The first Activision Blizzard game to join Xbox Game Pass will be Diablo IV, and it's due to land on March 28. The move means Diablo IV will be playable on Xbox and PC at no extra charge to Game Pass members — of which there are 34 million, Xbox announced today. 

This is just the first step in Xbox's broader plan to offer Activision Blizzard titles in its monthly subscription service, now that Microsoft fully owns the studio.

"There will be even more to play as we begin to fulfill our commitment to offer Activision and Blizzard games with Game Pass, both new releases and classic games from its legendary catalog," the Xbox Wire reads. Xbox plans to share more information about additional Activision Blizzard titles hitting Game Pass "soon."

Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in October 2023, after nearly two years of antitrust investigations from authorities in the United States and abroad. The deal was worth nearly $69 billion, the largest in Microsoft's history. As part of negotiations with regulators, Microsoft agreed to offload the streaming rights for Activision Blizzard games onto Ubisoft, opening the door for their inclusion in Game Pass, Ubisoft+ and other cloud services.

In the US, the FTC is continuing to investigate the acquisition and recently accused Microsoft of misrepresenting its plans for Activision Blizzard following a round of layoffs in January that affected 1,900 employees across the company's gaming segments.

Times are a-changing at Xbox. The brand's leaders have confirmed plans to bring more Xbox games to other platforms, most likely PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. 

On the latest edition of the Official Xbox Podcast, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says his team is bringing four of its games to "the other consoles." He didn't name the titles, but contrary to previous rumors, Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are not coming to PS5 or Switch for now. 

"The teams that are building those games have announced plans that are not too far away. As we know, game teams put a lot of energy into their announcements with the partners," Spencer said. "So I don't want to take anything away from those teams. So I won't be talking about the titles specifically. But I think when they come out, it'll make sense."

Reports have suggested that Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Halo and Gears of War would be among those crossing the great divide. Spencer did confirm that the Xbox games that are coming to PlayStation and Switch have been on Xbox and PC for at least a year already. "A couple of the games are community-driven games, new games, kind of first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let's say, on Xbox and PC — there's always growth, franchises that we obviously want to continue to invest in," he said. 

"Two of the other games are smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build that we love supporting creative endeavors across our studios regardless of size," Spencer added. "And as they've realized their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games, allowing us to invest in maybe future iterations of those, so equals to those, or just other games like that in our portfolio."

This story is developing; refresh for updates.

OpenAI on Thursday announced Sora, a brand new model that generates high-definition videos up to one minute in length from text prompts. Sora, which means “sky” in Japanese, won’t be available to the general public any time soon. Instead, OpenAI is making it available to a small group of academics and researchers who will assess harm and its potential for misuse.

“Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” the company said on its website. “The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.”

One of the videos generated by Sora that OpenAI shared on its website shows a couple walking through a snowy Tokyo city as cherry blossom petals and snowflakes blow around them.

Another shows realistic-looking wooly mammoths walking through a snowy meadow against a backdrop of snow-clad mountain ranges.

OpenAI says that the model works as a result of “deep understanding of language,” which lets it interpret text prompts accurately. Still, like basically all AI image- and video-generators we’ve seen, Sora isn’t perfect. In one of the examples, the prompt, which asks for a video of a Dalmatian looking through a window and people “walking and cycling along the canal streets,” omits the people and the streets in the video entirely. OpenAI also warns that the model can struggle to understand cause and effect — it can generate a video of a person eating a cookie, for instance, but the cookie may not have bite marks.

Sora isn’t the first text-to-video model around. Other companies including Meta, Google and Runway, have either teased text-to-video tools or made them available to the public. Still, no other tool is currently able to generate videos as long as 60 seconds. Sora also generates entire videos at once, instead of putting them together frame-by-frame like other models, which makes sure that subjects in the video stay the same even when they go out of view temporarily.

The rise of text-to-video tools has sparked concerns over their potential to more easily create realistic-looking fake footage. “I am absolutely terrified that this kind of thing will sway a narrowly contested election,” Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in artificial intelligence, and the founder of True Media, an organization that works to identify disinformation in political campaigns, told The New York Times. And generative AI more broadly has sparked backlash from artists and creative professionals concerned about the technology being used to replace jobs.

OpenAI said that it was working with experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content and bias to test the tool before making it available to the public. The company is also building tools capable of detecting videos generated by Sora and including metadata in the generated videos for easier detection. The company declined to tell the Times how Sora had been trained, except stating that it used both “publicly available videos” as well as videos licensed from copyright holders.

