"Consumer PC parts aren't the only things being gobbled up by the 'AI' industry," writes PCWorld's Michael Crider. "A Starcraft-inspired strategy game is shutting down its multiplayer servers because the hosting company got bought out for 'AI.'" The game will still be playable offline for now, but the shutdown highlights the ripple effects of the AI boom on the gaming industry. Amid the ongoing hardware shortages, AI companies are basically gobbling up as much infrastructure as they can to repurpose it for AI workloads. From the report: The game in question is Stormgate, a crowdfunded revival of the real-time strategy genre that has languished in the last decade or so. The developer Frost Giant Studios told its players on Discord (spotted by PC Gamer) that it would be unable to continue multiplayer access past the end of this month. The "game server orchestration partner" was bought by an AI company -- the developer's words, not mine -- which means that the multiplayer aspects of the game will have a "planned outage." The devs say the game will be patched for offline play, presumably including its single-player campaign mode and co-op modes, but "online modes will not be available at that point." They're hoping to bring back online play in a later update, but that'll depend on "finding a partner to support ongoing operations." That sounds like old-fashioned player-hosted games with lobbies aren't in the cards, at least not yet. Frost Giant's server provider is Hathora, which was bought by a company called Fireworks AI last month. Fireworks describes its offerings as "open-source AI models at blazing speed, optimized for your use case, scaled globally with the Fireworks Inference Cloud." So, yeah, Hathora's infrastructure will likely be used for yet more generative "AI." And according to GamesBeat, it's planning to shut down the game service aspect of its company completely. That means Stormgate probably isn't going to be the last game affected. Hathora also provides online services for Splitgate 2, among others. I'm contacting Hathora for comment and will update this story if I receive a response.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Gemini AI models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past year, but you can only use Gemini on Google's terms. The company's Gemma open-weight models have provided more freedom, but Gemma 3, which launched over a year ago, is getting a bit long in the tooth. Starting today, developers can start working with Gemma 4, which comes in four sizes optimized for local usage. Google has also acknowledged developer frustrations with AI licensing, so it's dumping the custom Gemma license. Like past versions of its open-weight models, Google has designed Gemma 4 to be usable on local machines. That can mean plenty of things, of course. The two large Gemma variants, 26B Mixture of Experts and 31B Dense, are designed to run unquantized in bfloat16 format on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU. Granted, that's a $20,000 AI accelerator, but it's still local hardware. If quantized to run at lower precision, these big models will fit on consumer GPUs. Google also claims it has focused on reducing latency to really take advantage of Gemma's local processing. The 26B Mixture of Experts model activates only 3.8 billion of its 26 billion parameters in inference mode, giving it much higher tokens-per-second than similarly sized models. Meanwhile, 31B Dense is more about quality than speed, but Google expects developers to fine-tune it for specific uses. The other two Gemma 4 models, Effective 2B (E2B) and Effective 4B (E4B), are aimed at mobile devices. These options were designed to maintain low memory usage during inference, running at an effective 2 billion or 4 billion parameters. Google says the Pixel team worked closely with Qualcomm and MediaTek to optimize these models for devices like smartphones, Raspberry Pi, and Jetson Nano. Not only do they use less memory and battery than Gemma 3, but Google also touts "near-zero latency" this time around. The Apache 2.0 license is much more flexible with its terms of use for commercial restrictions, "granting you complete control over your data, infrastructure, and models," says Google. Clement Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, called it "a huge milestone" that will help developers use Gemma for more projects and expand what Google calls the "Gemmaverse."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: OpenAI hasn't been shy about spending money lobbying for favorable laws and regulations. But when it comes to its involvement with child safety advocacy groups, the company has apparently decided it's best to stay in the shadows -- even if it means hiding from the people actually pushing for policy changes. According to a report from the San Francisco Standard, a number of people involved in the California-based Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition were blindsided to learn their efforts were secretly being funded by OpenAI. Per the Standard, the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition was a group formed to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act, a piece of California legislation proposed earlier this year that would require AI firms to implement age verification and additional safeguards for users under the age of 18. That bill was backed by OpenAI in partnership with Common Sense Media, which proposed the legislation as a compromise after the two groups had pushed dueling ballot initiatives last year. But when the coalition started to reach out to child safety groups and other advocacy organizations to try to get them to lend support to the bill, OpenAI was apparently conveniently left off the messaging. The AI giant was also left out of the marketing on the coalition's website, according to the Standard. That reportedly led to a number of groups and individuals lending their support to the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition without realizing that they were aligning themselves with OpenAI. As it turns out, OpenAI isn't just one of the members of the coalition; it is the group's biggest funder. In fact, the Standard characterized the Parents and Kids Safe AI Coalition as being "entirely funded" by OpenAI. While it's not clear exactly how much the company has funneled to this particular group, a Wall Street Journal report from January said OpenAI pledged $10 million to push the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act. Gizmodo notes that OpenAI's backing of the Parents and Kids Safe AI Act "could be self-serving for CEO Sam Altman," who just so happens to head a company called World that provides age verification services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sponsored by アドビ2月7日と8日にポートメッセなごやで開催されたcoldrain主催の音楽フェス「BLARE FEST.」。会場にはアドビが協賛ブースを出展し、来場者がオリジナルのステッカーやタトゥーシールの制作を体験することができました。...続きを読む

