This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI is coming for music, too While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is having an unprecedented impact on creative domains.By transforming random noise into coherent patterns, diffusion models can generate new images, videos, or speech, guided by text prompts or other input data. The best ones can create outputs indistinguishable from the work of people, as well as bizarre, surreal results that feel distinctly nonhuman.Now these models are marching into a creative field that is arguably more vulnerable to disruption than any other: music. Music models can now create songs capable of eliciting real emotional responses, presenting a stark example of how difficult it’s becoming to define authorship and originality in the age of AI. Read the full story. —James O’Donnell This story is from the next edition of our print magazine, which is all about how technology is changing creativity. Subscribe now to read it and get a copy of the magazine when it lands! A small US city is experimenting with AI to find out what residents want Bowling Green, Kentucky, is home to 75,000 residents who recently wrapped up an experiment in using AI for democracy: Can an online polling platform, powered by machine learning, capture what residents want to see happen in their city? After a month of advertising, the Pol.is portal launched in February. Residents could go to the website and anonymously submit an idea (in less than 140 characters) for what a 25-year plan for their city should include. They could also vote on whether they agreed or disagreed with other ideas.But some researchers question whether soliciting input in this manner is a reliable way to understand what a community wants. Read the full story. —James O’Donnell How Colossal Biosciences is attempting to own the “woolly mammoth” What’s new: Colossal Biosciences not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth—it wants to own it, too. MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA.But why? Ben Lamm, the CEO of Colossal, says that holding patents on the mammoth and other creatures would “give us control over how these technologies are implemented, particularly for managing initial releases where oversight is critical.” Patents, which usually last 20 years, could provide “a clear legal framework during the critical transition period when de-extinct species are first reintroduced,” he says. Read the full story.—Antonio RegaladoIf you’re interested in what else Collossal’s been up to, check out:+ Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire? The company recently claimed it has revived an extinct species, but scientists are skeptical. Read the full story. + As a first step towards resurrecting woolly mammoths, Colossal created these adorable gene-edited ‘woolly mice.’ The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI might be  building its own social networkIt’s a move that’s likely to enrage Elon Musk even further. (The Verge)+ Musk and Sam Altman are still locked in a legal dispute. (CNBC)+ There are plenty of reasons why OpenAI might want to build a social feed. (NY Mag $) 2 Buying directly from Chinese factories is not a good ideaDespite what TikTok tells you. (WP $)+ The popularity of apps allowing shoppers to buy from factories is skyrocketing. (WSJ $) 3 Mark Zuckerberg tried to settle Meta’s antitrust case last monthUnfortunately for him, the head of the FTC was unmoved by the offer. (WSJ $)+ The CEO considered spinning off Instagram in 2018, apparently. (Reuters)+ The first two days of the trial have focused on 2010-2014. (Bloomberg $) 4 A whistleblower has shed light on how DOGE may have taken private dataLabor law experts are certain the information is completely unrelated to making the government more efficient. (NPR)+ Federal workers are wading through the chaos. (The Atlantic $)+ A lot of DOGE’s fraud claims are old news. (The Guardian)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Nvidia is bracing itself to lose $5.5 billionAs a result of the Trump administration’s new chip sales restrictions. (FT $)+ Its new H20 chip now requires a special license. (The Guardian)+ The company’s shares plunged in response to the news. (CNN) 6 We’re getting closer to a cure for seasonal allergiesAn injection usually administered to treat asthma could hold the key. (Vox) 7 Maybe LLMs don’t need language after allAllowing them to process queries in mathematical spaces could improve their output. (Quanta Magazine)+ Why does AI being good at math matter? (MIT Technology Review) 8 YouTube was given an exemption from Australia’s social media ban for under-16sEven though it’s the most popular platform for children by far. (Bloomberg $) 9 Social media can still fight hate without censorshipAlthough X is probably too far gone, admittedly. (The Atlantic $)+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review) 10 How to survive on MarsThanks to water-rich asteroids. (Wired $)+ The quest to figure out farming on Mars. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day “How else can OpenAI acquire new training data at scale going forward?” —Bill Gross, the founder of tech incubator Idealab, believes OpenAI has a very clear motive for wanting to build its own social network, Insider reports. The big story How refrigeration ruined fresh food Three-quarters of everything in the average American diet passes through the cold chain—the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on the journey from farm to fork. As consumers, we put a lot of faith in terms like “fresh” and “natural,” but artificial refrigeration has created a blind spot. We’ve gotten so good at preserving (and storing) food, that we know more about how to lengthen an apple’s life span than a human’s, and most of us don’t give that extraordinary process much thought at all. But all that convenience has come at the expense of diversity and deliciousness. Read the full story. —Allison Arieff We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + This list of the 30 best fiction books of the last 30 years does not disappoint.+ Travel ghost stories? Truly chilling.+ It’s time to caulk the wagon—the seminal Oregon Trail is celebrating its 50th anniversary.+ These photos of fifties fashion are simply the best.

Apple today announced that the company has surpassed a 60 percent reduction in its global greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2015 levels.