The Apple Vision Pro is officially two weeks old, and the apps are starting to roll in. TikTok was conspicuously absent on launch day, but now our long national nightmare has come to an end. The Vision Pro has a native TikTok app.

This isn’t just the iPad app with a new coat of paint. There are some neat features here that take advantage of Apple’s well-regarded and prohibitively-expensive headset. The navigation bar and like button are moved entirely off-screen, giving users an uninterrupted view of video content.

TikTok

This extends to comment sections and creator profiles, as they both now appear as expansions alongside the feed, which TikTok says provides “a more immersive content viewing experience.” To that end, TikTok integrates with the headset’s immersive environments, so people can watch short-form videos on the moon or surrounded by the lush flora of Yosemite.

TikTok also works with the Vision Pro’s Shared Space feature, allowing the app to exist somewhere in your peripheral as you work on other stuff. The location of the app will remain static, so it’ll be in the same place every time you put on the headset (provided you are in the same room.)

You may notice that these features are primarily intended for content consumers, and not creators. Engadget reached out to TikTok to ask about creator-specific features and we’ll update this post when we hear back.

The app’s available for download right now, though it likely won’t be accessible for TikTok’s core userbase of 10 to 19 year olds. The Apple Vision Pro costs $3,500. That’s like an entire childhood of allowances.

On Thursday, Google unveiled Gemini 1.5 Pro, which the company describes as delivering “dramatically enhanced performance” over the previous model. The company’s AI trajectory — viewed internally as increasingly critical for its future — follows the unveiling of Gemini 1.0 Ultra last week, alongside the rebranding of the Bard chatbot (to Gemini) to align with the new model’s more powerful and versatile capabilities.

In an announcement blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis try to balance assuring their audience about ethical AI safety while touting their models’ rapidly advancing capabilities. “Our teams continue pushing the frontiers of our latest models with safety at the core,” Pichai summarized.

The company needs to emphasize safety for AI skeptics (including one former Google CEO) and government regulators. But it also needs to stress its models’ accelerating performance for AI developers, potential customers and investors concerned the company was too slow to react to OpenAI’s breakout success with ChatGPT.

Pichai and Hassabis say Gemini 1.5 Pro delivers comparable results to Gemini 1.0 Ultra. However, Gemini 1.5 performs at that level more efficiently, with reduced computational requirements. The multimodal capabilities include processing text, images, videos, audio or code. As AI models advance, they’ll continue to offer a more versatile array of capabilities in one prompt box (another recent example was OpenAI integrating DALL-E 3 image generation into ChatGPT).

ALAIN JOCARD via Getty Images

Gemini 1.5 Pro can also handle up to one million tokens, or the units of data AI models can process in a single request. Google says Gemini 1.5 Pro can process over 700,000 words, an hour of video, 11 hours of audio and codebases with over 30,000 lines of code. The company says it’s even “successfully tested” a version that supports up to 10 million tokens.

The company says Gemini 1.5 Pro maintains high accuracy in queries with larger token counts when it has more new data to learn. It says the model impressed in the Needle In a Haystack evaluation. In this test, developers insert a small piece of information inside a long text block to see if the AI model can pick it out. Google said Gemini 1.5 Pro could find the embedded text 99 percent of the time in data blocks as long as one million tokens.

Google says Gemini 1.5 Pro can reason about various details from the 402-page Apollo 11 moon mission transcripts. In addition, it can analyze plot points and events from an uploaded 44-minute silent film starring Buster Keaton. “As 1.5 Pro’s long context window is the first of its kind among large-scale models, we’re continuously developing new evaluations and benchmarks for testing its novel capabilities,” Hassabis wrote.

Google is launching Gemini 1.5 Pro with 128,000-token capabilities, the same number at which OpenAI’s (publicly announced) GPT-4 models max out. Hassabis says Google will eventually introduce new pricing tiers that support up to one million-token queries.

Joy Malone via Getty Images

Gemini 1.5 Pro is also adept at learning new skills from information in long prompts — without additional fine-tuning (“in-context learning”). In a benchmark called Machine Translation from One Book, the model learned a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers globally that it hadn’t previously been trained on. The company says Gemini 1.5 Pro learned to perform at a similar level as a human learning the same content when translating English to Kalamang.

In a piece of the announcement that will catch developers’ attention, Google says Gemini 1.5 Pro can perform problem-solving tasks across longer code blocks. “When given a prompt with more than 100,000 lines of code, it can better reason across examples, suggest helpful modifications and give explanations about how different parts of the code works,” Hassabis wrote.

