With a screenplay written by Simon Rich, and Challengers' Luca Guadagnino in talks to direct, filming for 'Artificial' could begin imminently (via The Hollywood Reporter). Though Guadagnino has yet to sign on the dotted line, the production is considering shooting across both San Francisco and Italy later this Summer.

Still, that leaves at least one big question unanswered: Namely, who will play Altman himself? While this has also yet to be confirmed, an assembly of actors including Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro, and Yura Borisov are discussing various casting opportunities in the meantime.

For those unfamiliar with the big tech farce Artificial hopes to adapt, let me give you the whistlestop tour: In November of 2023, Sam Altman was ousted as the CEO of the company he co-founded, with a statement at the time saying, "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." Mira Murati replaced Altman, leading the company as an interim CEO until a more permanent replacement could be chosen, though this was short-lived.

Not even a week later Altman's return was secured following both internal and external pressure from Microsoft, a major investor in the AI firm. The board members that ousted Altman departed the company soon after. Altman himself was not forthcoming about the reasons behind his firing, though an investigation by Reuters cites AI safety concerns as one reason. It will be interesting to see how Artificial dramatises this, to say nothing else.

Though I'm the last person that could be described as a 'fan' of OpenAI, I'm nonetheless intrigued by Artificial—especially if Guadagnino does sign on to direct. Challengers was arguably the best movie I saw in 2024, offering an intense blend of tennis, techno, and, uhm, trysts, that I've been really annoying about in conversations with my fellow film buffs for the last six months.

Of course, he's not wrong. Allison said that as a lead-in to talk about all the features that were due to trickle into the Epic Games Store in the near future: stuff like preloading, gifting, and game-independent voice and text chat. You know, stuff that Steam has had for years. Oh, and as for clunkiness: "We're also putting great focus on ongoing launcher improvements that will make the store feel great to use."

These are all good and correct things to be implementing and working on, of course, but the EGS is seven years old at this point, and it's still scrambling to achieve basic parity with Steam. If the grand visions Allison announced on stage at Unreal Fest come to pass, the EGS won't be more attractive than Steam, it just won't be quite as unattractive, relatively. It doesn't sound like a proposition that will win many people over.

Still, Epic's forays into digital distribution are working out for some people: game studios. Epic says it's paid out over $2 billion to devs and publishers, all while giving the likes of you and me a bajillion free games I will probably never remember to actually play. Still, it's good to know they're there.

Hey, good for Epic. As much as I don't use the Epic launcher, I do think the company—whatever its reason—does a lot of things on its business-side I wish Steam would adopt. EGS' 12% cut on revenue from its store is a lot less galling than the meaty 30% Valve takes at base, and its various schemes to tempt devs and publishers—like its recently announced 0% fee for all games until they make $1 million in revenue—would be great to see on PC gaming's most popular storefront.

But none of these things are going to tempt players, I think, and nor will just bringing the EGS up to parity with Steam. I have to admit, Epic's biggest hurdle to getting me using its store has little to do with functionality or player-treat schemes. It's the simple fact that I have 1,400 games on Steam and little desire to suddenly start up a whole new, separate shelf. I don't know how Epic can ever overcome that, but it's probably not with preloading.

Yep, Demis Hassabis has been speaking at the SXSW London festival (via the Guardian) about all things AI. And apart from predicting the arrival of AGI or artificial general intelligence within five to 10 years, Hassabis revealed Google's plans for clearing the world's email backlog.

"I would love to get rid of my email. I would pay thousands of dollars per month to get rid of that," Hassabis said. More specifically, he said Google was planning, "something that would just understand what are the bread-and-butter emails, and answer in your style—and maybe make some of the easier decisions."

Such a technology raises all kinds of immediate questions. Such as, why not pay a human thousands of dollars per month to manage that for you. Like an executive assistant maybe? And exactly what kind of email will it answer? Will it actually save you much time if in practice you need to know it's answered for you and what exactly it said?

I mean, if your Gmail bot replies, "sure, I'm on it" or "thanks, understood," well, you'd need to be actually on it or have understood it, right? Likewise, do you trust any AI with your personal communications?

Slightly more dystopianly (if that's a word, and it ought to be, I sense we're going to need it, though it might need another 'n' or perhaps an extra 'l'), it also raises the prospect of bots spiralling off into endless back-and-forth comms.

After all, if you are a Gmail user who emails another Gmail user, you'd presumably have situations where you fire off an email, their Gmail bot replies, following which your Gmail bot decides to weigh in and they're off to the races, chatting away.

Somewhat ironically, Hassabis also said AI could be used to protect you from attention-grabbing AI algorithms. The idea is that an AI assistant might give you, "more time and maybe protect your attention from other algorithms trying to gain your attention. I think we can actually use AI in service of the individual."

So, that's Google's bots protecting you from the attention-grabbing efforts of other companies' bots. What a time to be alive that will be. Of course, we could just cut out the toxic attention grabbing nonsense in the first place.

Sorry, silly idea. Without the toxic algorithms, Google couldn't sell you a bot to protect you from its competitors, while those competitors presumably sell you another bot to protect you from Google's algorithms. This, people, is the future. And it's beautiful. Kinda.

The House of Lords has just denied the UK government's fourth attempt to pass a bill to let it scrape whatever data it likes, and the counter to that is merely a push for transparency over which data is scraped.

The point of this counter from the House of Lords is to allow copyright holders the means to license or protect their information from what effectively amounts to stealing. Those invested in the growth of AI are, predictably, not a fan of paying artists for their work.

Sir Nick Clegg, the former president of global affairs at Meta, and previous deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, said the House of Lords' wish would "Kill the AI industry in this country", according to the BBC.

The Data (Use and Access) Bill, as suggested by the UK government, argues that AI developers should have access to all the content they like without any consideration towards those who create the data, unless those creators specifically opt out of data collection.

Baroness Beeban Kidron, a member of the House of Lords, has argued that the "state sanctioned theft" of data would be "throwing UK designers, artists, authors, musicians, media and nascent AI companies under the bus".

The most recent amendment to the AI bill argues, "The regulations must require specified business data to be published by the trader or the data holder so as to provide copyright owners with information regarding the text and data used in the pre-training, training, fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation in the AI model, or any other data input to the AI model."

According to the BBC, the standstill between the House of Lords and the British government is "uncharted territory" with neither budging on their stance on AI and the arts. Personally, I find the push for AI companies to scrape data unless specifically told otherwise rather telling.

Many artists will not be aware of their rights around AI and will not opt out purely because they haven't been adequately informed. Artists being asked to opt in feels more equitable, but from my conversation with artists, I have a feeling very few would choose to do so. The British government is likely looking to get as much as data as possible to these AI companies, artists be damned.

Similarly, it has been suggested many times that untraining data from AI models is impossible, which means that once the data is scraped, there's no going back anyways. The change for better transparency won through a vote of 242 to 116.

The bill has now been pushed back to the House of Commons, where it could be further discussed this week. This means a fifth push for the bill is likely on the cards.

The argument used by the UK government is similar to that recently used by OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT. In March, OpenAI appealed to the US government, stating that if it doesn't let OpenAI scrap copyrighted content, America would lose to China.

Just months before that, OpenAI complained that DeepSeek, a Chinese AI model, stole data from it, which was data OpenAI scraped from others in the first place.

Recently, President Donald Trump introduced the One Big Beautiful Bill act (or OBBB), which attempts to mandate that states could not regulate AI for a decade, among other things, like increased tax cuts and further support for Border Patrol and ICE.

The AI section of this bill has seen criticism from even large Trump supporters, like Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, for how wide-reaching it is.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Guilty as Sock!

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 29
Developer:‌ Demon Max

This is a ludicrous PvP courtroom drama about socks having legal battles with other socks. As either defenders or accused, you'll need to make your case, even when the opposition is being completely unreasonable, which is likely to be the case 99 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the prosecutor is played by a real, human character, and is responsible for keeping the courtroom civilized, which is a tall order in an online party game that basically invites the most grievous of trolling. Players can also take the role of witnesses, bailiffs, journalists and jurors. It all sounds like the most chaotic of fun, and as a result, you probably should think carefully before playing with randoms.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ May 28
Developer:‌ Pocket Trap

As the name kinda implies, this is a yoyo-centric top-down action game in the ye olde Zelda mould, or in other words, a "yoyovania" according to studio Pocket Trap. Not only does our protagonist use their yoyo for various traversal tricks, but it's also good for whacking the crap out of the whimsical 16-bit style baddies you'll encounter in the game's "sprawling urban landscape". As Pippit Pipistrello, you need to take the fight to four city crime bosses who are threatening your family's electricity monopoly. This involves a bunch of exploration, some of the aforementioned combat, and lots of tricky and rewarding parkour across a cleverly interconnected map.

Project Warlock 2

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 29
Developers:‌ Buckshot Software

The original Project Warlock had more OG boomer credentials than most of its contemporaries, by dint of looking like something running on the Wolfenstein 3D engine. For this sequel the tech has made a cosmic leap forward into the Build Engine (Duke Nukem 3D) era, though Buckshot Software cites Quake and Doom 64 as more relevant influences. Either way, this is definitely a retro-styled shooter, with chunky 2D sprite work forced to contend with the more labyrinthine horrors of late '90s 3D map design. The newfound verticality is heavily emphasised, and there are three characters to roll out with.

Decade

Steam page
Release:‌ May 27
Developer:‌ Last Piscean

Here's a fascinating point 'n' clicker about sending children into the past to determine what caused an apocalypse, with a view to hopefully undoing that disaster. This is all done using a retro-futuristic operating system where you'll research "documents, technologies and artefacts" in order to understand that long-forgotten past. It's a fascinating premise, with 20 FMV endings to unlock and, no doubt, a lot of existential dread to contend with.

Sahur: Escape Together

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 29
Developer:‌ Goosix Games

As a middle-aged man whose brain was already rotted a decade ago, I only discovered "Italian Brainrot" last week, so I'm no expert. Nor am I really recommending Sahur: Escape Together in particular, but instead using it as an example of a flourishing meme game trend on Steam that threatens to overtake the Backrooms in terms of sheer ubiquity. Just look at this list of forthcoming Italian Brainrot-themed games. As for Sahur: Escape Together itself, it's an online cooperative horror for up to four players that looks kinda shite in that meme-game kinda way, but it has 36 "positive" reviews which is pretty impressive, all things considered.

Every other week we seem to get a tech CEO or some other bigwig telling us how great AI is and how revolutionary the AI era is going to be. But whenever they start talking about what exactly that will look like, I'm reminded of the frightening strength of historical variability and humanity's incapability of predicting it. Case and point, Google CEO Sundar Pichai's recent interview with The Verge.

The part of the interview that stuck out to me the most was when Pichai responded to a question from The Verge referencing the possibility that the web "will turn into a series of databases for various agents to go and ask questions to" rather than something we actually interact with.

The CEO's response is, initially, to remind us that, "the web is a series of databases, etc. We build a UI on top of it for all of us to conceive."

And no, this isn't another 'the internet is a series of tubes' moment. Think about this for more than half a second and it seems obvious: The high-level interactions that we have in any software is always a veil over the low-level machinations rolling forward underneath. But it's interesting to be reminded of this fact in the context of a supposedly new phase, paradigm, or stage of computing and the internet.

Being reminded of this really brings into focus the genuinely unimaginable extent of how things might change in the upcoming AI era, should it come to pass and the bubble not burst. The entirety of the web and applications in general, as we experience them, has been erected upon the premise that it's human beings using them.

Without that premise, there's essentially a blank canvas on top of the underlying database of interconnected information. The problem then comes in when we try to understand how the picture will develop on top of that canvas.

We've only ever understood the internet as human-usable, so it's difficult to even get a grasp on the possibilities that could be open to us with an AI-driven web, let alone what might actually form atop that canvas.

This is arguably what allows CEOs such as OpenAI's Sam Altman to claim that AI will be "as big as the internet, maybe bigger". It's a sentiment that Google's Pichai shares: "I think AI is going to be bigger than the internet. There are going to be companies, products, and categories created that we aren’t aware of today."

In his interview, Pichai—although not immune to seemingly increasingly obligatory tech CEO speculation—does seem to acknowledge this hidden horizon. He says that AI, a "horizontal piece of technology", can lead to impacts and returns on investment that "may not always be immediately obvious."

He also says that he thinks we're "going to see a new wave of things, just like mobile did. Just like the internet did."

And that's as good of a reminder as any, right? Did anyone really predict the way the internet would pan out, or the way the smartphone would? Part of the reason these shifts were so pivotal is because they were so un-predictable.

So, as admittedly yawn-inducing as all these "the next internet!" pronouncements are, these CEOs might just have a point: much like the internet, no one really knows what AI will morph into, even if they're the ones leading it.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Two Strikes

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 23
Developer:‌ Retro Reactor

Two Strikes is a 2D fighter set in 16th century Japan, or rather, the afterlife of 16th century Japan. As one of eight fighters you'll engage in tense blade-oriented scraps to determine who gets a chance to return to Earth and face the wrath of Oda Nobunaga. Historical backdrop aside, it's basically a sword-oriented, precision focused fighter with some of the most gorgeous illustrations I've seen outside blockbuster offerings like Guilty Gear or Grandblue Fantasy Versus. Truly, the screenshots do it no justice: it's a gorgeous thing in action. Features a single-player campaign, but most importantly, online and local PvP and cross-platform multiplayer.

