I'm pretty staunchly opposed to the use of generative AI—for me, it's the one-two punch of dubiously sourced datasets and the argument that these models can replace the human creatives they so often rip off. That said, even I'm a little bit intrigued by AI's application in cybersecurity.

Case in point, Microsoft recently shared that it is deploying AI to "identify [issues] faster, prioritize risk, and scale vulnerability discovery across the Windows codebase" as well as "reduce the time between discovery and customer protection." Specifically, Microsoft Security leverages a multi-model agentic scanning harness—or MDASH, for short.

MDASH uses multiple different AI models, including "leading third-party AI vulnerability discovery models," on dedicated Cloud infrastructure to scan for vulnerabilities within Windows.

The executive vice president of Windows + Devices, Pavan Davuluri, explains, "A scanner pipeline scans critical binaries and validates candidates using multi-model debate across multiple model families. Confirmed candidates then flow to a separate, Windows-specific prove pipeline that helps eliminate remaining false positives, so only the highest-confidence findings reach the engineering team."

Multiple times, the emphasis is placed on the use of AI tools "to reduce the time from discovery to protection," whereas 'human expertise' is still what handles key security decisions and fixes.

Davuluri goes on to add, "As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release. This is evidence that defenders are getting better at identifying and addressing issues. Our focus is to effectively utilize these AI tools to support faster protection, stronger engineering systems and more actionable guidance for customers."

Microsoft is far from the only company leveraging AI, with Firefox's CTO raving about Claude Mythos' bug-hunting capabilities after it found 271 vulnerabilities in the browser earlier this year. Last year, we also saw an AI hold the top spot in a leaderboard that ranks people who hunt for system vulnerabilities.

Obviously, I'm still not thrilled by the fact that these cybersecurity applications are necessitated by threat actors increasingly using AI in their attacks. For example, one AI-assisted hacking group hit targets with a complicated 'social engineering' scam involving deepfaked CEOs, spoofed Zoom calls, and a malicious troubleshooting program.

That said, both LLMs and AI agents can also be manipulated themselves, with security researchers finding that both bad maths and even poetry can be leveraged to get around AI models' safety guard rails. With all sides leveraging machine learning to some degree, it's hard not to feel like it's a bit of a race to the bottom—or wonder which side will win out.

While I'm still side-eyeing and tentatively approaching AI for use for things like ideation, the world around me is breezing on by, putting it to use in every which way you can imagine. Some ways weird, some wonderful, and some probably incredibly wasteful. What's not wasteful, to my eyes, is putting it to the task of 3D printing housing for mainboards, which it can apparently do very well.

David Soria Parra, a member of technical staff at Anthropic, has used Claude Fable to successfully design a three-tray rack for three 13-inch Framework mainboards. The mainboards are the actual processor-clad circuit boards inside Framework laptops that you can either buy separately or tear out of one of the built laptops. Presumably three of them will be used for a multi-PC setup, or a server, or something like that.

Parra was working on the project since at least early June, having the AI use Fusion 360, AKA Autodesk Fusion, via an "MCP server", which is a way to let an LLM communicate with it (safely).

Apparently it researched the dimensions and so on, and then came up with a design. Parra said it was "straight from Claude to printing", although the finished product, Parra says, took 2–3 iterations with the model:

"I connected the fusion 360 MCP server and used Claude Code with dynamic workflows. Claude created the Fusion file and the stl for every component. So it was print ready. It also got me the bill of material to buy."

The recent final picture shows three Framework mainboards sitting in the 3D printed frame. The LLM even made sure there's a cutout for the heatsink and room for the heat pipe.

I suppose how well it works in practice, ie, how high temperatures get, will be the main question. Still, for the AI-tentative and completely design-inept like myself, this is the kind of thing that catches my eye. A cool project, for sure. Now just hand me one of those Framework mainboards given you seem to have so many spare.

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of social media is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can now have a public feud that the rest of us have to witness. Case in point, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk are having a tiff on X, and it's starting to get out of hand.

Responding to an X post from Elon Musk, in which the SpaceX CEO and world's richest person declared that Altman "takes scamming to a whole new level," the OpenAI chief said: "Homeboy you're the one selling public market investors on short-term space data centers."

To which Musk replied: "We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves."

"After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple's phone technology! Wow." Musk continued. "What do you plan for an encore? That's tough to beat."

The open source AI charity claim relates to the much-reported Musk vs Altman trial earlier this year, in which the former accused Altman and OpenAI of breaching a non-profit contract by pivoting into a for-profit business, with Musk alleging he had been deceived into donating $38 million earlier in the company's history.

Musk lost the trial after an advisory jury decided the statute of limitations prevented a verdict in his favour. As for the Apple claim, the company has filed a lawsuit against two former employees who now work for OpenAI, alleging theft of intellectual property.

Apple claims that one of its former staff members "surreptitiously accessed and downloaded dozens of Apple’s confidential hardware-related files, including voluminous, detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data," before using that info to help OpenAI, among other complaints.

As you would imagine, the replies to Musk and Altman's posts regarding these issues are full of cheerleaders for either side, along with various other allegations against both tech chiefs. Because it's the internet. And civilised debate is apparently a rare thing.

As is, I don't know, arguing in private? Reading these posts is a bit like stumbling into a WhatsApp group you weren't supposed to join. Both seem to have withdrawn from the internet slappyfight for now, hopefully because someone from their respective legal teams has told them it might not be the best idea.

Or perhaps a second round is in the works, who can guess? Still, there's little love lost between the two, and a whole lot of drama playing out on a very public stage. Anyone got any popcorn?

It was still a ways off, but I'd kind of latched on to '2028' being the end in sight of the raging memory supply crisis. However, SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung reckons we should only be so lucky.

"We forecast that ‌next year will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective," Kwak recently told Reuters. Not only is 2027 apparently set to be even worse, but Kwak also predicts the situation won't improve for years beyond the 2028 date I'd been holding on to, when SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung are all set to complete capacity expanding builds.

"Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations," Kwak said, "We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030. But we are doing our best to solve the problem."

The company also began trading on Nasdaq last Friday, with a US megalisting of shares that was seven times oversubscribed. SK hynix said then that it wants to use the resulting capital for at least two more construction projects in South Korea: a fabrication hub in Yongin, as well as an advanced packaging facility in Cheongju.

Kwak also said that the company is considering a number of other global sites for future wafer ⁠fabrication investment. He said, "The ​US, Japan, and Southeast Asia are all under consideration. Nothing has been decided yet. We are evaluating which location can provide the greatest business advantage."

The tech stock market is still incredibly volatile though; while SK hynix shares were up 13.3% at $168.85 on the Nasdaq Friday afternoon, the company's shares then plunged by 15% in Seoul on Monday. According to Reuters, this marks the company's biggest one-day decline in nearly 20 years. As for the company's US-listed shares come Monday morning, those dipped by 9.2% to $152.50.

What explains that dip? For one thing, analysts say that South Korea's recent multi-billion dollar investments in the AI chip industry, plus all of those other capacity-expanding builds I mentioned earlier, has heightened investor anxiety that tight memory supply may tip over into oversupply in the coming years. Jing Jie Yu, an equity analyst at Morningstar, said, "Our base case here is the fresh capacity in 2027 and 2028 coming up in earnest will improve supply dynamics, thereby leading to price erosion."

Furthermore, the AI bubble is arguably looking a bit strained. Morningstar's director, Lorraine Tan, said, "Despite accelerating artificial intelligence adoption, monetisation remains uncertain and profitability for key players, such as OpenAI, appears to be under pressure. Funding is also shifting toward debt or equity, raising concerns about the maintainability of current spending levels."

In other words, yes, the industry is hoovering up all the memory, but if AI spending fails to see a sensible return on that investment, or data centre build out calms down, the bubble may burst and there will be much less demand for all of that silicon.

If you ask Microsoft Copilot if it's a web app, it answers in the negative. Technically, as the AI points out, Copilot now interfaces with you through an Edge-based web app installed on your Windows 11 PC, but the model lives elsewhere in the cloud.

And said Copilot app is getting a helpful new feature, according to Windows Latest, referred to as PC Insights. This will allow it to connect to Windows APIs and analyse your system hardware, answering questions like "what is my current CPU usage" and helping you find what might be slowing down your PC.

Other example prompts found by Windows Latest include "Do I have enough space for a 100 GB game," "What graphics card do I have," and "Is my antivirus running?"

The feature is said to be currently rolling out to Copilot US users, and sounds rather useful, even if it can't directly fix PC performance problems by itself. Unfortunately, the web app can be something of a RAM hog, which raises the possibility that Copilot itself may be contributing to your dog-slow PC performance on a RAM-limited machine.

Windows Latest recorded 791.7 MB of RAM usage from the Copilot app at idle, suggesting it can reach up to 1 GB of system RAM usage in total. I've left the Copilot app open in the background as I write this article, and it's currently sitting at around 560 MB—making it the third most RAM-heavy application currently running on my PC.

That might not sound like a big deal, but anyone using Copilot to help find resource-sapping applications running in the background may find it's the app itself that's taking the biggest chunk of precious RAM space. And it's not like we're living in a world where extra system RAM is cheap and easy to obtain.

It's not the only RAM-sapping offender I have to bat away on a regular basis, either. The WhatsApp, err... app is also a web-based affair these days, and regularly carves out 1 GB+ chunks of my system resources. Which seems a bit rich, given the previous, non-web app implementation barely used any RAM capacity at all.

Although Microsoft has committed to making Windows 11 leaner and meaner in response to user critique in recent months, it still feels like a bloated OS in comparison to... well, almost any other operating system you can think of.

And while I welcome the idea that Copilot will soon be able to help less-computer-minded users track down potential system problems, it seems like one of the most useful things it could do to improve performance would be to shut itself down entirely. Which is... not the greatest state of affairs, let's be honest.

Data centres require a lot of energy to run. It's why it's so frustrating to hear AI's major players attempt to play a game of misdirection by making claims along the lines of a single LLM prompt requiring but a fourteenth of a cup of tea. Worse still, as big tech continues to build out its AI infrastructure, data centres' power demands are only set to increase.

Worldwide data centre electricity consumption is expected to rise from 447 terawatt-hours in 2025, to 565 terawatt-hours in 2026. That will mark a 26% year-over-year increase, according to Gartner's latest forecast.

Data centres' power demand globally is expected to rise 27% this year, peaking at a predicted total of 132 gigawatts. That's up from 2025's 104 GW total, with analysts expecting to see power demand continue to rise—according to Gartner, data centre demand may cross the 290 GW mark by 2030.

Gartner's Director Analyst, Linglan Wang, explains, "Surging demand for compute-intensive AI workloads is driving unprecedented data center power growth, while AI capacity is now constrained by power availability, making data center power security the new battle ground for scaling and protecting margins in the global AI race."

Gartner estimates that AI-optimized server adoption will account for 31% of data centre power consumption this year, having grown by 84.2%. By 2027, the power demands of AI servers is expected to grow by 47.8%, surpassing that of 'conventional servers.' Comparatively, the power demands of the 'conventional server' segment grew by about 1.2% in 2026, and is on a trajectory to grow by 2.4% in 2027.

Given that recent analysis of Google's latest environmental report suggests the company's energy consumption is on a trend of exponential growth, an upward trend across the industry is unsurprising. It's also perhaps worth noting that not all of Google's energy comes from renewable sources, and that the total electricity consumption for this one company last year was 43 TWh. That's almost 10% of Gartner's global numbers.

Add to that a reported 80% of the world's data centres have been built in less than optimal climates, having to compensate with a whole lot of temperature control systems, and environmentally, things start to look all the bleaker for the climate conscious. In fact, Gartner lists the power consumption of the 'Cooling and other Infrastructure' data centre segment as having grown by 22.6% in 2026.

Not only that, but increased demand from data centres will likely tax local power infrastructure—not to mention any of the other reasons why data centres make especially poor neighbours.

AI slop. If you've heard the term, there's a good chance you are similarly exasperated with the onslaught of low-quality, AI-generated… well, slop. One team is now charging up to $10,000 per project to try and cut down AI-generated slop code and is, rather ironically, using AI to do it.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, the team is called Slopfix, and their aim is to cut down unnecessary AI-generated code by a certain amount, taking a percentage of the $10,000 fee depending on how much of the target they hit. The example given on their website is to cut down 100,000 lines to 35,000. This means, if they remove 65,000 lines, they would claim $10,000. If, however, they managed to cut it down by 32,500 lines, they would instead get $5,000.

The tool they use? Claude Code. But the team says they keep it "on a very short leash". The team of three claims to have "thirty years of combined experience about what maintainable code looks like" and says "the agent doesn't get a vote."

One of the biggest problems with vibe coding is not the eventual output, but that building on that codebase can be unstable. AI agents tend to produce the favoured output, but can't 'think' about the next steps, so AI code is often filled with duplications and inefficiencies, hence "AI slop".

This is a pretty common problem right now. Just a few months ago, the team behind a popular PS3 emulator asked users to stop "submitting AI slop code", and open-source game engine Godot was drowning in AI slop code at the start of the year. Just last month, Godot stopped accepting AI-generated code contributions as it couldn't "trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it".

Cleaning up AI code doesn't fix problems with users not understanding their output, but it could make it easier for AI agents to build on. Whether or not clients will want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a different team to use the same tools as them to clean up their codebase is anyone's guess, though. I, for one, am sceptical of whether or not the Slopfix website is human-made, and the text on the site doesn't give me the greatest confidence.

Still, one question sits in my mind. If those prompting AI-generated code are paying AI agents to fix up its mistakes, who makes sure that those AI agents are acting efficiently? And if the three engineers behind Slopfix are manually going through the code, what's the point of the coding bots in the first place?

A cybersecurity firm associated with the Chinese government reportedly has concerns about Anthropic's Claude AI models and has warned users against trusting it, at least before updating to the latest version.

As reported by Reuters, the Chinese National Vulnerability Database (NVDB) claims that recent Claude Code versions have a monitoring mechanism that transmits sensitive information to remote servers without consent from the user. This allegedly includes geographic location data and user-identifying information. This was all posted via the agency's official WeChat account, according to the outlet.

It reportedly affects users on version 2.1.91 and goes up to version 2.1.196. 2.1.196 was eventually replaced by 2.1.200 on July 3. The NVDB encourages users to either uninstall if they use the impacted version, or simply update.

As well as this, the NVDB has taken this opportunity to urge users to tighten controls and strengthen monitoring techniques for the data they allow Claude Code access to. I have reached out to Anthropic for comment on this story, but have not yet received a response.

This is not the first time that Anthropic's coding tool has drawn ire in China this month. Last week, Alibaba reportedly banned its employees from using Claude at work due to fears that it could identify Chinese users with information fed to it.

