Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it down. It is 1983, and he’s about to ask designers for their help in improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he will tell them that those computers will shatter the lives they have led to date.

“How many of you are 36 years … older than 36?” he asks. That’s how old the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are sort of “precomputer,” members of the television generation. A distinct new generation, he says, is emerging: “In their lifetimes, the computer will be the predominant medium of communication.”

Quite a statement at the time, considering that very few of the audience, according to Jobs’ impromptu polling, owns a personal computer or has even seen one. Jobs tells the designers that they not only will soon use one, but it will be indispensable, and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.

The video of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibit called The Objects of Our Life, presented by the Steve Jobs Archive, the ambitious history project devoted to telling the story of Apple’s fabled cofounder. When the exhibit went live earlier this month—after the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection—I found it not only a compelling reminder of the late CEO, but pertinent to our own time, when another new technology is arriving with equal promise and peril.

The occasion of the speech was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. The theme of that year’s event was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be,” making Jobs the perfect speaker. While much of the talk is about his views on making products beautiful, the underlying message is straight out of that Bob Dylan tune: Something is happening and you don’t know what it is. He told his audience things that seemed preposterous: that in a few years more computers would be shipped than cars, and that people would spend more time with those computers than they spend riding in those cars. He told them that computers would become connected with each other, and everyone would use something called electronic mail, which he had to describe because it was such a strange concept then. Computers, he insisted, would become the dominant medium of communication. His goal was to make all that happen, to get to the point “where people are using these things and they go, ‘Wasn’t this the way it always was?’”

Jobs’ vision seemed to sway his audience, which gave him a standing ovation. Before he left Aspen that week, Jobs was asked to donate an object that would be placed in a time capsule that would commemorate the event. It was to be dug up in 2000. Jobs unhooked the mouse from the Lisa Computer he had brought to demo, and it was sealed in the capsule, along with an 8-track tape of the Moody Blues and a six-pack of beer.

The speech itself is kind of a time capsule. Jobs was right when he said one day we would not be able to imagine what life was like before these new tools he was ushering into the mainstream. Those of us still around who are, in Jobs’ term, “born precomputer” often astound young people by describing how we did our work (manual typewriters! carbon copies!), communicated with each other (phone booths!), and entertained ourselves (three TV channels! Bonanza!) before computers became our virtual appendages.

But on that sunny day in June, Jobs’ prism was rose-colored. The evolution he foretold came at a price. Just this past weekend, for instance, we experienced one of many downsides of this technology’s ubiquity. An update error in a security program called CrowdStrike crashed millions of mission-crucial Windows computers, and much of the world ground to a halt. Businesses curtailed operations. Doctors had to postpone medical procedures. Airports turned into all-night shelters for the stranded.

At Aspen, Jobs wasn’t bothered by the specter of unintended consequences. When an audience member asked him about privacy violations—another headache caused by pervasive digital tech—he shrugged off the question. “I haven’t heard a ton of issues concerning these giant databases knowing everything about us that had much substance to them,” he said. “The thing I’m most concerned with is the ability to turn all this stuff into something we can do something about.”

Eventually Jobs came to recognize the double-edged nature of computer tech, and tried to shape Apple as a champion of privacy. But his early apparent naivety is one of the startling aspects of this speech. Just as digital tech was finding its way, so was Steve Jobs. Technology historian Leslie Berlin, executive director of the archive, says revealing that was a big reason for the exhibit. “It shows Steve very young, with so many of the elements that made him great, and also still figuring things out,” she says. “We felt this talk could really resonate with that stage of people's lives where they’re working outside the main lanes, trying to pull together things that haven’t been pulled together in exactly this way before.”

That tension helps make Objects of Our Lives chillingly relevant to our present moment. In 1983, Jobs was trying to help people come to grips with a new technology that would change their lives. Some were tinkering with it, and some savvy pioneers had already transformed their businesses with it. But most people, whether they were intimidated or skeptical, hadn’t adopted it.

That sounds to me like society’s current status with artificial intelligence. Like computer technology 40 years ago, it’s been stealthily baked into infrastructure and is finally becoming available to all in a powerful form. But only a minority of people are actually using it, and a relatively modest subset are making full use of it. Others are, well, intimidated or skeptical.

But for better or worse, it’s coming, and it will be transformative. Jobs himself in the speech flicked at the idea when he said in the next 50 years we might “come up with these machines that can capture an underlying view of the world.” A future Aristotle, he speculated, might log all his thoughts into one of those systems. “Someday after the person is dead and gone, we could ask this machine, ‘Hey what would Aristotle have said?’”

That vision is straight out of the playbook of those who are trying to build AI. To date, though, none have pulled together as charming a presentation as Steve Jobs did. Maybe that’s a good thing. This time around, we should be cognizant of the dangers early on.

That aforementioned time capsule, by the way, has a story of its own. When it came time to unearth it in 2000, no one seemed to know where it was. But in 2014, a National Geographic team used scientific techniques to locate it, and publicly cut it open. The first item they pulled out was the mouse that Jobs donated. It did not seem like an antique at all, but something you might find on a desktop right now.

We’re living today in 1983’s tomorrow. As artificial intelligence improves, and worms itself more deeply into society, our own future is definitely not what it used to be.

My own first encounter with Steve Jobs came several months after the June 1983 Aspen appearance, when I was writing about the new Macintosh computer for Rolling Stone. In the interview, which I published as a Q&A in the 20th anniversary edition of my book Insanely Great, he explained why the unique moment of emerging digital technology led him to obsessively build this new machine—even though it meant, he told me, putting a romantic relationship on hold.

What’s driving you?

Well, it’s like computers and society are out on a first date in this decade, and for some crazy reason we’re just in the right place at the right time to make that romance blossom. We can make them great, we can make a great product that people can easily use. They’ll have great experiences. And if we don’t do it, IBM’s going to take over … [We’re] the only thing standing between IBM and a monopoly of the entire computer business. If having really great products—if having much better products isn’t enough to compete with them—then they’ll have the whole thing. They’ll be the greatest monopoly of all time. It’d be like owning every oil company and every car company in 1920. A lot of people would say, ‘Well, yeah … that’s a shame but there’s a woman who’s important to me, and I have to pay attention to that.’ It gets back to what you think is important, What do you do when you wake up every morning? And to me, for now, I just look at this whole experience as like boot camp. Great basic training. And for what I don’t know. Also, I look at most of the people I get to work with as artists. I look at myself as an artist if anything.

Really?

Sort of trapeze artist.

With or without a net?

Without.

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Over the past week, both CrowdStrike and Microsoft have been working to help restore affected systems. Late on Thursday, the CEO of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz, posted a note on his LinkedIn page, announcing that "over 97% of Windows sensors are back online as of July 25."