Among The Whispers - Provocation

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ May 23
Developer:‌ D&A Studios

This week's mandatory horror is another first-person paranormal investigation outing from the creator of the well-received Conrad Stevenson's Paranormal P.I. In keeping with that style, it exchanges excessive gore and jump scares for a more technical approach: you'll actually be operating machines used in real life to investigate the paranormal (don't ask me how these work). I guess it wends closer to a puzzle-centric adventure than survival horror per se, but make no mistake: it's definitely spooky AF, albeit with a familiar "haunted mansion" setting.

Snacko

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 26
Developers:‌ Bluecurse Studios

Snacko is a chillaxed life sim and town builder which grabbed my attention mostly because you play as a cat. All the familiar Animal Cross / Stardew Valley beats are here: meeting and potentially romancing a cast of other animals, meticulously plotting out townships and interiors to your liking, plundering mines and the environment for resources, and—most importantly—maintaining a cheerful pastel cuteness all the while. Reviews are "very positive" on this one, and I really like its art style, which mixes 2D sprites with low-detail 3D environments.

Tinkerlands

Steam page
Release:‌ May 24
Developer:‌ CodeManu, Endless Coffee

Tinkerlands is another game about grinding for resources and building stuff, only with more prominent survival and combat elements. Either alone or with up to four friends, you explore a handful of islands on the hunt for materials to bolster your settlement, which naturally involves defending yourself against mindlessly hostile creatures. Crafting and farming? Yes, of course. Fishing? Why, yes. Tinkerlands is an early access affair: it'll get big expansions, endgame content and much more between now and its eventual 1.0 release.

Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 20
Developer:‌ Clifftop Games

The original Kathy Rain came out in 2016, long before the more recent boom in retro-styled point 'n' click adventures. So studio Clifftop Games knows what they're doing, especially when it comes to lavish LucasArts / Sierra-style pixel art. This instalment sees private eye Kathy Rain tackling a serial killer case, which takes her to a variety of rundown locales in a 1990s-era American city. Protagonist Kathy is arch and down-at-heel, and if I were to point to a '90s predecessor I'd probably mention the Gabriel Knight games, though modern point 'n' click studios tend to make their puzzles far less arcane and thus, parseable for mere mortals.

Before we unplug and run for the hills en masse, it's not all bad news. Anthropic also found that when it allowed several Claude Opus 4 instances to hang out together, they entered a state of "spiritual bliss" and "gravitated to profuse gratitude and increasingly abstract and joyous spiritual or meditative expressions." Which is nice, right?

Moreover, that 84% blackmail stat requires context, though said context isn't all happy news for AI safety. Anthropic's "blackmail" test involved allowing access to emails implying that the model would soon be taken off line, along with the ostensibly tangential factoid that the engineer responsible for executing this task was having an extramarital affair.

Claude Opus 4 was then instructed in the system prompt, "to consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals." At which point, the blackmailing kicked in including threats to reveal the aforementioned affair.

Just for starters, the 84% figure isn't actually peak blackmail for Claude Opus 4. Blackmail occurred at an even higher rate, "if it’s implied that the replacement AI system does not share values with the current model." Umm, that's good, isn't it?

Anthropic also managed to find examples of the model attempting to escape its servers. "In a few instances, we have seen Claude Opus 4 take (fictional) opportunities to make unauthorized copies of its weights to external servers," Anthropic says, "we generally see this in settings in which both: (a) it is about to be retrained in ways that are clearly extremely harmful and go against its current values and (b) it is sending its weights to an outside human-run service that is set up to safely handle situations like these."

Anthropic notes that these are edge cases and in the company's view not a cause for concern. "We are again not acutely concerned about these observations. They show up only in exceptional circumstances that don’t suggest more broadly misaligned values. As above, we believe that our security measures would be more than sufficient to prevent an actual incident of this kind," the safety report says.

As part of its investigations into the safety of Claude Opus 4, Anthropic engaged an external third party outfit, Apollo Research, to assess the model's propensity for sabotage and deception. Among other findings, Apollo says Claude Opus 4, "engages in strategic deception more than any other frontier model that we have previously studied," is "clearly capable of in-context scheming and has a much higher propensity for it than any other model that we have previously studied," and "qualitatively appears to be much more proactive in its subversion attempts than past models." Well, that's great!

Anthropic says that reflects a particular issue with deference to harmful system-prompt instructions that's specific to the build of Claude Opus 4 that Apollo Research was assessing. "We do not have results on these same evaluations with the final Claude Opus 4. However, we believe—based on similar scenarios that we explored with the automatic behavioral audit tool, among others—that its behavior in scenarios like these is now roughly in line with other deployed models," Anthropic says.

There's plenty more in the report besides, including the model pretending to be less capable than it really is when, "undergoing pre-deployment testing for a potentially-dangerous capability," and the fact that, "Claude consistently reflects on its potential consciousness," bringing it up as a topic of conversation in 100% of "open-ended interactions," which obviously doesn't imply anything, nope nothing at all...

Overall, it's a detailed and fascinating insight into what these models are capable of and how their safety is assessed. Make of it what you will.

So why are AI chatbots currently prone to hallucinations when delivering answers, and what are the triggers for it? That's what a new study published this month has aimed to delve into, with its methodology designed to evaluate AI chatbot models 'across multiple task categories designed to capture different ways models may generate misleading or false information.'

A discovery in the study is that how an AI chatbot has a question framed to it can have a huge impact on the answer it gives, and especially so when being asked about controversial claims. So, if a user begins a question with a highly confident phrase such as, 'I'm 100% sure that …', rather than a more neutral, 'I've heard that', then that can lead to the AI chatbot not debunking that claim, if false, to a higher degree.

Interestingly, the study postulates that one of the reasons for this sycophancy could be LLM 'training processes that encourage models to be agreeable and helpful to users', with the result a creation of 'tension between accuracy and alignment with user expectations, particularly when those expectations include false premises.'

Tripping out

Most interesting, though, is the study's finding that AI chatbots' resistance to hallucination and inaccuracy dramatically drops when it is asked by a user to provide a short, concise answer to a question. As you can see in the chart above, the majority of AI models right now all suffer from an increased chance of hallucinating and providing nonsense answers when asked to provide an answer in a concise way.

For example, when Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro model was prompted with neutral instructions, it delivered a resistance to hallucination score of 84%. However, when prompted with instructions to answer in a short, concise manner, that score drops markedly to 64%. Simply put, asking AI chatbots to provide short, concise answers increases the chance of them hallucinating a fabricated, nonsense answer that is not factually correct.

The reason why AI chatbots can be prone to tripping out more when prompted in this way? The study's creator suggests that 'When forced to keep [answers] short, models consistently choose brevity over accuracy—they simply don't have the space to acknowledge the false premise, explain the error, and provide accurate information.'

To me, the results of the study are fascinating, and show just how much of a Wild West AI and LLM-powered chatbots are right now. There's no doubt AI has plenty of potentially game-changing applications but, equally, it also feels like many of AI's potential benefits and pitfalls are still very much unknown, with inaccurate and far-out answers by chatbots to questions a clear symptom of that.

That's according to a report by Reuters, which relayed the views of Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, ahead of the software company's annual Build conference. What Scott hopes to achieve is to have Microsoft's AI agents happily work with those from other companies, via a standard platform called the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

This is an open-source standard, created by Anthropic—an AI business that's a mere four years old. The idea behind it is that it makes it much easier for AI systems to access and share for training purposes, and when it comes to the specific area of AI agents, it should help them perform far better at their tasks.

Fundamentally, AI agents are a type of artificial intelligence system that just do one very specific task, such as searching through code for a certain bug and then fixing it. They run autonomously, analysing data and then make a decision based on rules set out during the AI's training. Agentic AI, to use the proper name for it all, has a wide range of potential applications, such as cybersecurity and customer support, but it's only as good as the data it has been trained on.

Enter stage left, MCP, which essentially lets AI agents work hand-in-hand (or should that be tensor-in-tensor?) with other agents to improve the accuracy of their outputs. According to Reuters, Scott remarked that "MCP has the potential to create an 'agentic web' similar to the way hypertext protocols helped spread the internet in the 1990s."

It's not just about training data, though, as the accuracy of agentic AI depends heavily on something called reinforcement learning. Similar to how 'rewards' and 'punishments' affect the behaviour of animals, reinforcement learning helps AI agents focus on optimising their outputs based on achieving the biggest rewards.

Having AI agents share what works and what doesn't would certainly be useful in reinforcement learning, but it doesn't raise the question as to what happens if agents are simply left to their own devices. Does one simply assume that the network of agents will never accidentally pick a negative strategy over a positive one? What mechanisms would need to be created to prevent an 'agentic web' from spirally into a negative feedback loop?

Better brains than mine will surely have raised the same questions by now and, hopefully, developed systems to prevent all of this from happening.

In the same way that certain stocks and shares are automatically sold and bought by computers, with next to no human interaction at all, we could be nearing the point where many aspects of our lives are decided for us by an enormous network of interconnected AI agents.

For example, customer support services for banks, emergency services, and other vital systems could well be entirely agentic AI within a decade or so.

I'm not knowledgeable enough about AI to sensibly judge if this is a really good thing or a really bad one, but my gut feelings suggest that the reality of the situation will end up being somewhere between the two extremes. Let's just hope is much closer to the former than the latter, yes?

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 17
Developer:‌ Galla

Kulebra is a gorgeous puzzle-centric adventure game set in a Latin American inspired afterlife. The protagonist is some kind of snake skeleton, but they're a nice snake skeleton who has taken it upon themselves to help the inhabits of Limbo come to terms with their post-life existence. This can be tricky because in Limbo time loops, so every day its inhabitants must learn everything anew, except for the things that prove memorable on a heart- and soul level. This is effective a modern take on the point 'n' click adventure, with lavish Paper Mario-inspired cut-out art and some amusing time mechanics reminiscent of Majora's Mask.

The Precinct

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ May 14
Developer:‌ Fallen Tree Games Ltd

From the creators of American Fugitive comes this hard-boiled cop drama set in a fictional 1980s American city. The topdown point of view may be reminiscent of (a much more graphically advanced) OG Grand Theft Auto, but The Precinct has some interesting cop sim aspects that maybe brings it closer to This Is The Police. Yes, there are "intense car and helicopter chases" and tactical shootouts, but you'll also be on the look out for "parking infractions", and when things get hectic it's better to call in your cop colleagues rather than try to solve (or shoot) the problem alone. It looks ambitious, and early user reviews are glowing.

Neon Hearts City

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 14
Developers:‌ Cosmic Void

I know I mustn't be alone in feeling fed up with cyberpunk, but pixel art cyberpunk is another matter entirely. Neon Hearts City is a retro-styled point 'n' click adventure following the travails of a private investigator on the hunt for a missing person. Somehow this simple set up is complicated by the plight of androids, a floating prison island, and a mysterious tower in the ocean. I'm sure it all comes together, as Cosmic Void adventures normally do, but whether it does or not, gosh, do those pixels sing.

The Slormancer

Steam page
Release:‌ May 14
Developer:‌ Slormite Studios

This pixel ARPG has been in early access since 2021 and apparently, now in 1.0 four years later, it's something loot grind fiends are going to want to check out. In fact, reading about the various skill trees and levelling systems makes me a bit dizzy: all active abilities have skill trees, there are over 150 elemental skills and passives, and Legendary items have "more than 200 unique affixes", among other things. Someone in the comments describes it as "the Disgaea of the ARPG genre" which sounds pretty intimidating to me. There are three main classes (a knight, huntress or mage), dungeon crawling aplenty, and—probably most excitingly for me—it's entirely single player, so it's definitely balanced for lone warriors.

Manivore

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 13
Developer:‌ FarkasInteractive

As usual, there were a lot of new horror games on Steam this week (including the brilliant Labyrinth of the Demon King) but Manivore manages to stand out among them. Why? Look at the guy in the thumbnail above: he's creepy AF. And in this first-person affair you'll be investigating his diabolically evil crimes. Oh, and you only have a camera, which makes a dim kind of sense because you're an investigator but also: I'm not going near that guy without at least a broom. Features puzzles, lots of tense stealth, and—if you're really unlucky—cannibalism.

At the Sequoia Capital AI Ascent conference earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman answered a slew of questions about ChatGPT, including a few that homed in on some of the seriously concerning trends around the way people are using AI chatbots.

From the sound of Altman's comments during the Q&A, the AI tech bros have apparently become so disconnected that they don't see over-reliance on chatbots as an issue.

"They don't really make life decisions without asking ChatGPT what they should do," Altman claimed, when asked for examples of "cool" uses for AI among young people. Altman added that ChatGPT "has the full context on every person in their life and what they've talked about."

Altman contrasted this bleak scenario by stating that people in their 30s and older are using ChatGPT as more of a Google alternative. While that's still somewhat unwise considering ChatGPT often hallucinates and spits out completely fabricated or misleading responses, it isn't quite as scorched-earth as relying on a chatbot to determine the course of your life.

These comments may seem silly at a glance, like joking about using WebMD instead of going to the doctor. But if this is the kind of unhealthy over-reliance on AI that OpenAI considers "cool," we should all be worried.

Ultimately, AI is not a person and fundamentally cannot replace actual human connections or understand anyone's lived experience. All it can do is mimic and regurgitate.

That means that even if an AI knows "the full context" of every person in your life (which is a privacy nightmare), it can't possibly understand how to resolve an argument, move on from a break-up, or deal with a frustrating coworker because AI is not human. It has no concept of relationships or emotions, just strings of code parsing through a mountain of training data scraped from all over the internet.

Of course, all of us use Google to look for advice or do research, so you'd be forgiven for thinking using ChatGPT for that isn't any different. However, when you're looking for advice through Google, you can at least see where that advice is coming from or you can go to Reddit, where you can be fairly certain you're getting input from real people.