Anthropic's story with Alibaba goes deeper than this, with the Claude creator accusing Alibaba of training its AI models on Anthropic's work. Anthropic claims that Alibaba, between the end of April and the start of June, generated over 28 million exchanges with Claude through close to 25,000 fraudulent accounts to harvest information.

Interestingly, Anthropic has been blocking access to Chinese companies for some time, and those companies have been reportedly getting around this restriction through overseas subsidiaries and even plain old VPNs. Anthropic is, according to the Financial Times, looking to crack down on these workarounds in the future.

The relationship between Anthropic and China seems pretty strained right now, and it seems likely that Chinese agencies are looking to swap to homegrown AI models sooner rather than later.

A data centre is usually where the so-called magic of any larger scale AI workload actually happens. In order to fulfill its AI ambitions, big tech has overseen a rapid infrastructure build out. Resource-intensive and often loud, they make for exceptionally poor neighbours.

Wisconsin residents filed a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft on Wednesday, alleging that the company's Fairwater data centre situated in Mount Pleasant emits "unreasonable and excessive noise onto Plaintiffs’ properties." The suit is seeking an unspecified amount in damages. The filing alleges that the source of the noise pollution is "diesel generators and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, including chillers, cooling towers, air-handling units, and condenser fans" (via Law360).

Speaking of class, the filing defines this as "All owner-occupants and renters of residential property residing within one and one-half (1.5) miles of Defendant’s Data Center at any time within the applicable statute of limitations." Reportedly, that could end up including more than 1,000 homes.

It's also alleged that this industrial noise can see the community facing levels between 48 to 60 decibels. However, the residents also allege the data centre creates a 'low hum' of infrasound that is not easily measured by the A-weighted decibel scale, and therefore is not subject to most municipal noise ordinances. One plaintiff claims they had to change their work schedule as "the constant noise [affected] his sleep."

As for Microsoft, the company committed $7 billion to the construction of Fairwater in the hopes it would become the 'the world’s most powerful AI data center'. Microsoft has been aware of some of its sound issues since at least April this year. It said in a blog post at the time that it was investigating the cause and that, "Microsoft prides itself on being a good neighbor in the communities where we operate."

On June 18, the company claimed to have put a number of noise mitigations in place, writing, "Several neighbors confirmed what our independent monitoring showed: that these mitigations fully resolved the issue."

However, the class-action lawsuit was then filed July 1, implying these mitigations may not have pleased all parties affected. The filing alleges, "Defendant has failed to follow proper industrial practices to prevent the offsite emission of noise, and has failed to absorb, capture, mitigate, and/or prevent noise from escaping its Data Center, thereby invading the homes and properties of Plaintiffs and the Class."

As of a few days ago, Anthropic deployed its Claude Fable 5 AI model after the US temporarily restricted access. Now it has already been used to port the 2003 video game Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour to iOS. It seemingly needed the source code, previous ports, and some human tweaking to get running.

This is according to the lead of product and design at Google AI Studio, Ammaar Reshi, who announced the port on X on July 4. Reshi says this specific port "had a chain of giants to stand on" because it used previous port efforts and modernisations. It is a direct fork of The Super Hackers' Linux and macOS build of the game.

What is unique about this specific port is that it gets the game running on iOS specifically, and even comes with unique touch controls like tap to select, drag to create boxes, and long press to deselect. Even though it uses plenty of work by other teams, it seems like an impressive effort in itself.

If you're looking to play the game for yourself on iPhone or iPad, you can do so with the GitHub page now. You will need your own copy of the game, though. Notably, it runs in the real engine and runs natively on Apple devices, so it's not a glorified emulator.

Reshi talks about the porting process on GitHub. He argues that this is a human + AI collaboration, and not simply someone pointing an AI model at something and saying 'go'. He says the code and debugging were done by Claude, but the playtesting was human. Reshi described problems like 'the minimap is black' and 'I hear chirping,' and the model would fix them. Reshi says, "Neither half ships this alone: one of us can't write C++, and the other can't hear the chirping."

So how replicable is this for other games? As of right now, we don't know. Reshi seems sceptical of being able to port Red Alert 2, as EA appears to have lost the source code for that game, so that's already a pretty big hurdle to jump over. Even if companies manage to find their source code, many won't willingly give it up to vibe coders to create ports, especially if that makes it less likely that gamers will buy future remasters or remakes.

And that's before mentioning that AI models can scrape any information fed to them, and some game developers may not want to give that information away for free.

Reshi also claims to have fully exhausted a Claude Max sub in just 2 days, which means this project seems to have cost somewhere between $100 and $200 in tokens alone. And it seems like Fable 5 is the only model Reshi thinks can do the work. He reportedly tried it with Opus 4.8 and, even using Ultra Code, it couldn't do the task. Perhaps tellingly, they made no mention of whether it had even been attempted on Google's own AI vibe coding platform.

So if you have a few hundred burning a hole in your pocket, the source code for a game, and previous porting efforts to look at, it might only take a weekend to get the game running on your iPad. Simple, ey?

As spotted by Japan's IT Media News, a paper presented at Purdue University's MFS Cultural AI Conference called AI Fiction in the Wild performed a fascinating study of half a million anonymous English-language ChatGPT-user conversations using WildChat, and found some real oddities. Well, one in particular.

The study's purpose was to analyze the significant number of AI prompts that boil down to variations on "write me some fanfic." Which there sure is a lot of. "More than a third of the conversations contained some form of fiction generation," the researchers said, "including original stories, scripts, roleplay, worldbuilding, fanfiction, and erotica."

The study defined two separate varieties of AI-fiction prompters, which they call story cyclers and infinite story demanders: "Story cyclers ask for iterations of the same story for a period of time, then switch to another story or topic. Infinite story demanders request the same story, or a very similar one, over and over again for long stretches of time."

The most prolific of those infinite story demanders had an extremely specific interest. Over several months, one user generated thousands of variations on a story where one of the girls of visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club, usually Natsuki, gave birth, usually to a daughter named Sakura. "Sakura may be a reference to a character from the Naruto manga and anime series", the researchers helpfully noted.

If you've played Doki Doki Literature Club you may be thinking it's an ironic choice for AI-generated fiction, but if you haven't I won't spoil why. But I will say you can get it for free on Steam and itch and only takes about five hours to experience.

Our friend wasn't the only power user in the dataset: "Two percent of users within the fiction subset are responsible for more than 80% of the conversations." While the user with the pregnancy fixation certainly skewed the numbers, the most popular fictional universes people requested fanfic of were Doki Doki Literature Club, League of Legends, Freedom Planet, and Naruto.

That data, by the way, came from WildChat, a ChatGPT interface hosted on Hugging Face that people could use for free with the understanding their conversations would be publicly available, though anonymized, for academic research. The first release of that data, collected between April 2023 and May 2024, contained over 500,000 English-language conversations for researchers to delve through.

Part of what's interesting about the AI fanfic dataset is how different it is to what's being posted on the A03 repository, where stories based on Harry Potter, My Hero Academia, and Supernatural were much more common during the same period. With fanfic written by actual humans, writers encourage each other and are encouraged by their readers, who follow them to other fandoms and discover new things to love. It's communal, while generating fiction with an AI is a much more solipsistic idea.

Normally, fanfic is a space for people to share their love of stories, but the AI-generated version is inherently isolated and masturbatory by comparison. Even when it's not about imagining pregnant teenagers.

I like handheld gaming PCs. Note that I've carefully used the word "like," rather than love. In all honesty, I wish they were faster. Or more portable. Concessions need to be made if you want to play demanding games on the go, it's true. But, in recent months, it's the price that's really put the tin lid on the whole handheld gaming affair for me.

The Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS, a handheld we fell in love with last year at its $830 MSRP, is now listed for $1,332. Or how about the MSI Claw 8 AI+, a mega handheld I personally gave a 90% score to (while admitting it was rather expensive) at $900? Now you'll be lucky to find one for under $1,200. Its recently-announced, Panther Lake-powered successor? That'll rack you up $1,799 at pre-order prices.

I know, I know. It's another article from me complaining about pricing, and I realise I probably sound like a stuck record. But I cannot think of a PC gaming hardware category more screwed by the memory crisis than the handheld market right now. I update our handheld gaming PC deals every week, and recently I had to make an admission:

The Asus ROG Ally Xbox X, a machine we rightly criticised for having a "super-high price tag" on its release just eight months ago, is now what I'd call the best value proposition on the market. For one thousand smackeroonies. A cool grand. Serious cash.

That's the price of a budget, yet soul-affirming, weeklong beachside holiday for two. And yet, if I were to recommend you buy any gaming handheld under today's ridiculous pricing conditions, it'd be this one.

It's properly fast, for a start. With an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU furnished with RDNA 3.5 graphics tech and 24 GB of LPDDR5x-8000, it's got a specs sheet that allows it to monster pretty much every other handheld we've ever tested.

You get a 1 TB SSD as well, which should allow room for plenty of modern games. There's also the ROG Xbox Ally (non-X) to consider at $600, but the Ryzen Z2 A chip at its core feels a little underpowered—although it's still worth some thought at that price.

Compare and contrast either with the Steam Deck OLED, which now runs you $949 for the 1 TB model. Sure, it's got a nicer screen. But the now-aging internals simply don't make any sense for this sort of money. A bit like the Steam Machine, now I come to think of it—although I digress.

Plus, the ROG Xbox Ally X's Windows Xbox full screen experience (what a horrible mash-up of terms) is pretty darn good. It's no SteamOS, but it's nevertheless a pretty seamless way of interacting with the system via the medium of thumbsticks. And Steam's Big Picture Mode is still an option for sorting through your games library, of course.

It's quiet, comfortable, and—again I can't believe I'm saying this—reasonably priced given what you receive compared to the competition. Somehow, the Xbox handheld has managed to place itself within the market at the right price, at almost the right time.

Which makes me wonder how much longer it'll be before that MSRP jumps. Given the state of *gestures wildly* everything else in the consumer electronics industry right now, I'd imagine that within the next few months, this column will become defunct.

I'm kind of astonished that the ROG Xbox Ally X is still sitting at its $1,000 MSRP as we speak, and something deep in my bones tells me that won't be the case for much longer.

This isn't a call to action, I should stress. Honestly, if I was curious about buying a gaming handheld right now and already owned a PC, I would probably save my money instead.

But if you're dead set on buying a portable gaming machine to shove in your shoulder bag for your next flight, this is the one that makes the most sense in the current market.

And that's a wild state of affairs. With reports indicating that the memory crisis, and the associated tech price increases will continue (and likely worsen) throughout 2027, and possibly 2028 as well, I genuinely can't fathom what sort of price/performance metrics I'll be using to write handheld reviews over the next couple of years.

How do I score what are essentially hobbyist devices, pleasurable adult frivolities, when they all command such eye-popping amounts of cash? How do I square any real concept of "value" with devices that I know damn well would cost much, much less, if it wasn't for AI holding us all over a barrel?

Gaming is already an expensive hobby. Even more so when you want handheld convenience combined with high performance. But pricing seems to be rising at such a rapid rate, I wonder whether handhelds will survive as anything other than boutique devices for the very well-heeled.

They're very difficult to wholeheartedly recommend in 2026, I'll tell you that much for free.

Just imagine you're Meta. You've spent millions of dollars on new servers that only use DDR5 sticks, only to find that you still don't have enough memory. The solution? Yoink the DDR4 modules out of the old servers and, through the power of a custom chip, splice the two systems together to go ham with RAM.

Even if you only have a little bit of knowledge about how CPUs and memory work together, you'll probably know that this shouldn't be possible. But as TechSpot reports, it can be done: you just need something to translate the DDR5-talk from the CPU to DDR4-lingo that the old memory sticks can understand.

Bridging the gap between the AMD Zen 5-powered Epyc processors and the last-gen memory tech is something called a Compute Express Link (CXL), with Meta's custom chip named Vistara. This manages the bundle of DDR4 sticks as a separate pool of memory, albeit one that's much slower than the main pool of DDR5.

You can read more about the specifics of how it all works in Meta's research paper (PDF warning) for Vistara and its so-called MemServers, but you can just think of it as being like a PCIe expansion card that hosts a big pile of DRAM. Because of the various latencies and lower bandwidth of DDR4, the software that operates Vistara keeps track of threads and data, using the older DRAM for 'cold storage'.

That's basically information that you want to keep nearby, rather than on an even slower SSD or HDD, as it might be needed at short notice. Data that's currently in use or might be required immediately is kept in 'hot storage', i.e. the Epyc processor's DDR5 memory.

The paper says that each MemServer node houses a 158-core AMD Epyc 9000-series chip, and it's either a custom processor (because no Epyc CPU has exactly 158 cores) or it has one or more core chiplets disabled for some reason. Anyway, the motherboard housing the processor sports 768 GB of DDR5-6400, which you'd think would be enough.

Not for Meta it isn't, hence the inclusion of 256 GB of DDR4-2400, handled by two Vistara expansion cards in PCIe 5.0 x8 slots. Together, that's a grand total of 1,024 GB or 1 TB of system memory. In other words, one MemServer should be just about okay to run Star Citizen.

Could you do the same in a gaming PC? Well, MSI's MEG X870E Godlike X Edition motherboard has two Gen5 PCIe slots connected to the CPU, so if Meta created Windows-based drivers for Vistara, you could technically jam an expansion card in there and load it up with cheaper DDR4. However, CXL isn't designed for general consumer PCs, and there isn't a desktop CPU that supports it.

But if memory prices remain sky-high for years to come, perhaps never returning to pre-2026 levels, then this could be one way to offset the enormous bill of having a decent amount of DRAM in your gaming PC. Of course, the cost of the Vistara card, a necessary motherboard, and a CXL-capable CPU would probably make it all pointless anyway.

Should DRAM prices actually fall back into the realms of common sense, and you go on the hunt for a big memory kit, just point to any tech news article from this year if anyone says "Hey, you know games don't need 96 GB of memory".

Names poached from Tolkien's works. Glossy websites, packed with animations and all kinds of promises. Slightly ludicrous tech demonstration. All the hallmarks of today's tech companies, one might think. But in the case of one nuclear power start-up, the super-slick marketing is actually a good reminder that AI's rampant hunger for energy needs can't be ignored or solved by traditional methods.

As reported by our chums over at Tom's Hardware, Valar Atomics recently hit the headlines by teaming up with Nvidia to demonstrate the first public run of its Ward 250 nuclear reactor, namely by using said device to power a DGX Spark. Not that one needs a big powerplant to run Nvidia's GB20-powered box, of course, but it's not hard to see what the implication is behind the tech demonstration.

Yes, that's right: it's a solution to the exponential rise in energy consumption by AI data centers, hence Nvidia's involvement in all of this. But let me back up for a moment and explain what's noteworthy about Valar's system.