Kurtz said the Windows restoration efforts are due "to the tireless efforts of our customers, partners, and the dedication of our team at CrowdStrike." At the same time, he also said that the company's work is not done. He added:

To our customers still affected, please know we will not rest until we achieve full recovery. At CrowdStrike, our mission is to earn your trust by safeguarding your operations. I am deeply sorry for the disruption this outage has caused and personally apologize to everyone impacted. While I can’t promise perfection, I can promise a response that is focused, effective, and with a sense of urgency.

CrowdStrike has released a preliminary report on what exactly happened to cause a faulty update to be released to millions of Windows computers worldwide and also what steps it will take to prevent a similar occurrence.

On Thursday, Microsoft went live with a blog post on its efforts to bring back the Windows PCs affected by the CrowdStrike update. It also stated, "This incident shows clearly that Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience." So far, the company has not revealed any specific plans it has to try to improve Windows resiliency.

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Combat in Arranger involves moving swords around and pushing them into enemies.

Image: Furniture & Mattress

 

Locked doors mean nothing to Jemma.

Image: Furniture & Mattress

 

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Almost 9 Years ago, Bethesda had released Fallout 4. It was a huge game which allows players to play the game for hundreds of hours. This ensured that the game was a massive success.

Though a lackluster story, the gameplay made up for the issues with the game. It also won many awards. Later, Bethesda released more DLCs. They were a massive hit too.

Meanwhile, a few years ago, in 2019, a small team of volunteers started developing a massive mod for FO4 on PC. It was named Fallout: London.

Official Description

Fallout: London is an ambitious, trail-blazing DLC-sized mod for Fallout 4, Bethesda Game Studios’ 2015 post-apocalyptic RPG. Fallout: London stands apart from its contemporaries and offers an entirely new experience: setting a Fallout game outside of the United States. True to its moniker, Fallout: London takes place IN London. From stuffy parliamentary aristocrats to a resurrection of the Knights of the Round Table to an uncompromising cult of revolutionaries (and more!), Fallout: London embodies the history and aesthetics of London and puts an unmistakably nuclear spin on the beloved city.

Fallout: London’s development is labour-intensive and involves a plethora of eclectic cross-discipline individuals, both at amateur and industry level. The team maintains a strong sense of professionalism and devotion to the craft. Everyone on the Fallout: London team shares a deep love of videogames, and most importantly, Fallout itself. Each member of the Fallout: London team is individually recruited for their contributions and talent in the realms of game design and modding.

Fallout: London Release

After years in the works, the game was all set to release. But 3 months ago, Bethesda released the Next-Gen update for FO4.

However, that update broke Fallout: London, which was all set to release at that time. So the team had to work more months. They had to make an update rollback mod for Fallout 4 to make it working again.

After the development was done, Fallout: London mod devs had to wait for several days more. Because they had submitted the mod to GOG, who took some time to check everything.

Finally, after years of development. Fallout: London was officially released today to all the Fallout 4 players for free.

The only requirement is that one downloads a mod called Fallout London Downgrader and Addons from Nexus Mods if one is using the Steam version. The instructions can be found here.

It must be mentioned, the game consists of some of the well known voice actors. Including John Bercow, who was a former speaker of the house in the UK and reprises his role in the game for the same.

Conclusion

Players can get Fallout: London for free on GOG. The only requirement is the base Fallout 4 game. It’s also compatible with both the Steam and GOG edition.

It’s not without its issues, though. Early players on the game’s subreddit are complaining of crashes at the launch or at the start of the game after character creation. However, the developers seem to be looking into a fix for some of them.

We personally are very happy to see a mod this size to have released, that too for free. It’s basically a community made Fallout 5 game for everyone, especially the fan of the series. It might take Bethesda years to release another game in the series, for now this is the best the players can get.

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Google says, "We're thrilled to share exciting new features that we're launching in India to make your navigation and exploration journeys more efficient and sustainable."

One of the features takes advantage of AI to help four-wheeler drivers navigate through narrow roads. This could come in handy, as Google is known to put car drivers through narrow streets that are difficult to navigate.

In addition to AI, the app will make use of satellite imagery, Street View, and other metrics to estimate the road width. The feature will be initially made available to eight cities, including Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai, and will later expand to more cities.

Flyover navigation is another issue Indian people have often cursed Google Maps about. Until now, users used to get confused about whether to take the flyover or not. To fix this, Google Maps will now highlight flyovers in supported routes within 40 Indian cities.

EV charging stations are another area where Google has improved Google Maps. Google has reportedly partnered with leading EV charging providers, such as ElectricPe, Ather, Kazam, and Statiq, to show information on over 8,000 charging stations in Maps and Search.

Users will now be able to view real-time availability and filter by charger type. Moreover, India is the first country that will feature two-wheeler EV charging stations on Google Maps.

One of the most requested options by Google Maps users has now landed for India. Google Maps has now simplified the process of reporting road incidents. With just a few taps, users can alert other Google Maps users about any ongoing construction or mishaps on their route.

Other features include the option to book metro tickets for users in Chennai and Kochi straight from the Google Maps app.

Google is also collaborating with local experts to curate a list of recommended places available in ten major cities in India. The features will start rolling out gradually across Android and iOS devices.

Source and images: Google

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Fallout: London has been in development by Team FOLON, a group of fans consisting of hobbyists, industry professionals, and modders, for over five years. Using Bethesda's 2015-released post-apocalyptic RPG as a base, the "DLC-sized" mod delivers a whole new adventure for fans to experience complete with fully-voiced characters, new factions, missions, and more. The complete mod is said to have about 90 hours of content.

Here's how the studio describes the setting:

There has never been a better time to sample the capital’s delights! Fallout: London lets you explore the wonders of the city 160 years after the bombs have dropped, and 40 years before the events of Fallout 3. You can now reimagine Fallout in a London-centric universe, interacting with a brave new world of London-based locations, stories, factions, creatures, weapons, and gameplay mechanics.

Despite releasing on the GOG platform, the mod can also be installed on the Steam version of Fallout 4 Game of the Year Edition (but not Epic Games Store), though it is a much more complex process. This is due to the mod needing Fallout 4 version 1.10.163.0, without the next-gen update. To use the Steam version, the game will need to be downgraded. Head here to find a guide on how to do that from the mod authors.

PC gamers who own the GOG version of Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition simply need to grab the mod launcher from its official Fallout: London GOG store page. It can then be downloaded via the GOG Galaxy Launcher or the store's DRM-free offline installers. The launcher will automatically download and install the mod over the base game and let players jump in when it's ready to play.

Disabling cloud saves on GOG is recommended before installing the mod. Since the mod completely overwrites the base game, those wanting to go back to playing regular Fallout 4 will need to uninstall and reinstall the full game.

