Researchers found organic glass in the skull of a volcano victim, indicating the extreme and unique environment triggered by Vesuvius's eruption in 79 CE.
Game Freak dropped a surprise trailer at today’s Pokémon Presents livestream for something called Pokémon Champions. It’s a dedicated battle sim, recalling the glory days of Pokémon Stadium for the N64. This means that Champions distills the franchise's formula down to just battling, with a heavy emphasis on multiplayer.
To that end, the game is cross-platform, with the developer saying that players on “Nintendo Switch and mobile” will be able to duke it out. We don’t know what kind of roster the game itself will provide, but it integrates with the cloud-storage service Pokémon Home. People should be able to pull most of their favorite Pokémon from titles like Pokémon Go and recent mainline entries like Pokémon Sword and Shield. It also works with the spin-off Pokémon Legends: Arceus. The official press release, however, does note that there will be some restrictions when it comes to availability.
The gameplay should feel instantly familiar to anyone who has ever dabbled in the franchise, as the trailer description touts tried-and-true “mechanics such as Pokémon types, abilities and moves.” The footage even shows more niche mechanics like Mega Evolution and Terastallization, indicating that players may not be tied to the base-level Pokémon rule set.
There’s no release window yet. All we know is that it’s currently in development. Speaking of release dates, today’s livestream did reveal that Pokémon Legends: Z-Awill be coming out by the end of the year for the Switch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/pokemon-champions-is-all-about-the-battles-194527252.html?src=rss
The Echo Show 21, Amazon’s newest smart display, shows the new user interface for viewing your calendar, playing music, and other tasks.
Oh, Alexa, how you’ve changed. The long-awaited new Alexa, Alexa Plus, is set to bring a more conversational, context-aware, and capable assistant to your smart home. With a new voice (eight of them, in fact) and a new attitude, this is the biggest change to the voice assistant since it debuted in 2014. And it all sounds very impressive.
Announced at a press conference in New York City this week, Alexa Plus offers several new generative AI-powered abilities to help you manage your life, plus some major smart home upgrades. I was at the event and saw several staged demos of the new features but also got to try out some of the smart home improvements for myself.
The biggest change is how Alexa can respond to natural language; the demo showed that you can talk to it and say what you want rather than having to remember specific commands. I saw the new Alexa understand and execute commands such as, “Bring the lights up in here and set to a warm glow.” The GE Cync smart bulbs and light strips in the room responded, despite the request not including a room or specific names for each device.
Then, when instructed to “Turn on the lamp in the sitting area,” Alexa was apparently able to “reason” that meant the lamp named “Sofa lamp.” This should mean no more memorizing specific device names, making it easier for anyone in the home to control devices with their voice.
I was also able to talk to the assistant myself and try out its new ability to follow multiple commands at once without needing to repeat the wake word, Alexa. I asked it to dim the lights and “make it a little warmer.” The thermostat adjusted while the lights dimmed. Alexa said, “I dimmed the lights in the living room and increased the temperature by two degrees; is there anything else you need?” I then said, “Can you vacuum the floor?” It replied, “Okay,” and the Roomba started a job.
This should mean no more memorizing specific device names
Another new feature I tried was the ability to set up a smart home routine just by using voice. I told Alexa I’d been having trouble waking up recently, and after some back-and-forth, it created a “Good Morning” routine that set an alarm to wake me up to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” and adjust the smart lights in my room.
That’s a fairly simple one because there weren’t a lot of devices connected to the Show. But Amazon says that, courtesy of its knowledge of hundreds of smart home APIs, Alexa is capable of creating more complex routines through voice. This should make it easier for people to do more with their connected devices and not have to spend time programming an app.
The other exciting upgrade is the new Echo Show UI. This is launching on the 15 and 21, but Scott Durham of Amazon told me it will come to the Show 8 and 10 at some point. With a cleaner, sleeker full-screen UI with larger widgets to take advantage of the screen size (I saw it demoed on the 21-inch screen), it’s now more customizable and feels more like a tablet interface than a smart display. During the demo, it appeared to move smoothly and quickly with limited lag.
The UI now has a much larger calendar and smart home widgets. A handy new feature is the ability to send images, documents, and notes to your [email protected] email address or through the Alexa app or new web interface. From there, Amazon says it can parse things like events and add them to your calendar, as well as let you ask questions about the information. Apparently, it can even decipher all the info in that lengthy school email and set reminders to tell you what you need to send in on which days.
The smart home control UI has been lifted from the excellent interface on the Echo Hub, giving you easy touch control of devices in your home when you don’t want to use voice or a smartphone. And when you take it full screen, it’s now much easier to switch between rooms and devices. Alexa’s Map View is here, too, and it looks great on the big screen.
A new Ring camera integration feature lets Alexa Plus query Ring’s Smart Video Search to show you summaries of events that happened around your house or pull specific instances like, “Did a package arrive?” or “Did someone let the dog out?”
Another big improvement coming with Alexa Plus is new cooking controls. Currently, following recipes on an Echo Show can be fiddly and frustrating; with Alexa Plus, the assistant gets more proactive. It can now take ingredients from recipes and add them to a shopping list, let you use natural language to add additional items, and arrange to have them delivered to you (with Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh as well as “several other grocery providers.”)