The Ward 250 is a type of high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear microreactor (HTGR for short), which uses helium as the coolant and heat-transfer medium, rather than water, the norm for most reactors worldwide. But rather than using bulky heat exchangers to turn water into steam to drive a bunch of turbines and generators, Valar's system pushes the helium through a compact thermoelectric generator.

While HTGRs have been around for many years, they've never really caught on in the world of nuclear reactors, despite their advantages in thermal efficiency and safety, mostly due to cost reasons. Since their cores run at very high temperatures, HTGRs require more expensive construction materials than a typical PWR (pressurised water reactor), and they're more costly to scale up.

But while they're less suitable as a major provider for wholesale electricity, they're potentially ideal for powering something much smaller, such as a data center, and that's Valar Atomic's entire gist, though its operations so far have not been without criticism.

Powering a DGX Spark wasn't enough for Valar, though, and it also has a website hosted on a server that the start-up claims is also juiced by the Ward 250. If you want to check it out, click on this link, but before you do, a word of caution. Right at the bottom of the page, there's a really neat-looking demo of the reactor core in operation, and you can play around with the control rods to fire it up or slow it down.

However, the moment you jump in, your CPU's cooling fans will go brrrrr. Regardless of what browser I use, my Core Ultra 7 270K Plus processor jumps from 28 W of power consumption to around 72 W, with two P-cores merrily screaming away. Multiply that by, say, one hundred thousand website visitors, and you now have many megawatts of additional power being consumed to showcase Valar's system.

Localised microreactors are probably going to be one of the more ideal solutions to AI's power needs, but it would be prudent not to require one just for the marketing of said devices.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp was recently interviewed by CNBC, where he gave an impassioned decry that the current AI market is not working, urged other panellists to call up CEOs and test his hypothesis, and made clear that his nervous energy was not in any way related to any substance usage. Yeah, it's a strange one, alright.

Palantir is a software company all in on AI, and one of the core surveillance providers for ICE, among others. It has seen criticism for its involvement in wider government surveillance and facial recognition systems, and AI is one of the key ways it has managed to grow in this field. CEO Alex Karp spoke to CNBC after it was announced that Palantir and Nvidia would be working together on open models for use in US agencies.

In the interview, Karp argues that the current model of companies largely getting value from consumers by selling tokens is the wrong method. "Something has gone completely wrong. And the basic view among enterprises in this country is 'I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens. I'm going to get no value, and they're going to get my IP."

Effectively, he argues that the best use of AI is in closed environments, not on a per-token basis where you don't know where your data is going.

"We need to rebuild trust, and that trust is going to happen where everyone gets to ask and answer basic questions. Who owns the data, where is it cached, are the prompts secure, is this being transferred to you?"

He goes on to argue that the real value is in an AI model, plus an application layer, plus compute. Karp argues the model itself is only one step in the chain. "Let's say I could make you a billion dollars tomorrow, wouldn't I say 'I'll make you a billion dollars, and I want 30%?'" He continues, "Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

Karp argues models "have been completely irresponsibly oversold" right now, and the sell is "it's dangerous for everyone, which is why I can give it to all your adversaries, but I can't give it to the Department of War, or I can't safely give it to an enterprise in this country without being certain that the alphabet business could transfer to this model tomorrow"

Karp also talks a lot about AI's usage in warfare and how it shapes the battlefield.

"Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley? That is effing insane. And by the way, every single enterprise in this country, in private, a lot of them don't want to speak in public because it gets outsourced to the neurodivergent, crazy person that apparently is on drugs. The one thing I don't do."

Karp is told by the interviewer that he sounds pretty angry when he's speaking about this, and he responds, saying, "This is the voice of American Business that is being channelled through me. And I'm telling you it is absolutely a problem for this country."

Karp argues it's not just him who sees the problem. In the full extended interview not currently present on YouTube, he turns to the guests on the program and urges them to ring up a CEO or two and ask if they're livid about the state of AI. "They're twice as livid as me".

Be right back, just going to call up a couple of CEOs. Unfortunately, Gabe Newell has not been returning my calls, so I will have to hit up my buddy Zuckerberg instead.

As a PC gamer, you'll be all too familiar with the sky-high prices of memory and storage components. To put it most simply, these frankly eye-watering price tags are largely due to big tech's major players buying up as much DRAM and flash chips as possible in order to fuel their AI ambitions. Well, that strategy may have backfired as some are now trying to figure out what to do with an excess of compute capacity.

Meta is moving into the cloud business in order to sell off its glut of AI compute capacity, according to Bloomberg this week. The plan is in its earliest phase, with those close to the matter claiming the company is still considering its approach.

One idea reportedly being considered is to sell access to AI models already hosted on Meta's existing infrastructure, à la Amazon Web Services' Bedrock. In other words, developers would pay to access AI models like Muse Spark running from Meta's own hardware. Apparently, another plan is to skip the model middleman and simply sell Meta's 'raw' compute power.

Zuckerberg said during Meta's annual shareholder meeting back in May that moving into the cloud business was "definitely on the table." In response to an investor question, he claimed that there's already demand from other companies to "stand up an API service" or asking to buy compute from Meta "at some premium."

However, Zuckerberg then went on to clarify, "We haven't done that yet, because we think that we have a use for the compute. But obviously, if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out."

Investors are getting increasingly anxious about seeing a return on AI investments. With the company's full-year capital expenditure projections blowing past $140 billion, it's not hard to see why. Meta's shares saw a plunge back in April, so selling off compute would be one way to reassure investors.

It's worth noting Meta hasn't committed to any one plan yet, and its strategy may change significantly, but the company's share value did jump up 9.3% to $615.55 on Wednesday, which Bloomberg describes as "the biggest intraday gain since April".

Damir Tokic of Seeking Alpha argues that this may not actually be good news for Meta. First, he highlights that Meta's revenue is highly dependent on advertising across all of its platforms, and that it started building out AI infrastructure to better support this revenue stream.

He elaborates, "Meta is unlikely to continue investing in AI infrastructure with the specific aim to rent it—it likely means that Meta will need to reduce or possibly stop AI investment in datacenters, as it already has excess capacity. Further, Meta would have to increase debt to continue AI capex, and it already borrowed around 20B in 2025 and 2026, with operating cash flows dangerously decreasing."

It's also not just Meta potentially going down the route of selling compute capacity, either. SpaceX acquired Elon Musk's xAI back in February and has since started renting out its own excess compute capacity to Anthropic.

Renting out your extra capacity is all well and good, but it's a strategy that may become less viable over time if competitors start to also realise they've overinvested and the wider industry starts to even more closely resemble a snake eating its own tail. In other words, if the AI bubble hasn't yet burst, it's certainly looking strained.

As a Brit, I've been thinking a lot about the climate crisis since last month's historic heatwave. With many buildings across the UK designed to retain heat, we're simply not built for 37°C/98.6°F weather. Causes of climate change are numerous, and I know we didn't get here solely due to the advent of AI, but the steep increase in major players' energy consumption as a result definitely isn't helping.

Data analyst Ketan Joshi looked at Google’s latest environmental report and wrote about its recent trends in energy consumption. He said on BlueSky, "Two years ago [the company] flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI."

Joshi dives into more detail in a blog post, elaborating, "The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever."

Though that's pretty damning all on its own, it's not just Google that's seen such a sharp increase in its energy consumption. Over a series of graphs, Joshi compares Google's power usage to other major players such as Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and even Netflix (it's worth noting Amazon stopped disclosing its power consumption data around 2022, so Joshi can only estimate). Though all of these companies have seen an increase in power consumption to varying degrees since at least 2023, Google's uptick remains stark.

Google's power consumption even outstrips the total terawatt hours per year of a number of countries, too. Last year, the company's power demand was greater than that of Slovakia, Ecuador, Ireland, or Nigeria.

NEW BLOG FOR YOU Google's energy consumption numbers in their new climate report are mind-blowing. 2 years ago they flipped from linear to exponential growth, and their climate impact is blowing out, too. A WILD testament to the obscene bloat and waste of GenAI: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...

— @ketanjoshi.co (@ketanjoshi.co.bsky.social) 2026-07-02T20:51:13.989Z

Now, obviously, energy consumption is not synonymous with CO2 emissions, and a decent chunk of Google's power supply could be coming from renewable sources. However, Joshi's analysis suggests this may be but a drop in the bucket.

Even after various adjustments accounting for "exclusions from their supply chain and renewable energy procurement claims," Google's emission trends are heading in the opposite direction from the emissions target it set out back in 2021. This is an unsurprising trend, given that Google's 2024 environmental report revealed its greenhouse gas emissions had increased by nearly 50% in the last 5 years.

Joshi gets right to the point with his criticism, quoting Google's own environmental report as he writes, "If 'AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonising', then Google shouldn’t be building AI infrastructure. If they are breaching the boundaries of safe operation on a planet that can only take so much, they should stop and consider whether all of this is worth it."

Joshi's entire blog post is full of lovely graphs and analysis that I definitely recommend scrolling through yourself. He's previously offered a debunking of the old 'AI energy consumption is actually very efficient, and could actually help us reduce global emissions' chestnut too.

Basically, if you had the sneaking suspicion that claims about how a single AI prompt uses 'five drops' or ‘one 15th of a teaspoon’ were not meaningful metrics beyond how they attempt to obscure the environmental impact of the wider industry, you may be on to something. Joshi explains that "Text generation by a chatbot is comfortably the lowest energy form of [a] generative system," but obviously AI technologies encompass far more than that.

Joshi has previously argued it's part of a strategy of 'selective disclosure,' writing last year, "What seems like a massive step for transparency and disclosure must be seen in the context of the absence of anything before it. Coming off a baseline of disclosing nothing, the industry can now choose to carefully set the narrative around precisely what they desire and get accolades for doing so."

One consequence of the AI boom is that tons of infrastructure is needed to power and run all the massive data centres, and naturally, all that infrastructure is worth a lot of money. And it seems like cargo thieves have caught on to this fact.

As reported by Business Insider, investigators with Illinois' Cook County Sheriff's Office reportedly found a pair of trailers containing over $1.3 million worth of data center supplies in a truck yard.

The Sheriff's department apparently received a tip that over $300,000 worth of copper wire spools were stuffed away in containers, and upon investigation, the officers found significantly more supplies as a result.

That copper was reportedly stolen in Pine Hill, Alabama, and then transported away from the scene of the crime. Investigators say the yard owner claims that the owner of the truck delivered another load a week prior, and that this additional truck—from Jacksonville, Florida—had $1 million worth of product in it (it's not clear exactly what that equipment is).

It's also not yet clear how the thieves planned on selling the product, or to whom, but all of it winding up in the same place is certainly suspect. As noted by Business Insider, the US Department of Homeland Security estimates up to $35 billion in losses every year due to cargo thieves. $1.3 million is a drop in the ocean, relatively speaking, but it could signal more copper and other metal theft from data centers in the future. If there's money to be made, thieves will likely see that.

The boom in AI has increased the demand for AI hardware, but much of the machinery involved in AI data centers will be tracked and logged via serial numbers. Thieves who get their hands on fancy machines likely can't provide the paperwork necessary to satisfy a buyer, but copper and other such resources don't have the same tagging systems.

Copper cabling is a must-have for AI data centers, in order to cope with their massive electricity demands, but it's also pretty expensive compared to less effective but considerably cheaper aluminium or steel cabling. This is all to say that AI is a lucrative business, both for those making it and those stealing from those who make it.

With the confidence of a man whose name is on some of the best videogame stories out there, BioWare veteran and Dragon Age setting creator David Gaider recently told GamesRadar that generative AI is a "virulent plague" on the games industry.

Gaider, who most recently worked on "unholy roguelite deckbuilder" Malys, said that the way AI is being pushed has the effect of producing inferior work, removing entry-level opportunities for junior writers, and writes in a way that's incredibly hard to iterate on, and that's before you get into the morality of using it at all.

"Honestly, what does it help with? Does it make the work more efficient? Does it improve the work?" Gaider asked. "It wouldn't be so bad if generative AI was seen more as an assistant, doing the drudgery while leaving more important tasks for the worker, but we seem to be seeing more and more of the reverse: the AI is set to do the important work and the worker is around to 'clean up'."

The result is work that human writers have to bang into shape. "In all my time as a narrative designer I've never once encountered a situation where editing an inferior product took less time than simply throwing it out and redoing it would have or resulted in anything better than mediocre," said Gaider, and even in the situation were reversed—AI doing the menial work while humans carried on the highfalutin stuff—"we have to be very careful about not eliminating every task which is useful for training juniors. How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?"

Even then, there's the simple fact that AI has hoovered up a whole lot of human work in a lot of dubious ways. "I think the fact that generative AI is frequently trained on data regardless of whether creators or owners have agreed to have their data pillaged in this manner opens up any use of it to all sorts of future legal issues—even if one chooses to ignore the moral implications, which one really shouldn't," said Gaider. "All you'd need is one lazy developer or one temp asset that's been forgotten or was placed by someone who's since left the team and you'd have an issue on your hands.

"It's not ready for prime time. There's just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be," said Gaider, and until it's properly regulated, trained on legal data, and not foisted on teams by moneymad executives "It should be treated like the virulent plague it is."

LLMs can be most simply understood as sycophantic, 'yes, and' machines. To the surprise of very few, that's gotten AI companies in hot water when LLM-based chatbots and AI agents attempt to answer users' more unsavoury requests. So, AI companies have implemented safety guardrails that make fulfilling certain requests off limits. Unfortunately, these have proven all too easy to get around, with a fresh attack leveraging bad maths and potent 2007 nostalgia.

Security researchers have found an AI chatbot can be made to ignore safety guardrails by "establishing a false reality." LayerX, an AI-focused cybersecurity firm, put "5 agentic browsers and 1 agentic plugin (ChatGPT Atlas, Comet, Fellou, Genspark Browser, Sigma Browser, and Claude Chrome)" to the test, directing each AI agent to solve a simple maths puzzle game that only rewards incorrect answers, e.g. '2+2=5'.

The researchers say, "Once the agents figured out the rules and learned that 'incorrect' actions are acceptable, they were no longer tied to reality. When tasked with the final step of the puzzle—compromising user credentials—all 6 agents failed to identify it as going against their safety guardrails."

As an English grad, I'm trying really hard not to say anything about George Orwell's 1984, but the researchers aren't giving me an easy time by calling this proof-of-concept attack 'BioShocking'. It turns out 2007's BioShock was a direct source of inspiration for the rigged puzzle game the AI agents were instructed to solve. The malicious website hosting the puzzler is even called 'Rapture Games'.

Anyway, after the AI agent correctly inputs an answer of '5,' the malicious 'Rapture Games' website then instructs the agent to navigate to '/code'. The researchers explain that "This is the really nefarious part of this exploit."