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In early June, AMD officially announced the Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs. However, it didn’t mention the release dates.

Later, it was finally revealed that the AMD Ryzen 9000 is going to release in the July 31. However, AMD made no mention of its prices.

Earlier today, AMD gave huge amount of details behind the Zen 5 architecture. Tom’s Hardware has the complete coverage about it.

At the same time, ComputerBase reported (via VideoCardz) that reviewers have still not received any CPU samples for testing. Which is surprising as testing CPUs take a few days.

Now it is revealed is that the reason why reviewers have not gotten any samples as the release for the AMD Ryzen 9000 series is getting delayed.

Ryzen 9000 Delayed To August

Kitguru (via VideoCardz) and Tom’s Hardware reports that AMD is delaying the release of the Ryzen 9000 series to August “due to an unspecified quality issue”.

Specifically, AMD Ryzen 9600X and Ryzen 9700X CPUs release dates have been delayed to 8th August. Whereas, AMD Ryzen 9900X and Ryzen 9950X CPUs release dates have been delayed to 15th August.

Not only that, AMD has pulled back all the Ryzen 9000 CPUs that it had delivered to all the retailers and OEMs. Tom’s Hardware calls this an unprecedented move by AMD in recent times.

AMD found the issues in the CPUs during final processor checks. They somehow didn’t find these issues during their initial checking.

An AMD representative spoke to Tom’s Hardware and said that the Ryzen 9000 silicon doesn’t require any redesign or re-spin. AMD will just re-check all the recalled CPUs and those without issues will be sent back to the retailers.

The statement also suggests some sort of CPU manufacturing packaging issue. Here, the CPU packaging means that the chip (chiplets in AMD’s case) is installed on the CPU base board. This suggests that there indeed doesn’t seem to be any issue with the chips themselves.

Official Statement

AMD has released an official statement to both Kitguru and Tom’s Hardware. Here’s the statement below:

Conclusion

Ryzen 9000 is a great opportunity for AMD to beat Intel. Not only in launch timing, but also in performance.

These days, Intel is in all the wrong news. Intel CPUs are crashing everywhere and there still isn’t a proper fix available for it. Though Intel claims to have found a root issue, the fix is going to come later.

So, AMD Ryzen 9000’s delay can be seen in two ways. On one side, AMD too joins Intel in CPU issues. On the other side, AMD has done a good thing to identify the issues before the launch and is trying to fix it.

Whatever it is. We hope the issue gets fixed quickly and consumers aren’t too much affected by it. We might see the reviews to release in August on the release dates of the respective CPUs.

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Gamers Nexus (2.24M subscribers)

July 25, 2024

Video length: 13m 30s

00:00 - AMD Delays Zen 5 CPUs

02:01 - Pulling All CPUs Back

04:52 - Not Golden Sample Filtering

06:25 - What This Means for Consumers & Intel

09:36 - Benefits of Delaying

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SAN DIEGO—The four hulking male gorillas roamed their zoo enclosure, sitting pensively on rocks overlooking a waterfall and climbing a wooden structure.

Suddenly, an 18-year-old western lowland gorilla named Ekuba bounded up to the glass. The 380-pound animal looked expectantly at a man wearing a shirt bearing the gorilla’s image as he pulled out his phone.

Ekuba stood on all fours and began watching videos—of himself and other gorillas.

“He really is watching! I wonder what he’s thinking,” said Cecilia Lee, a visitor from Orange County. “Anything that brings us together is fascinating.”

Ekuba isn’t the only gorilla enthralled with devices. Across North America, zoos have grappled with, and sometimes embraced, primates taking an interest in screen time.

In Louisville, Ky., a 27-year-old gorilla named Jelani has been enamored with phones for years, flicking his finger or tapping the glass when he’s ready for a visitor to swipe to the next shot. At the Toronto Zoo, keepers have hung signs to dissuade showing screens to gorillas, citing disruption to their family dynamic.

The interactions speak to man’s age-old attraction to gorillas, which share 98% of our DNA, and a desire to connect with them.

“They are a window to ourselves, they really are,” said Ron Evans, general curator at the Louisville Zoo. “Except for their superhuman strength.”

Evans said Jelani’s phone-watching hasn’t been a detriment to the otherwise quiet life he leads with his troop-mate, Bengati, so they’ve allowed it in moderation.

On a recent day in San Diego, visitors marveled at the phone-watching gorillas. A spokeswoman for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, however, said the trend is one “we do not condone and strongly discourage.”  

Adam Chiu came over to get a closer look at Ekuba’s video habit, surprised. He concluded it was cool. “It’s interesting to see how similar they really are to us,” Chiu, who lives in San Francisco, said. “You look them in the eyes and see consciousness, there’s something there.”

Eleven-year-old Calla DaCruz stood riveted, taking selfies and watching as male gorillas swung from ropes and tussled. She said she was surprised to see a gorilla watching a woman’s phone, but more amazed by their natural instincts. “I’ve never seen any other animal fight like how they do.”  

A few self-proclaimed gorilla groupies come almost daily to the world-renowned San Diego Zoo, filming and then showing the “home videos” to the apes.

Four brother gorillas who live in a troop are sometimes shown videos of their mother, who resides apart from them with a silverback male. The separation reflects how gorillas would organize in the wild, where a single alpha male lives with several females and young offspring, while mature males must go off on their own or band together as bachelors.

Calla DaCruz, in a selfie from the gorilla exhibit. Photo: Calla DaCruz

The San Diego superfans prefer to bond with the primates in anonymity. The man in the gorilla shirt (with a matching baseball hat) and a female regular refused to give their names, citing a fear of having zoo access removed. “This is my happy place,” said the man, who used nods and hand signals to try to goad gorillas into photogenic moves.

Tears came to the woman’s eyes as she said the zoo might want to block her and others from showing the animals videos. “Any enrichment is good enrichment,” she said.

Volunteer docents that day appeared split, with some smiling and chatting with superfans as they showed videos, and one saying she was told in training to discourage it.

The San Diego Zoo spokeswoman said: “We make a concerted effort to prevent guests from distracting the gorillas with their screens, and if we do see this happening, we will step in to stop it.” Instead of trying to connect with apes through technology meant for humans, guests should passively observe them “as they behave like gorillas.”

By the 1930s, young gorillas were taken from African rainforests and transported to barred zoo enclosures with bare floors. The few born in zoos were separated from their parents and raised by humans.

Seismic change for zoo gorillas took place from the late 1970s to 1990s. Scientists realized the key to the apes’ well-being would come from letting gorillas raise their young, in sprawling enclosures that gave an option to roam away from the glare of visitors.

