OpenAI Debuts GPT-4o ‘omni’ Model

OpenAI has announced a new AI model called GPT-4o. GPT-4o is being rolled out across OpenAI’s products over the next few weeks.

The new model improves upon GPT-4 Turbo by adding the ability to handle speech, text, and images. This enables a more interactive experience with ChatGPT. Users can now interrupt ChatGPT while it is answering, and the model can pick up on nuances in a user’s voice. GPT-4o also enhances ChatGPT’s vision capabilities, allowing it to quickly answer questions related to images or code shown.

OpenAI believes GPT-4o will lead to more natural interactions with their AI systems. With its speech recognition abilities, ChatGPT powered by GPT-4o can have more conversational dialogues where it responds in different emotive styles. In the future, the model may be able to watch live video and explain what is happening.

GPT-4o provides performance improvements as well. It is twice as fast and half the price of GPT-4 Turbo in OpenAI’s APIs. Initially, voice features will only be available to some partners due to risks of misuse, but other GPT-4o capabilities are already available in free and premium ChatGPT plans. OpenAI has also improved the ChatGPT user interface and added new desktop apps.

Google I/O 2024: Everything Announced

Google announced several new AI features and products at its I/O 2024 event.

Google Lens can now search using video input, and Gemini will understand photo libraries by answering questions from Google Photos.

Project Astra is Google's vision for an AI assistant that can see, understand, and perform tasks using a camera. It powers demos shown at I/O.

Google also introduced Gemini 1.5 Flash and upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro models.

Gemini is being integrated into Google Workspace where it can summarize meetings and assist across apps.

Creators can customize chatbots using Gems, and Gemini Live aims to improve voice conversations.

Gemini on Android is gaining multi-modal abilities like analyzing videos.

New products included Veo for Google's video generation and an AI assistant in Chrome.

Google's SynthID was improved for watermarking and detecting deepfakes.

Google Search is incorporating "AI Overviews" and Android gains scam detection using Gemini Nano.

The event heavily focused on Google’s Gemini AI models, along with the ways they’re being integrated into apps like Workspace and Chrome.

Instagram Co-founder Joins Anthropic as Chief Product Officer

AI startup Anthropic has hired Mike Krieger as their new Chief Product Officer. Krieger co-founded Instagram and is excited about how Anthropic's systems like Claude could empower more innovation.

Anthropic highlighted Krieger's experience leading Instagram and building out its engineering team. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Krieger's background in developing intuitive products will be valuable in creating new ways to interact with Claude, especially for workplaces.

Krieger's hire comes at a competitive time for AI safety startups. Anthropic gained attention with Claude 3 but now faces challenges from OpenAI's models. However, Anthropic staff remain optimistic about their training efforts, likening it to Rocky Balboa overcoming his rival.

With his experience scaling Instagram, Krieger is expected to help Anthropic achieve growth and build out systems. His leadership will be important in competing against OpenAI and others seeking to attract users, developers, and enterprise customers.

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Ubisoft Reveals ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ Official Trailer

Ubisoft has officially revealed Assassin's Creed Shadows, a new game in the series, with a cinematic trailer that confirms dual protagonists: Yasuke, a historical African samurai, and Naoe, a female shinobi. The game will be released on November 15, 2024, and will allow players to switch seamlessly between the two characters.

The game's development team, Ubisoft Quebec, has experience with dual protagonists, having worked on Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Assassin's Creed Syndicate. The trailer showcases the beauty and scale of feudal Japan, which players will be able to explore in the game.

According to the game's PlayStation preorder page, players will be able to explore a captivating open world, complete with unpredictable weather, changing seasons, and reactive environments. The game's narrative may take place over a long period, given the mention of changing seasons. Players will also be able to create their network of spies and unlock new skills, gear, and progression for each character.

The game's preorder listing also reveals that players will be able to create a fully customizable hideout for their shinobi league, where they can train their crew, craft new gear, and interact with key characters. Assassin's Creed Shadows is an exciting entry in the series, bringing players to feudal Japan for the first time and returning to the open-world format that began with Assassin's Creed Origins.

Square Enix Moves on to "Aggressive Multiplatform Strategy" as Profits Drop 70%

Square Enix has reported a 70% drop in profits, with operating income down 26.6% year-on-year and profit attributable to owners of the parent down 69.7% year-on-year. The company's digital entertainment sales were slightly up, but its MMO and Games for Smart Devices/PC Browsers sub-segments both declined year-on-year. The operating losses were due to higher development cost amortization and advertising expenses, as well as content valuation losses.

As a result, Square Enix will be implementing a new strategy, called "Square Enix Reboots, and Awakens", which is a three-year plan targeting long-term growth. The company will enhance its productivity and release titles more regularly by optimizing its development footprint, and will aggressively pursue a multi-platform strategy that includes Nintendo platforms, PlayStation, Xbox, and PCs. The company will also step up digital sales, further develop its IP across multiple media and markets, and rebuild its overseas business divisions from the ground up.

As part of this plan, Square Enix will be undergoing "structural reforms" which will involve layoffs across its U.S. and European offices. The layoffs, which are expected to affect staff working in publishing, IT, and Square Enix's Collective indie games division, will begin this week and will continue over the next month.