会議の議事録作成や、外出先での大事な通話メモ。後から手作業でテキストにまとめるのは、時間がかかって大変ですよね。そんな手間を省いてくれるスマートなアイテムを見つけました。Nottaの「Notta Memo AIボイスレコーダー」は、ワンタッチで録音から文...続きを読む

Will there be an AI-optimized programming language at the expense of human readability? There's now been experiments with minimizing tokens for "LLM efficiency, without any concern for how it would serve human developers." This new article asks if AI will force source code to evolve — or make it extinct, noting that Stephen Cass, the special projects editor at IEEE Spectrum, has even been asking the ultimate question about our future. "Could we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future?" Cass acknowledged the obvious downsides. ("True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks.") But "instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh." This leads to some mind-boggling hypotheticals, like "What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code?" Cass asked the question and announced "an emergency interactive session" in October to discuss whether AI is signaling the end of distinct programming languages as we know them. In that webinar, Cass said he believes programmers in this future would still suggest interfaces, select algorithms, and make other architecture design choices. And obviously the resulting code would need to pass tests, Cass said, and "has to be able to explain what it's doing." But what kind of abstractions could go away? And then "What happens when we really let AIs off the hook on this?" Cass asked — when we "stop bothering" to have them code in high-level languages. (Since, after all, high-level languages "are a tool for human beings.") "What if we let the machines go directly into creating intermediate code?" (Cass thinks the machine-language level would be too far down the stack, "because you do want a compile layer too for different architecture....") In this future, the question might become 'What if you make fewer mistakes, but they're different mistakes?'" Cass said he's keeping an eye out for research papers on designing languages for AI, although he agreed that it's not a "tomorrow" thing — since, after all, we're still digesting "vibe coding" right now. But "I can see this becoming an area of active research." The article also quotes Andrea Griffiths, a senior developer advocate at GitHub and a writer for the newsletter Main Branch, who's seen the attempts at an "AI-first" languages, but nothing yet with meaningful adoption. So maybe AI coding agents will just make it easier to use our existing languages — especially typed languages with built-in safety advantages. And Scott Hanselman's podcast recently dubbed Chris Lattner's Mojo "a programming language for an AI world," just in the way it's designed to harness the computing power of today's multi-core chips.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2026年3月20日にリリースされたオープンワールド・アクションアドベンチャーゲームの「紅の砂漠」において、ゲーム内で展示されている絵画がAI生成のものではないかという指摘がRedditで話題になりました。開発元のPearl Abyssは生成AIの使用を認め、「後に差し替える制作初期段階のものが意図せず残っていた」と説明して謝罪しています。

続きを読む...

OpenAIが、ChatGPT、コーディングアプリのCodex AI、AI搭載ブラウザのAtlasを1つのアプリに統合したデスクトップ版「スーパーアプリ」の開発に取り組んでいると報じられました。

続きを読む...

Google検索をすると表示されるリンク先タイトル(見出し)が、サイト制作者の設定したタイトルではなく、AIが生成したものに置き換えられていることが確認されました。中には、AIが見出しを書き換えたことでタイトルの意味が丸ごと変わってしまったケースも報告されています。

続きを読む...

コーディングAIの「Cursor」は、2026年3月19日に最新AIモデルの「Composer 2」を発表しました。Composer 2はコーディング性能は最先端クラスでありながら、コスト面も非常に優秀です。しかし、公開後に「Composer 2は強化学習(RL)を追加した単なるKimi 2.5」とユーザーから指摘され、CursorもComposer 2がKimiベースのAIモデルであることを認める事態となりました。

続きを読む...

AIの能力は急速に発展しており、すでにさまざまなタスクをこなしたり複雑な計算を完了したりできるようになっていますが、クリエイティブな文章の生成はチャットAIが出始めた頃からほとんど進歩していません。AIのライティング能力がなかなか向上しない理由について、The Atlanticが専門家の意見をまとめています。

続きを読む...