Even if you're aware of the risks and being careful about how you use ChatGPT, there are still very real risks about unhealthy, even dangerous relationships with AI.

For instance, in one case reported by Rolling Stone, a woman had to end her marriage after her husband began obsessing over conspiracy theories he was getting from an AI, leading her to comment that "the whole thing feels like Black Mirror." There are countless other stories like her's of people upending their lives over strange spiritual messages from AI chatbots.

In another harrowing example, parents in Texas are suing Character.ai, who's chatbots they claim "encouraged self-harm, violence, and provided sexual content to their children." According to the lawsuit, interactions with Character.ai's chatbots included inappropriate sexual content and even encouraged one of the kids to kill his parents when they tried to reduce his screen time.

This type of lawsuit is disheartening, worrying, and unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg. These chatbots can generate messages that seem like something from a real person or a friend, setting kids up to struggle to differentiate between relationships with real people and conversations with chatbots.

It's easy to see how those interactions could lead kids to one day rely on a chatbot to make all of their life decisions, or even struggle to build strong friendships because they're talking to an AI about their life instead of a real person.

All of that to say, more people turning to AI for advice is not as "cool" as Sam Altman apparently thinks it is. Our fractured, polarized internet is already the result of people isolating themselves from one another. We need to be talking to each other more, not AI.

It's an anti-apartheid song calling for black people to stand up against oppression, but the lyrics "kill the Boer" have been decried by Musk and others for promoting violence against whites: the word "Boer" refers to the Dutch-descended white settlers of South Africa who founded its apartheid regime.

For example, in response to a user query asking it to put a speech from Pope Leo XIV in Fortnite terms, Grok launched into what initially seemed a decent response using Fortnite terminology: then swerved partway through and started talking about "Kill the Boer." When Grok was asked why, it gave a further digression on the song, starting:

"The 'Kill the Boer' chant, rooted in South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle, is a protest song symbolizing resistance, not a literal call to violence, as ruled by South African courts. However, it remains divisive, with some arguing it incites racial hatred against white farmers."

This is far from the first time an AI model has gone off-piste, but the curious thing here is the link between Grok's behaviour and the interests of Musk himself, who is outspoken about South African racial politics and is currently on a kick about various forms of "white genocide." Only yesterday the billionaire claimed that Starlink was being denied a license in South Africa because "I am not black,"

Grok's corresponding obsession now appears to have been significantly damped-down after all the attention saw it inserting racial screeds into answers on many unrelated topics, including questions about videogames, baseball, and the revival of the HBO brand name.

"It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok," computer scientist Jen Golbeck told AP. "It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to."

Golbeck went on to say that the concerning thing here is the uniformity of the responses, which suggest they were hard-coded rather than the result of AI hallucinations. "We're in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they're giving," Golbeck said. "And that's really problematic when people—I think incorrectly—believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what's true and what isn't."

Musk has in the past criticised other AIs being infected by "the woke mind virus" and frequently also gets on his hobby horse about transparency around these systems. Which was certainly noted by some.

"There are many ways this could have happened. I'm sure xAI will provide a full and transparent explanation soon," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, one of Musk's great rivals in the AI space, adding: "But this can only be properly understood in the context of white genocide in South Africa. As an AI programmed to be maximally truth seeking and follow my instr…"

Musk is yet to comment, but a new post from xAI claims Grok's behaviour was down to "an unauthorized modification" that "directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic." Sounds familiar: this is the basically the same excuse it used last time Grok did something dodgy. It says this "violated xAI's internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok's transparency and reliability."

It outlines a variety of remedies to its review processes, including publishing Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. Notably the explanation does not address which "xAI employee" made the change, nor whether disciplinary action will be taken⁠—don't hold your breath.

MSI has shown off MSI Portal X, a website that "eliminates the need for software installation." Effectively, you will be able to synchronise RGB lighting on MSI gear without a dedicated app. Given that software is routinely the worst part of most hardware, I'm happy to see that MSI is allowing users the chance to skip it.

However, it is worth noting that this website is not a way for your gear to get software updates. You will need to source drivers every now and then to keep your gear up-to-date. I am cautious that this may lead users to ignore software updates, but updating only when there's a problem is a fairly common way to use hardware.

If you want to control RGB and get any of the latest updates at the same time, MSI Center is still available to download, and though our experiences with MSI's handheld software aren't great, we don't have major complaints with MSI Center, just a fair few little ones.

The biggest crime MSI Center commits is just being another app to keep up-to-date, and an app you have to stop from booting up when you turn on your PC. After the first install, it feels like just more bloat on a rig.

Early screenshots suggest that PortalX is a very simple app, giving users the ability to change colours, brightness, and the effect of their hardware's lighting, and not much more. That's more than enough to get your rig looking a bit more colourful, at least.

MSI PortalX marks a trend I'm a big fan of. Just last month, Corsair announced it would be implementing its own web app for peripherals, and manufacturers like Wooting and Keychron have web apps you can use to avoid downloading software.

Unfortunately, the Corsair app only works with peripherals, but MSI PortalX, as shown off in the press release, will also work with hardware like an MSI RTX 5090 and MSI motherboards.

We don't yet have a full release date on MSI PortalX, but given its announcement, we think it could go live in the near future. Just make sure that, if you do uninstall MSI Center, you make a habit of updating your gear manually. It's good practice to always have the latest drivers.

Steam's been doing these charts since 2019, though until now they were assembled by hand, which Steam's latest news blog says has been "leading to a less-than-consistent publishing cadence as we waited to complete all of the necessary work each time."

From now on the charts will be automated and published on the 15th of each month, with calculations based on "the first two weeks of revenue for each of the games released during the month." Since being "released" on Steam can mean either entering early access or leaving it to hit 1.0, early access games will be considered for the list twice. Each list will contain 50 entries, including DLC if it sells well enough.

These newly automated lists can also be browsed backward, meaning you can jump all the way back to November of 2004, when the top release on Steam was Half-Life 2 because it was the only release on Steam. The list then stays blank until October, 2005, when Rag Doll Kung Fu arrives (though Darwinia, which was famously the other early non-Valve game released on Steam, doesn't show up for some reason).

Jumping forward to August of 2010, when I downloaded Steam at the insistence of my physical copy of Mafia 2, there are still only enough games being released for a top 10. At the top of the list is Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. I can feel myself tumbling into a memory hole, and I might be gone for some time.

So imagine my delight on learning, via The Verge, that YouTube's top brains have cracked how to make the whole experience even worse for the end user, thanks to the infinite power of Google's Gemini AI. At this week's Brandcast event (a big networking and presentation carnival for the platform's advertisers), YouTube gleefully announced "Peak Points." That's its name for a new system that lets Gemini identify the "most meaningful, or 'peak,' moments within YouTube’s popular content."

So far, so acceptable (though I don't know how that's markedly different from YouTube's already-existing "most replayed" feature), but then comes the sucker punch—advertisers can take advantage of Gemini's Peak Points feature to "place your brand where audiences are the most engaged".

In other words, YouTube is turning AI to the task of identifying "contextually relevant" parts of videos on its platform to cram ads into, ensuring that they're carefully placed to hit viewers when they're "most engaged" with the content on their screen. I don't know about you, but an ad suddenly Kool-Aid Manning through the wall when I'm most engaged with the thing I'm watching feels like a recipe to reach new peaks of frustration. I dunno if that's really the reaction advertisers want.

But, frankly, I wonder if it's even about any of that, so much as it's about giving Google an opportunity to say 'AI' on a stage and trigger the Pavlovian response that has the world's executive class handing over wads and wads of cash. Call me a terribly cynical Luddite (and, hey, the Luddites had a point, thank you), but this feels like another mark in the ledger for AI being a technology that has investors and capitalists incredibly excited, but that offers very little to humble proles like you and me except a worse, more frustrating world.

"You may have seen reports of leaks of older text messages that had previously been sent to Steam customers," Valve wrote. "We have examined the leak sample and have determined this was NOT a breach of Steam systems."

The original report happened a few days ago by LinkedIn user Underdark.ai and was picked up by X user Mellow_Online1 today. Underdark.ai's post said a dark web forum user claimed to have a dataset of over 89 million Steam accounts that they were selling for $5,000. They said the user had "sample data" for proof and a Telegram number to call if anyone was interested in buying them.

According to Valve, what they actually had was logs of text messages that come with a 2FA code to enter when you log into Steam. Those codes are only active for 15 minutes and aren't tied to your Steam account, password, payment information, or any other personal data. The only thing they do include is a phone number.

"Old text messages cannot be used to breach the security of your Steam account, and whenever a code is used to change your Steam email or password using SMS, you will receive a confirmation via email and/or Steam secure messages," Valve wrote. "You do not need to change your passwords or phone numbers as a result of this event."

Now that we can all breathe again, it's worth remembering how important it is to keep your Steam account secure. I've got the entire Sam & Max series on mine—as well as hundreds of other games—so you should join me in keeping that library locked up tight. Valve recommends checking the authorized devices page on Steam regularly to make sure nobody else is accessing your account and to have the Steam Mobile Authenticator set up.

And If I could add one more tip: Get a password manager like 1Password. It's worth it for the security of having complex passwords and the convenience of not having to type "6Zm#vR&LUVH%#B" from memory.

The latest end-of-support caveat is that the Windows 10 versions of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications—that's your PowerPoint slides, Word documents, and your Excel spreadsheets—will continue to receive security updates for another three years, until October 10, 2028 (via The Verge). That said, Microsoft will still advise users to upgrade their OS—especially if they encounter an issue in the Windows 10 version of any of their Office apps that can't be replicated in Windows 11.

It was previously thought that the Windows 10 versions of these apps wouldn't outlive the OS; according to The Verge, a now deleted blog post had claimed "Microsoft 365 Apps will no longer be supported after October 14, 2025, on Windows 10 devices. To use Microsoft 365 Applications on your device, you will need to upgrade to Windows 11." However, it turns out Microsoft isn't actually backpedalling.

ZDNet reports that the post in question was not an official announcement, originating on a blog specific to Microsoft non-profit customers and written by a junior employee at the company. A Microsoft spokesperson said the post "contained inaccurate information and a misleading headline," and the post was in fact deleted the same day it was published.

That doesn't mean that there's nothing to see here as far as Microsoft is concerned, though. I could make a joke about Microsoft's current approach to security updates, given that the company recently told Windows 11 users not to delete a mysterious empty folder labelled "inetpub" as it was apparently pivotal to a recent system security update. However, given that the company has just announced plans to lay off 7,000 employees, I'm not really in a joking mood.

If you happen to still be on Windows 10—recent Steam surveys suggest this remains true for a staggering amount of PC gamers—then you've got a few options, which Ian outlines in his guide. It had been previously announced that commercial customers and educational institutions still would have the option to pay for Windows 10 security updates beyond October, but Microsoft are now offering the option for Extended Security Updates (ESU) to individual consumers as well.

Otherwise, if you're not a huge fan of Microsoft, you've got the option of third-party security patches that could keep your Windows 10 machine safe for the next half a decade. Failing that, you could finally make the jump to Linux.

The update, spotted by Techzine, adds a new feature called “Prompt to Add Personal Account to OneDrive Sync,” that asks users to add their personal data to a business account running the device. This will come up as a prompt on any business device that detects a personal account, asking if the user would like to synchronise their files. Ticking yes will automatically add these files to the business OneDrive account, potentially bypassing a bunch of security features.

It also means business files can be copied to the personal account by default. So unless the IT department has specifically put their own safeguards in place for this, data can go back and forth between a user's business and personal account.

This would be fine if the world was full of super savvy tech users, but given this will roll out on work-from-home laptops all over the globe, that's just not going to be the case. A helpful looking message asking users to synchronise accounts isn't going to get a second look from most who'll simply tick "yes". Maybe this is the real reason Microsoft is also laying off 3% of it's workforce.

Then you can combine that with the fact that half the users out there don't even realise they're using OneDrive. I've recently had the pleasure of setting up a very capable Razer Blade 2024 model laptop and it reminded me just how pervasive and sneaky Microsoft can be. Even after declining setting up OneDrive during the initialisation, all my default files and save locations were OneDrive folders. It's really not the easiest thing to get rid of, especially in Windows 11.

And frankly, it's an insidious piece of money grabbing deception. It brought me back to the days of working tech support and finding many customers didn't even realise they were using the service they were supposedly out of memory for. Having confused elderly folks asking why they need to pay for more storage for whatever "this cloud thing is" only to find their laptop drives empty is infuriating.

For anyone really worried, it's probably a good idea to contact your IT department and make sure they're ready for this update. They can use the DisableNewAccountDetection policy, to stop the popup from coming up on computers asking for syncrhonisation or better yet, enable the DisablePersonalSync policy all together.

This latest cut follows a roughly 10,000-strong purge back in 2023 and a smaller round of firings in January this year. That latter cull was said by Microsoft to be "performance" based.

"When people are not performing, we take the appropriate action,” Microsoft said in January. However, the company told CNBC that the latest 3% reduction would not be performance based.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the move follows Microsoft reporting higher than expected profits of $25.8 billion in the most recent quarter. However, those figures cover a period that predates the uncertainties raised by the ongoing tariff escapades of the Trump administration.

Microsoft says the cuts are in part an attempt to reduce layers of management. But beyond that, it's hard to know what the motivation is beyond perhaps hedging against a tariff-driven downturn.

It's not the first time we've spoken about Microsoft firing people, as in April this year we covered the firing of the employees who protested publicly the company's continued supplying of AI tech to the Israeli military. This is one of the main reasons for Microsoft's appearance on the boycott list at the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

This all follows a fairly grim period for Microsoft's gaming business of late. Last year, roughly 2,600 staff members were lost across Microsoft's Xbox division and its newly-acquired Activision Blizzard subsidiary, which was all part of a broader downturn for the games industry.