Take-Two Narrows GTA VI Release Window to 2025, Records $3.74 Billion Annual Loss

Take-Two Interactive, the company behind Grand Theft Auto, has narrowed the release window for GTA VI to Fall 2025. The company believes the title will be an "unparalleled entertainment experience." This news was shared in Take-Two's fiscal report for the year ended March 31, 2024, which revealed an annual net loss of $3.74 billion.

The company's annual net bookings increased by 1 percent to $5.33 billion, with recurrent consumer spending increasing by 2 percent year-on-year and accounting for 78 percent of total net bookings. The largest contributors to this growth were NBA 2K24, Grand Theft Auto Online, and Grand Theft Auto V, among others.

Take-Two's GAAP net loss of $3.74 billion was attributed to impairment charges, acquisition-related intangible assets, and business reorganization expenses related to cost-reduction programs. The company has been undergoing a cost reduction program, which includes layoffs and the cancellation of "several" unannounced projects. Despite this, CEO Strauss Zelnick believes the company is entering fiscal 2025 with "positive momentum" and expects to deliver net bookings ranging from $5.55 to $5.65 billion over the next year.

Zelnick expressed confidence in the company's ability to deliver new levels of success, with a focus on franchises that will provide the "best opportunities to achieve significant critical and commercial success." Take-Two plans to release 40 titles through Fiscal 2027, with expectations of driving scale, enhancing margins, and delivering industry-leading returns for shareholders.

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Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Proposes Gas Model Overhaul

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed a new Ethereum improvement protocol, EIP-7706, which aims to overhaul the current gas model for transaction call data. Currently, Ethereum-based transactions have two types of gas fees: one for transaction execution and another for storing data.

Buterin's proposal suggests introducing a third form of gas exclusively for call data, which is the portion of an Ethereum transaction containing key data transmitted to smart contracts. This would allocate a unique charge to data transferred during transactions, separate from the costs of executing contract code or storing data.

The new gas model would add a transaction type that provides max_basefee and priority_fee as a vector, providing values for execution gas, blob gas, and call data gas. This change aims to reduce the transaction costs associated with data-heavy transactions that are not necessarily computationally intensive.

Buterin recommends managing all three forms of gas via a dynamic model that modifies fees simultaneously. By implementing a separate gas fee for call data, the "theoretical max call data size of a block would be greatly reduced, while basic economic analysis suggests that on average, call data would become considerably cheaper." This proposal aims to address the long-standing issue of high gas fees on the Ethereum network.

Nyan Heroes Announces $NYAN TGE and Airdrop

Nyan Heroes, a cat-themed shooter game, is set to launch its NYAN token on the Solana blockchain next week via the centralized exchange Bybit. The game, which has been in pre-alpha since March, has reportedly broken into the top 30 titles on the Epic Games Store with over 200,000 downloads.

The NYAN token launch will be accompanied by an airdrop for players who participated in the game's play-to-airdrop campaigns. Players can earn MEOW and CATNIP points by playing the game or engaging on social media, which will earn them an allocation of NYAN tokens once the token has launched.

The game, developed by Singapore-based game studio 9 Lives Interactive, received $3 million in funding to support its launch. Despite its crypto integration, the game can be played entirely without touching crypto or having a wallet. The developers are focusing on gameplay first, and there will be an in-game premium currency for purchasing "Web2" items, as well as special tokenized items marked as "awakened" that can be traded.

9 Lives Interactive's Creative Director and CEO, Max Fu, emphasized that engaging with the crypto side of the game is completely optional. The game's focus on gameplay first has contributed to its successful pre-alpha launch, with over 100,000 players in its first week and a half.

Pump.fun Exploiter Drains over $2M worth of SOL

Pump.fun, a popular tool for launching meme coins on Solana, suffered an exploit on Thursday, resulting in an estimated $2 million worth of Solana being drained from the protocol. The attacker, who claimed to be a former Pump.fun employee, targeted bonding curve contracts that move liquidity from tokens onto the Raydium decentralized exchange.

The attacker used a private key, only accessible to employees, to divert funds to unrelated wallet addresses. Igor Igamberdiev, head of research at Wintermute, estimated that the attacker stole at least $2 million worth of SOL. Instead of keeping the funds, the attacker began airdropping them to random wallet addresses, selecting holders of specific Solana tokens and NFTs.

The attacker, who claimed responsibility on Twitter, wrote that he was not afraid of imprisonment and was aware his identity was doxxed. He stated that he wanted to "kill" Pump.fun because it had "inadvertently hurt people for a long time." In a Twitter Spaces conversation, the attacker said he had worked for Pump.fun for a few weeks, felt the company was "horribly managed," and had "personal grievances" against the leadership.

Pump.fun announced that it had paused trading on the protocol and was investigating the issue. The company said it would cooperate with law enforcement, and the self-proclaimed attacker is Canadian. Decrypt reached out to Pump.fun to verify whether the attacker did previously work for the company, but did not receive a response. The incident has raised concerns about Pump.fun's management and its potential impact on the crypto community.

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