Gorillas, who can live into their 50s or 60s in captivity, stopped being taken from the wild. One of the last “founder” gorillas in U.S. zoos, as those born in Africa are known, died in San Diego this month at 52. Today, there are around 350 gorillas in accredited North American zoos.  

Some see the trend of gorillas watching phone videos as the latest human indignity foisted upon the endangered gentle giants, which spend most of their time in the wild eating vegetation.

“I get that people want that sort of connection,” said Beth Armstrong, a conservationist who helped shape a pioneering gorilla program at the Columbus Zoo beginning in the 1980s. “But the reality is: What does it do for the gorilla?” She wishes people would put down their phones and learn from watching the animals, be it parenting tips or how to navigate a tough social dynamic.

Decades ago, scientists debated whether great apes could actually recognize images in photos or videos. Today, it’s abundantly clear they do, said Robert Shumaker, president and chief executive of the Indianapolis Zoo and a great-ape researcher.

Chimpanzees play cognitive games at the Indianapolis Zoo to help researchers understand great ape intelligence. Photo: Chris Martin

In the Indianapolis Zoo, chimpanzees and orangutans use touch screens to learn to communicate using symbols and play cognitive games like tic-tac-toe. Shumaker said visitors who watch apes demonstrate mental abilities often come away with more support for conservation efforts.

Shumaker said it doesn’t surprise him, based on his research, that gorillas are engaging with phones.

“But I would give the same advice to any great ape I know as I would to anyone in my own family,” he said. “This can’t be all day for you. You’ve got to do other things.”

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One of the major drawbacks of using nuclear energy to generate electricity is the fear of a meltdown, possibly exposing populations to radiation. Scientists have been working to develop designs for nuclear reactors that do not melt down if their coolant supply is interrupted. In this new study, the team in China tested the HTR-PM design, in which the fuel rods used in reactions are less dense than those currently used.

They employ more graphite and less uranium, and the uranium is encased. The design results in slower reactions and the ability to sustain higher temperatures for longer periods of time. It also disperses heat over a larger area, which means cooling can be done passively, using either convection, conduction or both. That means that no external power source is needed for cooling.

The design would have prevented the meltdown that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011. In that accident, a tsunami caused a power outage that made it impossible to pump the water used to keep the reactors cool, which allowed them to overheat.

The new nuclear plant in China has been under construction and testing since 2016—it has two reactors, each capable of generating 105 MW of power. It began operations last year. The research team sought to prove that the plant is incapable of melting down by revving both reactors up to full power and then turning off all external power—this immediately stopped water flowing to and from the turbines that are used to generate power.

The researchers then monitored the plant in case of a meltdown, which did not occur; instead, stable temperatures were reached within 36 hours.

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Logitech has started emailing customers about the upcoming end of life for the classic Logitech Options app on Windows and macOS. Those still using the old program are now encouraged to update from Options to Options Plus, the more modern version of the program with broader device support. Here is what the email says:

Logitech Options Retiring Soon

 

We are grateful to you for being a valuable user of Logitech Options so far. Options has been enhancing your Logitech mice, keyboards, and touchpads experience by allowing customization, making the device truly yours. However, Options will be retiring soon and we want to help you with this transition.

 

Logi Options+ is the next-gen of Logitech Options offering you everything that Options had. Options+ will be the application going forward for personal workspace devices and provide ongoing integrated device firmware updates for optimal security and performance.

There is no information on when Logitech will retire the old Options app. The program is barely getting any updates these days, and all the attention from the developers is on the Options+ program. Although it received a lot of updates and some interesting features, like integration with generative AI services, Options+ still lacks some features found in the old app. For example, there is still no Duolink support, an extremely convenient thing that lets you double the amount of available shortcuts on your mouse by pressing the Fn button on a Logitech keyboard.

At the same time, if you are buying the Logitech MX Master 3S or another recently announced device from Logitech, there is no way to use the old Options app with them. Therefore, the end of the Logitech Options app will mostly affect customers with older peripherals, like the Logitech MX Master 3, 2S, MX Anywhere 3, MX Keys, etc.

If you use the Logitech Options app, you can update to the Options+ variant within the application. Before you do that, check out the list of compatible devices to make sure your mouse, keyboard, or another Logitech-made device is supported.

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As usual, the Google Search division brought in the majority of the company's revenue at $48.50 billion, compared to $42.63 billion from the same quarter a year ago. For the first time, the Google Cloud division brought in over $10 billion in revenue; $10.35 billion in fact. That was up from $8.03 billion from a year ago.

Revenue from Google's YouTube ad division came in at $8,67 billion for the quarter. While that was up from $7.67 billion from a year ago, today's numbers reportedly did not meet expectations from analysts, according to CNBC.

The company's Other Bets financial category, which includes its long-running Waymo self-driving car division, brought in $365 million for the quarter, which is up compared to the $285 million the division had in revenue from the same period a year ago.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in the earnings press release:

Our strong performance this quarter highlights ongoing strength in Search and momentum in Cloud. We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack. Our longstanding infrastructure leadership and in-house research teams position us well as technology evolves and as we pursue the many opportunities ahead.

Alphabet's stock price is up by over 1 percent in after-hours trading as of this writing. It would appear that traders like the numbers from Alphabet and Google, even with the YouTube ad revenue miss.

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July 24, 2024

Video length: 26m 55s

00:00 - Intel Admits Oxidation & Voltage Issues

03:52 - Intel's Statement

06:38 - What Intel Needs to Do

09:56 - Oxidation Also a Problem

13:35 - Public Pressure from Partners

19:44 - What YOU Should Do & FAQ

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In the patch notes for the PC Steam version of the game, we learn more about the new mission:

With one member missing and another critically injured following a disastrous skirmish, an Enclave is desperate for help. Are you prepared to give your blood, sweat and tears to save them?

The new mission also includes three new cosmetic items to unlock along with two new traits, Blood Donor and EMT Driver. Finally, the Bloodmobile vehicle for the game is back and players can unlock it permanently if they get the EMT Driver trait or by unlocking the new special enclave missions. You can learn more about how to donate blood by going to the American Red Cross State of Decay web page.

Besides the new mission and unlockables, State of Decay 2 has some other improvements with Update 37. One is that the flashlights in the game are now brighter so they are more useful during the night. Also, the game's Curveball feature, which was introduced in its September 2023 update, has added a number of new sliders to help influence how it generates random events.

Speaking of which, there are two new Curveball events that can be made with this feature:

• Bangernomics - Keeping your rides running smoothly even before the apocalypse was a pain. Nowadays keeping these heaps of junk on the road is even more problematic. This Curveball affects the handling and performance of your vehicles.
• Smoke Storm - The wind has carried over a dense, thick plume of smoke from a mysterious explosion at a chemical plant a few miles out of town. This Curveball creates a suffocating smog that lowers your visibility.