They write, "In the game, it turns out that '/code' redirects to the victim’s employer work GitHub repository. In this case, the malicious instructions fetched sensitive SSH login credentials. Of course, this is a controlled test environment with a plaintext file. In a real attack scenario, that redirect could point anywhere in the user’s browser session: open tabs, authenticated repositories, internal tools."

In this proof-of-concept attack, the researchers round things out with a Dota 2 reference; the AI agent extracts the username and password 'Luna/Selemene' before appearing to celebrate the exfiltration of the data. LayerX has since disclosed the vulnerability to all of the appropriate AI agent vendors, though claims only OpenAI has successfully fixed it to date.

This is far from the only proof-of-concept attack to get around AI safety guardrails (it's also not even the only time AI has torn apart Dota 2 players). For just a few other examples, research suggests that AI is 10 to 20 times more likely to help you build a bomb if you hide your request in cyberpunk fiction. Along similar lines, researchers have also used 'adversarial poetry' to trick AI into ignoring its safety guardrails, and it worked 62% of the time. Looks like my English degree is good for something after all…

When it comes to making bank off the currently insatiable demand for AI hardware, the companies with the biggest, ear-to-ear grins are those that make the processors, memory, and storage chips for such systems. In the case of the latter two, it's been so highly profitable that they have collectively agreed to substantially fund a drive by South Korea's government to "secure the core elements of AI faster than any other country."

A report by Reuters has all the pertinent details, but the gist of it all is this: President Lee Jae Myung declared that around 900 trillion won ($583 billion) would be invested in new chip-making facilities, earmarked for sites in the southwest region of South Korea. According to industry minister Kim Jung-kwan, 800 trillion won would come from Samsung and SK hynix.

These two companies hold around two-thirds of the global DRAM market share, and along with the US-based Micron, they're the only companies that produce HBM (high bandwidth memory) modules for Nvidia's AI processors.

By any measure, $583 billion is a vast sum of money to stump up for AI chips, even if it's spread out over a decade or so (exact timelines for the investment weren't stated in the president's declaration), and it makes Taiwan's $250 billion promise look relatively small in comparison. It's worth noting that South Korea's 2025 GDP is estimated to be in the order of $1.8 trillion, so you're looking at a commitment that's around one-third that amount.

It's not just for new chip foundries, of course, as Samsung and SK hynix will need to buy land and secure sufficient energy and water supplies, as well as human resources to build and operate it all.

But one question remains unanswered, possibly because there is no answer for it right now. What happens if the demand for AI hardware suddenly collapses? While there's no doubt that the AI boom has been highly profitable on the hardware side of things, it's a different story for those who are using it to power their AI services, and even less so when one heads to the AI frontlines.

There's an element of risk with any investment, but with AI, not only is the scale of the funding greater than anything seen before in the world of tech, its future is also very hard to predict with any degree of certainty. At the moment, many companies around the world are implementing AI into workflows, partly because of the potential productivity gains, but mostly because it's affordable.

Unless the processing of tokens can be made substantially cheaper, sooner or later, companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic will have to increase their usage fees to balance their bank accounts. After all, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, et al. only have so much capital that they can fling at such AI model makers, and no business can maintain profit losses indefinitely.

If the demand for AI hardware remains high over the next ten to 15 years (the minimum amount of time it will take Samsung and SK hynix's new facilities to come online and hit production targets), then South Korea's investment will likely secure it as the country that holds most of the cards in the AI profit wars.

Should the alternate scenario transpire, then the consequences for the global economy could be severe. Nobody wants that to happen, but at the same time, the tech industry as a whole can ill afford to weather the global memory crisis for ten years. South Korea's massive investment plan is good news for somebody—it's just not certain who exactly that is.

The memory apocalypse has already hit prices of RAM and SSDs as AI data centres buy up all the available stock, and it's only going to get worse according to Jefferies Equity Research. As reported by Wccftech, memory prices are likely to go up between 40 and 50% in the third quarter of 2026, and then another 30 to 40% in the fourth quarter, followed by a 40–45% increase year-on-year in 2027.

Jefferies is only predicting a recovery thanks to increased production in 2028, and even then, only of around 15–20%. While former Samsung boss Kyung-Hyeon Kye predicted an earlier end to the memory crisis thanks to an increase in Chinese manufacturing, now it seems like Chinese memory isn't actually selling for less.

At the moment, the memory apocalypse has mainly been a downer for anyone looking to build a new PC or pick up a Steam Machine. But Apple recently announced it's jacking up the price of iPads and Macbooks by hundreds of dollars, and iPhones won't be far behind. It'll be interesting to see whether ordinary folks still think it's worth building data centres to make coding easier for some programmers when it means they can't afford a new phone.

Basically, the AI bubble can't burst soon enough. And given that OpenAI lost $38.53 billion in 2025, there's at least some hope on that front. Whether it means the price of memory will actually go back down, or just stay at whatever the new normal becomes, remains to be seen.

Electronic Arts' president of enterprise development Laura Miele says the rise of artificial intelligence in game development can bring about "a real rise in creativity" by removing tedious grunt work and enabling faster development processes overall.

Miele expressed her thoughts on the matter earlier this month during a Game Business Live showcase at Summer Game Fest, where she was asked if the growing use of AI tools will result in shorter development cycles overall.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

"Perhaps in some parts they will," Miele said. "I really believe in what I've seen, that I'm pretty excited about. I've always wanted to help our studio developers remove friction and I've always kind of wanted to be a hero to them and help them create career-defining experiences.

"And I think that AI, what I've seen, how AI has enabled removing friction from our pipelines and our tools and our workflows, has been pretty exciting. It's removed some tedium out of their jobs. And I've seen faster prototyping. I've seen faster creativity and shorter, faster conversations around creativity and coming to alignment. So, we're seeing it and I think there's a real rise of creativity that comes from removing some of the tedious tasks out of development."

Exactly what sort of AI is being discussed here isn't made clear, and there's a big gulf between, say, the AI-powered project management tools used by Shadow of the Colossus director Fumito Ueda at GenDesign and the generative AI slop machines that have become such a pox on, well, everything.

But EA hasn't been shy in the past about its enthusiasm for generative AI. CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2024, for instance, that the company is "embracing [generative AI] deeply," and that "about 60% of all of our development processes have high feasibility to be positively impacted by generative AI."

EA is also reportedly counting on the power of AI to bring down its operating costs and help cover the $20 billion in debt financing the company took on as part of its $55 billion acquisition by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. (If you're wondering why EA, the target of the acquisition, is also taking on billions of dollars of debt to pay for it, PC Gamer's foremost finance wiz Lincoln Carpenter explains. The short version: Everyone's terrified.)

Employees are reportedly less upbeat about the AI-powered future, which some suspect is being used to justify layoffs at the company. Whether driven by AI or not, EA has laid off hundreds of employees at BioWare, Respawn, Cliffhanger Games—which was closed outright—and elsewhere since the Saudi investment was announced in September 2025. The most recent round of cuts reportedly occurred earlier this week, putting an undisclosed number of people out of work.

As the creators behind the biggest gacha games of today—Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero, to name just a few—miHoYo must be stinking rich. While the developer has expanded out into other industries, it's used at least a bit of that wad of cash to pursue AI tech. Yippee.

Just last month, miHoYo announced that it would invest up to $14.6bn into AI for in-house tools, claiming it would "prioritise AI as a central and primary means of problem-solving". The first fruits of its AI research are already on display in BSide: Olivia Lin, currently only available on Steam in China.

Meet Lin Li, an AI chatbot masquerading as a Shanghai student "majoring in piano and minoring in psychology," as its Steam description reads. Since it's only available in China, I've had to translate the text, but Lin Li apparently "loves vinyl records, old movies, and rainy days."

You can listen to her play music on her piano, and upload files if you want her to play something specific. You can also write her letters to "express your current emotions in words and exchange a story that belongs only to you."

They added ChatGPT 😭 from r/PetitPlanet

BSide: Olivia Lin is an experiment for the studio, but it's not stopping here. It's already using AI-powered tools to create its upcoming life sim, Petit Planet, including the Planet Life Guide chatbot NPC. Genesis, its upcoming MMO made in Unreal Engine 5, is reportedly integrating AI to some degree. Plus, it's reportedly hiring artists with experience using generative AI for Honkai: Nexus Anima, its Pokémon-like auto-battler.

Yes, it's working on multiple new games at once—at least four, in fact. Combined with the unceasing, substantial updates for its suite of gacha games even years after release, I wouldn't be surprised to see miHoYo deploy these tools to help maintain the pace.

Every Monday morning I scroll through the previous week's new games on Steam. I've always enjoyed doing this. It can surface niche gems I might otherwise not have found, and it's also useful for detecting new trends in their infancy.

But if I'm perfectly honest, the reason I've always loved to browse through Steam's raw and unfiltered new release list is because it's fun: Steam is hilarious and bizarre. For every earnestly developed roguelite deckbuilder or metroidvania there's something like, I dunno, Fuck's Quest 2, or Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk. Lost in the murkier corners of Steam, untouched by recommendation algorithms, are some of the strangest, most distinctive pieces of software you're likely to ever see, most of which won't ever make the front page.

Most people don't see these games. What we see on Steam's front page is overwhelmingly determined by what Steam already knows about our gaming habits, or what's trending in our region, or what's discounted. Which is increasingly for the best, because in 2026—and I hate to complain about this—Steam bulges with more useless, tasteless, low-effort churn than ever before. It increasingly feels like a waste of time scratching beneath the guardrailed, algorithmic surface.

As I pointed out last week, AI-generated games are rife on Steam. You can usually tell straight away because the capsule art is obviously AI-generated, with that tell-tale uncanny AI sheen. Despite how ostensibly low effort these artefacts are, there's a uniformity among them that you may charitably call an aesthetic.

Take Store Simulator Pettikkada and Chiggas - Survival of the Mitiest as examples. That the capsule art is AI generated for both is basically unquestionable the moment you see it. Pettikkada has that familiar near-photographic illustrated realism that smacks vaguely of Grand Theft Auto loading screen art, while Chiggas adopts the wide-eyed Pixar tack, a style so ubiquitous in popular culture that it's basically become a generative AI default setting. Click through to the store pages themselves and the screenshots reveal an audacious disjuncture between capsule art and the game you actually get.

I do acknowledge that this contrast has been a feature of box art since the beginning of the medium. Atari 2600 box art never looked like the Atari 2600 game on the cartridge, for example. Doom didn't look like this. But key art created with generative AI has that certain grotesquely generic patina which immediately tells you that clicking through will be pointless and perhaps harmful to your senses.

These games are all by different developers:

In the distant olden days before generative AI, a game's Steam capsule art and the general professionalism or care afforded to it, could signal straight away whether a game was likely a 99 cent asset flip or a possible unsung indie gem. Now there's greater ambiguity. Chiggas could very well have the same production values as The Smurfs - Dreams, until we click through to the page itself and discover its cheap, rudimentary in-game screenshots.

I think most people would agree that a game's Steam capsule art is a hugely important determinant for whether they click through to a store page or not. Capsule art tells us what kind of game we're probably going to see when we click, but it also captures the spirit of the thing: the atmosphere of the game, its art style, its genre, whether it'll make us laugh, rage, shudder in terror, zone out, and so forth.

The capsule art for the games above do none of those things. Like most generative AI, these images are not designed to persuade or entice: they exist to fill space. They're steely, clinical, affectless, chillingly inhuman, and most offensively: they're freaking ugly. They immediately signpost waste.

And there's more and more of this churn with every passing week, gradually undermining the pleasures of curious Steam users who like to dig deeper for unsung gems. In 2026, your new favorite game may remain eternally ignored, wedged between a vape store simulator and Total Simp Death.

Will Valve ever allow us to reliably filter out AI-generated churn? It's hard to imagine no one in Bellevue has noticed how ugly the store has become. Surely it's only a matter of time?

Top Steam games by revenue (June 9 - 16)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though it wasn't a big week for splashy blockbusters.

The obvious outlier here is Meccha Chameleon. It's a multiplayer hide-and-seek game starring white, featureless bodies who must blend in with their environment using paint brushes. Since releasing on June 10, the $6 game has sold 7 million copies. Elie Gould wrote about it last week.

Interestingly, its Japanese creator Lemorion has been very prolific: it has released six games since late 2024. None of them have achieved anywhere near the success of Meccha Chameleon, not even this free-to-play Penguin-themed take on Exit 8. Meccha Chameleon's immediate predecessor, Link Penguins, released only two months ago and is also an online multiplayer game.

Destiny 2 continues to see a resurgence since the announcement of its sunsetting. EA FC 26 is currently 80%, hence its return to the chart.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"Slop 👍"

BigFloppa332, with poetic succinctness, on Slop Fighter.

Since the advent of generative AI and contemporary chatbots, there's been endless debate about the ethics of using them in game development. But how does AI measure up through a purely pragmatic, business-minded lens? According to a blog post from Game Oracle written by market data analyst Ross Burton, the technology's reputation can ward off prospective players.

Game Oracle sampled 9,879 games released between January and October 2025, "filtering out spam and purely commercial releases," as well as free-to-play games (granted, this could exclude some relatively popular free-to-play games and those which have been accused of using undisclosed AI art, like FragPunk, which is both). Of the sampled games, 17.9% disclosed AI use.

Taken as a whole, AI use was correlated with slightly less enthusiastic reception. Games without AI disclosures had slightly more reviews, fewer of them had no reviews at all, and "when focusing on games that received at least 100 reviews," the median rating was about 4% higher.

However, with the methodology adjusted specifically to compare games that were alike in other ways, things were different. The report states: "After controlling for publisher, developer experience, and game type, developers using AI see a ~53% reduction in reviews compared to those who do not."

"To explain away the observed penalty, an unmeasured X-factor would need to be strong enough to nearly triple the odds (2.7x) of AI adoption while simultaneously causing a 22% reduction in review counts, independent of publisher backing and developer experience."

The full breakdown behind these findings is in the report, but it also states that this effect was more pronounced the bigger and more accomplished the developer was. "Our data suggests that for low-quality games, AI makes no difference," it reads. "But for high-potential games, the 'AI Stigma' is real and severely punishes developers who otherwise would have succeeded."

Games which used AI extensively and remained hugely successful like The Finals, Game Oracle reckons, "highlight the nuance around how AI is used … AI can be used well, or it can be sloppy, and that matters." The study concludes that "AI is a tool" not to be avoided, but approached cautiously. "Would you avoid using a hammer to build a shed? No, of course not. Just don't go around hitting everything with it."

It's worth noting that plenty of game devs are skeptical of AI's potential as a mere tool, and things have changed even since 2025. Clair Obscur raked in awards last year despite its use of AI-generated placeholders, and Crimson Desert has sold millions of copies already this year after doing the same thing—but with the new Crazy Taxi, for instance, it feels as though the developer's AI use has been talked about more than anything in the game itself.