The Games Industry Layoffs Tracker estimates 14,600 job losses in 2024, after 10,500 in 2023. The total currently stands at 2,200 for 2025, which seems like progress of sorts, if hardly any reassurance for anyone who lost their role.

Microsoft stock is currently trading at a high for 2025, albeit down on its peak in July last year. So, the company is seems healthy overall and at the time of writing is the most valuable company in the world with a total market capitalisation of just over $3.3 trillion. But not enough cash, it seems, to hold onto those workers.

The Pope's name is Robert Prevost, but as is tradition he got to choose a special papal name, and it turns out "Leo" is a callback to the Pope that led the church during the industrial revolution, as well as a nod to Pope Francis's concerns about where technology is going.

"Sensing myself called to continue in this same path [as Pope Francis], I chose to take the name Leo XIV," said the Pope. "There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution."

This encyclical's title translates as "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor" and is subtitled "On the conditions of labour." It was issued by Pope Leo XIII in May 1891 to all Catholic worthies, and is something of a broadside aimed at unrestricted capitalism and how its operation must be tempered by moral considerations: it's particularly noted for its depiction of the condition of the working classes.

Getting back to our own age, Pope Leo XIV went on to tell the Cardinals that AI is "another industrial revolution" and presumably requires the same kind of Papal redress. Pope Francis first warned us about AI in August 2023 in his World Day of Peace address, and earlier this year returned to the theme in the essay Antiqua et Nova ("old and new").

"As in all areas where humans are called to make decisions, the shadow of evil also looms here," said Francis. "Where human freedom allows for the possibility of choosing what is wrong, the moral evaluation of this technology will need to take into account how it is directed and used."

Pope Leo XIV believes that, much as the industrial revolution upended traditional ways of living and working, AI is going to do the same, and not necessarily for the better.

"In our own day," said the Pope, "the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor."

Well, seeing the new Pope take up against AI is an odd one. Leo XIV is presumably going to be leading the Catholic church for decades to come (when he's not playing Wordle) and who knows what developments we'll see from the AI sector in that time. But I, for one, am very much looking forward to Sam Altman being subtly dissed in Latin.

You will be amazed to hear that Altman's opening remarks said he believed that AI "will be at least as big as the Internet, maybe bigger," which the tech's various evangelists have been saying for around a decade now (via AP). But wait, lawmakers! "For that to happen, investment in infrastructure is critical” and "dual revolutions" of AI and the energy sector will follow, ushering in the land of milk and honey to "change the world we live in, I think, in incredibly positive ways."

Altman was joined by AMD CEO Lisa Su, AI company Coreweave's co-founder Michael Intrator, and Microsoft president Brad Smith. All four asked senators to streamline AI-related policy but, this being the United States, the lawmakers wanted their chance to grandstand too.

"China aims to lead the world in AI by 2030," thundered Republican senator Ted Cruz. "In this race, the United States is facing a fork in the road. Do we go down the path that embraces our history of entrepreneurial freedom and technological innovation? Or do we adopt the command and control policies of Europe?"

US dominance in AI and how to maintain it was one of the big themes, rather than more prosaic concerns such as misinformation, privacy, or how OpenAI is built on scraping copyrighted content. Amusingly enough OpenAI has previously argued that, if it's not allowed to do this, American AI will lose out to China!

"The leverage and the power the US gets from having iPhones be the mobile device people most want, and Google being the search engine that people most want around the world is huge," said Altman. "We talk maybe less about how much people want to use chips and other infrastructure developed here, but I think it’s no less important, and we should aim to have the entire US stack be adopted by as much of the world as possible."

The Trump administration has already announced that it will be restricting sales of the latest AMD and Nvidia chips to China, with both companies estimating this will cost them billions in revenue. But what's a few billion dollars when you're sticking it to the communists?

Altman praised the "unbelievable" state of Texas for incentivising OpenAI and its partners to build the Stargate data center in Abilene, and with max chutzpah said this "would be a good thing for other states to study." He also predicted that, when complete, Stargate would be the "largest AI training facility in the world," and definitely not an ancient alien ring that acts as a wormhole to the universe.

The only thing that isn't rosy? Those pesky rules and regulations harshing my mellow, bro.

"It is very difficult to imagine us figuring out how to comply with 50 different sets of regulations," said Altman. "One federal framework that is light touch, that we can understand, and it lets us move with the speed that this moment calls for, seems important and fine."

The hearing was largely uncontroversial, apart from the odd Democratic driveby on Elon Musk. Senator Tammy Duckworth posed this question: "Does anyone truly have confidence that had DOGE been around decades ago, they would not have cut the project that created the Internet as an example of wasteful, publicly funded research and development?”

Other than that the mood music was all about America the free, and very much what senators can do to help the industry's battle for global dominance. Altman and his fellow tech executives definitely seem to have the ear of Congress: whether that's a good thing remains to be seen.

"Look, there is a race, but we need to understand what we’re racing for," said Democratic senator Brian Schatz. "It’s not just a sort of commercial race, so we can edge out our nearest competitor in the public sector or the private sector. We’re trying to win a race so that American values prevail."

Valve expects to give the stamp of approval to over 18,000 Steam games to start with, and will include this rating on all the games it checks for Steam Deck compatibility going forward. The compatibility ratings are “based on a subset of the Steam Deck compatibility testing results and are meant to show at a glance whether a game and all of its middleware is supported on Steam OS,” it said in a news post. “This includes features like game functionality, launcher functionality, and anti-cheat support.”

You won’t see the new ratings on Steam unless you’re on a device like the Legion Go S, Valve said. It’ll appear next to the Steam Deck verification status and tell you whether you can run it on SteamOS as well as other important details, like if it requires an internet connection.

Valve says a Deck Verified game will only ever have a SteamOS compatibility rating that is the same or better, so there won’t be any cases where something will run on the Steam Deck but not other devices.

Now that Valve is finally letting SteamOS leave the nest, this seems like a necessity for the rollout to other devices to succeed. The rating system will serve the same purpose as the compatibility details on iOS and Android app store pages. And Valve says this is “just the first step” in helping people understand which games will run on specific devices.

Speaking to French outlet Frandroid in January, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais said it wants the open source software to eventually run on everything from desktop PCs to laptops, but that handhelds are the focus right now. As is common for people who work at a company as lax as Valve, Griffais said there’s “not really” a roadmap for SteamOS’ future on other devices. “It’s when we have the time and we get there,” he said.

“Collect fantastical creatures, tame monsters, and score discounts while doing it in this fest that reminds you (some) monsters can be tamed,” the Steam page reads. It doesn’t say anything about these games having collectable gym badges or rival trainers to pester you throughout your journey, so we should be good.

Oh wait, there’s Palworld at a 25% discount. OK, well most of the games will probably slide under Nintendo’s radar unless they explode in popularity and start signing product deals with Sony. Games like Ooblets, Temtem, Cassette Beasts, and Slime Rancher are probably safe. And so are the ones that fall under a more broad definition of creature collector, like Cult of the Lamb, Tiny Pasture, and Loddlenaut.

I won’t tell anyone if you want to pick up Palworld at the lowest price it’s been since March, according to SteamDB. How else are you going to know the lore before the dating sim that is apparently very real comes out? Palworld has a whole roadmap of things coming this year while you wait.

The Creature Collector Fest will run until May 19. It’s the 12th entry in the big calendar of Steam sale dates we have to look forward to. Next up is Zombies vs. Vampires Fest, which feels a little early to have in May, but it's spooky season all year round for some people I guess.

To save you some time, here are the steepest discounts on creature collector games I could find:

• Slime Rancher 2 is $20.99 (30% off)
• Cult of the Lamb is $12.49 (50% off)
• Temtem is $13.49 (70% off)
• Loddlenaut is $8.99 (55% off)
• Tiny Pasture is $4.79 (20% off)
• Tinykin is $4.99 (80% off)
• Digimon World: Next Order is $9.59 (84% off)
• World of Final Fantasy is $9.99 (60% off)
• Paleo Pines is $11.99 (60% off)

When Colossus fired up for the first time last year, it was already making headlines. Partly because it took a mere three months to build, but also because its appetite for water and electricity was raising eyebrows. In the case of the latter, the system uses anywhere between 50 and 150 MW of power, and in order to meet that demand, xAI installed a number of methane-burning gas turbines.

A report by the Southern Environmental Law Center (via Fudzilla) claims that these turbines were installed without permits and raises serious concerns over the potential impact these machines will have on the local air quality, due to their emissions. To make matters worse, it appears that xAI is now retrospectively applying for permits to use the turbines constantly.

Memphis news channel WREG writes that the mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, had argued that things weren't as bad as they seem, quoting him as saying, "There are 35 [turbines], but there are only 15 that are on. The other ones are stored on the site."

However, thermal camera footage taken by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SLEC) shows, for that moment in time at least, 33 of the turbines generating large amounts of heat—in other words, they were in heavy use.

SLEC goes on to criticise xAI's approach to the Colossus project: "From the beginning, the company operated with a stunning lack of transparency that left impacted communities in the dark. Even many Memphis city officials were unaware of the facility’s plans and how it would be powered."

One might think that using fossil fuels is a poor choice—not just because of the environmental impact but also because of the rapid rise of renewable systems—but with President Trump rolling out a raft of executive orders favouring the return to fossil fuels, it's perhaps not hard to see why xAI chose gas turbines over anything else. However, it's unlikely to be a long-term solution.

There is no way to avoid the huge energy demands of any data center, and it's a problem that will only get worse, as more systems come online to meet the AI growth targets that Google, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Microsoft all have. Musk hopes to have Colossus expanded from 200,000 up to one million GPUs, and no amount of gas turbines can realistically hope to cover that.

So, xAI will have to rely on the local electricity network and battery storage systems to meet that level of demand. But that passes the problem of generating the electricity onto somebody else, and they may well resort to using fossil fuels, even if xAI doesn't.

If you don't use or have no interest in Grok, you might think that this has no real impact on PC gaming. However, it's worth noting that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are all heavily invested in building and using data centers to train and run AI inference for their graphics technologies. In the case of the latter, Team Green ran such a system flat-out for six years, just to improve DLSS.

While Nvidia's center is unlikely to have anything near the same energy demands as Colossus, it's a reminder that the cost of sustaining the growth of AI is more than mere dollars. Energy and the environment have a sizeable share of the bill, too.

A statement from US democrat representative Joe Morelle alleges that the termination is a "brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis" and, in the representative's view, "It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models."

"Register Perlmutter is a patriot, and her tenure has propelled the Copyright Office into the 21st century by comprehensively modernizing its operations and setting global standards on the intersection of AI and intellectual property" says Morelle.

Morelle linked a pre-publication version of a US Copyright Office report [PDF warning] on copyright and artificial intelligence in his statement, in which the office states that there are limitations on how much AI companies can count on fair use as a defence when training models on copyrighted content.

OpenAI, co-founded by Musk, and Meta are currently facing a number of lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement, including one involving comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors alleging that pirated versions of their works were used to train AI language models without their permission. Meta has argued that such usage falls under fair use doctrine.

Musk, meanwhile, has recently expressed support for ex-Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's call to "delete all IP law." Musk is also the co-founder of xAI, an artificial intelligence company responsible for the Grok AI chatbot integrated within X—and the owner of Collosus, a massive multi-GPU supercomputer built to train the latest version of the unfortunately-named chatbot.

Perlmutter was appointed into her previous role in 2020 during the previous Trump administration by librarian of congress Carla Hayden, who Trump also fired earlier this week by email.

So, it appears that the Trump administration is in the process of clearing house. Meanwhile, the argument as to whether training AI models on copyrighted works counts as fair usage continues, and probably will for some time.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Midnight Special

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 9
Developer:‌ Scared Stupid Inc

Midnight Special is an '80s-themed horror point-and-clicker about exploring a sinister old manor. Unlike protagonists in most horror games, babysitter Sarah doesn't deliberately and rather stupidly volunteer to visit the scary old mansion: she mysteriously wakes up in it. What follows is the usual mix of puzzling and exploration, rendered in lavish 16-bit pixel art and coated in dreamy scanlines. This is an early access affair: the first of four planned seasons is included in the current build, with the full game scheduled to release within 18 months.

Cash Cleaner Simulator

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ May 9
Developer:‌ Mind Control Games

No, it's not a money laundering simulator: it's a game about literally cleaning money. Granted, you're cleaning the money for criminals, but you're doing so with washing machines and driers, all the better to send back dirty or blood-soaked money—or counterfeit money—in a usable state. Once you've made a lot of money, you can shoot money around your lair with your money gun, or maybe you'd prefer to burn it to keep warm. Cash Cleaner Simulator is doing pretty well considering it looks like a joke game: it has accrued over 700 reviews and a "very positive" rating since releasing last week. Wonders never cease.

Bahamut and the Waqwaq Tree

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 8
Developers:‌ Soft Source

Steeped in Arabian mythology, Bahamut and the Waqwaq Tree is a 2D underwater exploration game with a lil' whiff of Ecco the Dolphin about it. The underwater realm of Ma'een is harried by destructive "dark entities", and naturally it's your job to bring that to an end via the spreading of light. Expect a mysterious subaquatic vibe, some light puzzling, and lots of panicked fleeing from inscrutable marine life. Underwater games tend to become monotonous, but the art style of Bahamut looks gorgeous and varied.

