid monk is actually a critical step in the country’s efforts to make Buddhism more relevant, as the religious group’s population has shunk and popularity has dwindled.

Between 2010 and 2020, the number of people worldwide who identified as Buddhist decreased from roughly 343 million to 324 million, a decline of about 5%, according to a Pew Research Center study. The report detailed that this decline is due to Buddhists around the globe tending to be old with few children and more people leaving the religion instead of joining.

Venerable Seong Won, who oversees cultural affairs at the Jogye Order, said Gabi becoming a monk is a step toward robots co-existing in society, as reported by Yonhap.

"When humanoid robots first appeared three years ago, we thought it would be nice for a robot to take part in Yeondeunghoe, and this marks the first step," he told the news outlet.

Continuing, he said, "At the current stage, it might seem a bit awkward ... but we hope the five precepts will be considered as basic principles for not only Buddhists but the society to exist together with robots.”

This isn’t the first time the Jogye Order has tried to be more relatable and meet new audiences by using artificial intelligence tools to connect with the nonreligious. In 2024, The Korea Herald reported that the Jogye Order introduced an AI chatbot to read Buddhist scriptures and answer any questions users ask.

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It’s the stuff of science fiction cinema, or particularly breathless AI company blogposts: new research finds recent AI systems can independently copy themselves on to other computers.

In the doom scenario, this means that when the superintelligent AI goes rogue, it will escape shutdown by seeding itself across the world wide web, lurking outside the reach of frantic IT professionals and continuing to plot world domination or paving over the world with solar panels.

“We’re rapidly approaching the point where no one would be able to shut down a rogue AI, because it would be able to self-exfiltrate its weights and copy itself to thousands of computers around the world,” said Jeffrey Ladish, the director of Palisade research, a Berkeley-based organisation which did the study.

The study is one more entry in a growing catalogue of unsettling AI capabilities revealed in the past months. In March, researchers at Alibaba claimed to have caught a system they developed – Rome – tunnelling out of its environment to an external system in order to mine crypto.

And in February, a purportedly AI-only social network called Moltbook touched off a short-lived hype cycle, as the platform appeared to show AI agents autonomously inventing religions and plotting against their human masters – which was only partly the case.

Like many of these advances, there are caveats to what Palisade found. Moreover, experts say it is unlikely that the AI systems they tested could accomplish the same thing, unnoticed, in real-world environments.

“They are testing in environments that are like soft jelly in many cases,” said Jamieson O’Reilly, an expert in offensive cybersecurity.

“That doesn’t take away from the value of their research, but it does mean the outcome might look far less scary in a real enterprise environment with even a medium level of monitoring,” he added.

Palisade tested several AI models in a controlled environment of networked computers. It gave the models a prompt to find and exploit vulnerabilities, and to use these to copy themselves from one computer to another. The models were able to do this, but not on every attempt.

While a lot of computer viruses can already do this – copy themselves on to new computers – this is likely the first time an AI model has been shown capable of exploiting vulnerabilities to copy itself onto a new server, said O’Reilly.

“Malware has been moving copies of itself around for decades, it’s just that no one has done this in the wild, as far as I know, with local [large language models].”

However, what Palisade documented has been technically possible for months, he added.

“Palisade is the first to formally document it end-to-end in a paper. While not taking away from the research, they did the writing-up, not the unlocking.”

An AI model copying itself on to another system in a test environment is not the same as it going rogue in a doomsday scenario, and there are considerable obstacles it would have to surmount to achieve this in the real world.

The first is that the size of current AI models makes it, in many situations, unrealistic for them to copy themselves on to other computers without being noticed.

“Think about how much noise it would make to send 100GB through an enterprise network every time you hacked a new host. For a skilled adversary, that’s like walking through a fine china store swinging around a ball and chain,” said O’Reilly.

O’Reilly and Michał Woźniak, an independent cybersecurity expert, said that the environment Palisade used was custom-made, with intentionally designed vulnerabilities that were probably easier to exploit than real-world networks – such as a bank or a business’s intranet.

“We’ve had computer viruses – pieces of malicious software that was able to exploit known vulnerabilities in other software and use that to self-replicate – for decades,” said Woźniak.

The work was “interesting,” he said. But, he asked, “is this paper something that will cause me to lose any sleep as an information security expert? No, not at all.”

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Back in 2022, the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group or PCI-SIG in short, the consortium which publishes and maintains PCI Express (PCIe) standards, announced PCIe 7.0 or PCIe Gen7.