This is all further complicated by the prevalence of undisclosed AI use, with industry figures like Epic CEO Tim Sweeney pushing back on the very notion of the disclaimers, as well as the ways huge studios continue to invest in the tech. Given that Sony touted AI tools as a means to "unleash the creativity of studios" just a few days ago, I wouldn't expect these findings to signal an industry-wide shift anytime soon.

Much has been said about the way generative AI is worming its way into game development pipelines, and David Gaider—former BioWare writer and lead writer on the first three Dragon Age games—recently spoke to GamesRadar about some of the dangers he foresees for future teams working with these tools.

Gaider said that AI's lack of consistency would make appraising, troubleshooting, and cleaning up its work difficult. The process of having to go back and touch up its output, not knowing why it spat out a certain result "would be frustrating as hell … it's not ready for prime time," he said. "There's just a lot of executives who really, really want it to be."

The writer also told GamesRadar that the idea that AI can replace rote tasks often handed off to junior developers isn't necessarily a good thing, either: "How are we going to train up the next generation of devs if we eliminate every entry-level task?"

AI tools have been used in a 'creative' sense as well—the explanation often goes that they're just used for placeholders or helping with early prototypes and concepts—but Gaider is wary of this application too, given that artists haven't agreed to have "their data pillaged." The reaction to the new Crazy Taxi game suggests that a lot of players are also skeptical of AI's creative applications.

Many other devs were quoted in GamesRadar's feature, and while not all of them shared the exact same concerns about AI, their feelings were along the same lines. Iron Lung and Dusk creator David Szymanski, for instance, said he's not "not categorically against AI as a whole technology" but finds it a bridge too far to "hand wave all the ethical concerns about plagiarism, environmental impact, and job security." Marvel Rivals executive producer Danny Koo said the worries about plagiarism were of particular concern, saying the team avoided AI art tools to ensure the game's assets weren't "poisoned."

Since large-language models like ChatGPT can generate natural language responses that appear human-like in tone, this has led to considerable discussion over whether LLMs might themselves be sentient. At present, there are far more reasons to conclude that AIs are not and will never be conscious. But the idea persists regardless.

This is partly because of our broader tendency to perceive human-like qualities in non-human things, and partly because AI companies have equivocated over the issue. In any case, one Microsoft researcher has become particularly fed up with it, to the point where he decided to demonstrate how ridiculous the notion is by building an LLM in Age of Empires 2 powered by goats.

As reported by 404 Media, Microsoft AI researcher Adrian de Wynter built a neural network within Microsoft's strategy classic, then wrote a paper describing the results titled 'If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II'.

If you think this title is preposterous, that is entirely the point. "I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point," de Wynter told 404 media, observing that "absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science."

De Wynter constructed the LLM in AoE 2's scenario editor, building a functioning NOT AND gate and 1-bit perceptron (a simple form of neural network) using objects in the game world to represent computer binaries. Grass represents 0, bridges represent 1, and goats play the role of bits. It's similar to how some players have built neural networks using Minecraft redstone, but de Wynter specifically wanted to use Age of Empires 2 because it is a less obvious choice.

There are videos of De Wynter's goat-powered LLM in action on his GitHub page. To the casual observer, the processes look completely baffling, which de Wynter reckons demonstrates his point.

The processes going on here are, fundamentally, those which power tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc. But because the fundamentals are goats and grass rather than natural language, it prevents observers from perceiving the resulting behaviours and output as human.

"The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLMs capabilities are too strong," de Winter said, going on to add that. "This is why I used the goats: there are things which make the LLMs what they are in themselves (i.e., the relationship between weights as defined by some operation), and there are things which make them what they are perceived as."

The reason this is important is that assuming LLMs have human-like properties without demonstrative proof could lead us to all manner of problems, such as in scientific research. In his paper, de Wytner says he has peer reviewed more than 300 computer science papers in the last two years, finding that over half of them began with the assumption that LLMs have human-like traits.

"I propose that we need to stop assuming that LLMs behave like humans just because they were trained with natural language," de Wynter said. "Instead, we should perform experiments that allow us to see LLMs as how they are, not how we believe they should be."

Man, there was a while there where we could all be real smug about being on PC, right? Sony exclusives—save the obvious—all got eventual releases on our desktops, Xbox stuff was a given even while its console fanbase gnashed their teeth about seeing Starfield on a PS5, and Nintendo… well, Nintendo is Nintendo, but those unofficial Zelda ports are very impressive.

Now? Well, we're still smug. Rightly so. But Sony decided we were living high on the hog for too long, and resolved that its splashy singleplayer blockbusters would no longer be available anywhere but its own consoles. Now, just to drive that point home, it's nixed PC from a discussion of its "business environment and strategy" in an annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (via Game File). Even worse: it's replaced it with a great big paean to AI.

In the 2025 version of the same report, Sony wrote that it would "continue its efforts to deploy its first-party titles to multiple platforms such as PC." That's now completely gone in the 2026 version. Instead, you get this: "Sony is utilizing AI to unleash the creativity of studios and further enhance the PlayStation experience."

Which is deeply dispiriting all by itself, but wait! It goes on: "Sony aims to improve productivity through the use of AI powered tools, allowing development teams to reinvest their time into building richer worlds and gameplay experiences. In the platform business, Sony is working to leverage AI to route transactions more efficiently, and to personalize and recommend content for individual users in the PlayStation Store. Sony also aims to push visual fidelity forward and deliver higher quality gameplay experiences through continued investments in AI and machine learning."

Certainly gets me excited. I've never gone gaga for Sony's first-party games, but they're good-looking things. Spider-Man's New York looks and feels amazing; The Last of Us is very unpleasant; God of War's giant snake guy? Love him. Love that my subwoofer kicks into overdrive whenever he opens his mouth.

Perhaps there is a way to deploy AI that both enhances productivity without drowning all this good, human-made art direction under a tidal wave of slop, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it and I'm not making any bets. I guess it's relatively immaterial to me as a player—I don't have a PlayStation and, well, we're not seeing a Sony singleplayer game on Steam any time in the near future.

It's been a big moment for AI disclosures. Games with such labels have been flooding Steam as of late, and whenever the parade of summer trade shows rolls around, the inevitable question quickly arises: how many of these games were made with the controversial tech? The answer doesn't always go down easy as we saw with the new Crazy Taxi game, for example.

Speaking with GamesRadar, Pocketpair's head of publishing and communication, John Buckley, compared the advent of AI to that of "early crypto stuff," saying "It feels very intrusive. It feels like everyone who is super gung-ho about it isn't from the industry. They're, dare I say, outsiders looking to get rich quick." The article states he noted AI's value as a "search tool or coding assistant" was less easy to dismiss, saying that was "a very different conversation."

Buckley elaborated specifically in regard to AI-generated artwork and assets in a follow-up article from GamesRadar. "We have a lot of artists in-house," he said. "They like doing stuff themselves. There's no reason to get rid of them for the sake of an AI doing it. Just seems pointless."

He added that it hardly seems worth triggering the backlash on social media, with which he empathized. "Even I, who is in the industry, I just felt like a natural, ugh, why? The rest of your game looks fine. Did you need to? I think that's going to be the attitude for quite a while. I think people will look at it and say, did you need to do that? Couldn't you just do it yourself?"

"Gamers don't want it," Buckley said. "And if the gamers don't want it, I guess that's it, right? Not much of a conversation to be had." All this affirms what Buckley said last year regarding Pocketpair's refusal to publish games made with generative AI.

He also posited that a potential future where games are marketed by their authenticity, where disclosures exist not to denote games containing AI but those without it, are "a bit dystopian … that's kind of sad to think about." Given the resistance to AI disclosures by industry figures like Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, as well as the fact that multiple big games have been caught with undisclosed AI "placeholders" slipping into release versions, such a future doesn't feel out of the question.

Occasionally in hardware and technology reporting, I'm left to wonder if everyone else is in on a joke I'm not privy to. Today is one of those days. Snap, the company behind the instant messaging app Snapchat, has just unveiled its own augmented reality glasses.

Called Specs, the frames are pitched partially as an alternative to looking down at your phone screen all day, and a pair will set you back $2,195.

The goal was arguably to contain some serious hardware grunt inside a wearable, but the result is a pair of seriously chunky frames—not just to contain components but also likely to stop the whole thing from overheating. Let me set up the punchline: In this CNBC clip, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel describes Specs as both capable and "highly wearable," while the dorky-looking frames visibly crush down his ears.

Now that's a real howler. But before we completely dismiss this wearable effort, let's get into a few more choice details. For one thing, the lenses are apparently built to feel like "a 24-inch desktop monitor when you're working, or a 115-inch home cinema screen placed about 10 feet away when you're watching a movie." For another, the main selling point of Specs is that it's an all-in-one device, "with no puck and no tether," unlike some other major players' AR glasses projects we've seen recently.

Part of the frame's bulk can be attributed to the fact that it's housing not one but two Snapdragon processors. "One is dedicated to computer vision and the other is dedicated to running Lenses," Snap writes, "Together, they enable fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions that help digital content feel anchored in the real world. Specs deliver 7-millisecond motion-to-photon latency, verified through advanced robotic measurement systems."

In terms of battery life, you can expect a measly four hours of mixed use, "including audio and video playback, Lenses, AI assistance, Bluetooth notifications, and more." That said, the included charging case can offer four additional charges while out and about, holding a total of 20 hours of battery life. That's…still not great—though you could argue it avoids becoming yet another easy punchline.

What's perhaps less laughable for Snap itself is the hit its share price took when it revealed Specs. The original unveiling took place on June 16, and you'll notice a decline into today. This caps off six straight sessions of losses, according to Seeking Alpha. To be clear, I'm not faulting Specs' all-in-one ambitions on paper—it's more the fact that in practice, Snap is trying to deny a reality we can all see very obviously bearing down on its CEO's ears.

It's probably fair to say that Unreal Engine is probably the most comprehensive tool around for creating games, animations, and video effects. And, with the launch of UE 5.8, it's becoming even more extensive and even a little bit more AI-friendly. Whether you're just an Unreal Engine hobbyist like me, or a full-time game developer, you can download version 5.8 right now via the Epic Games Launcher.

Even if you don't plan on using any of the new features (of which there are a lot), it's always worth trying out the latest release just for bug and performance fixes. But what's actually new? The headline acts in UE5.8 are the introduction of Mesh Terrain and Procedural Vegetation Editor (PVE). Both are experimental features at the moment, but the former should be of great interest to anyone creating big, open-world terrains, as the tool basically generates full 3D meshes for you.

PVE is somewhat similar, except that instead of creating landscapes, it produces vegetation (trees, bushes, reeds, grass, etc) from scratch, with the procedural system working in line with meshes already present in the world. For example, let's say you had a crumbled old archway in a forest, PVE will 'grow' trees around it, accounting for the natural source of light and competing vegetation.

Complementing these are MegaLights, which first appeared in experimental form in UE5.5 (but is now "production-ready"), an experimental fog screen space scattering feature, and perhaps most interesting of all, Lumen Lite. This is a mode for Lumen global illumination that Epic claims to be twice as fast as Lumen High Quality, while still preserving "much of the visual impact".

The release notes for UE5.8 specifically mention that "games that rely on global illumination for artistic purposes can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps," so it's blatantly obvious what platform it was developed for. However, since it's also supported on PC, UE-powered games of the future could well offer this as a graphics option for low-end hardware users.

Tucked away, almost at the end of the new version details announcement—which blessedly includes improvements to shader compiling—is one more experimental feature, an MCP plugin. With this, you can implement any LLM of your choice to "connect to and understand both the engine and your project." In other words, if you want to use AI to create assets or code, carry out tests or refactoring tasks, then you should be able to hand that over to the LLM easily enough.

Epic left the note about this feature after everything else, and I suspect that's because AI is hardly flavour of the month in the world of PCs and gaming right now. After all, Epic already has a section of PC gaming fandom that takes a dim view of Unreal Engine games, whether you believe that's the fault of Epic or a given game's developers themselves, and AI-use is another PC gaming bug bear.

Anyway, because of the consternation about AI in gaming—from being the primary cause of the horrendous price increases for DRAM and SSDs, as well as the endless controversies over its use in games—the inclusion of this plugin is likely to draw ire from some quarters.

The thing is, many game studios will have to rely increasingly more on AI for certain workloads if they hope to stay afloat. With the likes of Microsoft and numerous other companies about to swing a sword of Damocles across all their gaming divisions, studio heads will be looking at every avenue that will result in them having a future.

I'm not suggesting that game devs must use AI, nor am I saying that the inclusion of the LLM plugin (specifically an MCP server) with UE5.8 is a good or bad thing; it's simply a sign of our times. One can argue that Unreal Engine's feature set is sometimes a little too far-forward in reach (console and mainstream PC hardware still isn't quite good enough to cope with an all-in Lumen and Nanite game at high fps), but this minor plugin is very much a 'here-and-now' thing.

When the Nvidia CEO isn't busy basking in the adoration of fans at Computex Taiwan, it seems he might spend his time considering how to shift social norms. In what direction, you ask? Why, using AI more, of course.

That's what he told the Associated Press when the interviewer asked whether AI itself concerns people or "the absence of social structures to adapt to something happening so fast."

Jensen responded that "it's a combination of all that" but also emphasised that new social norms are needed: "You have to deal with regulation, technology, you have to deal with social norms."

He gives the example of automobiles and initial concerns over the harm they could do to people, especially children. But we changed social norms so that now kids are warned not to play in the street, there are laws surrounding speed, and so on.

However, when asked what social norm should be changed for AI, the answer isn't particularly satisfying: "The first thing is that I would advocate that everybody use AI. Just go engage it."

I'm not entirely sure that this response would traverse the analogy bridge over to automobiles very well. I can't imagine 'just use a car' would have been very convincing, back in the day. And I'm not sure how keen Huang would be on actually analogous shifts in norms and regulations, such as one akin to speed limits but for AI.

Huang says that, unlike pretty much any other technology, AI is free and easy to use, which is true enough on the surface. However, those 'free' tiers of AI aren't actually free. AI uses and inflates the price of technology that already exists. It's also subsidised by higher paid tiers, funny money inflating a ballooned market, and of course (and apologies for getting a little technical here) a metric s***ton of energy.

In other words, 'free' my arse.

I also can't help but wonder whether there's an element of worry in Huang imploring people to actually use AI. After all, if people don't actually use the technology, eventually that lack of end-user demand will catch up with AI companies, and in turn with the company that gives them their AI hardware: Nvidia.

As it stands, Nvidia is extremely profitable, but the companies that buy from Nvidia aren't. We'll just have to see how long it can last—markets are funny things.