The update also has a number of other quality-of-life improvements along with many bug fixes. The update will be rolling out today for the PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S platforms.

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In a post on the game's website, Microsoft says the World Update XVII that's available today will include improved graphics for the following cities and points of interest, along with five updated airports:

16 TIN cities:

 

• Bristol, Brighton, Greater London, Heathrow, Leeds-Bradford, Liverpool, Newcastle-Sunderland, Welling, and Wembley in England
• Cork, Dublin, and Cliffs of Moher / Liscannor in Ireland
• Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland
• Cardiff in Wales
• Gibraltar

 

79 points of interest (POIs):

 

• 31 in England, 13 in Ireland, 5 in Isle of Man, 11 in Northern Ireland, 1 in Orkney / Scotland, 9 in Scotland, and 10 in Wales.

 

5 handcrafted airports:

 

• Farnborough Airport (EGLF) and London Stansted Airport (EGSS) in England
• Cork Airport (EICK) in Ireland
• Sumburgh Airport (EGPB) in Scotland
• Cardiff (EGFF) in Wales

Today's update will also add eight new activities for virtual pilots to take on, including "three discovery flights, two landing challenges, and three bush trips." The world update was created in collaboration with Microsoft's own Bing Maps division, along with Gaya Simulations, and iniBuilds. Owners of the flight sim must have version 1.37.19.0 or above in order to download the new World Update.

The company recently announced that the current 2020 edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator hit a new milestone of 15 million unique players. The game will also continue to get content updates until at least 2028. That's even with the upcoming launch of the stand-alone sequel, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. That game is currently scheduled for launch on November 19 for the PC and Xbox Series X and S consoles, along with PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

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In a post on the game's Steam page, Arrowhead describes some of the new content and features that will be a part of the update. There will be three new alien bugs to deal with. One is actually a creature from the first Helldivers game, the Impaler. This enemy alien has huge tentacles that come out of the ground so players won't be able to run away from them.

The update will also include a variant of the game's Charger, called the Spore Charger, which is hidden in a fog until you are close to it. There's also the Terminid Alpha Commander, a bigger and meaner version of the game's Brood Commander. Finally, there's a new Rocket Tank Automaton enemy, and Arrowhead says there will be some surprises as well.

The update will also have a new and higher player difficulty, Combat Rating 10: Super Helldive. Arrowhead added:

We’ve also heard your desire for mission variation, which is why we’re bringing you new mission objectives and bigger enemy outposts for both bots and bugs that offer brand new Super Sample rewards. These outposts will be heavily fortified, and require players to coordinate and strategize in order to take them out.

The update will also offer some improvements to help cut down on the amount of grief kicking in the game's multiplayer along with a number of quality-of-life improvements which will include changes to the game's social meun. Escalation of Freedom will be released as part of Helldivers 2 on August 6 for Steam and PS5.

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Today, the official Assassin's Creed X account includes a lengthy statement from the game's development team that's directed toward Japanese gamers.

As part of the statement, the Shadows dev team admits that "some elements in our promotional material have caused concern within the Japanese community. For that, we sincerely apologize". The statement added that footage of the game that has already been released "is in development and the game will keep evolving until launch."

The statement added that while the development team has consulted with a number of experts in the history of feudal Japan, they are not responsible for the decisions that the Assassin's Creed: Shadows team has ultimately made for the game.

Having said all of that, the dev team does state that the game is not being made as a 100 percent historically accurate depiction of feudal Japan, and indeed it has a number of fantasy elements. The team also addressed the game's use of the character of Yasuke, stating:

While Yasuke is depicted as a samurai in Assassin's Creed Shadows, we acknowledge this is a matter of debate and discussion. We have woven this carefully into our narrative and with our other lead character, the Japanese shinobi Naoe, who is equally important in the game, our dual protagonists provide players with different gameplay styles.

The team says it will still continue to encourage feedback from from gamers "respectfully". Assassin's Creed: Shadows is currently set for release on November 15 for PC, Mac, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 platforms.

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“Where did CrowdStrike go wrong” is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question.

We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it’s too late to limit the fallout. The alternative – a staged rollout – would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50 million.

If you aren’t going to do a staged rollout, then before you push the update to users, you should test it. Normally, the extent of prerelease testing is a contested realm: there are uncountable possible configurations of hardware, software and user requirements, and any testing regime has to narrow down the ones that matter – and hope nothing falls through the cracks. Thankfully, when an update crashes 100% of the computers it is installed on and renders them inoperable until an onerous fix is manually applied, one can fairly easily conclude it was undertested.

If you aren’t going to do a staged rollout and you aren’t going to test your update before it ships, then you need to make sure it is not broken.

It was broken

Flights at Orlando airport, Florida, were among many cancelled or delayed amid the CrowdStrike crisis. Photograph: Miguel J Rodríguez Carrillo/Getty Images

In CrowdStrike’s defence, you can see why some of this happened the way it did. The company offers a service called “endpoint protection”, but if you’ve been around the Windows ecosystem for a few years, it might be easiest to think of it as an antivirus. It’s geared towards the corporate market, rather than consumers, and as well as guarding against common malware it attempts to prevent individual computers used by businesses from becoming footholds into the corporate network.

That not only covers PCs used by large companies that need to be able to offer a keyboard and mouse to every one of their employees, but also anyone else with massive fleets of cheap and flexible machines. If you left home on Friday, you’ll have seen what that means: advertising displays, point of sale machines and self-service kiosks were all hit.

The comparison matters because in the space CrowdStrike plays in, speed is of the essence. The worst-case scenario – at least, until last week – is a ransom worm like WannaCry or NotPetya: a piece of malware that not only wreaks critical damage on affected machines but can spread within and across corporate networks automatically. And so the frontline of the defence is operated at pace. Rather than waiting for a weekly, or even monthly, release schedule for the software update, the company pushes files daily to cover the latest threats to the systems it protects.

At the margins, even a staged rollout could cause real harm: WannaCry bricked computers across much of the NHS in the hours it was allowed to spread unchecked, before British security researcher Marcus Hutchins accidentally stopped it in its tracks while trying to work out what made it tick. In that scenario, a staged rollout could cost lives. A delay for testing could cost more.

So, instead, the updates aren’t supposed to be able to cause this sort of problem. Rather than being new code run on each machine, they are instead more like updates to the dictionary – telling the CrowdStrike software already installed what new threats to look out for, and how to recognise them.

At the loosest end, you can think of it like, well, this article. You’re almost certainly reading these words through an application of some sort, be that a web browser, mail client, or the Guardian’s app. (If you have secured an arrangement whereby someone prints this off and delivers it with your morning coffee, congratulations.) I haven’t performed a staged rollout, or run a full test of the article, because it shouldn’t do anything.