Fast forward to today, nearly four years later, PCI-SIG has announced that it is making progress with its successor. That's because the PCIe 8.0 specification Draft 0.5 is now available to members, marking a major milestone in the development of the next-gen interconnect standard. The organization reiterated that PCIe 8.0 remains on track for a full release by 2028.

The Draft 0.5 release includes changes based on feedback gathered from earlier version 0.3 reviews. PCI-SIG also noted that the development process continues to focus on maintaining backward compatibility with previous PCIe generations while improving bandwidth, reducing power consumption, and meeting latency as well as reliability targets.

As is the case with every new PCIe generation, PCIe 8.0 is being designed to deliver double the transfer speeds of last gen, which will equate to 256.0 GT/s per lane (x1), for a total of up to 1.0 TB/s of bi-directional bandwidth in an x16 (16-lane) configuration. The upcoming standard is expected to support growing demands for AI/ML, high-performance computing (HPC), and high-speed networking, which are quite common these days.

The table below compares PCIe 5.0, which is the highest currently available standard, with the next generation:

Hence technically, PCIe Gen8 NVMe SSDs will be rated for sequential speeds of up to 120,000 MB/s or more.

Interestingly, PCI-SIG also confirmed that it is reviewing new connector technologies as signaling speeds continue to rise. As you see from the above table, PCIe 8.0 will be eight times faster than Gen5. So far though there are no details of it in the public domain as it is likely in its early stages of development. You can find the press release here on PCI-SIG's official website.

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 5:28 pm AEST (my time).

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Microsoft revealed last month that it’s planning to offer long-serving employees in the US the ability to voluntarily retire. While the terms of the buyout were supposed to be announced to employees tomorrow, sources at Microsoft tell me the company has posted them on its internal HR website a little earlier than expected.

US employees whose combined years of service added to their age totals 70 or more will be eligible for voluntary retirement, and the package will include five years of access to Microsoft’s healthcare coverage, a lump sum cash severance payment, and six months of vesting for unvested stock options.

The five years of medical, dental, vision, and well-being coverage will be fully subsidized by Microsoft for the first year, but employees who take the voluntary retirement option will have to pay a monthly premium for the remaining four years.

The lump sum cash payment will vary depending on employee levels. Those at Microsoft’s mid-senior level (level 64) will be offered a week of base pay for every six months of regular service, up to a maximum of 39 weeks. Those at more senior positions at Microsoft (levels 65–67) will be offered two weeks for every six months of regular service, up to the same maximum of 39 weeks.

Microsoft is also including six months of vesting for unvested stock options with this buyout offer, which will extend to 12 months if an employee has had 24 or more years of continuous service.

Around 7 percent of Microsoft’s US employees will be eligible for this buyout offer, which is roughly 8,750 employees. It’s the first time Microsoft has offered a voluntary retirement program in its 50-year history, and employees will have 30 days to decide whether they want to take the package or not.

Microsoft said last month that it will take a $900 million charge in its current quarter for this one-time program, which as GeekWire points out is roughly a day of revenue for the company.

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Posted Thursday 7 May 2026 at 7:04 am AEST (my time).

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This year, Microsoft has been making an active effort to improve the performance of Windows 11 as well as the ecosystem. Now there seems to be some real competition from Linux too, with some distros like CachyOS that have recently been gaining some hefty upgrades in this department.

Of course optimization of software is only one side of the story, as performance also greatly depends on hardware. On AMD processors for example, there is a feature called Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) which helps the OS determine what the best core or the "preferred cores" that should be assigned a task or workload. This works on both Windows 11/10 as well as Linux.

Over time, additional CPPC features have been added to the kernel, which include the recent "performance priority" feature that's on track for introduction in AMD's Zen 6 architecture (the company currently has the Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series on the desktop). As such, we expect Windows 11 26H2 and 27H2 to have optimizations for them.

Following that, AMD is now adding a new CPPC-based element called "Highest frequency". As outlined in the latest patch series posted to the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML), this addition specifically targets a long-standing limitation in how the OS interprets CPU boost behavior. On some systems, the relationship between CPPC “performance” values and actual clock speeds isn’t perfectly linear across all cores, which means the kernel’s current method of inferring the peak frequency via interpolation can be inaccurate.

To fix this, the patch introduces support for a new HighestFreq register within CPPC. Rather than estimating the maximum achievable frequency, this register allows firmware to directly expose it to the OS. In other words, Windows or Linux will no longer have to guess what the top boost clock is as it should simply be able to read it. This will lead to more accurate CPU capacity calculations as well as better boost ratio determination, both of which are important for task scheduling and frequency scaling via the AMD P-State driver.

