Currently serving over 70 million daily active users, Roblox is still going strong since its September 2006 launch — almost 18 years ago. The development team is now taking one step further to boost the platform's massive community, by way of providing real-time AI chat translation to connect gamers around the world. According to CTO Daniel Sturman, his team needed to build their own "unified, transformer-based translation LLM (large language model)" in order to seamlessly handle all 16 languages supported on Roblox, as well as to recognize Roblox-specific slangs and abbreviations (this writer just learned that "obby" refers to an obstacle course in the game).

As a result, the chat window always displays the conversation in the user's own tongue — with a small latency of around 100 milliseconds, so it's pretty much real time. You can also click on the translation icon on the left of each line to see it in its original language. Sturman claims that thanks to the language model's efficient architecture and iterative training, it "outperforms commercial translation APIs on Roblox content." The development team will later roll out a feedback tool to help improve translation quality, in addition to its ongoing updates with whatever new catchphrases it picks up on the platform.

Roblox

Roblox's translation efforts don't stop there. Sturman adds that his team is already looking into automatically translating "text on images, textures, 3D models" and more. As Roblox supports voice chat, the exec also teases the possibility of automatic voice chat translations, so gamers from around the world can seamlessly talk to one another in their own tongue on the platform. Given that Samsung already offers a similar feature via Galaxy AI, it probably won't be long before we hear another update from Roblox on this end.

According to a document leaked on X, Google is planning to introduce some major changes to its Bard AI tool as soon as this coming week. The plans, which have not been publicly confirmed, reportedly include changing the Bard name to Gemini. It would make sense for Google to do so, if only for simplicity’s sake — the company introduced its new multimodal AI model, Gemini, at the end of 2023 and has begun integrating it into some of its products, including Bard.

The changelog shared by Android app developer Dylan Roussel is dated February 7, and also notes that the paid Gemini Advanced tier will become available at this time. It mentions a Gemini app for Android is “coming soon,” as well.

Per the document, Gemini Advanced will give users access to the Ultra 1.0 model of Gemini, which is “far more capable at highly complex tasks like coding, logical reasoning, following nuanced instructions, and creative collaboration.” It’ll be available in over 150 countries and optimized for the English language at the start. The changelog also says Gemini will expand to Canada with this release.

Pokémon Go creator Niantic is bringing an AR skateboarding game to the Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality headset. The company teamed up with Reality Crisis, another player in the AR gaming space, to create Rodney Mullen’s SKATRIX. For the uninitiated, Mullen is a professional skateboarder who is credited with creating a number of iconic tricks, including the ollie and the kickflip.

This is the first augmented-reality skateboard game ever, unless you count using an actual skateboard to speed around town catching pocket monsters in Pokémon Go. Niantic says the gameplay will involve players navigating the real world to “explore and collect skatepark elements.” The game will use the same AR precision elements as the company’s other titles to “turn the world into an endless skatepark.” A gameplay demo shows an avatar skating in real-world locations like parking lots and inside of washing machines. However, there’s one really expensive elephant in the room.

The Apple Vision Pro costs $3,500 and isn’t exactly suited to removing from the living room, let alone the home. You’ll also look pretty stupid wearing Apple’s bulky ski goggles while out and about, not to mention it’d be mighty easy to snag it from your head and race away, perhaps on a real-life skateboard. 

To that end, Niantic and Reality Labs are also bringing the game to standard mobile devices, including iOS and Android smartphones. Much of the gameplay is still under wraps, but Niantic promises that players will be able to share custom-made skateparks with other users on both mobile devices and mixed-reality headsets.

Rodney Mullen’s SKATRIX will be released sometime this year. As for the Apple Vision Pro, the device looks to be getting all kinds of apps. The headset will have access to Microsoft’s entire 365 productivity suite at launch, along with a Zoom app. All told, Apple says there will be 600 apps available for tomorrow’s release.

Block is the latest notable tech company to lay off hundreds of workers, according to reports. CEO Jack Dorsey is said to have informed employees that the company is firing a "large number" of them, with Cash App, Square and the foundational (i.e. operations) teams bearing the brunt of the impact. According to a Business Insider source, Block is letting go nearly 1,000 people.

Dorsey reportedly wrote in his memo that the company is becoming leaner. It laid off around 40 people from the Tidal team in December. Last year, Block said it planned to limit its headcount to around 12,000 workers, a reduction from the around 13,000 it had in late 2023. Engadget has contacted Block for confirmation of the layoffs.

While it was initially expected that the layoffs would take place over a period of months, executives reportedly opted against that in favor carrying them out at the same time. "Why is so much happening in one single day? All of these teams were confident in the direction they're taking, and were ready to take action within the same 2-3 weeks," Dorsey is said to have written in his memo. "We decided it would be better to do [it] at once rather than arbitrarily space them out, which didn't seem fair to the individuals or to the company. When we know we need to take an action, we want to take it immediately, rather than let things linger on forever."

The tech industry has shed tens of thousands of workers over the last year or so, including thousands this month alone across companies including Unity, Twitch, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, eBay and Google. It also emerged on Tuesday that PayPal is firing around 2,500 people. 

