Tech Ops Labs

In a new paper, Google DeepMind researchers reveal just how AI can persuade us, what mechanisms enable it to do so, and explore its dangers. https://bit.ly/44lyxi2

Escape from Tarkov defined the extraction shooter genre, but its top spot is in jeopardy due to blunders and rivals like Gray Zone Warfare. https://bit.ly/44u0YdS

Dynabook Americas announced the refresh of its Satellite Pro C Series laptops, aimed at delivering enhanced performance and durability. https://bit.ly/3y9wzFi

Sui, the Layer 1 blockchain and smart contract platform initiated by Mysten Labs, has announced a collaboration with Google Cloud. https://bit.ly/4a1kYWm

Amazon reports that its Fallout Prime series has reached 65 million viewers since it launched two weeks ago. https://bit.ly/4aXq1Ir

Jackbox Games announced its next title during today's ID@Xbox showcase, and it's targeting a more specific audience. https://bit.ly/44kB5gk

Microsoft CISO talks about the potential of generative AI to shift the cybersecurity balance during the Atlanta stop of the AI Impact Tour. https://bit.ly/3Qq7P1X

Fortanix launches Key Insight, a new product designed to enhance cryptographic security management across multi-cloud environments, addressing data exposure risks and preparing enterprises for the quantum computing era. https://bit.ly/4aWCagM

Google DeepMind's Gecko benchmark reveals flaws in current text-to-image AI evaluation methods, introducing a rigorous new standard with 100,000+ human ratings. https://bit.ly/44seFtF

Web3 game startup GFAL has raised $3.2 million in a seed funding round from investors including Supercell and Mitch Lasky among others. Barcelona-based GFAL has done a soft launch of its mobile game Elemental Raiders and it is steadily growing the Web3 game’s audience. The $3.2 million seed funding round adds to the $4.4 million […] https://bit.ly/4aLj6lH

A set of quick and to-the-point recipes for different approaches you can take when it comes to large language models (LLMs). https://bit.ly/3UbxXyA

Will 2024 be the year of AI in the enterprise? How much does AI actually cost? This week's carcast answers questions around AI, ML and data. https://bit.ly/4aWkaDw

Ubisoft has said that it is working on games that use Web3 technology and those games will likely launch this year. https://bit.ly/3Uh5RCf

Yoneda Labs raised $4 million from Khosla Ventures to build a foundation model for chemists to help streamline the drugmaking process. https://bit.ly/3WnZqjD

GEM Capital announced its adding three new advisors to guide its investment strategy, all CEOs from the games industry. https://bit.ly/3UyDqkC

UserTesting is going beyond basic generative AI summarization to help user experience researchers discover actual trends. https://bit.ly/4d5lBkz

Blizzard Entertainment announced that its games will return to China this summer thanks to a renewal of its publishing agreement with NetEase Games. https://bit.ly/3UdlYli

Today Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, the latest expansion for World of Warcraft Classic, launches on May 20. https://bit.ly/3TV2qRC

Ubisoft released a story trailer for Star Wars Outlaw today and revealed an August 30 release date. https://bit.ly/3vSrf8A

USC Games announced that its annual Games Expo is returning to campus on May 7. It will feature over 60 student-made games. https://bit.ly/4asBCz1

Story Kitchen, a game adaptation company, has partnered with Black Salt Games to adapt the video game Dredge into a live-action feature film. https://bit.ly/43PdcgP

Basemark, a designer of automotive augmented reality software, announced it has raised $23.9 million (€22M euros) to make driving safer with augmented reality. With an advanced AI-based computer vision system that enables the rapid development of automotive AR experiences, Helsinki, Finland-based Basemark is setting its sights on OEMs in Europe, East Asian markets, and the […] https://bit.ly/3VP4oW8

Xbox president Sarah Bond allegedly disclosed the formation of an internal game preservation team at the games company. https://bit.ly/3PWOfKx

Disney has promoted and hired new game industry veterans that show it's getting more serious about games. It has promoted Sean Shoptaw to EVP. https://bit.ly/43QaOWV

The U.S. Department of Commerce announced it will provide $6.6 billion in direct funding to chip maker TSMC to build chip factories in Arizona. https://bit.ly/3VQNh6l