On the ethics and safety front, Google says it’s taking “the same approach to responsible deployment” it took with Gemini 1.0 models. That includes developing and applying red-teaming techniques, where a group of ethical developers essentially serve as devil’s advocate, testing for “a range of potential harms.” In addition, the company says it heavily scrutinizes areas like content safety and representational harms. The company says it continues to develop new ethical and safety tests for its AI tools.

Google is launching Gemini 1.5 in early access for developers and enterprise customers. The company plans to make it more widely available eventually. Gemini 1.0 is currently available for consumers, alongside a Pro variant that costs $20 monthly.

YouTube just released a new feature that lets users remix music videos and turn them into Shorts. This allows you to adjust various parameters from a full-length music video to create something wholly unique. Does this sound like TikTok? It definitely sounds like TikTok.

Here’s how it works. Just tap “remix” on a music video. You’ll be presented with four options: Sound, Green Screen, Cut and Collab. You can only pick one, so choose wisely. The Sound tool does what you think. It strips the audio and lets you use it in your own YouTube Short. This is the kind of thing that’s hugely popular on TikTok, with many users lip-syncing to various audio clips. This Sound tool is available to any music video and most songs that were automatically uploaded to the platform.  

Green Screen takes things a step further. It turns the video into a background, which you can then dance in front of or whatever. The Cut tool just clips out a five second portion of the video that you can add to any Short. Finally, Collab creates a side-by-side video that places your Short next to the original content. YouTube says this is the perfect option when “you and your friends” want to show off choreography alongside the original artist.

The feature’s already available on the mobile app, though it may not have rolled out to every user yet. If you want to check, just open the app, click on a music video and look for that “remix” option. It’s worth noting that many of these features were already available to Shorts creators, but not in one handy tab.

YouTube/Lawrence Bonk

YouTube Shorts was already a TikTok-alike when it released back in 2021, but these features make it even more, uh, TikTok-ier. With that in mind, YouTube picked the perfect time to officially launch the toolset. Universal Music has pulled its roster from TikTok after a breakdown in financial negotiations. UMG artists include Taylor Swift, Drake, Billie Eilish and many more. 

This has forced TikTok creators to swap out music tracks, as anything sourced from Universal is automatically muted. The record label has accused TikTok of wanting to pay a “fraction” of rates offered by other social media sites. YouTube’s Remix tool has access to Universal’s entire roster.

The mini PC is misunderstood. Easily dismissed as underpowered, over-priced or just plain ugly; we intuit that a computer with a tiny footprint has to mean a compromise. Ayaneo, best known for its Windows gaming handhelds, has branched out into tiny desktops with retro-inspired designs. Thankfully Ayaneo’s AM01 and AM02 mini PCs have more to offer, but their initial draw over rivals, I won’t lie, is nostalgic appeal.

Sadly, I’m old enough to remember using the original Macintosh that inspired the AM01 and if Nintendo ever reimagined a real NES, I hope it looks like the AM02. Both PCs come in various specifications, but to save typing out the numerous configurations the AM01 starts at $200 and comes in low-to-modest specifications, good for retro gaming and general office tasks. The AM02 is priced between $440 and $630, and all variants come with an AMD 7840HS APU, better suited for PC gaming and heavier tasks like video editing or even music production.

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

As someone that plays a lot of retro games and doesn’t mind playing PC games on low or medium settings, the AM02 is fast becoming my primary gaming system. Partly because the AM02 strikes a good balance between retro and contemporary design so it fits well in my adult living room. It’s also really well built. I’m not so sure about the four-inch touch screen (more on this later) but the overall design blends in nicely with a contemporary decor without calling too much attention to itself.

The AM02 I’ve been testing is fully loaded with 32GB or RAM and 1TB of storage, but there are enough ports here that even with a lower-spec model you can add more storage or even an eGPU (thanks to a USB 4.0 port) later down the line. There are also two RJ45 ports, one of which is 2.5Gbps, future-proofing the AM02 somewhat and making it well-suited to pulling media from networked storage. This model is also powered by USB-C which makes it more “portable” than its Mac-inspired sibling that uses a laptop-style power brick. Theoretically you could power a display from the AM02’s USB 4 port and have a PC that can easily be moved around. Yes, they invented laptops for exactly this but a perk of mini PCs is that they aren’t a pain to relocate.