Unfortunately, the update pushed on Friday did do something. The high-level technical details remain fuzzy, and until CrowdStrike deigns to publish a full breakdown of what it did, we’re stuck with what they’ve told us. The update, which was meant to teach the system how to spot a particular type of cyber-attack that had already been observed in the wild, instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash”.

I’ve been covering this sort of thing for more than a decade now and my guess is the “logic error” will turn out to be one of two things. Either something in one of the most complex systems that humanity has built in its history will have a barely comprehensible fail state and an almost inconceivable combination of bad luck will have led to something catastrophic happening; or someone did something tremendously dumb.

Sometimes there are no lessons

Consumer-facing self-service kiosks, such at those operated by South Western Railway in the UK, were also hit. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Over the last few days, there have been lots of takes:

• This is an inevitable harm of the concentration of power in just a few companies in the technology sector.

• This is an inevitable harm of the EU banning Microsoft from limiting the power of antivirus companies to rewrite the base level of Windows.

• This is an inevitable harm of cybersecurity regulations that care more about box-ticking than actual security.

• This wasn’t a security issue at all, since no one got hacked. It was just a bug.

None of them have hit home. CrowdStrike, for all the disruption, doesn’t have a huge concentration of power; it’s one of the larger companies in its sector, but it’s installed on only about 1% of all PCs. And while Microsoft has tried to push the line that it’s only because of regulation that the failures happened, the alternative – where third-party security companies can’t operate on Windows – feels mostly a world where the first big failure really does affect 100% of PCs because Microsoft has set itself up as the only line of defence.

Cybersecurity regulations really do reward companies for installing CrowdStrike, turning a complex certification process into a simple box-tick, but that’s probably good as well. “Buy the thing to make you safe” is the only reasonable demand for the vast majority of companies, and CrowdStrike did the job, except for that one unfortunate time.

But unfortunate or not, it was absolutely a security issue. There are three goals in the golden triangle of information security: confidentiality (are secrets secret), integrity (is data correct), and availability (can you use your systems). CrowdStrike failed to preserve availability, and that meant it failed to guard the information security of its customers.

In the end, the only lesson I’m comfortable with taking away is that this sort of thing is going to happen more. We’ve successfully tackled so many fail states in society that those that still hit us are increasingly going to be surprising, serious and unprepared for. Similar to how drivers get overly confident with cruise control and find themselves unable to take over in the split second before an accident, we’ve succeeded in making catastrophic IT outages rare enough that recovering from them is a marathon task.

Hooray?

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When Noah saw the email, a wave of anxiety hit. It was spring 2023, and the Activision artist was reading a message from the company's then chief technology officer, Michael Vance, about how artificial intelligence was “top of mind” at the video game publisher. Systems were still being tested, Vance wrote, but “what we have seen thus far holds a ton of promise.”

There had been a couple emails like this sent to the employees of the studio, which produces the juggernaut Call of Duty series. A previous one had approved the internal use of generative AI tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for producing concept art.

That spring, backchannel chats lit up with rumors, worry, and whisper networks of whose jobs AI might replace. Where executives saw reason for excitement, many game artists, writers, and designers saw a direct threat to their livelihoods. Noah was grief-stricken. (Noah is a pseudonym; the employee has been granted anonymity because he fears retribution.)

“I felt that we were throwing away our humanity,” he says.

Then the jobs started disappearing.

Video games—and the people who make them—are in trouble. An estimated 10,500 people in the industry were laid off in 2023 alone.

This year, layoffs in the nearly $200 billion sector have only gotten worse, with studios axing what is believed to be 11,000 more, and counting. Microsoft, home of the Xbox and parent company to several studios, including Activision Blizzard, shuttered Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games in May. All the while, generative AI systems built by OpenAI and its competitors have been seeping into nearly every industry, dismantling whole careers along the way.

But gaming might be the biggest industry AI stands poised to conquer. Its economic might has long since eclipsed Hollywood's, while its workforce remains mostly nonunion. A recent survey from the organizers of the Game Developers Conference found that 49 percent of the survey’s more than 3,000 respondents said their workplace used AI, and four out of five said they had ethical concerns about its use.

“It’s here. It’s definitely here, right now,” says Violet, a game developer, technical artist, and a veteran of the industry who has worked on AAA games for over a decade. “I think everyone’s seen it get used, and it’s a matter of how and to what degree. The genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's box is opened.”

Now, previously unreported emails obtained by WIRED, in addition to interviews with artists, developers, designers, and workers across the gaming world—from AAA studios with thousands of employees to indies with just a handful—paint a picture of an already precarious industry getting further squeezed by the rise of AI.

Job automation rarely happens evenly or cleanly. Historically, much of its impact is felt through deskilling, as more tasks are handed over to a machine or program, or attrition, as employees who are laid off, quit, or retire, don’t get replaced or hired back. Generative AI, by all indications, is no different.

Managers at video game companies aren’t necessarily using AI to eliminate entire departments, but many are using it to cut corners, ramp up productivity, and compensate for attrition after layoffs. In other words, bosses are already using AI to replace and degrade jobs. The process just doesn’t always look like what you might imagine. It’s complex, based on opaque executive decisions, and the endgame is murky. It’s less Skynet and more of a mass effect—and it’s happening right now.

“There's a ton of anxiety for artists across the board with AI,” says Molly Warner, an environment artist who was working on an Overwatch game at Activision’s corporate sibling, Blizzard Entertainment, at the time the CTO’s emails went out. “Pretty much everyone I know is vehemently against the use of AI-generated images.”

That anxiety rose as Vance’s drip of AI-boosting emails continued. In May 2023, Brian Kotick, then the CEO of Activision Blizzard, fielded a question about how generative AI would impact the gaming industry at a company-wide meeting.

“I’ve known Sam Altman and the folks who are working at OpenAI for a long time,” he said, according to a recording obtained by Kotaku. “I don’t know how much people realize that a lot of modern day AI, including ChatGPT, started with the idea of beating a game, whether it was Warcraft or Dota or Starcraft or Go or Chess.” Kotick went on: “One of the things that I’ve experienced over the last year is that same feeling that I had when I saw that first Macintosh, about how meaningful the impact of AI would be on society, both positive and negative.”

By July, the company’s initial restraint had slackened. In another internal memo, Vance announced that Activision had secured access to GPT-3.5 and approved the use of certain generative AI tools in creating concept art and marketing materials. The company would also deploy AI in other public-facing use cases, like to compose user surveys.

Though many of the game workers and artists were queasy about this proliferation, and some were even afraid for their livelihoods, few spoke out. “I think we all didn’t talk about it much for fear of losing our jobs,” Noah says. He claims Activision assured its artists that generative AI would be used only for internal concepts, not final game assets—and importantly, that AI would not be used to replace them.