Embracer Group, the Swedish holding company undergoing restructuring, has reportedly canceled a Deus Ex game. Bloomberg says developers had been working on the unannounced title for two years. Neither Embracer nor developer Eidos addressed the reported cancellation specifically, but they confirmed they were laying off 97 employees at Deus Ex developer Eidos Montreal.

Eidos will reportedly focus instead on “an original franchise.” Bloomberg’s sources say the Deus Ex game was scheduled to start production later this year. The franchise’s most recent mainline installment was 2016’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

After aggressively growing through acquisitions during the pandemic, Embracer Group entered a turbulent period last year. The company announced a restructuring plan in June 2023 after an unnamed partner pulled out of a planned deal that would have brought in $2 billion over six years. Axios later reported the mysterious investor was Savvy Games Group, which the Saudi government funds.

In August, Embracer announced the closure of Volition, the studio behind the Saints Row series. The parent company laid off about 900 employees in September and another 50 workers at Chorus developer Fishlabs. Earlier this month, Embracer shuttered Lost Boys Interactive, makers of Tiny Tina’s Wonderland — pinning the blame on “headwinds facing the industry right now.”

Embracer says the restructuring phase will run until the end of March. The company claims it will provide regular updates on the process, including when it publishes its next quarterly report on February 15.

Alongside the alleged Deus Ex cancellation, Eidos confirmed it let go of 97 employees from development teams, administration and support services. “The global economic context, the challenges of our industry and the comprehensive restructuring announced by Embracer have finally impacted our studio,” Eidos wrote in a statement.

Microsoft didn't have to look too far to find the new president of Blizzard. Former Call of Duty general manager Johanna Faries is replacing Mike Ybarra, who stood down from the role amid last week's sweeping layoffs in Microsoft's gaming division. Blizzard was said to be particularly hard hit as Microsoft fired around 1,900 people.

Faries, a former National Football League executive, joined Activision as the head of Call of Duty esports in 2018. She started overseeing all things Call of Duty in 2021 and officially starts her new role on February 5. 

Blizzard has largely operated independently since it merged with Activision in 2008. As such, Blizzard workers may be forgiven for being concerned at someone from the Activision side taking control. Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick often meddled in Blizzard's affairs, reportedly resulting in Overwatch 2 delays, among other things.

In an attempt to soothe any worries, Faries wrote in an email to staff that "Activision, Blizzard, and King are decidedly different companies with distinct games, cultures and communities. It is important to note that Call of Duty’s way of waking up in the morning to deliver for players can often differ from the stunning games in Blizzard’s realm: each with different gameplay experiences, communities that surround them, and requisite models of success. I’ve discussed this with the Blizzard leadership team and I’m walking into this role with sensitivity to those dynamics, and deep respect for Blizzard, as we begin to explore taking our universes to even higher heights."

Faries added that she is "committed to doing everything I can to help Blizzard thrive, with care and consideration for you and for our games, each unique and special in their own right.” Meanwhile, on X, Faries wrote that Blizzard's Diablo 4 was part of her current rotation of games, alongside Call of Duty and Baldur's Gate 3.

Meta is teaming up with the Center for Open Science (COS) to start a pilot program that studies “topics related to well-being.” It looks like the program will dive into our social media data, but on a voluntary basis, as COS says it will use a “privacy-preserving” dataset provided by Meta for the study. The agency says the study should help people understand “how different factors may or may not impact well-being and inform productive conversations about how to help people thrive.”

The specifics of the study remain opaque, but COS says it’ll use “new types of research processes” like pre-registration and early peer review. That last one is important, as it sends proposed research questions to peer review before being issued to study participants. This should help stave off bias and ensure the questions are actually useful. The agency also says that all results will be published and “not just those that confirm one’s hypothesis or support a prevailing theory.”

As for a totally non-scientific study on the effects of social media, using it for even ten minutes transforms any dopamine in my brain to the swamps of sadness from The Neverending Story. You could be the same. It’s no secret that social media is basically a factory that creates mental unease, and this is particularly true for kids and teens.

So, why announce this partnership today of all days? It could be a coincidence, but the timing sure is funny. Meta is set to testify this week in front of the US Senate Judiciary Committee about its failures to protect kids online, along with other social media bigwigs like TikTok, Snap and X. It is worth noting, however, that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew are willing participants in this testimony. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, Discord CEO Jason Citron and X CEO Linda Yaccarino had to be formally subpoenaed.

However, Meta has a particularly bad track record when it comes to this stuff. After all, the company’s being sued by 41 states for allegedly harming the mental health of its youngest users. The suit claims Meta knew its “addictive” features were bad for kids and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms.

Unsealed documents from the suit claim that Meta actually “coveted and pursued” children under 13 and lied about how it handled underage accounts once discovered, often failing to disable these accounts while continuing to harvest data. This would be a brazen violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998.

Another lawsuit alleges that Facebook and Instagram's algorithms facilitated child sexual harassment, with the complaint stating that Meta's own internal documents said over 100,000 kids were harassed daily. Facebook's "People You May Know" algorithm was singled out as a primary conduit to connect children to predators. The complaint alleges that Meta did nothing to stop this issue when approached by concerned employees.