I’ve suggested that the AM02 works great in a living room, and it does, but the placement of the built-in display suggests this was designed to live on a desk. When Ayaneo announced these mini PCs, marketing shots showed them in horizontal and vertical configurations. Sadly, neither model makes sense in a vertical orientation. Not least because both have ports on the side that would be facing the desk. Worse, the AM02 has a delightful NES-inspired front flap covering the USB and 3.5mm ports. Press the red button and it satisfyingly clicks open, but that would be the side facing down in a vertical set-up. Not to mention all the cables would then be coming out of the top.

It’s kind of a bummer as I was hoping the built-in display could be visible from across the room, but you can only see it if you’re near enough to peer over from above. What’s more, at least right now, the display is more of a novelty. By default it shows performance statistics such as FPS, CPU usage / temperature and fan speed which is useful for some folk. You can even change the TDP/power draw right from the display, but honestly, given that this thing is plugged in I’ve just been leaving it on the max 45W setting.

Swipe left on the screen, and the view changes to a date and time widget. Swipe one more time and there’s a virtual volume control along with the option to turn the display off. Fun fact, right now there’s no option to turn it back on again. I restarted the PC via Windows and it still didn’t come back to life. I tried once more via the physical power button and that worked, there’s a neater solution coming in the final software. Relatedly, Ayaneo is hoping users will create their own widgets for this display, so there’s definitely potential here. I’m sure it won’t be long before Doom is running entirely on the linux that runs that display.

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

If you do want to use this just for gaming, then you’ll have to decide whether you want to use the company’s own launcher or not. On Ayaneo’s handhelds it’s useful for changing power settings on the fly and other tasks that would otherwise be a pain for a handheld. On a PC like this, the launcher is adequate, but you might want to find your own or just ditch it for the most part. I set the AM02 up to load right into Launchbox/Big Box which handles all my retro/Steam/Epic games just fine and gives a much more console-like experience. But that’s the joy of Windows for gaming I guess, you can do what you want with it.

Despite their diminutive size, mini PCs aren’t always cheap. Like their full-size counterparts, prices range wildly depending on their performance, storage and components. Ayaneo’s handhelds almost universally fell into the “premium” pricing category with nearly all its Windows models costing more than the Steam Deck they try to rival. The two mini PCs break that trend with both models offering, at worst, fair market prices and, at best, beating the competition.

Most direct rivals to the AM02 don’t have a built-in screen (though some do) or have quite as good a selection of inputs and outputs. That’s to say, overall the AM01 and AM02 are reasonably priced for their spec and even more so if you can scoop them up during the early-bird window, which at time of publication is still active for the AM02.

Photo by James Trew / Engadget

There’s a small elephant in the room though. That is, if you’re looking for a true gaming PC, there are likely better ways to spend your money. The lowest spec AM02 costs more than a PS5. Or about the same as an LCD Steam Deck with a dock. Then there’s the Mac Mini which starts at $600 (with less memory and RAM but that M2 processor is no joke). So if gaming is your sole goal, then there’s a slim niche that the AM02 serves best — those looking for a mix of retro and PC titles that also want the flexibility of other media tasks (an easier way to watch Netflix with a VPN, for example) in a package that only draws the right kind of attention. Or maybe you just love it for its design and the capabilities work for you.

Mostly, it’s a promising new direction for a company that made a name for itself trying to take the Steam Deck head on. It might not have been truly successful in that specific mission, but it earned itself plenty of fans along the way for its high-spec handhelds that help re-establish portable gaming as an exciting category. As Ayaneo enters the more general PC market, it might well have found a space where it can excel against a very different type of competition.

This week’s edition of the Official Xbox Podcast is likely to have far more eyes and ears on it than usual. That’s because three top Xbox executives are set to lay out what's ahead for the brand.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, Xbox President Sarah Bond and President of Game Content and Studios Matt Booty will “share updates on the Xbox business,” following rumors that several major games could be coming to PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. Various reports have indicated that one-time exclusives such as Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are bound for rival platforms. Even tentpole franchises like Halo and Gears of War could be on the way to Sony and Nintendo platforms.

It's likely that Spencer, Bond and Booty will either dispel such rumors or confirm the reports on the Official Xbox Podcast. Spencer pledged that the “business update” will include details “about our vision for the future of Xbox.” You can find out for yourself what that entails by checking out the episode on YouTube or podcast services such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts when it drops at 3PM ET on Thursday. We'll embed the YouTube video below once it's live.