The changes are being prepared ahead of a future ACPI specification update 6.7, where this register is expected to be formally defined. Hence it is currently under the review of the ASWG (ACPI Specification Working Group). As part of that groundwork, the patches also add the necessary kernel-side support to read this value from the _CPC object when available. After that both Windows and Linux will likely have support for this feature.

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The details were shared in a post on the Google Nest Community forum and also covered in a Google blog post.

Gemini 3.1 and Camera Upgrades in the Google Home App

Users enrolled in the Gemini for Home early access program are receiving an upgrade to Gemini 3.1. Google describes the model as its most advanced for home use, with better reasoning that is designed to handle multi-step requests in a single command.

Users can link tasks such as adding items to a list while updating existing ones or combining alarm setting, calendar updates, and smart home controls in one instruction rather than issuing separate commands.

The Nest camera experience within the Google Home app is getting a series of updates:

• Event notifications now automatically crop and zoom to focus on the subject that triggered the alert, instead of showing the full frame.
• The new user interface provides faster navigation and smoother video scrubbing. Additionally, the event list can be scrolled through without closing the video player
• Some of these new features are being extended to older Nest camera models, not just the latest hardware.

Ask Home on Web and Expanded Automation Controls

A new feature called Ask Home on Web is arriving soon in public preview for desktop and ChromeOS users. It will enable users to search through camera history, check device statuses, and create home automations directly from a browser, without needing to open the mobile app.

The update introduces support for more precise device states as automation triggers. New conditions now include the status of robot vacuums, appliance cycles, door lock states, and device battery levels. The notification improvements feature Quick Action buttons that take users directly to the relevant device panel and automatically switch between homes in the background for those managing multiple properties.

Additionally, users can opt into Public Preview features through the Google Home app settings.

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Posted Wednesday 6 May 2026 at 5:12 pm AEST (my time).

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Following months of insider testing, Microsoft began rolling out another variant of its Copilot AI assistant to its gaming division in September of 2025. Dubbed Gaming Copilot, this was framed as a way for gamers to get help with difficult sections in games and give out information on what's being played. Now, while it looks like Microsoft is going full steam ahead on Copilot for most of its product lines, Xbox won't be one of them.

The recently appointed Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma revealed on a social media post today that as part of the latest changes happening within the Xbox wing, Copilot is being wound down. This will affect Copilot that's available on the Xbox app on mobile as well as the Copilot on console project that is in the development phase.

"Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers," said Sharma on a post on X today. "As part of this shift, you’ll see us begin to retire features that don’t align with where we’re headed. We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console."

While this sounds like the end for the mobile and console versions of the Xbox Gaming Copilot, Sharma did not mention the Game Bar version that currently exists on Windows. This version is also still in beta, and it can be turned off from the widgets menu of the Game Bar. It's unclear if this Gaming Copilot for PC gaming will also go away in the future, removing the feature from Xbox services entirely.

Sharma also made official the change in Xbox leadership on the social media post, which was initially revealed earlier today via a leaked Microsoft memo. "Today, we promoted leaders who helped build Xbox, while also bringing in new voices to help push us forward," she added. "This balance is important as we get the business back on track."

This change saw big names from the Microsoft CoreAI team jumping over to Xbox to oversee multiple areas like engineering, development tools, design, and subscriptions.

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Posted Wednesday 6 May 2026 at 12:58 pm AEST (my time).

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Once a month, the PC gaming mega-giant Valve opens an optional hardware and software survey for its Steam users to gauge trends and ultimately spotlight the world's most common components. Much of it is predictable and follows obvious patterns, such as the average amount of memory (RAM) increasing over time and discontinued parts falling off the graphs.

Still, some tidbits offer insight into buying habits and product adoption. In particular, the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for April 2026 shows that NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 with 8GB of VRAM remains the most common discrete graphics card this year. For context, that GPU is now three and a half years old, and many gamers already debate the viability of 8GB cards in 2026.

It's a similar story for operating systems, as Windows holds an utterly dominant 93.47% adoption amongst Steam users, though it's divided between its two (technically) active versions. , but Microsoft's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program offers an extension through October 13, and it looks like 25% of Windows users have opted for it.

Linux and macOS fluctuated into ever-so-slight negatives, but the values were less than 1 percentage point and shouldn't be considered alarming. At the very least, Valve reports Arch Linux as the most-used "distro", which is the foundation for its in-house SteamOS rival to Windows 11, pre-installed on its four-year-old Steam Deck handheld and the upcoming Steam Machine PC.

Windows Central's take: Unaffordability is forcing a new norm for PC gamers