With all of this in mind, it doesn’t really take a study to recognize that the “well-being” of users isn’t exactly the most important thing on the minds of social media CEOs. Still, if the program helps these companies move in the right direction, that’s certainly cool. COS says the study will take two years and that it’s still in the early planning stages. We’ll know more in the coming months. In the meantime, you can watch CEO Zuckerberg and all the rest testify before congress on Wednesday at 10 AM ET.

Rocksteady’s new third-person action shooter Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been pulled offline just one hour after launch when players encountered a bizarre bug that immediately beats the game. We’ve all heard of game-breaking bugs, but this may be the first game-beating bug. Obviously, players want more than three minutes of playtime out of their $70 purchase.

The issue immediately locks players out of all story missions, including tutorials, in a race to reach the end credits. This also makes it impossible to receive trophies and achievements, though most purchasers will probably get hung up on the whole “the game is basically unplayable” aspect. Still, if you’re looking for the easy mode to beat all easy modes, this is it. We could have used this bug for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Cuphead.

There’s one major caveat here that’s saving this from becoming a huge story comparable with the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2099, and many other recent AAA launches. The game doesn’t officially release in most of the world until February 2. Some territories get it tomorrow, January 30, and that’s where the bug comes in. Due to the magic of global time zones, it’s already January 30 in New Zealand, which is where players encountered the issue. However, it’s not too hard to change your Xbox system clock to New Zealand time to snag the game early. Don’t do that. Give Rocksteady some time to fix the problem.

To that end, the developer says they are working on a fix, which involves performing maintenance on the servers. Rocksteady urges patience, writing that it could take “several hours” before being handled. Throughout this time, the game will remain offline. In any event, the ship should right itself before February 2.

Looking for a silver lining? Being as how the bug skips the vast majority of the game, the risk of story spoilers is really low for the next few days. So go ahead. Hit up your favorite social media sites and message boards.

Instagram is testing yet another feature meant to give users an alternative to finstas. It’s called “flipside” and it allows people to create a secondary photo grid that only designated friends can see.

If that sounds somewhat familiar it’s probably because Instagram already makes it pretty easy for users to create posts intended for a more limited audience. The app added the ability for users to share grid posts with “close friends” back in November (Stories for close friends has been a thing since 2018). More recently, it tested audience lists for Stories, so users could create multiple lists for small-group sharing. The app, of course, also makes it fairly easy to create an actual finsta.

Flipside, somewhat confusingly, offers yet another way of doing essentially the same thing. Users create a separate list of friends, distinct from “close friends,” to add to their “flipside.” They can then choose to post to their main grid or to their “flipside,” which is also accessible from their profile but only visible to the aforementioned list of friends. People will know if they have access to someone’s flipside if they see a key icon in someone’s grid, according to screenshots shared on Threads. (You can see a video of it in action over on Threads.)

Apparently, even Instagram head Adam Mosseri realizes this is all a bit redundant. “On one hand it feels good to create a clear space that feels more private,” he wrote in a post on Threads. “On the other, it's yet another way to reach a smaller audience on top of secondary accounts and Close Friends.”

He added that “we're not even sure we'll launch it,” which might explain why the company has been relatively quiet about the test. Flipside was first spotted back in December but was an internal prototype at the time, according to TechCrunch. However, it's now started to appear for actual users, with a number of reports of it appearing on Threads over the last day.

Early reactions seem to be mixed, with some enthusiasm for the update and some wondering why on earth they need yet another social media profile to maintain. Others seem to be, understandably, confused.

While finstas have (sometimes hilariously) been maligned, Meta’s recent obsession with creating “more private” spaces on Instagram is likely about more than simply adding convenience. Mosseri has noted many times over the last couple years that Instagram users simply aren’t posting as much as they used to, especially in their feeds. For an app that relies on advertising — much of it in users’ feeds — that’s less than ideal. So it’s not all that surprising Instagram would be looking for new ways to get people to spend more time posting to and scrolling their feeds.

TikTok is one of the latest companies to be hit by layoffs sweeping across tech industry over the past year. A spokesperson from the short-form video platform told NPR that the company laid off around 60 employees, mostly from its sales and advertising division across its various offices in the US — Los Angeles, New York, Austin — and abroad. They told the media organization that the layoffs were part of a routine reorganization, but NPR said the company decided to let them go to cut costs. 

ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, reportedly cut hundreds of jobs at Marvel Snap developer Nuverse last year. According to previous reports, TikTok itself did a round of layoffs in mid-2022 due to global restructuring efforts and then again in early 2023 to let its recruitment staff in Dublin go. This round affects just a tiny fraction of ByteDance's global workforce that's around 150,000 strong, but as NPR notes, it's a "sign of pain in the tech industry."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told employees to expect further downsizing this year, as the company allocates its resources. He said that Google is "removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas." Amazon also recently told Engadget that it's letting go of about five percent of staff in its Buy with Prime division. Twitch, a video-streaming platform owned by Amazon, was hit by a bigger round of layoffs affecting over 500 people earlier this year in order to reduce costs and run its business more efficiently.