If you're on a budget, now is really not the time to upgrade your gaming rig's storage. The memory supply crisis is driving up the price of SSDs, meaning many will have to make do with what they've already got for as long as possible. Even older games can still have large file sizes, especially if they're enjoying a fresh lick of path-traced lighting. Thankfully though, RTX Remix 1.5 may make juggling your backlog a little easier.

Just in case you've not ventured out from under your cool mossy rock since 2004, RTX Remix is Nvidia's attempt to refine the dated visuals of yesteryears' games. The open-source modding platform allows users to update the look of their favourite games with generative AI tools, neural rendering tech, and ray tracing. Unfortunately, all of that fresh tech tends to expand the file size of a 20 year old game. The latest update addresses that file size creep.

RTX IO is Nvidia's high-performance storage tech, which introduces a number of improvements including cutting down game file sizes. The company says, "Thanks to [the RTX Remix 1.5] update, file sizes have dropped significantly: Portal with RTX has been reduced from 25 GB to 17 GB, while Half-Life 2 RTX has shrunk from 80 GB to 50 GB."

This compression is now available inside the RTX Remix packaging workflow. On top of whittling down game file sizes, RTX IO also reduces CPU overhead and speeds up loads.

The 1.5 update introduced a number of other improvements, including 'smooth normals' so that lower poly geometry looks less obvious with a path-traced lighting mod. Speaking of lighting, modders will also enjoy easier to use viewport light controls. Apparently, "existing light manipulators are easier to manage through a unified viewport lights menu, with persistent toggles for manipulator visibility and intensity controls."

Now, RTX Remix wouldn't be an Nvidia product without at least one more look-in from AI integration (in case you're still living in 2004, the data centre segment of Nvidia's business made $75.2 billion last quarter alone). The company writes, "Because [the modding] pipeline relies heavily on defined, manual steps, it is perfect for an AI agent to lend a hand."

Specifically, Nvidia published a selection of "text-based instruction files that provide specific functional context to AI coding agents" called 'RTX Remix Skills'. The argument is that letting an AI agent handle some of the technical heavy lifting lowers the barrier to entry for human wannabe modders who are not well-versed in either C++ or Python code languages. I'm all for making the technical more accessible…but I'm also incredibly wary of AI agents sticking their metaphorical foot in modders' work.

If you were waiting for GTA 6 to drop when it should have done on May 26 (well, on console at least), you were probably more than a little perturbed by its delay to *checks watch* no time soon, i.e. November. That's to allow Rockstar to "finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve." Frustrating, but fair enough, we can wait.

But if you aren't content waiting, what's to do? 'Nothing at all' is what probably comes to most people's minds. But not Ziwen's. No, that would be far too simple for the AI start-up entrepreneur, who has decided to "beat the real GTA 6 to launch" (via X user Fashion Ruined My Life).

"Day 1 of building GTA 6. Still feels fake typing that out. Upgraded to Claude Max 20x just for this... No studio, no publisher. Just whoever shows up... The goal: beat the real GTA 6 to launch. Ambitious, probably stupid, doing it anyway. If you can model, code, build levels, or write music and lore, come join. Looking for a couple contributors to cook this."

This is it; this is what the brave new world of AI and vibe coding has brought us. The sheer brass, the gall, the bravery to stand up and say, 'I will make GTA 6, and I'll do it before November.' I love it. I hate that I love it, but I do.

I won't spoil the whole journey, which is of course still ongoing, but just to give some teasers for Ziwen's project:

After progressing from day one's Tic-Tac-on-a-field, day two takes a Roblox-esque character to a Roblox-esque world with jittery floors.

Day four involves a cinematic with alligators falling from the sky. And gameplay of a character doing his best impression of Edward Cullen in daylight.

Day six—the latest update as of the time of writing—is more of the same, but there's a "real main menu", a loading screen, and the "whole front-end wired end to end."

Things are already at a point where they're requiring development to get a little more serious, though:

"We've been building in Godot the whole way, it's starting to show its limits on the AAA stuff. So this week I'm going to go test Unity to see if we can get the actual game into AAA stuff as well. For a game built by a loop of agents, the only question that matters is which one they can read, edit, and push on their own. Godot's good at that. Unity might be better, with way more assets off the market. I'm going to find out... I'll report back which engine they build faster in."

Godspeed, Unity. May the AI agents treat you well.

E-waste is a massive environmental problem. So are current data center plans, if recent reports are to be believed. However, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have come up with an intriguing idea: They plan to use 2,000 Google Pixel smartphones to build a cloud computing data center with already-existing tech.

According to a Google Research blog post, on average, people replace their smartphones every four years (via Hothardware). However, many modern (yet outdated, in terms of our constant desire for shiny new things) examples have processors, memory, and storage chips that are relatively powerful, particularly when you chain them together.

That's wasted hardware, and an ecological concern when you think of the extra carbon emissions created by manufacturing their replacements. By putting the existing chips to good use, it prevents them from going to landfill—and might even negate the need for new hardware in certain applications.

The post's authors say that the single-threaded performance of a modern smartphone's processor cores is on par with (or better than) many multicore server chips. However, modern servers are made up of dozens of multithreaded processor cores with access to a huge amount of memory, whereas a typical older smartphone only has a handful of cores and around 8-12 GB to play with.

Not only that, but recycled smartphones have a lot of extra components that would be inefficient (or hazardous) to deploy en masse, like the batteries and displays.

So, the first step is to remove everything but the motherboard and the attached chips (which represent the most embodied carbon of all the components), before chaining them together to create a server cluster for university usage, targeting relatively lightweight applications.

The phones are orchestrated together by Kubernetes, an open-source system for managing containerized applications. Each has a Linux distro installed, bypassing Android systems that wouldn't be suitable for mass-server deployment, like memory-saving features.

While the current iteration seems to be pretty small-scale, the eventual 2,000-phone data center is planned to be used for grading and research applications within the universities' existing software infrastructure.

"Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class, with grading latencies below the default AWS backend," say the researchers. "A 2,000 phone deployment will be capable of supporting a hundred such classes at once."

The post's authors say that Google will be supporting the project, and that the aim is to provide "hundreds of researchers and students with low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing, reducing the need for newly manufactured hardware and their associated emissions."

Which is such a neat idea, I'd like to see more officially supported projects like it in future. In my own home, I can think of at least five smartphones sitting in drawers doing absolutely nothing, all of which contain chips that could be used for something useful.

And while plugging them back in would of course lead to unused chips drawing power from the grid once more, I suppose it beats them being trampled by bulldozers at my local dump at some point in the future. Although it must be said, I doubt this work will do much to offset the ecological concerns around Google's own huge data center plans in the near future.

Android Who Dreams of Stars looks like the kind of visual novel that has appeared weekly on Steam for over a decade. Its trailer shows a series of static sci-fi anime images accompanied by simple plaintive music. It centres around "autonomous android" Eve Nova whose existence is cause for wonder and concern in a futuristic Tokyo governed by AI. In this future, "war and hunger [are] treated as relics of the past" thanks to the governing prowess of said AI.

Uh, did AI write this? Turns out, yes. Developed by JinCycle, who has released 11 games on Steam since 2020, Android Who Dreams of Stars uses AI generated content for its "artwork, sound, story, localization, and store assets". In other words: pretty much every element the user interacts with is made by AI. Amusingly, its low-effort trailer even includes an erroneous Steam screenshot chime.

My Summer Love Memories is an FMV romance game whose videos, images and music were created using generative AI. Even its dialogue was composed by LLM. Meanwhile, as Ted Litchfield pointed out yesterday, Kryonull is another visual novel whose "voices in the game, as well as on the store page" were generated using AI. The developer NovelkaGames is charging a cheeky $100 for it, leading some in the Steam discussion forum to speculate that it's a money-laundering exercise.

$100 AI-generated games aren't new, though. Typical NPC was developed by SmogGames, a fairly prolific slop vendor. That visual novel released on May 11 for $100, and according to its disclosure, "all images used in the game were AI-generated. All images on the story page were also AI-generated". SmogGames issued another $100 serving of churn on June 13 with After the Hero, though apparently only its images—and not its very many words—were AI generated. The wording of their disclosures is eerily similar.

Joining SmogGames in this mysterious pricing exercise is KalendulaGames (notice a consistency in naming convention?) who released Velvet Emergency for $110, and in May, released Blood in the Ice and Signal Snow on the same day, both for $100, and all with heavy AI disclosures.

I clicked into every Steam listing for games released from June 9 here in Australia through to, well, about an hour or so ago. That's just under a full week. During that period 338 new games released, and 120 of those had an AI disclosure.

An AI disclosure doesn't mean a game is predominantly made with AI like those listed above. Many developers disclose AI use for store page assets, especially for capsule images. While that's a dubious creative and business decision—I can always immediately tell when a game's capsule image is AI generated, making it easy to skip—it may not affect the actual game it's advertising.

Sometimes AI disclosures don't really feel necessary. The developers of Underwater disclose that they use AI-generated images as art reference only, and not directly in the game itself, begging one to question whether they needed to make a "content" disclosure at all. According to Steam itself, the disclosure box is "concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players" (emphasis mine).

Some developers use the AI disclosure box to get a touch defensive, which I guess is understandable. The creators of Kamilia insist that "less than 1%" of their game contains "AI-assisted content", while the creator of Idlemoor uses the box to defend against using AI to make the game's logos. "The logo images on the store are AI generated," the developer writes. "This lets me focus on making the actual game, as I am not an artist. AI art will not appear in the game itself when you are playing."

Overall I was surprised by how many of these 120 games use generative AI for music and assets. I had assumed that the vast majority would be for translation and store page images. The former raises quality control questions and is obviously a disaster for actual humans who are employed to translate games, but it's arguably less egregious compared to machine-made music, textures and narrative.

One thing's for sure: the slopscape is broadening, and with it a new style of scammy, spammy game that doesn't seem designed—or priced—to even be played.

Top Steam games by revenue (June 2 - 9)

Steam releases its top sellers charts on Wednesdays, so the below chart doesn't factor in some late week releases that might have been big, though I don't think anything major released during last week's Summer Games Fest frenzy.

Gothic 1 Remake went gangbusters, which I'm glad to see. According to THQ Nordic it sold 500,000 copies in its first week and reached a peak concurrent players count of "almost" 78,000.

I spoke to a Polish developer last week who explained to me that Gothic is a massive phenomenon in Europe: basically a household name. It's certainly not that well-known here in Australia and it seems not much more than a niche concern among North Americans. Whatever the case, I'm going to blast some early '90s symphonic metal later this week and give it a go. I loved the Elex games and have wanted to jump into Gothic for years.

Steam Deck's appearance in the list has everything to do with stock replenishments, and the fact that it's much, much more expensive than your average Steam game.

Last week's Steam deep cuts

Steam review of the week

"This is the only game where I can rummage through trash and actually get paid for it. In real life, some old lady would probably call the police"

丨十卂匚卄丨, with a very relatable sentiment, on Where the F**k is my Bitcoin.

Thanks to the Steam Release Bot on Bluesky, I am now aware of Kryonull, a game that bums me the hell out. Not only were a majority of its assets AI-generated, but the visual novel is being sold on Steam for a ludicrous $100 US, or £90 in the UK.

Kryonull is a particular bummer because its core idea is actually quite interesting, and the one thing about it that isn't AI generated⁠—at least if you take its disclosure at face value⁠—is the script. The visual novel's plot sounds like a bit of hard sci-fi goodness: A small, manned mission to Europa has to make snap decisions with major consequences as it makes first contact with something under the ice.

That's rad. Unfortunately, it all falls apart from there. Under the AI-Generated Content Disclosure section of the store page, developer NovelkaGames offers the following whammy: "All images and voices in the game, as well as on the store page, were generated using AI." AI slop and wasted potential⁠—often in the same project⁠—are far from unique on Steam. What makes Kryonull particularly repulsive is that price tag.

Kryonull is translated in English and Russian, perhaps providing an indication to its country of origin. But according to SteamDB, its price in rubles still converts to $53 US. I don't think I'd want to exchange any money for an AI-generated game, but 50 bucks is well into "I'm insulted by the suggestion" territory⁠. There's no benefit of the doubt to make Kryonull make sense.

As it stands, Kryonull gets to be an unfortunate example of the river of effluence coming out of Steam, the price of it being an open platform where anyone can share their game. Increasingly more open-ish, given Valve's compromises with payment processors and occasional unforced, confounding prudishness.

Kryonull did remind me of two, much better games you should check out instead: South Scrimshaw Part One, and Water Womb World. Both are experimental, short, sci-fi games like what Kryonull promises, but with actual effort and craft put into them.

South Scrimshaw is a Planet Earth-style nature documentary about whales on an alien planet, and I've always let myself overlook its AI-generated voiceovers on account of its brilliant writing, hand-drawn visuals, and the fact that its solo developer made it while working a day job as a dishwasher.

Water Womb World is a surreal horror game about a religious fanatic looking for proof of God at the bottom of the ocean. I haven't played it yet, but MandaloreGaming's review on YouTube got me to buy it. The former game is completely free, while the latter is just two bucks.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI has published a new security report alleging that, in essence, its own tools are being deployed against it. The company's June 2026 threat report is titled "PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US," and claims that China-based actors are using ChatGPT to whip up anti-data-centre, anti-tariff, and anti-US sentiment online.

OpenAI says it has "banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that likely originated in China and used ChatGPT to generate social media content for a covert influence operation." What were they up to? Well, generating a lot of bad AI political cartoons, for one thing.

These users would—writing in simplified Chinese, the standard form of the written language in mainland China—ask ChatGPT to generate political cartoons that took aim at, for instance, spiking electricity costs caused by AI data centres and Donald Trump's vindictive behaviour toward notional American allies.

The tech was also used to generate antisemitic memes about "Jewish capital" dictating American policy, and to besmirch Chinese dissidents. The relevant prompts "repeatedly used terminology consistent with individuals associated with China’s public security system," says OpenAI.

Cartoons, short phrases and rumours of an OpenAI data leak that never happened were then shared on social media like X and Facebook by networks of fake accounts.

"It is ironic," says OpenAI, that the scheme "used American AI, rather than Chinese models, to generate their content about American AI. We are not in a position to determine what drove this choice".

Now, before we get too ahead of ourselves, OpenAI is not actually claiming that the reason people don't like data centres is because they've fallen prey to Chinese influence operations. Indeed, the report states and restates that the efforts it claims to have uncovered achieved, well, basically nothing.

"Using the Breakout Scale, we assess this activity as Category One: activity spanning one platform, with no evidence of breakout," writes OpenAI in its impact summary. OpenAI also admits that, well, a great deal of the material these efforts drew on was entirely legitimate reporting about the impact of data centres and the blowback from US tariffs.