Alexa can also come up with recipes based on ingredients you tell it you have on hand and suggest substitutions for items you’re out of. The kitchen is one of the most useful places for hands-free voice control, and if this works well, I can see it being very helpful. I’m most excited about the new timer feature, which takes all the time-based steps in the recipe — such as whisk for two minutes or bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes — and automatically sets them for you to kick off when you’re ready.
Aaron Rubenson of Amazon told me that thanks to Alexa’s improved natural language skills, it interfaces better with smart kitchen appliances. So, instead of having to use specific nomenclature to get it to preheat my Thermador oven, it should respond to any command that implies I want my oven on. For example, “Alexa, can you set the oven to the right temperature for this recipe?”
I’ve used Alexa for close to a decade now, and while it has its uses, it’s never felt indispensable. This is largely because of how tricky it is to talk to correctly. I’ve had to learn Alexa-speak to get it to do anything reliably, often making it more frustrating than useful. If the new Alexa can work as well in my home as it did in the demos I saw this week, this will be a major shift in home automation.
Alexa Plus pricing and availability
Amazon Alexa Plus costs $19.99 a month and is included in Prime membership. It will be available via an early access program in late March, in the US only, to customers with an Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21.
It’s also accessible in a new Alexa app and at Alexa.com. Amazon says it will come to other Echo devices, including Echo Buds and Echo Frames, and will be compatible with Fire TVs and Fire tablets.
OpenAI is launching GPT-4.5 today, its newest and largest model. GPT-4.5 will be available as a research preview, and OpenAI is calling it the company’s “largest and most knowledgeable model yet,” but warning that it’s not a frontier model and might not perform as well as o1 or o3-mini.
GPT-4.5 will have better writing capabilities, improved world knowledge, and what OpenAI calls a “refined personality over previous models,” but it won’t introduce enough new capabilities to be considered a frontier model. “GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM, improving on GPT-4’s computational efficiency by more than 10x,” OpenAI says OpenAI says in a document that leaked ahead of its announcement. “It does not introduce 7 net-new frontier capabilities compared to previous reasoning releases, and its performance is below that of o1, o3-mini, and deep research on most preparedness evaluations.”
It was previously reported that OpenAI was using its o1 reasoning model, code named Strawberry, to train GPT-4.5 with synthetic data. OpenAI says it has trained GPT-4.5 “using new supervision techniques combined with traditional methods like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), similar to those used for GPT-4o.”
Despite some of its limitations, GPT-4.5 hallucinates a lot less than GPT-4o, according to OpenAI, and slightly less than its o1 model. Leaks earlier this week suggested GPT-4.5 will be limited to ChatGPT Pro users, much like how Operator was released. OpenAI is about to hold a stream where it will share more information on how GPT-4.5 will be released.
I revealed in Notepad last week that OpenAI was planning to launch GPT-4.5 by the end of February, and GPT-5 as soon as late May. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has referred to GPT-5 as a “system that integrates a lot of our technology,” and it will include OpenAI’s new o3 reasoning model, which the company teased during its 12 days of Christmas announcements in December.
While OpenAI released o3-mini last month, OpenAI is only shipping o3 as part of its upcoming GPT-5 system. This aligns with OpenAI’s goal to combine its large language models to eventually create a more capable model that could be labeled as artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
TikTok is preparing to sunset its creator marketplace in favor of a new, more expanded experience, the company has informed businesses and creators via email. The online platform, which connects brands with creators for collaborating on ads and other sponsorships, will stop allowing creator invitations or the creation of new campaigns as of Saturday the […]
Figure is planning to bring its humanoids into the home sooner than expected. CEO Brett Adcock confirmed on Thursday that the Bay Area robotics startup will begin “alpha testing” its Figure 02 robot in the home setting, starting later in 2025. The executive says the accelerated timeline is a product of the company’s “generalist” Vision-Language-Action […]
Eye on CBS News: A week after the departure of Adrienne Roark to Tegna, CBS News has brought in Tom Cibrowski to lead the news organization as its president and executive editor. Reporting to Wendy McMahon, Cibrowski will oversee CBS News' newsgathering, units, and shows. "Journalism and storytelling are what CBS News does the best,"...
Waze is rolling out a new update on Android and iOS which brings support for showing your navigation map and other details via the heads-up display (instrument cluster) in some vehicles.
Earlier this week Apple shipped new firmware for AirPods Max models with Lightning. Today, the company has followed that up by releasing a beta version of new firmware for all models. Here are the details.
Adult Swim announced that it would air the next anime from Shinichirō Watanabe, the creator of Cowboy Bebop, way back in 2023, and as of today, we finally have a release date. Lazarus is set to premiere on April 5 at midnight on Adult Swim, and will be available to stream on Max the day after.
Lazarus follows a task force of agents, also called Lazarus, who are hunting a mad scientist that developed a miracle drug called "Hapna." The drug was created to be a painkiller, but was also secretly designed to kill whoever takes it, three years after it's first taken. Lazarus are trying to find the creator of Hapna to create a vaccine that prevents the drug's negative side effects, and save the world in the process.