It's clear that Microsoft's gaming division has been going through a sea change over the last few months after finally closing its mammoth takeover of Activision Blizzard in October and then laying off 1,900 people a few months later. We should get more clarity as to the overall direction of Microsoft Gaming today.

It does seem that Microsoft is about to become more of a multi-platform publisher, though. The company has already pledged to bring more of its games to Switch after making a deal with Nintendo to release Call of Duty titles on that company's systems.

That said, Microsoft is unlikely to stop making consoles of its own any time soon. Spencer told staff at a town hall earlier this month Xbox has more hardware in the pipeline, according to Inverse. Bond also reportedly laid out a vision of making Xbox available on "every screen" and showed the smash hit Game Pass title Palworld on various tablets, TV screens, monitors and handheld devices.

A team of South Korean researchers at Yonsei University have developed a hybrid rice variant that’s quite literally filled with beef. The lab-grown rice grains were infused with cow muscle and fat cells, so they are one part plant and one part meat. The rice is also an appetizing shade of bright pink, which tends to happen when flesh enters the picture.

The team hopes to eventually offer a cheaper and more sustainable source of protein with a much lower carbon footprint than actual beef. It’ll also save time for those who enjoy a nice beef bowl over rice—the rice is the beef bowl.

Here’s how they achieved this culinary delight. The researchers first coated each grain of rice in fish gelatin to help the meat cells latch on. Next, they inserted cow muscle and fat stem cells into each grain, which are then left to culture in a petri dish. Rice grains feature a porous, yet organized, internal structure that actually mimics the “biological scaffolds” found in meat cells. So the rice grains offer a housing that allows the cells to grow and thrive, along with molecules to provide nourishment.

The meat cells grow both on the surface of the rice grain and inside of the grain itself. After around ten days, you get a finished product. The study, published in Matter, says the rice grains taste like beef sushi, which makes sense given the ingredients.

“Imagine obtaining all the nutrients we need from cell-cultured protein rice,” primary author Sohyeon Park said in a press release. “Rice already has a high nutrient level, but adding cells from livestock can further boost it.”

The team even envisions a day when livestock could be eliminated from the process entirely. They hope to develop a line of cells that continue to divide and grow over long periods of time, so they can source from that line instead of from actual cows. “After that, we can create a sustainable food system,” Park told CNN.

Obviously, this is still in the research phase, so pink beef rice won’t be showing up on restaurant menus anytime soon. The team’s refining the growth process to produce rice grains with more nutritional value. They also hope to further improve the taste, texture and color. “It could one day serve as food relief for famine, military ration, or even space food,” Park said in the press release.

This is just one part of a global effort to do something, anything, about the ongoing ecological disaster that is meat production. Livestock intended for slaughter are responsible for 6.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere each year, according to a UN report. That’s nearly 12 percent of all human-caused carbon emissions.

To that end, there are various efforts underway to create palatable and economical lab-grown meat, from cultured chicken nuggets to steaks grown using a similar gelatin-based biological scaffolding system to the aforementioned beef rice. There’s also the rise of insects as a viable source of protein.

Meta says it will start making businesses and influencers cover the cost of a 30 percent fee Apple is charging when they pay to promote their posts on the Facebook and Instagram iOS apps. In 2022, Apple updated its App Store policy to apply the 30 percent cut it takes from digital purchases to boosted posts, claiming that they were effectively in-app purchases. Meta is now passing that additional cost along to advertisers.

Starting later this month in the US and in other markets later this year, Apple will take over billing of boosted posts through the apps. When the 30 percent fee becomes applicable, it will be more expensive for advertisers to pay for boosted posts on the Instagram and Facebook iOS apps. They can get around Apple's fee by going through the mobile web or desktop instead.

Meta says its hands are tied, since it either has to play by Apple's rules or remove the boosted post feature from its iOS apps. "We do not want to remove the ability to boost posts, as this would hurt small businesses by making the feature less discoverable and potentially deprive them of a valuable way to promote their business," the company wrote in a blog post.

Those who don’t mind paying extra to promote posts via the iOS apps will need to go through a different payment process too. They’ll have to add prepaid funds to their account and pay for boosted posts in advance of publishing them instead of after the ads run. 

If advertisers add prepaid funds through the Facebook or Instagram iOS apps, they'll be subject to Apple's 30 percent service fee. Alternatively, they can add funds to their Meta account on desktop or the mobile web. That way, Meta says, they can use the funds to boost posts "from any tool, including from the Instagram or Facebook iOS apps, without incurring fees."