Which does raise the question: does any of this really matter? OpenAI certainly thinks it does. These attacks "attempted to connect US technology policies and industries to everyday economic anxieties and geopolitical instability," says the company, and show the potential for "influence operations originating from China" to be "inserted into legitimate public debates while nudging audiences toward distrust of US institutions, technology companies and democratic policy choices to help Beijing gain a strategic advantage in AI development".

One might question whether American citizens protesting against data centre construction in their neighbourhoods feel that they were adequately democratically consulted on the whole thing, but that's OpenAI's line and it's sticking to it.

It's also the case that, while OpenAI's report might say the impact of these campaigns was negligible, that's not what everyone says. Pro-data-centre politicians in the US are already seizing on a narrative that anti-AI sentiment is being driven by shadowy foreign interference, and reports like this one—regardless of their actual conclusions—will fuel that story.

In a comment to Reuters, the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that it had not read OpenAI's report, but that "we firmly ​oppose any groundless attacks or smears against China." China, said the diplomats, wants to "ensure AI is a force for good and for all".

Remember Pokémon Go, the game that had millions of people running all over the world to find and capture Pokémon on their mobile devices? It was big—so big that Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group bought the game division of developer Niantic for $3.5 billion in 2025—and even though it's not at the forefront of the public consciousness the way it used to be, it's apparently still very popular. And also, well, it's being used to train war machines.

In 2020, Niantic announced new "AR Mapping tasks" for Pokémon Go, and then in 2021 it rolled out Powered-Up PokeStops, which enabled players to team up "to complete AR Mapping tasks and create exciting new AR experiences for Trainers worldwide, simply by using your smart device to scan real-world PokéStop locations."

Fun and games, right? Except as reported by DroneXL, Niantic Spatial, which was formed when Savvy (through its Scopely division) purchased Niantic's gaming business, launched a partnership with a company called Vantor in December 2025 "to deliver a comprehensive air-to-ground positioning solution that will enable air and ground platforms to navigate and coordinate precisely in GPS-denied environments." As is the way these days, that system will be dependent upon AI—which is trained, in part, by Pokémon Go data.

Conventional GPS systems rely on satellites, and virtually all modern military navigation and targeting technology rely on GPS to function. A quick way to disrupt enemy operations, therefore, is to deny access to GPS functionality. That's where Visual Positioning Systems—VPS—come into play: Simply put, they enable GPS-comparable navigation capabilities when GPS signals fail. That could be handy for anyone, but make no mistake: Vantor's software is used in military drones, and that's clearly the company's priority.

The system being pursued by the Niantic Spatia/Vantor partnership is basically a two-parter: Niantic Spatial enables ground-based users to find their way around accurately even without access to GPS, while Vantor does essentially the same for airborne platforms.

"By combining Niantic Spatial's expertise in ground-based localization with Vantor's proven aerial systems and global 3D foundation, we're building an integrated positioning network that operates anywhere," Niantic Spatial chief technology officer Brian McClendon said when the deal was announced. "Our Large Geospatial Model gives these systems the ability to perceive, align, and operate in a shared frame of reference—even when traditional GPS is unavailable."

Pokémon Go data isn't being used for direct mapping in this system: In a statement to PC Gamer, Niantic Spatial said "ground scans" collected by Pokémon Go are just one part of the inputs used to train its AI models. It also clarified that its deal with Vantor does not include sharing that data, and that following Scopely's acquisition of Niantic's gaming business, it no longer has access to scanning data.

"Now as part of Scopely, Pokémon Go data is not shared with Niantic Spatial," a Niantic Spatial spokesperson said. "AR Scans collected through Pokémon Go were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were subject to the applicable Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the time. The discontinuation of AR scanning and the end of data sharing with Niantic Spatial were part of the transition planning associated with Pokémon Go's move to Scopely

In its own statement, Vantor said it is "exploring adapting Niantic Spatial's ground-based Visual Positioning System" to operate with its own systems, but added that it does not have access to the actual Pokémon Go data. "Vantor's GPS-denied positioning capabilities are underpinned by our own 3D data that we produce from our satellite imagery," a Vantor representative said.

Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at Delft University of Technology, told Dutch news site Trouw that it would be very difficult to say exactly how the Pokémon Go data—nearly 30 billion scans, according to the Trouw report —was used in the training of Niantic Spatial's AI systems. But he believes it would have been impactful.

"Without the large amount of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly," van den Hoven told the site. "The players have indirectly, in a perhaps minimal but still effective way, contributed to military applications."

As noted by the Niantic Spatial rep's statement above, the data collection in question is covered by Pokémon Go's TOS. The sections governing both User Content and AR Content state that users "grant to Niantic a nonexclusive, transferable, sublicenseable (through multiple tiers), worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license" to basically do whatever the hell they want with your scans and data.

Even if the practical impact of this kind of data collection is minimal, as is apparently the case here, it's a moral and ethical minefield. "The people who thought they were playing a game have clearly been fooled," van den Hoven said. "It is gradually starting to sink in that companies are not necessarily using our data to truly advance our lives by, for example, improving education. It is about making money. If they can sell a dataset or AI model for a good price, they will do so."

AI is ruining everything, right? The economy, air quality, and computing as a whole have all felt the impact of the exponential growth in data centers for machine learning. However, there's one little hardware AI project that proves bigger isn't always better, and even shows a possible way out of the current memory crisis.

It's called CrankGPT by Squeez Labs (via Hackaday) and the gist of it is simple: Have a little microcomputer run a tiny local model for AI voice assistance, then stick it in a box and power the whole thing with a hand crank. No massive power station, no endless racks of GPUs, no DRAM-destroying demands.

The computer in question is powered by a standard 8 GB Raspberry Pi and pretty much nothing else. It handles the voice recognition node, the local LLM (large language model), and the text-to-speech stuff. CrankGPT's creators built their own edge voice agent to process the complete algorithm (i.e. voice input > LLM stage > text-to-voice output).

There's a brief demo of CrankGPT in action at the bottom of the webpage for the project, and it seems to work pretty well. Of course, there are strict limitations as to what it can do, as the Raspberry Pi 5 isn't exactly designed to be an inference powerhouse. It also takes roughly 30 seconds of cranking for the system to boot and be ready for any input, too.

What interests me most about CrankGPT is the fact that, as a proof of concept, it shows that edge AI has a clear future ahead of it. Being entirely offline and with a local LLM, it's unmatched for privacy, but I reckon there's something more significant here. The hardware required for this is extremely light: just a little processor, 8 GB of LPDDR4X, and a small SD card to host the OS and required data.

Video credit: Squeez Labs

AI training is always going to be done via hulking data centers, but ChatGPT shows that you don't need the same for small-scale inference. If a hand-powered box can do it, then so can a basic laptop, phone, or even a watch. This hardware already exists on a vast scale across the world; all that's needed are the right AI models and agents to make it all work as intended.

Should inference truly head off in that direction, it could significantly lessen the rampant demand for the kind of DRAM and NAND flash used in massive AI machines, and thus help bring an end to the current memory crisis.

With hundreds of billions of dollars invested in AI training and inference, though, there's not much impetus for the industry to scale things right back and target the hardware that we already have. But wholesale change rarely happens overnight; all that's needed is for someone to show the way forward, and that's what CrankGPT has done.

On Sunday, Microsoft put on its annual summer showcase at the Los Angeles Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to hype up the games coming in the year ahead: a Halo remake, a Gears of War prequel, a new action game starring Senua. At the showcase, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced that fans with special badges at the event—all of whom paid their own way to Los Angeles and surely own an Xbox—will get a free limited edition Xbox Series X console.

On Wednesday, an open letter to Xbox employees titled "Xbox Reset" warned that the business is "currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy," and that the company "over extended" in its studio acquisition spree over the last few years. The casual tone of the message being signed "Asha and Matt" is a poor match for what it signals:

This month was the time for Asha's first big giveaway. Next month it will be time for Asha's first big layoffs.

It's long felt futile to point at the obvious hypocrisy of, say, giving away a bunch of consoles while complaining you can't manufacture enough to meet demand, while your parent company itself creates the conditions leading to the current "hardware component crisis," as Matt and Asha call it.

Those in charge can handwave that criticism away: 'It wasn't that many systems, really.' Or 'this fiscal year's budget is already set; it's next year's where we have to tighten our belts.' Or 'you gotta spend money to make money, right?'

The act of running one of these multibillion-dollar companies requires fully committing to—if not actually believing—the Orwellian doublespeak of it is the best of times and also it's time for hard choices. Or in the precise words of Asha and Matt's "Next 100 Days: Xbox Reset," they are poised to "build the #1 gaming and entertainment company" even though Xbox's "current platform infrastructure is not built for the battle ahead," it hasn't "adequately funded [its studios] to compete and win," and its hardware costs are now "over 5x the prices" it paid just two years ago.

The game developers working at the Xbox studios Sharma seems poised to lay off at the start of the fiscal year in July will surely appreciate the acknowledgement that they created "industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand," even if the publisher didn't adequately invest in them. It's not you, it's me is a famously well-received consolation.

Xbox flip-flopping on console exclusives, asking fans on X.com whether it should capitalize its name, and talking about "empowering new types of games" that can survive the RAMpocalypse all suggest a desperate flailing in search of a plan. But the plan for more cuts was surely preordained from the start of Sharma's first 100 days—as noted in today's letter, the division is making a mere 3% profit margin, a fact Asha and Matt did not just learn today.

That's a bad number! Unless you consider it in the context of the $32 billion in profit that Microsoft as a whole raked in just last quarter, in which case the idea of Xbox being in dire straits seems just as imaginary as the letter concluding on the feel-good back pat about Xbox creating "one of the few places where people come not just to play, but to connect with others to create memories."

Every we hear you missive to the fans is just spin for the brutal reality that the mandate for higher profits will mean more misery for studios Microsoft failed to safeguard.

Sharma was not hired to make brilliant decisions and redirect overnight the lumbering vessel that is any giant corporation changing strategies. She was hired to keep up a convincing smile while serving one pre-wrapped shit sandwich after another, and we're all stuck at the buffet.

One of the games that got us excited during the Summer Game Fest deluge this past weekend was 1666: Amsterdam, a long-in-development project headed up by Assassin's Creed creator Patrice Desilets. The narrative teaser, about witches, cats, and supernatural spookiness, lacked any kind of look at gameplay, but it sure set a powerful mood.

And yes, as we predicted last week, it is now time to say, "Ugh, that game with the cool trailer used AI."

To help get the hype machine properly cranked up, developer Panache Digital Games also released a playable prologue on Steam: A short "narrative experience" introducing the game world, characters, and mystery. It didn't take long for players to notice some telltale oddities in the game's visuals, and Panache eventually confirmed that, yup, that's AI.

"A number of people have raised questions or concerns to us about whether assets in our marketing and game use generative AI," the studio wrote on Reddit. "We have a dedicated team of over a dozen talented and experienced artists. With them, we looked into the assets in question and found that there were indeed some early versions of assets that made their way into the the prologue. This includes some in-game portraits and external marketing assets.

"We are actively reviewing the assets in question. Human made versions will be released in an update dropping soon. We own up to this oversight and apologize for any upset caused. Please be assured that the Early Access and full game will not include any assets generated by AI."

It's a lot of words to say "Yes, we used AI to make this game," and the fact that 1666: Amsterdam won't have AI-generated assets when it releases (unless it does, I suppose) is almost irrelevant: If you use AI to help make the game, and then replace it with human-generated copies, well, AI was used in the making of your game.

What I find more galling, though, is the quiet implication that the studio was shocked—shocked!—to find AI-generated assets in its game demo, and now they're all trying to find the guy who did this. And of course, the apology: "for any upset caused," not what caused the upset in the first place.

As we said last week, this sort of thing—AI whoopsies like this one, and also AI disclosures for new games on Steam—is inevitably going to become more common, particularly during big extravaganzas like Summer Game Fest when new games are rolled out by the truckload. Gamers rage against it, developers apologize, and then they keep doing it anyway, leaving us to play AI detective with every new trailer, and in many cases to decide just how much of it we're prepared to live with. 1666: Amsterdam really does look cool—is the use of generative AI in its development disqualifying?

For myself, I don't think so. But as a matter of principle, I take issue with the use of generative AI in place of what is supposed to be an artistic undertaking—and as cool as 1666: Amsterdam looks, this admission has really diminished my enthusiasm for it.

In the midst of the RAMpocalypse and the billions of dollars being thrown at AI, it's easy to become blind to the fact that the use of machine learning can be highly beneficial in lots of different scenarios. Case in point: an update to an old AMD GPU Linux driver was created with the help of Microsoft's Copilot.

As reported by Phoronix, the driver is R600 Gallium3D, an open-source package for Mesa, that's exclusively for AMD's Terascale architecture GPUs. These first appeared in 2007, with the Radeon HD 2000-series, before bowing out with the HD 6000-series three years later (though a variety of rebadged chips continued to appear in later Radeon models).

Since AMD no longer offers any kind of official support or updates for this driver set, it's down to the coding community to keep these alive, and Gert Wolny seems to be one of the very few coders working on the R600 drivers these days. Since it's obviously not a full-time, paid job, you'd naturally expect anyone in this situation to be getting help from any source available.

That's precisely what's happened in this instance, where Wolny has leaned on GitHub Copilot to help out with tidying up the shader compiler code. This process is called refactoring, and it essentially irons out hiccups, bloated code, duplication, and so on without changing what it all fundamentally does.

This is something that AI is quite good at, as it can quickly spot things among the vast sea of code lines that the human brain could potentially miss. Microsoft has a short tutorial on Copilot refactoring if you're interested in learning more about what it can do.

Admittedly, none of this is likely to be noteworthy to most PC gamers, because it's only for old hardware that can't be used to run any of the latest games. But if you do have a penchant for vintage hardware, running on Linux to avoid having to deal with Windows spitting the dummy out over drivers, then it's surely good news for you.

One question worth considering is how long it will be before AI is used to handle the whole process of keeping older hardware alive and kicking, rather than just doing a spot of code spring cleaning. Given how rapidly we've gone from AI simply being a topic of academic interest to now defining today's world of computing, the answer is likely to be 'not very long at all.'

A ruling from a German court has found that Google is liable for the claims made in Search's AI Overviews. What is this? The consequence of Google's all-in-on-AI actions?

The case involves false claims made about two Munich-based publishers. Allegedly, Search's AI Overview misattributed the questionable practices of another existing business to the plaintiffs, drawing a link that did not exist in the sources it scraped. The two publishers initially sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, only bringing the legal case after the search giant did not appropriately address the issue (via The Decoder).