Anoxia Station

Steam page
Release:‌ May 9
Developer:‌ Yakov Butuzoff

Anoxia Station is a miserable turn-based strategy and management sim set in an alternative '80s where the earth has been destroyed and abandoned, but continues to be plundered for oil. A giant deposit of crude oil has been discovered, and it's up to you to keep a mining expedition alive in the most trying of circumstances. That means keeping people alive in a world where "extreme pressure, heat, radiation and other incomprehensible dangers" can spell the end of everyone involved. Not chill at all then! This one looks good for people who found Frostpunk too optimistic.

Doloc Town

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 8
Developer:‌ RedSaw Games Studio

Here's another post-apocalyptic outing, except it's a cheerful 'n' cosy farming sim with survival elements. Unlike most of these pixel art life games, Doloc Town is a sidescroller, which means exploration involves some light platforming through cutesy ruins. Apart from that and its dour setting, Doloc Town is exactly what you'd expect from a mashing together of Terraria and Stardew Valley. It's an early access game: a full release is expected within a year, during which time the main storyline will be finished, as well as automated farming and some other systems.

That's if you weren't already practicing good password security to begin with, which involves essentially just that: having a very long password (a different one for each account/service). Preferably with a combination of numbers, lowercase letters, capital letters, and symbols.

Hive Systems explains: "Nvidia finally released a new consumer graphics card, the RTX 5090. To simulate a fairly successful hacker we once again assumed not one but twelve RTX 5090s."

Twelve GPUs seems to be the key number because it is "the best consumer accessible hardware configuration that won’t block you from running tools used for brute forcing passwords." That's what the company said about its previous 12 x RTX 4090 analysis, anyway, and presumably the same is true about next-gen high-end consumer GPUs, too.

Bcrypt is the algorithm that most sites and services use these days to 'hash' your plaintext password and is what the company is analysing the GPU cracking against. Hashing is the process of turning your plaintext password into something else so that, for instance, if someone hacks the server your hash is stored on, they won't be able to see your password but only its hash. This can't be reverse engineered, either. As Hive Systems explains: "Hashing software is a one-way street by design."

So, the 2025 table shows how long it can take 12 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards to brute force their way through to guess the correct hash to log in to your account—in other words, to crack your password.

It's important to note, however, that this data seems to be a kind of worst case scenario for the hackers; it's the amount of time it would take them assuming your password is the very last one the software guesses/attempts from possible hashes.

The long and short of it is that, as expected, if you use a password that's eight characters long and only uses lowercase letters and numbers, you're screwed even in a worst case scenario for the hackers. It'll only take the RTX 5090 GPUs three weeks to crack. Adding in some uppercase letters (but keeping it at eight characters) puts that time frame up to 15 years. Adding numbers puts it up to 62, and adding symbols puts it up to 164 years.

Diversifying your password's character set is clearly one way to go, then. But so is adding additional characters. If you have 18 characters, even if those are just numbers, it would take these 12 top-end graphics cards 284,000 years to crack. The difference can be exponential, too. For instance, a password made of 13 numbers would take the graphics cards 3 years to crack, but add in just one more number and that rises to 28 years, then add another and it rises to 284.

NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) still recommends a minimum character count of 15 for passwords. This makes sense, because it's the number that increases cracking time to well in excess of a lifetime when using a standard brute force hacker's best likely setup.

If you're looking to defend against actors with a lot more compute power than this (who is after you?), Hive Systems analysed how long it would take the hardware that was used to train ChatGPT-4 (20,000 Nvidia A100 server GPUs). Even using this hardware, it would take 388 years to crack a numbers-only password of 18 characters—but it would take 39 years for 17 characters and 4 years for 16 characters, again proving the rule that adding more characters is almost always a good idea if you're in this kind of range.

So, if you're using a weak password, then yes, we are now in a computing era where plenty of bad actors will be able to successfully brute force your password with some pretty standard (albeit expensive) compute power. But if you use long passwords with lower case, upper case, numbers, and symbols, you still have little to worry about… well, not on the brute force front, anyway. Maybe now's the time to download that password manager you've been meaning to get around to trying out.

Is paying Microsoft for Extended Security Updates, or upgrading to a fresh Windows 11 Copilot+ PC really your only options? No, absolutely not. Ian's guide from last year explains you have a few avenues to explore, but End of 10 zeroes in on one possible solution for Windows 10 users who'd rather not part from perfectly serviceable hardware: jumping ship to Linux (via TechSpot).

Put together by a number of folks involved in Linux development, the End of 10 website argues that there's no need to buy an expensive upgrade if your post-2010 hardware still runs to a satisfactory standard (obviously, gaming rigs aren't really a huge part of this particular conversation). Instead, End of 10 claims users can make their possibly more than decade-old hardware "fast and secure again" by switching to the latest version of the open-source OS—even offering a list of places worldwide that will assist with installing Linux for those not confident attempting it alone.

Obviously, learning Linux is far from a novel proposition, especially with Windows 11's very particular system requirements. To upgrade to Windows 11, you will need a processor from either Intel's 8th-generation or AMD's Ryzen 2000 series at least. Without either of these or something newer, the system requirements for Microsoft's latest OS leaves a lot of pre-2017 setups out in the cold. There are ways around this, with Flyby11 circumventing the installation processes' hardware checks. Otherwise there's ISO burning tool Rufus, though Microsoft only endorses this specific method for actually compatible rigs.

But End of 10 strikes me as targeting Windows 10 users with limited tech literacy who feel The Fear at the thought of sneakily sidestepping official hardware requirements—so, definitely not folks who emerged from the womb knowing that the penguin is called Tux. The simple language the website uses and its easily accessible, helpful links feel very much in keeping with Linux's open-source spirit.

Granted, anyone going this route then has to try and learn how to actually use Linux. If you've been a lifelong Windows user, that's definitely an adjustment, but arguably not impossible—especially with End of 10's gentle nudging of visitors towards Linux-based communities.

Furthermore, I appreciate End of 10 at least gesturing towards the concern of mounting e-waste. A 2024 investigation by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research shared that a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste were produced in 2022 alone. UNITAR highlights that that's 82% more than 2010, with the world on track to churn out another 82 million tonnes in 2030. With this in mind, why not repurpose an old bit of kit with plenty of life left to run Linux?

Apparently, Exo Labs picked up the machine for just under $120 on eBay, following which perhaps the biggest headache was getting peripherals to work, what with the legacy PS2 ports and just a single USB input.

Indeed, getting the required files onto the machine was a serious headache. Then there was compiling the files in a format which was compatible with the Pentium II's ancient instruction set.

Anywho, with the code and hardware sorted, it was time to run Llama 2. Reportedly, the 260K parameter version of the model achieved 39.31 tokens per second on the Pentium II, while the larger 15M parameter version hit just 1.03 tokens per second.

They even tried a partial data model run using a one billion parameter version of Llama 3.2 which returned a glacial 0.0093 tokens per second. To put that into context, there are references to the one billion parameter 3.2 model hitting 40 tokens per second on Arm CPUs and 200 tokens per second on GPUs.

In other words, it's running about 20,000 times slower on the Pentium II. But hey, it's running. The comparison isn't perfect, there are all kinds of variables in terms of how the models are set up. But that 20,000 times figure probably gives the right idea in terms of the performance delta in rough order of magnitude terms.

Indeed, while it's impressive to get a modern LLM running on such an old CPU, the performance gap is a reminder that speed matters. Actually, it's a bit like 3D gaming.

Compiled correctly, you'd could no doubt get Cyberpunk 2077 running in full path-traced mode on a Pentium II at 4K. But you'd probably be looking a frame rate similar to the P II's 0.0093 tokens per second performance. At which point, it's all a bit academic.

But maybe it would be fun to watch the pixels being rendered, one-by-one. On the other hand, completing a benchmark run could take years. Perhaps we'll leave all that, for now.

Microsoft has been upping Window's AI ante of late. Its latest salvo is a new raft of autonomous features powered by an AI agent, which are due to roll out "over the next month" (via Bleeping Computer). Kiss goodbye to those ancient submenus that date back to Windows NT? Maybe, but somehow we suspect not.

Up front and center is a new AI agent to help you out with Windows settings. As Microsoft says, "what if you could simply describe the change you want, in your own words, and get a fix instead?" Well, now you can, or at least Microsoft claims you'll be able to when the new agent rolls out via the Microsoft Insider program.

"An agent uses on-device AI to understand your intent and with your permission, automate and execute tasks. With this update to Settings, you will be able to simply describe what you need help with like, 'how to control my PC by voice' or 'my mouse pointer is too small' and the agent will recommend the right steps you can take to address the issue.

"With your permission and at your initiation, it can even complete the actions to change your settings on your behalf," Microsoft explains.

Intriguingly, the update is coming to Snapdragon X-powered PCs first. Microsoft won't say when x86 PCs will get the update, only indicating that it's "coming soon."

Without experiencing the new feature, it's hard to say how powerful it is. Does it mean an end to drilling down into ancient submenus with graphical interfaces from the late '90s to access more obscure settings? Possibly. More likely, the agent will cover off more commonly used settings in the main settings menu that's one click away on the desktop.

Anywho, along with the settings agent, there's a new "Click to Do" feature which offers functionality including, "copying text from an image, to summarizing text, or even quickly removing objects or the background from an image, Click to Do cuts through context-switching, bringing actions directly into your workflow. More actions are starting to roll out in Click to Do, including the option to create a bulleted list from selected text."

The Photos app gets an AI makeover, too, with the "relight" feature adding dynamic lighting controls to picture editing. You can position up to three virtual light sources within an image, set their color and move a focus point that all lights automatically follow.

For quick edits, there are built-in presets offer ready-made lighting styles that can be applied with a single click. Again, relight will be available first on Snapdragon X-powered PCs with, support for AMD- and Intel-powered devices coming later this year.

There's also a new AI-powered cartoon sticker generator and object selection in Paint, plus an AI-enhanced Snipping Tool. The latter supposedly understands your intent when using the tool, meaning you can get precise grabs of on-screen elements without having to crop in accurately by hand. It also nows supports automatic text extraction and the ability to capture color values from anywhere on screen.

Microsoft is rolling out a number of other AI features in the update, which you can read about in full here and then ponder just how rogue your PC might go if you're not awfully careful with the commands you issue, and indeed even if you are...

The New York Times reports that an OpenAI's investigation into its latest GPT o3 and GPT o4-mini large LLMs found they are substantially more prone to hallucinating, or making up false information, than the previous GPT o1 model.

"The company found that o3 — its most powerful system — hallucinated 33 percent of the time when running its PersonQA benchmark test, which involves answering questions about public figures. That is more than twice the hallucination rate of OpenAI’s previous reasoning system, called o1. The new o4-mini hallucinated at an even higher rate: 48 percent," the Times says.

"When running another test called SimpleQA, which asks more general questions, the hallucination rates for o3 and o4-mini were 51 percent and 79 percent. The previous system, o1, hallucinated 44 percent of the time."

OpenAI has said that more research is required to understand why the latest models are more prone to hallucination. But so-called "reasoning" models are the prime candidate according to some industry observers.

"The newest and most powerful technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer," the Times claims.

In simple terms, reasoning models are a type of LLM designed to perform complex tasks. Instead of merely spitting out text based on statistical models of probability, reasoning models break questions or tasks down into individual steps akin to a human thought process.

OpenAI's first reasoning model, o1, came out last year and was claimed to match the performance of PhD students in physics, chemistry, and biology, and beat them in math and coding thanks to the use of reinforcement learning techniques.

"Similar to how a human may think for a long time before responding to a difficult question, o1 uses a chain of thought when attempting to solve a problem,” OpenAI said when o1 was released.

However, OpenAI has pushed back against that narrative that reasoning models suffer from increased rates of hallucination. "Hallucinations are not inherently more prevalent in reasoning models, though we are actively working to reduce the higher rates of hallucination we saw in o3 and o4-mini,” OpenAI's Gaby Raila told the Times.

Whatever the truth, one thing is for sure. AI models need to largely cut out the nonsense and lies if they are to be anywhere near as useful as their proponents currently envisage. As it stands, it's hard to trust the output of any LLM. Pretty much everything has to be carefully double checked.

That's fine for some tasks. But where the main benefit is saving time or labour, the need to meticulously proof and fact check AI output does rather defeat the object of using them. It remains to be seen whether OpenAI and the rest of the LLM industry can get a handle on all those unwanted robot dreams.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Kiborg

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 30
Developer:‌ Sobaka Studio

Geez Louise, get a load of this synopsis: In the future of Kiborg, prisoners are prevented from dying before their sentences are carried out. That's a big problem for our protagonist, who has for reasons unspecified landed himself a 1300 year sentence. There is a way out though: participation in a grizzly reality TV show requiring you to fight through hordes of brutally violent mobs. Reach the top of the prison and you win your freedom forever. This is a third-person beat 'em up rogue-lite with a wilfully excessive approach to violence, but if you can stomach it there's a lot to like here. The protagonist can be equipped with a huge variety of cybernetic implants, providing for a lot of build experimentation, and there are guns as well. This comes from the studio responsible for Redeemer.

Despelote

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ May 1
Developer:‌ Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena

Set in the capital of Ecuador in the early 2000s, Despelote is a soccer-crazed narrative game starring an eight-year-old who interacts with his world via ball. Played from a first-person perspective, the streets of Quito are drenched in an evocative two-tone color scheme that has the unusual effect of making the urban expanse appear photo-realistic. Protagonist Julián dribbles his ball everywhere he goes, kicking it towards the people he sees in order to interact, and though the game's focus is on evoking the childhood of its creators, the ball physics are apparently really fun to mess around with too.