Pocket Worlds announced it's collaborating with Rainbow to bring Winx Club outfits to the Highrise and Everskies platform. https://bit.ly/3TY0wQi

Quintar has gained a new investment as part of an $8.2 million funding round for its spatial XR platform. https://bit.ly/49sRMqP

How can data scientists, AI engineers and cybersecurity professionals ensure their AI system is secure during development and avoid backlash? https://bit.ly/3vLQNnV

AI companies and government bodies should not be in charge of AI — we, the people, should govern the groundbreaking technology. https://bit.ly/3vwb5Ss

Stellar Blade's Eve is stirring quite the debate online with her design, but GamesBeat's Rachel Kaser still finds it too safe. https://bit.ly/49swwlc

Gretel releases world's largest open source Text-to-SQL dataset, empowering enterprises to harness AI's potential with high-quality synthetic data while balancing privacy and accessibility. https://bit.ly/3U6jUM4

Microsoft's Azure AI Search is now more affordable thanks to increased data capacity and adds retrieval system support for OpenAI apps. https://bit.ly/3VItsy7

We're pleased to announced that the top leaders of Scopely will talk at the GamesBeat Summit 2024 event about the enormous success of Monopoly Go. https://bit.ly/3PPDHwT

Today, a web3 social simulation game, raised $5M in seed funding to further develop its gen AI-powered NPCs and no-code creator tools. https://bit.ly/3QdVH4j

DataStax acquires Langflow, an open-source platform for building retrieval-augmented generation applications, to accelerate enterprise adoption of generative AI and simplify AI app development. https://bit.ly/4ay4t4K

Hercules AI's debuts an "assembly line" approach to building and deploying AI agents for the enterprise in regulated industries. https://bit.ly/49onaGT

A survey by Writer reveals CIOs overwhelmingly believe gen AI will be a key enabler for business growth and that the technology is not a fad. https://bit.ly/43LtTJQ

Pixelynx, maker of the Korus immersive and gamified music platform, said Korus will be integrated with the Vipe avatar market. https://bit.ly/3VLXcdf

A new report reveals that Perplexity's AI search engine yields referral traffic and relevant results just as good as Google's. https://bit.ly/4aAxdKJ

Assembly AI claims its new Universal-1 speech recognition model beats OpenAI's Whisper Large-3 and other AI providers in accuracy and latency. https://bit.ly/3TKBHXV

Meta's chatbot also seems to dislike platonic mixed-race friends, reinforces stereotypes and reflects biases around age in relationships. https://bit.ly/43OcrEO

Voldex has acquired one of Roblox's top-grossing sports games, Ultimate Football, with the co-creators joining the developer. https://bit.ly/3TZML4y

Amazon Web Services makes the Mistral Large model public on Amazon Bedrock, giving developers an advanced LLM from which to build gen AI apps. https://bit.ly/43GV88z

Chipotle Mexican Grill announced today a new interactive game, Burrito Vault, that will give away 100,000 Buy-One-Get-One free entrée codes. https://bit.ly/3J4THXY

Microsoft unveils major expansion of Priva privacy suite with 5 new AI-powered products for automated data privacy compliance, tackling challenges like consent management and risk assessment in the AI era. https://bit.ly/4aBbxgU

Liftoff's latest ad report suggests that playable ads and minigames offer some of the biggest draw for gaming ads. https://bit.ly/3PNgE5T

Fitness technology company Form is launching its second-generation smart swimming goggles for $250. https://bit.ly/4cHJAWI

Laton Ventures, a new gaming venture capital fund, is launching today with $35 million in money to invest in game companies. https://bit.ly/43KJEkw

Apple researchers develop AI system that understands screen references and context, enabling more natural voice assistant interactions. https://bit.ly/3TD6zcN

Nidhi Chappell, VP of Azure Generative AI and HPC Platform Microsoft, spoke about Microsoft’s partnership with both OpenAI and Nvidia. https://bit.ly/3xj0TNz

Hiroki Totoki is taking over today as interim chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment, filling the role of former head Jim Ryan. https://bit.ly/3vzHLdA

A16z opened applications for the latest Speedrun tech and games accelerator class -- the third such class for the $75 million accelerator. https://bit.ly/3U05sFt