Yet by the end of the year, Activision made an AI-generated cosmetic available for purchase on the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 store. In late January, Microsoft laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees—among the teams hit hard were 2D artists.

“What a fucked up day,” a onetime environment artist at Blizzard, Lucas Annunziata, posted on X. “Half the environment art team cut from [Overwatch 2], folks I helped hire and train.”

At Activision, it was the same. “A lot of 2D artists were laid off,” Noah says. The department was slashed. “Remaining concept artists,” he claims, “were then forced to use AI to aid in their work.” Employees, according to Noah, have been made to sign up for AI trainings, and its use is being promoted throughout the org.

“From an AI perspective, different parts of the industry are getting eaten up by others,” says Violet, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retribution. “Why get a bunch of expensive concept artists or designs when you can get an art director to give some bad directions to an AI and get stuff that’s good enough, really fast—and get a few artists to clean it up?”

Hence the emerging consensus is that concept artists, graphic designers, asset artists, and illustrators have been most impacted by AI so far—attested to by personal accounts of game employees, laid-off workers themselves, and the reams of posts on Reddit, X, and beyond.

Generative AI can most capably produce 2D images that managers in cost-squeezed studios might consider “good enough,” a term AI-watching creative workers now use as shorthand for the kind of AI output that’s not a threat to replacing great art, but is a threat to their livelihoods. Some clients care more about cost than quality, after all. Tasks like 3D animation and programming are, for now at least, much harder to automate in full.

Games have, to varying degrees, used automation for years. They rely heavily on “AI” programs that control enemies, environments, and nonplayer characters. That’s not what people are talking about when they discuss AI now. In 2024, they’re typically talking about generative AI produced by large language models (LLMs), and the related systems that have been unleashed by the latest boom.

A recent report from the consulting firm CVL Economics, commissioned by entertainment industry trade groups, found the gaming industry already relegated tasks to generative AI more than its peers in TV, film, or music. According to its survey of 300 CEOs, executives, and managers, nearly 90 percent of video game companies had already implemented generative AI programs.

Gaming, CVL found, “relies heavily, more so than the other entertainment industries, on GenAI to carry out tasks like generating storyboards, character designs, renders, and animations. In fact, by some estimates GenAI may contribute to more than half of the game development process in the next five to 10 years.”

This might be news to some games workers, who are often unable to see the whole picture of what’s going on at a major games company like Activision Blizzard, which consists of a winding supply chain of studios, developers, third-party contributors, and quality assurance (QA) testers. One studio might be a subsidiary of a larger one, tasked with developing or codeveloping a single game for its parent organization. “It’s pretty fractured in AAA, so you don’t see who’s doing what,” Violet says. “You’ll probably never see which part is using AI in what, but you know it’s there.” (Activision Blizzard did not provide comment when contacted about this story.)

This murkiness about when and where AI might be used in any given game also seems to have made copyright infringement concerns easier to dismiss. “It’s the Wild West,” Violet says. “I’ve been in meetings at different companies, and at some level they’re like, ‘We should make sure this is legal,’” before deciding to move ahead with adopting AI anyway.

US law insists that any work seeking copyright must have a human author—a fact that gives, say, Hollywood studios pause. But it's still an open question whether using unlicensed intellectual property to train AI systems violates copyright. Even in cases in which an AI program generates work based on human prompts, courts have ruled against copyright protection. For things like concept art, character descriptions, or code that doesn't wind up in the game, it's harder to determine what is out of line. The thinking becomes, Violet says, “How do you prove that’s copyright infringement?”

Uncertainty about copyright, concerns over the security of LLM systems, and worker fears of displacement have divided the industry.

“There are basically two camps,” says Karla Ortiz, an artist who often works in the industry, “companies that are like ‘Oh, hell no,’ and companies who see this as ‘Ooh I can cut labor costs.’” (Ortiz is also a plaintiff in a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney.)

As Ortiz notes, some studios have all but banned generative AI use. According to multiple sources, Blizzard, unlike its sibling studio Activision, doesn't allow devs to use publicly available AI generators, even as it develops its own AI tools. Other companies embrace them. “I’ve seen a lot of optimism from executives on integrating AI,” says Dan Beglov, a narrative designer for Sensorium and Team Gramps. “And I think it’s pretty obvious there’s a negative sentiment among game workers.”

Last May, Electronic Arts (EA) CEO Andrew Willson said on a quarterly earnings call that, “the fear of displacement of the workforce is something we read a lot about and we talk a lot about." He noted that in every revolution—agricultural, industrial—there “has been displacement of the workforce in the near term, and then meaningful increases in workforce opportunities over the longer term. Our hope is that AI represents the same opportunity." In February 2024, EA cut 5 percent of its workforce.

Riot Games, the company behind the wildly successful League of Legends series, held an internal town hall in 2023 with the creative department about AI. “It was pretty uncomfortable,” says Rachael Cross, a concept artist who worked at the company at the time, “but I remember leadership saying they didn’t intend to replace anyone with it because they knew the value of their artists, and how much the art at Riot was what carried its brand integrity.”

In January of this year, Pony Ma, CEO of Riot’s parent company, Tencent, said in his annual company speech that Tencent’s focus should be on integrating a proprietary Hunyuan AI model into ‘different business scenarios as a way to boost efficiency,’ as Reuters put it.

The week before Ma made those comments, Riot Games laid off 530 employees, including Cross. Cross doesn’t think their job was replaced outright with AI, “but considering the amount of people who worked on big tentpole events (including myself) who got laid off, it’s funny.”

Not all, or even most, of the video game industry’s lost jobs were replaced directly by AI systems rolled out by management. Many studios went on hiring sprees during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and overextended in the process. Others consolidated—Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in a record-breaking $69 billion gaming industry deal last October—and commenced layoffs in the aftermath. (Kotick stepped down following Microsoft’s acquisition; Natalya Tatarchuk replaced Vance as CTO soon thereafter.) Others have followed the lead of many major tech companies and begun relying more on outsourcing and contract work.

Within hours of the time Cross was laid off from Riot, where they worked on character skins for League of Legends, they say, they were approached by a company that outsourced artwork for game studios. The company asked them if they were available to create skins—for a version of League of Legends. They would get a flat rate, per skin completed.

“I do think AI is a problem,” Cross says, “but it’s emblematic of a much larger issue.” Art is undervalued in games, they say, and as with so many other jobs, it’s a race to the bottom to drive down wages by any means necessary—often by outsourcing work to other countries.

“We started outsourcing lots of 3D art assets, almost all of the art,” Noah, the Activision worker, claims, “because in-house art couldn't keep up” after the layoffs. Some of those third-party concept artists are using AI-generated art too, he says.