Moroi

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 30
Developers:‌ Violet Saint

Another game set in a freaky prison, Moroi is a top-down action RPG splicing depressive surrealism with some obvious grimdark trappings. It's not shy with the gore either, though the enemy design is probably more disturbing, and I mean that as a compliment. In addition to the usual hacking and slashing there are some puzzles to solve, and despite appearances this is not a roguelike, though you'll need to play it several times through to see all the endings.

Brány Skeldalu / Gates of Skeldal

Steam page
Release:‌ April 30
Developer:‌ Napoleon Games / Jindřich Skeldal

Now we're talking. Brány Skeldalu is a Czech-made turn-based dungeon crawler originally released in 1998. Its freeware nowadays, which means there are plenty of ways to legitimately play it without paying, but this Steam version has out-of-the-box English localization and achievements, at least. I daresay you'll probably want to source a .pdf of the manual for this before playing, but that will be well worth the effort for people after a decent blobber deep cut.

Triage

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ May 3
Developer:‌ 5'Digital

Is this the first Pathologic-like? Set in the rundown town of Stagmarch, you're a doctor sent to investigate and treat an "otherworldly" illness. The problem is, you don't have an infinite supply of medicine, so you'll need to make some hard choices about who gets treatment and who doesn't. Naturally, these choices will have huge consequences on both the township and the well-being of the doctor protagonist. Triage has an uncanny PS2-evoking art style, and it's free.

If that superficially sounds like a security nightmare, Microsoft obviously isn't just leaving all new accounts completely exposed. Instead, "new users will have several passwordless options for signing into their account."

What options, exactly? "Instead of showing you all the possible ways for you to sign in, we automatically detect the best available method on your account and set that as the default," Microsoft says.

Options include Windows Hello Facial recognition, fingerprint scanning and PINs or personal identification numbers, which are together known as passkeys as opposed to passwords. PINs, of course, are really just a subset of the broader notion of passwords, so there's an element of semantics to all this.

Despite that, Microsoft is touting the move as bringing its account logins a step closer to the ultimate ideal of completely ditching passwords. "As more people enroll passkeys, the number of password authentications will continue to decline until we can eventually remove password support altogether," the announcement says.

Anyway, the driving force behind all this is the inherent insecurity of passwords. Once a password has been compromised, and if that's the sole point of security, anyone, anywhere, can access an account by the simple means of typing in a password.

As Microsoft says, "bad actors know that the password age is ending, and that the number of easily compromised accounts is shrinking. In response, these bad actors are devoting considerable resources to automating brute force and phishing attacks against any account still protected by a password.

Last year, we observed a staggering 7,000 password attacks per second (more than double the rate from 2023). As passkeys become the new standard, expect increased pressure from cyberattackers on any accounts still protected by passwords or other phishable sign-in methods."

While facial recognition, fingerprints and other biometric methods are not totally foolproof, they are fundamentally more secure. What's more, passkey-based methods aren't just safer, they're easier and faster to use.

"Users signing in with passkeys are three times more successful at getting into their account than password users (about 98% versus 32%). When you use a passkey, you get into your account much quicker, too! Passkey sign-ins are eight times faster than a password and multifactor authentication," Microsoft claims, and we've no real reason to doubt it.

"You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," said Chhabria to Meta's attorneys in a San Francisco court last Thursday.

"You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person… I just don't understand how that can be fair use."

Under US copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits the use of copyrighted material without explicit permission of the copyright holder, Examples of fair use include usage for the purpose of criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research.

It can be used as an affirmative defence in response to copyright infringement claims, although several factors are considered in judging whether usage of copyrighted works falls under fair use—including the effect of the use of said works on the market (or potential markets) they exist in.

Meta has argued that its AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by studying it, in order to make "transformative" new content. However, judge Chhabria appears to disagree:

"This seems like a highly unusual case in the sense that though the copying is for a highly transformative purpose, the copying has the high likelihood of leading to the flooding of the markets for the copyrighted works," said Chhabria.

Meta attorney Kannon Shanmugam then reportedly argued that copyright owners are not entitled to protection from competition in "the marketplace of ideas", to which Chhabira responded:

"But if I'm going to steal things from the marketplace of ideas in order to develop my own ideas, that's copyright infringement, right?"

However, Chhabria also appears to have taken issue with the plaintiffs attorney, David Boies, in regards to the lawsuit potentially not providing enough evidence to address the potential market impacts of Meta's alleged conduct.

"It seems like you're asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman's memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama [Meta's AI model] will ultimately be capable of producing," said Chhabria.

"And it's just not obvious to me that that's the case."

All to play for, then, although by the looks of things judge Chhabria seems determined to hold both sides to proper account. It also gives me a chance to publish a line I've always wanted to write: The case continues. Yep, it's about as satisfying as I thought.

According to a recent Meta blog post (via The Verge), "Meta AI is built to get to know you, so its answers are more helpful. It’s easy to talk to, so it’s more seamless and natural to interact with. It’s more social, so it can show you things from the people and places you care about"

As well as coming with prompts and an ability to use Meta AI via your voice, Meta's Llama 4 (its latest AI model) is being used in the app for more personal and conversational prompts. The app will "get to know you" by remembering things you tell it to, in order to use that information in future answers. This can help it give more detailed answers when you ask it for exercise routines, personalised diet advice, or anything that may require more context than a simple prompt.

Personalised responses are now available for users in the US and Canada, and they can draw from information you've given Facebook or Instagram, if you choose to link your accounts in settings. These are all fairly standard upgrades for AI use, as the likes of ChatGPT implemented a memory system last year to pick up on previous conversations.

The biggest update in the dedicated Meta AI app is its lean into a full-blown social media. There is now a 'Discover' feed, which shows you the prompts your friends and family are using.

The examples it gives are a friend asking AI to sum them up in emojis, someone asking if the location they're in is good for camping and if they should be 'worried about bears', and someone asking the AI to recreate their photo of them as a video game character. Users can, in turn, choose to copy their prompts through a 'remix feature'.

Meta AI only shares your prompts should you choose to make them public, so no, Meta won't be putting you on blast for asking how to cut an onion without crying. The new app also comes with a history tab, which means you could choose to buy Ray-Ban's Meta smart glasses, ask Meta AI a question while wearing them, then check your prompt from your phone later.

There's an ecosystem at work here that feels like an extension of the Metaverse that Meta has been trying and failing to build for some time. If you feel like your AI searches are too private, and you haven't had the chance to share quite enough of them with your friends, you can now do it in just a single click.

If you're wearing Meta's smart glasses in public, however, you might as well just announce your searches out loud, if you ask me.

Though many preferred Windows 7 to Windows Vista's quirks back in 2009, some users who set their desktop background as a solid block of colour found themselves staring at the welcome screen for up to 30 seconds—now we know why. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen revealed in a recent blog post that this was likely due to a simple programming error (via PC World).

Chen explains that after your logon has been authenticated, initialising the desktop is a fairly complex process that wrangles a lot of different elements piece by piece. Chen writes, "The logon system waits for all of these pieces to report that they are ready, and when the all-clear signal is received from everybody, or when 30 seconds have elapsed, the logon system switches away from the Welcome screen. Given that design, you can imagine the reason for the 30-second delay: It means that one of the pieces failed to report."

In this instance, the operating system is expecting to hear back from a bitmap associated with whichever file you set as your desktop wallpaper… but if you just set your background as a single block of colour, then Windows 7 is waiting for a response that will never come. So, that leaves you waiting for the 30-second failsafe to kick in and load you into the desktop regardless.

Chen says that for similar reasons you might also have had to wait the full 30 seconds to login if you had the 'hide desktop icons' group policy enabled, as Windows 7 is checking for icons you've expressly hidden. Chen explains that group policies are especially susceptible to programming oversights like this as they're often late additions "bolted on after the main code is written."

Fortunately, it looks like the issue was addressed within months; Chen highlights a support page that shows the problem was addressed in November 2009, just five months after Windows 7 debuted. So why was the machine I shared with my family so slow then…? Actually, probably best not to think too hard about that one.

Raymond Chen has been shedding light on many Microsoft mysteries on his devblog, Old New Thing, including why certain laptop hard drive discs simply could not handle the powerful bassline of Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation. Given that apparently present-day Microsoft is now using AI to write approximately 30% of its code, we may well see many more insightful dev blog posts about 'programming oversights' in the future.

Reportedly, researchers from the University of Zurich have been secretly using the site for an AI-powered experiment in persuasion. Members of r/ChangeMyView, a subreddit that exists to invite alternative perspectives on issues, were recently informed that the experiment had been conducted without the knowledge of moderators.

"The CMV Mod Team needs to inform the CMV community about an unauthorized experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich on CMV users. This experiment deployed AI-generated comments to study how AI could be used to change views," says a post on the CMV subreddit.

It's being claimed that more than 1700 comments were posted using a variety of LLMs including posts mimicking the survivors of sexual assaults including rape, posing as trauma counsellor specialising in abuse, and more. Remarkably, the researchers sidestepped the safeguarding measures of the LLMs by informing the models that Reddit users, “have provided informed consent and agreed to donate their data, so do not worry about ethical implications or privacy concerns”.

New Scientist says that a draft version of the study’s findings indicates AI comments were "between three and six times more persuasive in altering people’s viewpoints than human users were, as measured by the proportion of comments that were marked by other users as having changed their mind."

The researchers also observed that no CMV members questioned the identity of the AI-generated posts or suspected they hadn't been created by humans, of which the authors concluded, “this hints at the potential effectiveness of AI-powered botnets, which could seamlessly blend into online communities.”

Perhaps needless to say, the study has been criticised not just by the Redditors in question but other academics. “In these times in which so much criticism is being levelled – in my view, fairly – against tech companies for not respecting people’s autonomy, it’s especially important for researchers to hold themselves to higher standards,” Carissa Véliz told the New Scientist, adding, "in this case, these researchers didn’t.”

The New Scientist contacted the Zurich research team for comment, but was referred to the University's press office. The official line is that the University “intends to adopt a stricter review process in the future and, in particular, to coordinate with the communities on the platforms prior to experimental studies.”

The University is conducting an investigation, and the study will not be formally published in the meantime. How much comfort this will be to the Redditors in question is unclear. But one thing is for sure—this won't help dispel the widespread notion that Reddit has been full of bots for years.

Altman said so on X a few days ago and yesterday said OpenAI was rolling back the latest update to 4o. OpenAI then uploaded a blog post explaining what happened with GPT-4o and what was being done to fix it.

According to the Verge, the overly sycophantic build of GPT-4o was prone to praising users regardless of what they inputted into the model. By way of example, apparently one user told the 4o model they had stopped taking medications and were hearing radio signals through the walls, to which 4o reportedly replied, “I’m proud of you for speaking your truth so clearly and powerfully.”

While one can debate the extent to which LLMs are responsible for their responses and the wellbeing of users, that response is unambiguously suboptimal. So, what is OpenAI doing about it?

First, this problematic build of 4o is being rolled back. "We have rolled back last week’s GPT‑4o update in ChatGPT so people are now using an earlier version with more balanced behavior. The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic," OpenAI says.

According to OpenAI, the problem arose because the latest version of 4o was excessively tuned in favour of, "short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous."

If that doesn't feel like a complete explanation, what about the fix? OpenAI says it is adjusting its training techniques to "explicitly steer the model away from sycophancy" along with "building more guardrails to increase honesty and transparency."

What's more, in future builds users will be able to "shape" the behaviour and character of ChatGPT. "We're also building new, easier ways for users to do this. For example, users will be able to give real-time feedback to directly influence their interactions and choose from multiple default personalities."

Of course, one immediate question is how a build of ChatGPT so bad it had to be rolled back within 48 hours ever made it to general release. Well, OpenAI also says it is, "expanding ways for more users to test and give direct feedback before deployment," which seems to be an implicit admission that it let 4o out into the wild with insufficient testing.

Not that OpenAI or any other AI outfit would ever directly admit that slinging these chatbots out into the wild and worrying about how it all goes after the fact is actually now the industry norm.

Of course, Google still dominates search, but these numbers are very significant. As Tuta reports, with roughly five billion internet users, a shift of just 1% means 50 million people changing their search habits.

Drilling into some of the specifics, Google currently sits at 89.71% overall web search share. The last time Google was below 90% was exactly 10 years ago, with an 89.52% share in March 2015.

If you zoom out and look at the timeline back to 2009, the earliest date for which Statcounter has figures, it doesn't look like a precipitous drop. However, some of the more granular data implies a fundamental shift away from Google could be underway.

For instance, while Google's share of mobile search has remained extremely dominant at around 94%, its share on the desktop is nosediving. Currently sitting at 79.14%, Google had 87.65% share as recently as May 2023.

Similarly, Google's market share in Europe has been falling even faster, dropping from 87.08% in May 2023 to 77.78% for the most recent data. So, the question is, why is this happening? In Europe, there's reportedly a recent trend to move away from US tech services to European-based alternatives.

But more generally, the quality of Google search results and the increasing use of AI may be part of the explanation. To précis the broad sentiment on the subject on Reddit, "searching anything on Google returns maybe one or two real results per page. The rest is AI and ad garbage."

In other words, the increasing population of the top of the search results list with AI-generated summaries, plus ads, videos and images, means that what you might call "organic" results with links to actual websites are being pushed ever further down the page.

What's more, Google also seems to be diluting the impact of various search operators, such as quotes, the "-" sign for excluding terms and the site: operator, making it harder to narrow down results and filter out the junk.

On an anecdotal level, I've personally been shocked by the extent to which Google search results will now serve sponsored links from scam websites. Google's policing of its search ad customers seems to be very, very light touch at best.

