Technology News

1,900 Microsoft video game employees get the axe

02/05/202402/02/2024 Jorge Gonzalez

Activision Blizzard and Xbox and ZeniMax brands have slashed their worker numbers. About 1,900 video game employees at Microsoft are being laid off, particularly in Activision Blizzard and Xbox, but also in ZeniMax. Mike Ybarra, Blizzard president, has also chosen to exit the company. As Blizzard’s survival game has been canceled, Ybarra is leaving, and massive layoffs are occurring. The layoffs are impacting around 9 percent of the video game employees in the Microsoft Gaming division, which currently employs about 22,000 people. “We have made the painful decision to reduce…

Meta wants its VR technology to provide realistic hands

01/30/202401/29/2024 Jennifer Goula

The Facebook parent company feels that people will respond well to having accurate virtual reality hands. Since people communicate and identify with their own unique hands, Meta is currently researching strategies to make hands as realistic and accurate as possible using their VR technology. Researchers have found that people relate very closely to their specific hands and how they look and move. A team of researchers from the Codec Avatars Lab at Meta joined those at Nanyang Technological University in presenting a new research paper unveiling URHand. The name is…

Artificial intelligence scientists leave Google to launch their own startup

01/25/202401/24/2024 L. Green

The startup is called Holistic upon its creation and could focus on developing a new AI model. Two artificial intelligence scientists from DeepMind, Google’s AI subsidiary are reportedly in talks with investors to launch their own AI startup in Paris. According to Bloomberg News, Karl Tuyls and Laurent Sifre are considering the startup over Google. The two artificial intelligence scientists had already announced that they would be leaving DeepMind by the time this article was written. They are in negotiations in a financing round for a startup that could bring…

Excessive use of mobile devices can lead to anxiety, but it can be eased

01/22/202401/19/2024 Jorge Gonzalez

Mobile devices - Person looking stressed at mobile phone

Overusing social media in particular has been linked to mental illness such as depression and anxiety disorders. As convenient as mobile devices make our lives in terms of accessing information or completing day-to-day tasks, their overuse has also been associated with a rise in the instance of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders. Social media use is linked with both positive and negative impacts on its users, but overuse is problematic. Heavy social media users, particularly younger generations on mobile devices, have been spending substantial amounts of time…

Deceptive behaviors are difficult to stop once an AI model learns them

01/19/202401/18/2024 John Montgallo

Researchers from Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, discovered that it’s hard to stop artificial intelligence deception. Researchers from Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup backed by Amazon, recently published a paper in which they showed that once an AI model learns deceptive behaviors, it can be very challenging to stop them. The paper the researchers co-authored showed that artificial intelligence can be trained to behave deceptively. Beyond that, the researchers also concluded that once an AI model is trained to exhibit deceptive behaviors, it’s hard to get rid of them. In fact,…