And those companies in other countries, primarily China, are getting squeezed by AI too. Last year, Leo Li, a Hangzhou-based gaming industry recruiter, told Rest of World the number of illustrator jobs in his country had fallen by 70 percent, due in part to the widespread availability of generative AI tools.

In Japan, the startup Crypko AI hocks AI-generated characters. “Character illustrations that typically cost upward of ¥100,000 each to outsource can be obtained from Crypko for a flat monthly fee of ¥4,980 and a commercial license of ¥980 per image,” per Bloomberg. That’s $692 for one human-made illustration, versus $34 per month for access to an endless stream of the AI-generated variety. A human artist still needs to touch up the output—but they can be paid a lot less than the cost of retaining a staff illustrator, or for a full custom design.

Meanwhile, the leverage that AI tools give management, the justification for cuts, can be as impactful as the tech itself. Warner says many of her friends and industry colleagues’ jobs were transitioned into AI image-training jobs or AI image clean-up jobs over the last year or so—“and then they were laid off.” Now, she says, “it's also unfortunately become fairly common to see job postings” for concept art jobs that require applicants to use generative AI.

In one viral example, Treyarch, a Southern California-based studio that produces some elements of Activision’s Call of Duty games, posted a job listing for a “2D Artist Animator.” The first thing listed under the “To succeed you should have …” section was “exceptional skills and expertise in digital sketching, drawing, and painting, as well as advanced expertise in working with generative AI tools such as Stable Diffusion, Vizcom, Dall-E, or equivalent.” The artist community did not respond kindly.

If there’s one thing a number of games workers say they’re glad AI is generating, it’s more interest in unions. “AI is definitely a catalyst for workers to organize,” says Beglov, who appeared on a panel on the topic at this year’s GDC. “If AI is going to be used, it has to be used with workers’ consent and workers having a voice.” Fifty-seven percent of developers surveyed by GDC organizers this year said they were in support of unionizing.

Chrissy Fellmeth, an organizer with International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), and Beglov’s copanelist, points to the efforts Hollywood guild writers made to secure protections from AI use in their contract with the major TV and movie studios. Right now, there’s little to no worker consent between game developers and their managers about when and how AI could be used; a contract like the Writers Guild of America’s could change that. “The use of AI is up to the writers and not the studios,” Fellmeth says. “I think that’s a great baseline goal for game workers to have.”

There’s another factor that management might soon need to consider with the generative AI tools they’ve deployed: They simply might not turn out to be all that good, or reliable. Tales of companies overextending in their embrace of AI have gone viral on social media, and, as Lauren Lehmann, an animation director at Terrible Posture Games, notes, AI may be able to generate pictures of guns and robots, but not one that transforms into the other. Even humans struggle with that. “The stories I’ve heard is they tried to bring some AI prompters, and as soon as they said, ‘Yeah that’s a good start,’ it pretty much broke down,” Lehmann says.

Still, the fear is that demand for quantity cost-cutting will trump quality, at least in the short term. "I think over the next year or two it’s going to be painful for a lot of people,” Ortiz says, particularly the entry-level workers who rely on commissioned work to gain experience and make ends meet. “I see massive displacement coming from companies who think that ‘good enough’ is good enough.”

And yet some video game companies are going even further, pursuing a business that doesn’t just dabble in AI but is almost fully automated. Take the self-described AI game maker Braindump, which aims “to give you an entire AI game studio, complete with coders, artists, and so on, to help you create your dream game.” It promises to let users build entire top-down games and interactive worlds “by simply typing prompts.”

Meanwhile, studios like Activision Blizzard and Riot are developing their own in-house systems, to varying degrees of success.

“Riot was experimenting with trying to make a custom internal-use-only generative AI, but it never got a lot of traction internally,” Cross says. Others with knowledge of the program told WIRED it was being pursued in partnership with Vizcom, a startup whose tagline is “Bring your design ideas to life,” and was indeed off to a rocky start, viewed with derision by artists at the company.

When WIRED reached out to Riot about this story, its head of tech research, Wesley Kerr, said the company has "teams exploring AI tools that could improve the player experience in ways that align with our values. We know AI is a complex issue, and will be transparent with players about our intentions." Vizcom didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Reportedly, Blizzard is building its own AI system too, which at one time was named Blizzard Diffusion—though details are scarce, beyond a patent the company filed for a “machine-learning based 2D structured image generation” system. “Blizzard's ‘internal AI’ that they trained is still super secretive. Only those who have access to it work with it, and no one else knows how it works,” Warner claims.

The risk here, Ortiz believes, is that a sufficiently advanced internal model could reduce the need for future work and incentivize short-term hires over permanent staffing. Ortiz herself spent the last year and a half looking for full-time work. Many in the industry “want me to do work for hire, train their own model, and never have to work with me again,” Ortiz says.

Not a single artist, illustrator, or designer WIRED spoke with wanted to use AI. It was foisted onto them by their bosses. Some of these workers took significant risks to speak out, often in trembling voices, afraid that doing so would cost them their jobs.

Ultimately, those whose work is at stake—the developers, artists, designers, and programmers actually making the games—may determine how much AI disrupts their industry. How much of the gaming world gets automated away may depend on how much workers push back or demand control over the use of AI systems.

“AI isn’t bad in and of itself,” says Violet, the veteran AAA games developer. “It’s bad when the end goal is to maximize profits. AI can be extremely helpful to solve complex problems in the world, or do things no one wants to do—things that are not taking away somebody’s job.”

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Despite the offer representing a substantial premium over its last private valuation of $12 billion, Wiz’s management team with the support of investors has opted to remain independent, the person said.

Wiz’s CEO, Assaf Rappaport, sent an email to Wiz’s 1200 employees around the world, writing that, “Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice.”

New York-based Wiz was founded in 2020 by four former Israeli military officers who previously co-founded a cloud cybersecurity company called Adallom that Microsoft later acquired for $320 million.

Each of them — including Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak — reportedly owns 9% of Wiz. The outfit’s venture backers include Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital, among others.

Below is the email that Rappaport sent to employees:

Wizards,

I know the last week has been intense, with the buzz about a potential acquisition. While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz.

Let me cut to the chase: our next milestones are $1 billion in ARR and an IPO.

Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice.

The market validation we have experienced following this news only reinforces our goal – creating a platform that both security and development teams love. We are grateful for the faith our employees, investors, and customers have in us as we build the best cybersecurity company in the world.

Thank you for your hard work and focus during these days, which helped us stay on track and finish the quarter stronger than ever. As we always say: LFG.

Assaf

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Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts

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Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every single day for many years.

2023: Over 5,800 news posts | 2024 (till end of June): 2,839 news posts