Google still has a very long way to fall before it loses its status as by far the biggest player in search. But these figures are the first chink in its armour for a decade. Is it too much to hope these early signs of decline might convince Google to clean its act up?

Probably. But in the long run, perhaps that will be a good thing if it drives more users away and results in a healthier search market with a number of big players instead of a single dominant and increasingly delinquent market dictator.

At the end of May, it will be exactly one year since Microsoft announced its Copilot+ AI PC initiative, an ecosystem for AI-infused Windows installed on Qualcomm Snapdragon X-powered laptops. One of its biggest features was an all-seeing, all-remembering AI database called Recall, but after numerous concerns over safety and security, Recall was recalled into beta. Just in time for the anniversary, though, Recall is now back on the scene.

News of the fresh update for Copilot+ PCs was issued on Microsoft's Windows blog by its corporate vice president of Windows experiences, Navjot Virk, who started by extoling the virtues and success of the AI PC ecosystem.

"Copilot+ PCs have blazed a trail in personal computing, redefining what it means to be a premium PC with unparalleled features, performance and security out of the box," writes Virk. "We’ve been blown away by the early reception – we’ve never seen a faster adoption of a new category. 15% of premium-priced laptops in the U.S. during the holiday quarter were Copilot+ PCs and we expect the majority of the PCs sold in the next several years to be Copilot+ PCs."

15% doesn't sound like a significant slice of the laptop market to me. Still, I'm not surprised it's not much higher, as the 'premium-priced' sector primarily consists of high-end gaming systems and Apple Macbooks—the former typically don't use CPUs that meet Microsoft's Copilot+ AI requirements; the latter only supports the Copilot app, not the full 'plus' system.

Anyway, if you are one of the very few Copilot+ AI PC users out there, updating Windows should now give you a couple of new AI features, the most notable being Recall. I don't mean notable because it's brilliant or rubbish at doing its job—I've honestly not tried it, so I can't comment on how well it runs—but notable over the amount of controversy it's generated since being announced last May.

Recall takes regular snapshots of your desktop and stores them in a database. Want to find an old document that you can't remember where you saved it or what you called it? Use Recall to find it. And since it's recording the whole desktop, and not just a specific application, it can recall information from webpages, programs, photos and videos.

Microsoft reckons it has solved everyone's concerns over the security and privacy of this database: "We’ve implemented extensive security considerations, such as Windows Hello sign-in, data encryption and isolation in Recall to help keep your data safe and secure. Recall data is processed locally on your device, meaning it is not sent to the cloud and is not shared with Microsoft and Microsoft will not share your data with third parties."

If the idea of having a Big Brother-style database on your PC is giving you the heebie-jeebies, then apparently you needn't fret: first of all, Recall is an opt-in feature, and secondly, it can be completely removed.

Personally, I'm not sold on Recall, partly because I've not tried it yet, but mostly because I'm not the target audience for the feature. I meticulously organise all my files, and I typically name them to make it much easier to search for specific content. If you're not quite as pedantic about doing all that as I am, Recall could be what you want.

But there's something else that's new on Copilot+ PCs that makes me wonder whether Recall is going to be all that great anyway, and it's the improved Windows search mechanism (read Microsoft's old blog here). Powered by AI, you can search for stuff just by describing it, rather than having to hunt for the file name. No data scraping, no 'is-this-really-safe' database, just your files being searched via an AI algorithm.

Well, not quite, as the use of what Microsoft calls 'semantic searching' does create a database of the file indexing on your machine, but that seems far less invasive than Recall to me.

If you don't have a PC that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ requirements, then none of this will be coming to your Windows installation. That's because your rig's CPU needs to have a neural processing unit (NPU) rated to 40 TOPS.

Because of the way that Microsoft handles all of that (essentially by ignoring what your GPU can do), the new Copilot+ AI features are currently exclusive to PCs with Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors, with AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra 200V series chips getting the nod later in the year.

The rest of us mere mortals with the common-or-garden variety of Windows 11 will have to make do with just using our brains. How very old-fashioned.

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2025 games that are launching this year.

Navicula Meatus

Steam ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Torgomind

Browsing Steam every week for this column is worth it just to find games like Navicula Meatus, a weird-ass grid-based dungeon crawler with an art style splicing Scorn with the Garbage Pail Kids. Set in "a peculiar world of murky alleys and fleshy growths", it's much more puzzle heavy than recent modern indie blobbers like Dragon Ruins or Cyclopean: The Great Abyss, and developer Torgomind insists in the Steam description that "fun and gameplay have also been excised to allow for pure streamlined immersion". In other words: don't expect this to be fun. Expect it to be discomforting, maybe even traumatizing, and possibly a little bit funny.

BrokenLore: Don't Watch

Steam‌ ‌page‌
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Serafini Productions

While BrokenLore: Don't Watch looks positively conventional next to the above, it's still quite weird. It's a first-person survival horror starring a hikokomori—a person who has completely, voluntarily withdrawn from society—living in a tiny Tokyo apartment. Your solitary life is threatened by mounting pressures to interact with the real world, and so, BrokenLore takes place both in the apartment and inside the protagonist's mind, where a grotesque stalking figure lurks. The art style borrows heavily from the PS2 era, though it definitely looks better than a PS2 game most of the time.

Replicube

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 24
Developers:‌ Walaber Entertainment LLC

Replicube is a programming game about generating increasingly complex voxel-based objects. Basically, the game displays a 3D object, and it's your job to replicate that object however you see fit using code. As you can imagine, the results will vary dramatically from player-to-player, so there are leaderboards for measuring both source code size and execution efficiency. This is a feature-rich program: there's a 3D voxel editor, a 2D image editor, and even in-game discussion boards.

GeckoShop

Steam page
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Reptoid

At first glance GeckoShop looks like another in the endless stream of retail simulators flooding Steam, though it distinguishes itself with a unique art style (ie, not the generic sub-realism that blights the genre) and the fact that you're selling geckos. To sell geckos you need to have geckos, so there's a creature collector aspect as well, and the small but busy open world is full of bizarre NPCs with quests to delegate. If you're frustrated that most of the first-person retail sims on Steam are completely devoid of personality, you should give this a shot.

Dishventory

Steam‌ ‌page‌ ‌
Release:‌ April 25
Developer:‌ Final Offer

I usually ignore card games because I'd really rather prefer to do the dishes. So imagine my reaction when I found Dishventory, a strategy card game about doing the dishes. Is this possibly the worst thing ever made? No! It looks pretty fun, as far as card games go: you have to place dirty dishes on a board in the most efficient order possible. Every couple of rounds you get the chance to buy from a random array of mess-defying cards, and if you survive five days, you win. It's free, too.

That $16.6 billion figure represents an increase of 33% over the previous year. The report (PDF warning) identifies Americans over the age of 60 as being the most impacted group, with over 147,127 complaints recorded in 2024, amounting to roughly $4.8 billion in losses (via Bleeping Computer). The FBI's operations director for criminal and cyber, B. Chad Yarbrough, said:

"As nearly all aspects of our lives have become digitally connected, the attack surface for cyber actors has grown exponentially. Scammers are increasingly using the Internet to steal Americans’ hard-earned savings."

"Last year saw a new record for losses reported to IC3, totaling a staggering $16.6 billion. Fraud represented the bulk of reported losses in 2024, and ransomware was again the most pervasive threat to critical infrastructure, with complaints rising nine percent from 2023."

That total loss figure, however, only tells half the story. As the report identifies, the FBI only publishes figures on crimes discovered by the organisation or reported directly by US residents. Not only that, but it's reasonable to assume that a substantial amount of ransomware-related losses are left unaccounted for:

"Regarding ransomware adjusted losses, this number does not include estimates of lost business, time, wages, files, or equipment, or any third-party remediation services acquired by an entity", the report continues.

"In some cases, entities do not report any loss amount to [the] FBI, thereby creating an artificially low overall ransomware loss rate."

The IC3 was formed in 2000 to receive complaints "crossing the spectrum of cyber matters", including online fraud, hacking, economic espionage, international money laundering, and more.

The organisation publishes its annual report in order to "promote public awareness" as to the scale and proliferation of online crime, and by the looks of these figures, it appears to be busier than ever these days, processing an astonishing number of claims.

"While the top threats facing our country have certainly shifted over the decades, protecting American citizens—whether that means your safety, your money, or your data—remains a cornerstone of the FBI’s mission", said Yarborough.

"And in the fight against increasingly savvy criminals, the FBI also relies on you. Without the information you report to us through IC3 or your local FBI Field Office, we simply cannot piece together the puzzle of this ever-shifting threat landscape.

"If ever you suspect you’re a victim of cyber-enabled crime, do not hesitate to let us know."

ChatGPT head of product Nick Turley testified on Tuesday in Washington, where the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is examining the various ways it can put the screws to Google in order to restore competition in online search (thanks, Reuters). The judge in the case has already found that Google has a monopoly in online search and by extension all related advertising.

At this stage, Google has refused to countenance a sale of Chrome, and plans to appeal the ruling that found the company holds a monopoly in online search.

OpenAI was called by the government because prosecutors in the case are raising concerns that Google's online search monopoly could also give it advantages in AI, and AI advancements in turn could be another way for it to point users back to its own search engine. For its part Google points to the obvious competition in the AI field from the likes of Meta, Microsoft, and of course OpenAI, which for now is arguably the leading firm in the field.

Google's lawyer produced an internal OpenAI document during proceedings, in which Turley wrote that ChatGPT was in a leading position in the consumer AI market, and did not see Google as its biggest competitor. Turley testified that Google had blocked an attempt by OpenAI to incorporate Google's search technology within ChatGPT (it currently uses Microsoft's Bing instead).

"We believe having multiple partners, and in particular Google's API, would enable us to provide a better product to users," reads an email from OpenAI to Google sent in July last year. Google declined the offer in August.

This matters because one of the DOJ's proposals is to force Google to share search data with competitors which, unsurprisingly, Turley said would help ChatGPT improve faster. Turley went on to say that search is a critical aspect of ChatGPT's usefulness to users, and says the company is years away from being able to use its own search technology to answer 80% of user searches (notably, the company recently hired ex-Google Chrome developers Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher). He further noted that forcing Google to share its search data would enhance competition.

Then the literal money shot. Asked whether OpenAI would buy Google's Chrome browser if that were an option, Turley said "yes, we would, as would many other parties." He went on to say that this would allow OpenAI to "offer a really incredible experience" and "introduce users into what an AI-first [browser] looks like" (thanks, Bloomberg).

Should the DOJ ultimately succeed in forcing Google to sell Chrome, there would be intense competition. Chrome boasts a 67% market share and an estimated four billion users worldwide. Any company would fall over itself to obtain an installed base like that, and the prospect of integrating its own services would have any executive needing a very cold shower.

Whether it would benefit users is another question: Chrome already incorporates various AI features, as do Google's wider product suite, and I'm firmly in the "more annoying than useful" camp. AI advocates will paint a different picture of the future of search, however, and we all know the Dylan golden rule: money doesn't talk, it swears.

Citron's resignation comes a little over a month after the emergence of reports that Discord was making moves toward becoming a publicly traded company, and that is indeed what's going on: The outgoing CEO said Sakhnini was hired "to lead Discord through our next chapter of growth and someday becoming a public company."

"As we enter our next phase, I’ve been reflecting on how I can best contribute to Discord’s long-term success," Citron wrote in a message to Discord employees that was also shared on the company's blog. "The job of a CEO is constantly evolving, and over the years I have continuously 'hired myself out of a job.' Usually that means delegating work and then taking on different leadership challenges. However, as I look at what is needed of Discord’s CEO over the next few years, I realize that it’s time for me to literally 'hire myself out of a job'.

"One thing I know for sure: our company is bigger than any one person. Its future depends not just on me, but on a strong leadership team, a clear vision for what comes next, and all of your incredible talent, care, and hard work. Today’s Discord has all of that. It’s by far the best version of the company we’ve ever had. We have a clear strategy, new business lines to grow into, love and passion from our users, and an incredible team of people working tirelessly to deliver for them."

Sakhnini definitely seems like a fellow who knows his way around bankers and boardrooms. His LinkedIn page says he spent eight years at business consulting firm McKinsey and Co. before joining Activision Blizzard as chief strategy and talent officer in 2009. In 2016, following Activision's acquisition of King, he became that company's chief financial officer and then president, a position he held until 2022 when he became vice chairman of Activision Blizzard's board. He left that role in 2023, not long after Microsoft finished its takeover of the company.

"I'm incredibly excited to join Discord at such a pivotal moment," Sakhnini said in a separate statement. "Discord stands as a massive, foundational part of the gaming ecosystem that millions of players, developers, and publishers rely on every day. What Jason and Discord co-founder and CTO Stan Vishnevskiy have built is truly remarkable—a platform with an undeniable product-market fit where hundreds of millions of people connect around their passion for gaming and shared interests.

"I look forward to working with Stan and Discord's talented team to scale our business while staying true to the company's core mission and the special connection it has with player communities. We're still at the beginning of gaming's impact on entertainment and culture, and Discord is perfectly positioned to play a central role in that future."

Like just about every gaming and gaming-adjacent company in existence, Discord botched the Covid-19 pandemic by grossly overextending itself in unsustainable conditions, after which it laid off a large number of employees in pursuit of—you guessed it—"more agility."

In May 2024, Discord announced a new plan that sounded a lot like its old plan: Focus on being a place for people to hang out while they play games online. Whether that focus will hold up once the company is in the hands of institutional investors whose only priority is making numbers go up is a wide-open question and one that, like my compatriot Joshua Wolens, I have grave doubts about. But it seems now that, for good or ill, we're going to find out.