CNN looks at "the Magic AI fitness mirror," a new product "watching you, and giving you feedback automatically," while sometimes playing footage of a recorded personal trainer. Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland describes CNN's video report: CNN says the device "tracks form, counts reps, and corrects technique in real-time — and it doesn't go easy on you." (Although the company's CEO/cofounder, Varun Bhanot, says "we're not trying to completely replace personal trainers. What we are providing is a more accessible alternative.") CNN call the company "more a computer-vision firm than a fitness company, building the tech for this mirror from the ground up." CEO Bhanot tells CNN he'd hired a personal trainer in his 20s to get fit, but "Going through that journey, I realized how old-fashioned personal training was. Dumbbells were still dumb. There was no data or augmentation for the whole process!" "The AI fitness and wellness market is already huge — and it's growing," CNN adds. "In 2025 the global market was worth $11 billion, according to [market research firm] Insightace Analytic. By 2035, this market is expected to reach just shy of $58 billion. And Magic AI is far from alone. Form, Total, Speediance, and Echelon, to name a few, are all brands vying for a slice of this market. Even the most purely physical of activities — exercising your body — now gets "enhanced" with AI accessories...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ChatGPTやClaude、GeminiなどのAIチャットサービスは便利ですが、それぞれのサービスを行き来する手間がかかります。無料でセルフホスト可能な「LibreChat」は、ありとあらゆるAIモデルをひとつの画面でまとめて扱える統合プラットフォームです。今回はLibreChatの機能のうち「ウェブ検索」と「画像生成」を試してみました。

続きを読む...

調査会社・ガートナーの調査により、アメリカの消費者の半数は消費者向けコンテンツで生成AIの使用を避けるブランドを好む傾向があることがわかりました。

続きを読む...

動画生成技術は目覚ましい進化を遂げていますが、根幹を支えるVAE(Variational Autoencoder)の設計と訓練には依然として多くの困難が伴います。AIラボのLinumが画像と動画の両方に対応するVAEの開発に挑んだ過程で直面した課題や得られた貴重な知見について自社のブログにて詳細に解説していました。

続きを読む...

joshuark shares a report from Neowin: OpenAI is planning to combine its Atlas web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a singular desktop "superapp." CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, said the company was doubling down on its successful products. By taking this move, the AI company aims to streamline the user experience and reduce fragmentation. Simo said in an internal memo: "We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts. That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Fan Xinquan, a retired electronics worker in Beijing, has recently started raising a "lobster," hoping that the AI agent he has been training can help organize his specialized industry knowledge better than chatbots like DeepSeek. "OpenClaw can actually help you accomplish many practical things," the 60-year-old said at a recent event hosted by AI startup Zhipu to teach people how to use and train the AI agent, which has gone viral in China, with its various local versions earning the "lobster" nickname. In the past month, OpenClaw, which can connect several hardware and software tools and learn from the data produced with much less human intervention than a chatbot, has captured the imaginations of many in China, from retirees looking for side income to AI firms hoping to generate new revenue streams. [...] Huang Rongsheng, chief architect at Baidu's smart device unit Xiaodu, said at an event on Tuesday that parent group chats for his daughter's primary school class have become overwhelmed by OpenClaw discussions. "My daughter came to me and asked: Dad, I see you raising a lobster every day," he said. "Can I have one too?" Bai Yiyun, another attendee at the Zhipu event, said she hopes to use the agent to start a side hustle during her retirement. "If DeepSeek marked a milestone for open-source large language models, then OpenClaw represents a similar turning point for open-source "agents," said Wei Sun, chief AI analyst at Counterpoint Research.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AIにコードを書かせること自体はすでに珍しくありませんが、最近は書いたコードを自分で実行し、その結果を見ながら修正まで進めるAIツールも登場しています。こうしたAIの支援を受けながらソフトウェア開発を進める考え方が「エージェントエンジニアリング」です。ウェブ開発者のサイモン・ウィリソン氏は、Claude Code・OpenAI Codex・Gemini CLIのようなコーディングAIエージェントを活用することで、人間は「何を作るかを決める」「必要な道具を整える」「出てきた結果を検証する」役割をより強く担うようになると主張しています。

続きを読む...

GoogleがUIデザインツールの「Stitch」に大幅なアップデートを施しました。アップデート版のStitchではAIに自然言語で指示を出すだけで高品質なUIを作ることが可能。日本でもすでに利用可能だったので実際に使ってみました。

続きを読む...

GIGAZINEの記事を電子化した書籍を対象に「2026年2月に出版した中で最もたくさん読まれた記事は何なのか？」がわかるランキングを作ってみました。Google検索の影響が大きい普段のアクセス解析記事と違い、Amazonならではのランキングとなっています。

続きを読む...