Based on the trailer, the series' sci-fi setting, jazzy music (provided by Bonobo, Floating Points and Kamasi Washington) and shaggy-haired protagonist Axel all recall Watanabe's previous series Cowboy Bebop, but Lazarus looks like it'll have its own charms, too. The series' action sequences are choreographed by by John Wick director Chad Stahelski and the story takes inspiration from the opioid crisis and climate change, according to a Polygon interview with Watanabe from October 2024.
Watanabe's last series Carole & Tuesday premiered on Netflix in the US in 2019 and Netflix's less-than-stellar live action remake of Cowboy Bebopcame and went in 2021. The world is more than ready for some original strength Shinichirō Watanabe anime, and now it won't have to wait much longer to get it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/lazarus-the-new-anime-from-the-creator-of-cowboy-bebop-premieres-april-5-192314801.html?src=rss
I tell Amazon’s Alexa to shut up on a near daily basis. I have almost zero interest in speaking to Gemini after our first awkward chat. The hitches, misunderstandings, and lag in any given AI “conversation” mean I’m always wasting time speaking when I could be texting instead.
But speaking to “Maya,” one of two voices from a new startup headed by the man who built Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook, is the first time I’ve been left wanting more. Like I could just talk to it, or at least play a genuinely fun game of testing its limits, like I did with Bing before Microsoft decided to tame down its unhinged persona.
I don’t have to describe it to you: you can try it, and you can listen to my first conversation yourself just below. Fair warning: I am a nerd! Confronted with a new voice assistant, I will ask it to dream up a Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventure and quiz it about small Android phones.
But here you go:
While I could absolutely still hear some chatbot nonsense coming through the cracks, I could easily interject – I asked Maya to inject “herself” into the adventure “she” was describing, and it did so without a hitch, immediately coming up with a Gnome engineer named Maya cobbling together deathtraps to protect my castle from incoming Orc invaders. Combined with the AI’s natural-sounding pauses, it felt more like a real conversation than anything I’ve had so far. Compared to my colleague Kylie Robinson’s conversation with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode last year, it feels like we’re somewhere much more compelling.
The company behind this is called Sesame, and it’s coming out of stealth today with an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Matrix Partners —- all of which were big Oculus VR investors — with Oculus co-founder and former CEO Brendan Iribe, former Ubiquity6 CTO and co-founder Ankit Kumar, and former Meta Reality Labs research engineering director Ryan Brown in charge.
And the company says it’s building AI glasses to go along with its new voice assistant, too, ones “designed to be worn all day, giving you high-quality audio and convenient access to your companion who can observe the world alongside you.” So far, it’s only sharing a few small images of what look like early prototypes:
Sesame has a mini white paper you can read on its website, describing the model and its dataset of around one million hours of “publicly available audio.” It says it plans to both open source its models, and expand from just English to over 20 languages “in the coming months.”
Is this “crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice,” as Sesame titles its blog post? Perhaps check it out and decide for yourself.
Meta has fired âroughly 20â employees who leaked âconfidential information outside the company,â according to a spokesperson.
“We tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,â Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. âWe recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.”
Meta has ramped up its efforts to find leakers due to a recent influx of stories detailing unannounced product plans and internal meetings, including a recent all-hands led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After we and other outlets reported on what Zuckerberg said during that meeting, employees were warned not to leak. In comments that were subsequently leaked, CTO Andrew Bosworth then told them that the company was âmaking progress on catching people.â
PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio from PUBG creator Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown), has shared a gameplay trailer for Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player survival game that’s launching in early access on Steam this year.
The studio previously shared that the game would be built with “machine-learning-driven terrain generation technology,” and in this new trailer, you can see some gorgeous, wooded areas on display. In the game, you’ll also have to deal with various types of weather, including pouring rain and heavy snow. The point of the game, according to a fact sheet, is to explore and survive so that you can find a weather station to call for help.
Prologue is just one of three games in the works from PlayerUnknown Productions. The “ultimate project,” dubbed Project Artemis, is going to be “a massive multiplayer sandbox experience” that builds on the technology featured in Prologue and a tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World, that’s available on Steam.
Sony's first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR's biggest hits. The PlayStation 5's PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort to clear unsold inventory, an attempt to revitalize the platform, or both, Sony has announced it's dropping the price of the headset significantly.
Starting in March, the main SKU of the headset will drop from $550 to $400 in the US. Europe, the UK, and Japan will also see price cuts to 550 euros, 400 pounds, and 66,980 yen, respectively, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog. Strangely, the bundle that includes the game Horizon: Call of the Mountain (originally $600) will also drop to the same exact price. That's welcome, but it's also a little bit difficult not to interpret that as a sign that this is an attempt to empty inventory more than anything else.
The headset launched in early 2023 but has suffered from weak software support ever since—a far cry from the first PSVR, which had one of the strongest libraries of its time. It didn't help that unlike the regular PlayStation 5, the PSVR2 was not backward-compatible with games released for its predecessor.