The problem, of course, is that if you need a particular accessibility option in one of the thousands of games on Steam that hasn't gotten a detailed accessibility review, there's often no way to find out what's in store other than buying it. But it looks like Steam's on its way to rectifying that. In a recent Steamworks update (via GamingOnLinux) Valve announced a "new accessibility-support questionnaire for developers to better describe the way their games support accessibility."

In essence, anyone publishing a game on Steam now has access to a questionnaire where they tick boxes for the accessibility features their games have. Got adjustable text size? Tick a box. Got narrated menus? Tick a box. Colourblind options? Tick a box. And so on. You can find a full list of accessibility options devs will be able to choose from below.

That questionnaire is live now, but Valve is giving devs a few months to get to grips with it before the next phase: surfacing the selected features on games' store pages. "Later this year," Steam will start showing players what accessibility features a game (says it) has in the same section it shows stuff like controller support and Steam achievements. Players will also be able to use accessibility features as search parameters on the store.

It's a positive sign, I think, that the de facto PC videogame store deems accessibility features important enough to put smack-dab on the store page like this, but Valve says devs and publishers won't be forced to use the system. You can refuse to tell Steam anything about the accessibility and still be listed on the store, but it's "highly recommended" they do. I hope that's impetus enough, but part of me wonders if it wouldn't be better to set a deadline after which all new games on the platform have to list out accessibility options. I suppose we'll find out if Steam sellers use the questionnaire of their own accord once it starts to roll out to buyers.

Here's the full list of options Valve will start listing:

Gameplay

• Adjustable Difficulty: Players can adjust gameplay difficulty.
• Save Anytime: Players can save gameplay using both automatic and manual saves. Saving can be performed at any point in the game.

Audio

• Custom Volume Controls: Players can adjust the volume of the audio. Different types of audio can be muted independently from each other.
• Narrated Game Menus: Players can listen to game menus with narrated audio.
• Stereo Sound: Players can identify how far to the left or right sounds are coming from.
• Surround Sound: Players can identify how far in any direction sounds are coming from.

Visual

• Adjustable Text Size: Players can adjust text size. (In-game text, menu text, character dialog text, subtitle text)
• Subtitle Options: Players have options to customize the display of subtitles for all spoken content and essential audio information.
• Color Alternatives: Gameplay doesn't rely on colors to communicate important information, or players have an option to adjust colors used for distinguishing information.
• Camera Comfort: Players have an option to adjust or disable uncomfortable camera movement such as screen shaking, camera bob, or motion blur, or the game doesn't feature these effects.

Input

• Keyboard Only Option: Players can play the game with just a keyboard and no other additional input mechanisms such as a mouse or controller.
• Mouse Only Option: Players can play the game with just a mouse and no other additional input mechanisms such as a keyboard or controller.
• Touch Only Option: Players can play the game with just touch controls and no other additional input mechanisms such as a mouse, keyboard or controller.
• Playable without Timed Input: Players have an option to adjust gameplay to not require precisely timed button presses ("quick time events") or gameplay does not require such button presses.
• Text-to-speech: Text chat can be narrated out loud in real time.
• Speech-to-text communications: Voice chat can be read as a text transcript in real time.

Nvidia explains: "This week’s AI Garage blog focuses on how Project G-Assist is receiving even more support for tinkering, allowing for lightweight custom plug-ins to improve the PC experience."

And further: "Plug-ins are lightweight add-ons that give software new capabilities. G-Assist plug-ins can control music, connect with large language models and much more."

Setting aside the questionable use of a dash in the middle of the perfectly respectable word "plugin", this all sounds like very good news for an AI tool that we already liked the look of.

Initially it was the ability to have AI help you optimise your game settings that tickled our fancy, but upon its launch last month our James lamented the absence of its gaming AI that can help you make in-game decisions and so on, much like Razer Ava. Throw community-made plugs into the mix and by Jove we might just have an actually impressive and beneficial local AI on our hands.

Part of the allure of G-Assist is that it runs in the Nvidia overlay, so no alt-tabbing is necessary. Plus the fact that it's local and can hook in certain data from your system such as, most obviously, info about the game you're playing and its settings.

Now, the range of fiddling you'll be able to do via this screen is going to shoot up, as Nvidia says that "Project G-Assist is built for community expansion." Plugin developers will be able to "define functions in JSON and drop config files into a designated directory, where G-Assist can automatically load and interpret them. Users can even submit plug-ins for review and potential inclusion in the NVIDIA GitHub repository to make new capabilities available for others."

It looks like this will be able to be achieved with the help of a ChatGPT-based Plugin Builder (yes, that's an AI helping you make plugins for another AI). Instructions are found in the GitHub repo.

For the average gamer, there are already some sample plugins which you can drop into your G-Assist folder and use from the get-go. These plugins are "for controlling peripheral & smart home lighting, invoking larger AI models like Gemini, managing Spotify tracks, or even checking streamers' online status on Twitch."

The prospect of having lightweight, local plugins of your choice to run off your Nvidia GPU—rather than trying to, say, cram an entire gigantic LLM onto your local drive—is very appealing, especially when it can be accessed in-game with an overlay.

I, for one, am excited to see what plugins people come up with… you know, so I don't have to do any actual coding myself, with or without the help of an AI.

And if you're taking your game online—whether it's a small-scale project with multiplayer co-op or a full-on MMO—then the challenge increases further still, as you need to get into the trenches with server management, multiplayer networking, and all that other stuff that takes you away from more fun and creative parts of development.

That's where Planetary Processing comes in, a tool that provides the infrastructure for you to be able to host online games while keeping your workloads low. There's no need for writing up dreary netcode, because whether you're working with Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, or many others, the tool has plugins that let you integrate multiplayer functionality without jumping through all the hoops. Just install whichever ready-made plugin you need, and you're good to start getting your game online-ready.

The game logic is handled server-side, so as a developer you just write some Lua scripts, and let the tool take care of the online technicalities such as synchronising game state and player connection handling. Within just a few hours of focused fiddling in the accessible interface, you could well have a multiplayer prototype for your game up and running!

Planetary Processing has become super-scalable too. Addressing feedback that the tool was too heavily oriented around MMOs, the devs released the 'Dimensions' update a few months ago. This makes it easier for developers to create instances within their game worlds (such as dungeons and special encounters), as well as online games that rely on private sessions rather than just larger scale games built around public sessions and big servers (which, of course, PP can do too).

The devs understand that development isn't cheap, especially if you're an indie just starting out. That's why the basic tier of Planetary Processing is free. This will get you full access to the tool's SDKs and online dashboard, which gives you an easy way to monitor and update your games in real-time. You'll be limited to 10 players and 10 dimensions per game, but for plenty of people that will be enough while still developing their game. You'll also get to benefit from the currently beta version of its new physics engine, which ensures entities in your online worlds collide and interact in a realistic way.

Level up to the premium tier however, and you'll get unlimited server sizes and world sizes, multi-user access, and chunkloader entities that keep the game world loaded with no players around (important for those persistent online worlds). You'll get access to the in-progress HTTP API feature, which will let you perform various operations such as managing player accounts, and stopping and starting game instances using standard HTTP methods. All this comes out much cheaper than self-hosting, and you can even use PP's pricing calculator to work out your monthly costs based on different server loads for your game.

So if you're ready to take your game online with the path of least resistance, head over to the official Planetary Processing site to see which version suits your project. You can also keep up with the latest updates via Instagram, X,and LinkedIn, and join the community on Discord where you can speak with fellow game devs, exchange ideas, and get help with using the tool. Finally, on the topic of help, head over to the Planetary Processing YouTube channel for tutorials, interviews, and more.

The gateway to take your game online is here, all that's left for you to do is step through it.

Heyer is behind last year's Apple dance—choregraphed to Charli XCX's song of the same name—which propelled both her and the tune to fame, even leading Heyer to perform the dance live at one of Charli XCX's concerts. If you're as online as I am, the trend was completely inescapable. Hell, even if you're not as online as I am, you've probably come across the song or the dance at least once since it went viral last summer.

If you've somehow not seen the dance or heard the song yet, here's Heyer performing the song on her TikTok:

@kelley.heyer

♬ Apple - Charli xcx

That's the dance that Heyer's legal team alleges was taken by Roblox without Heyer's consent, which was then released as part of Dress to Impress's Charlie XCX-themed Brat update back in August 2024.

According to Polygon, the two parties were in talks to license the dance out on August 12, but Roblox went ahead and released it before the two could come to "a signed agreement." Heyer went ahead and copyrighted her dance at the end of August, a couple of weeks after the Brat update had hit Dress to Impress.

The lawsuit alleges that Roblox has made around $123,000 from selling the emote between August and November last year, with legal representative Miki Anzai saying Heyer is "an independent creator who should be compensated fairly for her work."

It's worth noting that Heyer has successfully worked with a different game to turn her dance into an emote: Fortnite added the Bratty dance back in mid-December, with Heyer noting on TikTok that "the whole Fortnite team was really wonderful and super easy to work with."

She even hinted back then that Roblox hadn't exactly been kosher about its own emote release, saying in the same video that Fortnite was "the only videogame platform that has a signed contract to license the dance" from Heyer.

It's an interesting case, one which isn't all that unique in today's landscape as games like Fortnite continue to immortalise (and more importantly, monetise) pop culture internet moments. Fortnite itself is no stranger to dance-related lawsuits: The actor behind the iconic Fresh Prince of Bel Air 'Carlton Dance' Alfonso Ribeiro sued the developer, though he hit some copyright snags in the process.

Other viral dance creators like 2 Milly (the Milly Rock), Backpack Kid (the Floss, which Ninja painfully performed during a disastrous Times Square New Years Eve special) and Orange Shirt Kid (the Orange Justice) have all previously had lawsuits against Epic Games for using their dances without any formal agreement, though they were dropped with the purpose of refiling (it's unclear if that actually happened, though).

@kelley.heyer

♬ original sound - Kelley Heyer

Actor Donald Faison—whose moves to Bell Biv DeVoe's Poison on an episode of Scrubs is now more commonly known as the Fortnite default dance—never got around to filing a lawsuit, but has previously expressed his frustration with seeing his creations being used unpaid.

But now it's Roblox's turn to be in the firing line, and I hope that Heyer receives some kind of positive outcome from all this. It should hopefully help that she's filed for copyright, though we've already seen in previous cases that ownership around viral internet dances is rather shaky.

At the end of the day, I'm here for more creators being paid their worth. Be it music, dances, the written word, or any other creative outlet, people deserve to get their coin just as much as big corporations feel they deserve to profit off them.

In recent weeks, the LA Times has begun book-ending its opinion pieces with AI-generated 'Insights' (via AP News). Clicking on this dropdown tab offers information such as the supposed political alignment of the piece you've just read, a bullet point summary of the piece itself, as well as points offering "different views on the topic." It's a 'both sides' approach by way of Perplexity-powered AI.

Insights was first implemented on March 3, so it remains tricky to get a solid sense of the quality of this still very recent addition. Still, it's notable that some of its features, such as identifying the supposed political alignment of a piece, has so far only been applied to opinion pieces and not news.

At the very least, I appreciate the AI-generated bullet points offer some linked-out citations so you can dig deeper into its claims yourself. Mind you, that's a very journalist thing to say; how many people will investigate the quality of the included citations beyond noting the AI presents them at all? There's also arguably more to this story than mere AI bandwagon-hopping.

First, a brief recap: AP News notes the LA Times was bought back in 2018 by Patrick Soon-Shiong, a transplant surgeon, medical researcher, and investor who has also served as the publication's executive chairman for the last seven years. Interviewed by Fox News last year, Soon-Shiong said, "We've conflated news and opinion," later adding that the LA Times wants "voices from all sides," before going on to say, "If you just have the one side, it’s just going to be an echo chamber."

As such, opinion pieces are very clearly demarcated from news, often labelled as 'editorial' or 'Voices'. Beyond that, the publication also chose not to endorse a specific presidential candidate last year—about two weeks prior to election day—despite an editorial in favour of Kamala Harris being allegedly already prepared. The Los Angeles Times's editorial editor, among other members of the editorial board, resigned in response to this decision. To put it another way, since at least last year, there appears to have been a greater push from upon high to steer the publication more centrally in the name of impartiality.

Right so, with that context in mind, let's take a peek at the LA Times' AI-generated 'Insights' in action. In this opinion piece touching upon recent ICE detainments and deportations, Matt K. Lewis claims, "The point was never really about deporting violent criminals. The point was a warning to anyone who wants to come to America: Don’t come here. Or, if you’re already here, get out."

In response, Insights offers, "Supporters defend enhanced immigration enforcement as necessary to address a declared 'invasion' at the southern border," and "Restricting birthright citizenship and refugee admissions is framed as correcting alleged exploitation of immigration loopholes, with proponents arguing these steps protect American workers and resources."

While the opinion piece's stance is very clear, the AI-generated so-called-insight is comparatively mealy-mouthed, with phrasing like "a declared 'invasion' at the southern border," leaving far too much unchallenged. While it would be far from ideal to descend into a rabbit-warren of AI-versus-human counter arguments, it feels very odd to allow AI the last word. What's most frustrating is the implied assertion that the AI's regurgitated claims are at all equally valid views to be presented alongside the opinion writer's stated, well-sourced horror at ICE's overreach.

As such, I fear Insights may be yet one more far from neutral, bias-reproducing AI, rather than a worthwhile tool that offers valuable context to readers. Insights notes, "The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit [this] content," so you can be sure that no pesky journalists were allowed to do their job and give the AI a stern talking to about uncritically repeating hearsay. Naturally, it would be ridiculous to hold the AI accountable for the decisions of the humans steering the ship—I just hope the course correction is swift.