In the days that followed the US and Israel’s joint military strike on Iran on Saturday, floods of images and videos that supposedly document the war have appeared online. Some are old or depict unrelated conflicts, are made or manipulated with AI, and in some cases, are actually taken from military-themed video games like War […]
As OpenAI transitions from a wildly successful consumer startup into a piece of national security infrastructure, the company seems unequipped to manage its new responsibilities.
On Friday evening, amidst fallout from a standoff between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that his own company had successfully negotiated new terms with the Pentagon. The US government had just moved to blacklist Anthropic for standing firm on two red lines for military use: no mass surveillance of […]
On Thursday morning, I attended a Q&A panel with four top Samsung smartphone executives. Until 2025, Samsung was the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, and by association, the world’s largest maker of cameras. It’s still the second largest after Apple. Samsung handed me the microphone first. I asked: We see a divide in society between people […]
It took me a while to recover from the first big scare in Resident Evil Requiem. There I was, hunched over with a screen inches from my face and headphones in my ears, when a gigantic woman began chasing me through a dimly lit hallway intent on, well, eating me. It was a heart-racing sequence, […]
Over the past several weeks, as more and more Anthropic executives do interviews on a publicity blitz for Claude, one thing has gotten increasingly clear: Anthropic sure seems to think Claude is alive in some way, shape, or form. “Alive” is obviously a loaded term; the more frequently used word is “conscious.” If you ask […]
When Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson began uploading a series of short clips created with Seedance 2.0 – TikTok developer ByteDance’s newest video generation model – it was hard to deny that the footage was much more impressive than what we’ve seen from other gen AI outfits. The clips’ star (a digital duplicate of Tom Cruise) […]
The last few years of Xbox have been expensive. Under Phil Spencer’s leadership, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars in an attempt to build an ambitious future for gaming that looks a lot like Netflix. And while its subscription service Game Pass started out as a good deal for gamers (although now not so much), […]
Substack has updated its partnership with betting platform Polymarket, “introducing native tools that make it easier to share, discuss, and debate prediction market data directly on Substack.” Additionally, Polymarket will effectively pay “a cohort of creators,” including Matt Yglesias, to use its data though the newsletter platform’s pilot sponsorships program. This is just the latest […]
I’ve written about a lot of different video game hardware over the years, from new consoles to retro gadgets to whatever you want to call the Playdate. But I can’t remember ever being perpetually sore from testing a device; such are the joys of the Virtual Boy. Nintendo has turned its biggest flop into an […]