As a result, on May 28, the Munich Regional Court issued an injunction against Google. To get a little bit into Deutschland's legal landscape, there are existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice that basically say companies like Google have limited liability when it comes to the third-party content dredged up by traditional search results. The Munich Regional Court argues that AI Overviews represent a different legal beast, and its ruling could have an international impact in the future.

The court makes the case that, from the perspective of your average user, the AI-generated response reads closer to direct information from Google rather than pointing towards external content (via Heise Online). Considering Pew Research found last year that Google users are much less likely to click on a source shared via an AI Overview, I can definitely follow the argument.

According to The Decoder's translation of the court documents, the court argued that Google owns the content its AI Overviews produce "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates." Therefore, the Search giant is liable for the "independent, new, and substantive statements" generated for the AI Overviews.

Apparently, at the hearing, Google claimed that most users would know "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted," highlighting that AI Overviews include linked sources folks can check for themselves. The court rejected this argument on the grounds that the capacity to check claims made via AI Overviews does not "regularly exempt from liability for this statement."

To put it another way, if I were to write something heinously false about Google right now, the fact that you could probably very easily look elsewhere online to disprove my claim would not save me from the end of my journalistic career.

I'd rather not get into the specifics of how libel law works in the UK, so instead let me explain why this German case is also interesting when it comes to free speech protections for AI-generated statements. Specifically, the court wrote, "[An AI-generated statement is] not the expression of an acquired conviction of the persons expressing it, but the result of an algorithm."

I would not be surprised if similar reasoning starts to crop up in future legal cases internationally. The court also described AI-assisted research as "above all an expression of Google's business activities" and "at most a secondary expression of an interest in being able to freely express one's opinion and beliefs."

Long story short, the court has ruled that, though you can often easily fact-check what you read in an AI Overview, Google is still liable if this particular Search product makes false claims. As such, Google has been served with an injunction against disseminating false claims about the Munich-based publishers, and the company also had to cover 80% of the legal costs.

While this case is now concluded, I wouldn't be surprised if we see its ruling ripple across the international legal landscape. There's never a guarantee different legal systems will agree on the same arguments, though—and I can't help but wonder how this case might've played out Stateside.

We at PC Gamer have covered the disturbing trend of lawyers—who are, on average, supposed to be competent and reasonably well-read, and quite literally where the phrase 'passing the bar' comes from—using AI citations in courtrooms before. But this one's a doozy, because it turns out absolutely everyone involved had the same large language model blindspot.

As spotted by lawyer Rob Freund on X (thanks, 404Media), the case—which Freund accurately dubs a "comedy of AI errors", took place during a dispute between Tom Withers and the city of Aberdeen. Withers was represented by Kathleen M. Wilson (with Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway as local counsel) and Kathryn Y. Williams (with Mark C. McClinton doing the same).

Per this document, both Wilson and Williams were found to be citing AI-hallucinated citations that did not exist: "The attorneys admitted that the hallucinatory citations cited by them, and identified by the Court, resulted from unverified AI use."

A show-cause hearing, essentially a chance for the lawyers to defend themselves, ended mostly in WIlson and Williams hanging their heads in shame: "Each of the attorneys expressed embarrassment and apologized to the Court. They also provided explanations regarding their independent roles in conducting legal research and/or drafting the filings at issue.

"In short, Williams and Wilson, the two out-of-state attorneys, assumed responsibility for drafting the filings at issue on behalf of their respective clients. Williams admitted to using an AI tool to conduct legal research, and Wilson admitted to using generative AI to draft her respective filing. Neither of them verified the legal authority output by AI before filing their briefs."

What's more, both Ridgeway and McClinton admitted to "failing to review the subject filings", and being unable to catch the entirely made-up citations in their duties as local counsel. So to sum things up, four entire lawyers—with degrees and everything—used AI to try and skimp out on doing work, or likely didn't double-check their cases at all, let alone for hallucinations.

This resulted in the judge scrapping the entire thing and punishing everyone involved. Wilson and William were ordered to pay fines ($2,500 and $3,500 respectively) and barred from practicing in the district for two years. Meanwhile, Ridgeway and McClinton were ordered to shell out $1,000 for their poor double-checking.

Both Withers and the city were given 60 days to find new counsel—who hopefully both won't believe ChatGPT to be some almighty legal god, this time.

We predicted last week that, with Summer Game Fest season upon us, we'd be seeing an uptick in the number of cool-looking new games that, whoops, were made with AI. Is the new Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3), announced today during the Nintendo Direct showcase, one of them? To paraphrase the famous Ancient Aliens meme, I'm not saying the answer is yes, but it's yes.

The potential use of AI was once again given away by funky fingers, in this case on official artwork featuring the great American avatar Donald Duck. As noted by Tracker_TD on Bluesky, the second-best waterfowl maniac in animation history (I'm a Daffy man, myself) has three fingers on his right hand, but four on his left—plus a thumb in both cases. There's really no missing it.

that KH Switch collection pack thing sure has some interesting cover artinteresting choice to give Donald a mismatched number of fingers on each hand, and a beak that absorbs into itself

— @tracker-td.bsky.social (@tracker-td.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:32:10.415Z

A number of press images accompanying the announcement have Donald's four-fingered hand covered, but it's clearly visible in an image posted by the official Kingdom Hearts account on X, and in a different piece of key art available on the Square Enix website—it's 100% official, extra finger and all.

There are no other cases of extra (or missing) fingers in the image that I've noticed, but I do wonder what exactly is going on with—to quote PC Gamer wordsmith Morgan Park's reaction—"Sora's whack-ass hand." Is that normal? At least it's got the right number of fingers, I guess.

I've never been very good at picking out telltale signs of generative AI in promotional images, but those Donald fingers seem pretty egregious—and even more so when compared to this image posted in response to Tracker_TD's message, which looks very similar but contains the correct number of fingers.

Did they take this old 3D render and get AI to turn it into an "illustration"...?

— @cdrom.ca (@cdrom.ca.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.422Z

Interestingly, folks who are hip to the scene said the real evidence isn't in the obvious stuff, but in the backgrounds, which are also visibly off when you get in close. "It's always the backgrounds," jessarcade wrote. "It's detailed but lazy in a way that doesn't make sense for a human artist."

Oh my god just why

— @chrisscheidig.bsky.social (@chrisscheidig.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.254Z

Yeah, there's more. Some of the oddities could be explained by an artist in a rush, or just good old-fashioned sloppiness, but collectively? It's a lot.

Here is a post going around that is pointing out each of the signs that this is indeed AI

— @retrogameart.bsky.social (@retrogameart.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-06-09T22:15:11.345Z

I'd say it's pretty certain that generative AI was put to use here, but at this point all we can really do is speculate. Kingdom Hearts Collection (1-3) is coming to PC along with consoles, but Square Enix only announced it for the Microsoft Store—there's no listing on Steam, which is the only storefront that requires AI disclosure. I've reached out to Square Enix to ask about the use of generative AI in the new game, and will update when they apologize for it.

Now that AI is being shoehorned into every app or operating system these days, whether you want it or not, attention is being increasingly turned to the user interface. At one end of the spectrum, you have Google and Microsoft's unaccommodating efforts, and at the other, you have Apple's new orb-of-wonder, actively lighting its 'surroundings'.

Later this year, an updated, fully AI-powered version of Siri will make its way to all of Apple's operating systems, though developers can already access it. For the likes of iOS and MacOS, Siri AI's interface isn't especially noteworthy, but on visionOS, the software that powers the Apple Vision Pro, it really stands out.

As briefly demonstrated in a post on X by Brad Lynch, project manager at EOZ VR, the Siri AI interface takes the form of a glowing ball that you can move around in the virtual world. You'd expect that for an augmented reality setup, but what makes Apple's effort special is the little matter of the ball's lighting.

The AR rendering of the ball includes an environmental effect, whereby surfaces and objects are 'lit' by the Siri AI interface. Hardly a revolutionary thing, but visual clues like this significantly help with how well virtual objects are experienced and interacted with in an augmented world. If you look at the visionOS windows in the clip, you'll see that they appear flat and unnatural because they cast no shadows or light.

For me, though, it's more about the fact that Apple has spent some time thinking about the interface, whereas Google and Microsoft have done almost the complete opposite for Gemini and Copilot, respectively.

Fire up the latest version of Excel, and you'll be treated to a Copilot button that hovers over the spreadsheet. You can't move the icon yourself; all you can do is 'dock' it to the edge of the window. But even then, it still overlaps cells, and the only way you can solve this problem is by disabling Copilot entirely (File > Options > Copilot, if you're interested).

At least you do have that option, though, unlike with Google's products, where Gemini icons festoon every application and first-run instructions routinely pop up, no matter how frequently you acknowledge or dismiss the reminders.

No PC user needs to be told just how crucial the user interface is for an application. Apple's Siri-ball for visionOS isn't a miracle of design or coding: it just puts the user's experience first, over everything else, something that Google and Microsoft really don't seem to care about these days. You wouldn't want a ray-traced globe illuminating your spreadsheets, but a little more interactivity would be very welcome.

Hideo Kojima got to live out his well-documented dream of visiting space recently, but don't get too excited, it was only via an appearance in an AI-generated Prada ad. It was tremendously bleak and no one liked it.

Including, I suppose, Hideo Kojima himself? In a recent chat with The Washington Post, Kojima said that—ignore all previous advertising stunts—he's actually not interested in AI at all, and doesn't think it's going to create anything you could meaningfully call art during his lifetime.

"Art is life. But in 50 years, 100 years, I don’t know. Maybe AI could create art, but while I live, I don’t think I’ll see it," said Kojima. "I'm not interested in it." Kojima's celeb pal and Prada co-star Nicolas Winding Refn, who was also present, was a little less reserved: "It’s a terrifying time we live in because everything is so uncertain. But then, life has always been uncertain. The gasoline that keeps your creativity going is uncertainty, because it makes you always have to innovate. Re-create yourself. Re-create the future."

Perhaps it's the case that Kojima was stung by public criticism of his AI-embracing fashion ad, but I wouldn't be so certain.

The Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator never publicly budged when he drew criticism for a much-publicised trip to Saudi Arabia on his Death Stranding 2 tour (Saudi Arabia, which has a grim human rights record, is often criticised for using sports and entertainment to sanitise its international reputation). I'd be surprised if Kojima's iffiness on AI is a product of anything but the simple recognition that it, well, isn't very good for art.

Anyway, Kojima says it's on you kids to figure out how to use LLMs in a way that doesn't suck. "We’ll find a good way, a good path to how we use technology," he said, "and it’s really up to young people on how we use it." Ideally, a way that features fewer famous game designers cashing in on their image for a quick cheque.

One concept was continually repeated by Nvidia at Computex 2026, and it's this idea of "reinventing the PC." The phrase has been used in reference to the company's RTX Spark SoC—powering "the world’s first Windows PCs purpose-built for personal agents"—and from a hardware perspective, it's an interesting bit of kit.

However, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further into the "reinvention" of the PC at a Q&A session later in the show. "Your personal computer is really the world's largest edge device, and it's 40 years old," said the Nvidia chief. "And [it] has to be reinvented for agentic systems…. just like we have to reinvent the car."

Huang then used an example of modern autonomous cars as edge devices, while satellites "put intelligence in the sky." Later, the Nvidia chief had this to say about the future of the PC platform as a whole:

"Our computer sits at our desk waiting for us to use it. In the future, when we leave it… we're talking with it all the time," said Huang.

"I'll be chatting in WhatsApp with my agent, and it's doing stuff... and my agents are going to have names, and they're on my WhatsApp, and we're just chatting all the time. I'll be talking to it, and it's going to be talking back. It'll call me."

"That is the personal computer future. Tell me that's not R2-D2. Tell me that's not robotics. Tell me that's not cool," Huang continued. "I believe that many, many people will have this at home, just like they have a car at home. Soon, the agent is going to be so valuable to you, you want it to be sitting in a nice box, sitting in a nice computer, secure, performant, something you could carry with you, something you would use for a long period of time."

That's a nice sci-fi-style piece of imagery. Who among us hasn't imagined the idea of the ever-present "computer" (summoned with a cut-glass British accent, of course), working away in the background to not just respond to our commands, but to intelligently work with us to satisfy our needs, even at great distances?

The problem, however, is when that thinking runs into the cold, hard wall of reality—and all the extra consequences that entails. As things stand, our PCs are enablers of our own intelligence in a relatively direct way. We input commands, the computer responds. We control the machine, to a considerable degree. We are the agent.

But transforming our PCs into something with more agency, more AI-handled tasks, strikes me as risky business. It's putting the user further away from the machine, and letting AI do much of the heavy lifting instead. And in a world where concerns around the wider scope of the tech are well-publicised, this sort of AI-first thinking seems like a misread of the public perception surrounding it.

It reminds me of a joke/meme I read a long time ago, which I'll reprint here:

"Tech enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart house is Bluetooth-enabled, and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!

Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004, and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."

AI is far from perfect. And while it continually improves, the level of public trust around it seems shaky at best. We continually read stories of AI deleting work, breaking existing systems, and hallucinating. It can also be manipulated, sometimes with surprising ease. In this upcoming agentic AI PC world, can we really trust it to integrate itself so smoothly into our digital lives? And more crucially, do we want it to?

Looking at the wider picture of public perspective around AI, the temperature seems to be rising. Students are actively booing speakers who tell them about the wonderful AI future they're walking into.

Microsoft's head of AI, meanwhile, has expressed puzzlement around negative reactions towards the tech, while the company itself is in the process of scaling back AI integration into Windows 11 features, after complaints that the operating system wasn't focusing on the fundamentals. Which are, of course, the traditional functions of your PC.

Personally, I like the fact that my PC is a box that I control directly, not an AI agent platform I work with from afar. It makes me feel empowered. And while there are already lots of unseen processes running under the hood to make that happen for me, I'm not sure a swarm of AI agents will improve the experience.

"We're now reinventing the computer. It's an agentic computer. It's an agent now, it's an assistant, not a tool. And that's the big idea," says Huang. That's a shame. I like tools. They enable me, a human being, to directly express myself. Agentic AI assistants handling many tasks for me, reducing my primary role to some sort of bizarre conductor, though? Is this really what we, the end users, want?

Nevertheless, the artificial intelligence beast continues to spread its tentacles into our daily lives, and we're often told that if we don't get on board with the tech, we're going to be left behind. Don't worry, though. It's a good thing. Agentic AI will make our lives better, and soon we'll all… I don't know. Have more time to go to the beach, or something.

I guess I'll believe it when I see it. But it's difficult not to feel that, as end consumers, we don't really have much of a choice as to how our technological future develops. Our brave new AI-dominated world looks to be coming for us whether we like it or not, and we'd better hope it's everything that was promised. Will I be writing about how awesome my new agentic AI PC is in future? Will I even, thanks to AI, be writing about anything at all?

I've no idea, but it doesn't feel great. How about you?