Apple is celebrating Earth Day by giving you a reason to declutter your junk drawer and get a discount while you're at it.Earth Day 2025From now through May 16, Apple is offering 10% off eligible accessories when you bring an old device to recycle at a participating Apple Store. The promo covers everything from AirPods and Apple Watch bands to iPhone cases and charging cables.You'll need to make the accessory purchase at the same time as you recycle the device, and it has to be in-store — online purchases don't count. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Argentine studio OJA (Organic & Joyful Architecture) has completed Casa Gallareta, a boutique tourist complex composed of modular cabins nestled within a native forest in Villa La Angostura, Patagonia. Designed by Juan Segundo Díaz Dopazo and María Ayelén Olivieri Martinez, the project consists of a series of small-scale vacation units located on a steep, wooded site overlooking Lake Correntoso. Photo credit: Juan Segundo Diaz DopazoPhoto credit: Juan Segundo Diaz DopazoThe 2700-square-foot development was conceived as a minimal-impact intervention within a dense forest. The team carefully positioned each unit in natural clearings to avoid tree removal, prioritizing environmental preservation. The result is a collection of compact “landscape cabins” designed to blend with their surroundings through a shared architectural language and subtle variations in form. Photo credit: Nacho BallesterPhoto credit: Nacho BallesterEach cabin accommodates two to three guests and is organized as a ...

The Xbox brand is in a nebulous state right now, branching out to other platforms, but Game Pass remains a stable source of revenue for Microsoft. Despite its great value, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer believes that it’s designed as an option rather than a necessity for gamers. In a recent interview with Variety, Spencer stated, “For me, I look at Game Pass as a healthy option for certain people. It’s not for everybody. If you play one or two games a year, Game Pass probably isn’t the right business model for you, you should just buy those two games, and that would make total sense. But I want you to have the choice.”​ He emphasized that Game Pass is one of several models available to players, alongside traditional purchases and free-to-play options. “I’ve always thought about Game Pass as just another option for somebody who wants to play. We have many business models for people playing from free to play, buying games, discounted games, Game Pass is an option,” Spencer explained. Spencer acknowledged that while console sales are stable, they are not a growing segment for Microsoft. This has led the company to invest more in PC and cloud gaming to reach a broader audience. “Our biggest areas of growth right now are PC and Cloud, which makes sense, since consoles, all up, are a good business. They’re an established business, but they’re not really a growing segment in gaming. So, we’ve got good growth on PC, and we’ve got growth on Cloud, in terms of users and hours. “And console continues to be a really healthy part of Game Pass. But there isn’t a unique need for Game Pass to be the only way for people to play. If everybody who’s a Game Pass subscriber instead decided to buy their games, that’s good for the business as well,” he added. In a related report, Spencer has pledged his support for the Switch 2, thereby continuing Microsoft’s strategy of bringing its games to third-party platforms.

Omeda Studios scored a hit game with Predecessor, a multiplayer online battle arena game, when it launched in August 2024.Read More

A Minecraft Movie surpasses $550m globally Warner Bros. adaptation earned $281 million domestically, has remained No.1 at box office Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on April 16, 2025 A Minecraft Movie has grossed over $550 million globally after ten days in theatres. As Variety reports, the Warner Bros. Pictures adaptation earned $281 million domestically and has remained at the top of the box office. This follows a successful opening weekend, during which A Minecraft Movie grossed $157 million domestically and $301 million globally. The film was reportedly estimated to earn between $70 million and $80 million. A Minecraft Movie has now surpassed Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in terms of global box office revenue, which has grossed $491 million. The Super Mario Movie remains the highest-grossing video game film adaptation having surpassed $1 billion after nearly a month in theatres in 2023. GamesIndustry.biz recently spoke to analysts about how A Minecraft Movie will influence transmedia between games, film and television, and how faithful adaptations of beloved franchises have the potential to take over Hollywood. Elsewhere, Microsoft's Phil Spencer reacted to the success of A Minecraft Movie. When asked by Variety what the metric for success for the movie was within Microsoft, Spencer said that while it will bring new audiences to the game, "respecting [the] player community" is more crucial. "More important to me are the people who have been playing, who have been part of the community, and when they see this, they're proud," he explained. "That Minecraft is something they've been investing in with their time and they see it represented on the big screen and doing well now." "We will see more players playing the game across more platforms [as a result]. The game has business models to allow people to invest as they're playing, and the business can perform, and that'll be the real world metric for us – looking at the impact that the movie has, as it raises awareness." Spencer said that he wants to see the entertainment industry to realise the potential that video game narratives can have in different mediums. "As part of the games industry, I want our worlds and the characters that our creators have built to feel deep enough, quality enough, and, frankly, successful enough that they could be realised in TV and movies, and even in other places," he continued. "Movies went through books, [like] Lord of the Rings, and then they moved into comics with the whole Marvel and Batman [era]. And you really see that industry turning its view to video games, because they have a large community, and the stories are actually really rich and deep enough."

Chris Kerr, News EditorApril 16, 20252 Min ReadImage via PanicPlaydate developers have earned over $1 million through the handheld's Catalog storefront since it launched in March 2023.Panic shared the news in an email and explained precisely 289,305 titles have been sold via the curated digital marketplace in that time. Those sales have netted developers exactly $1,043,186 in payouts."Playdate might be an indie platform, but seeing numbers like this makes us realize that even an indie platform can be meaningful in the gaming world. Catalog has been successful beyond our expectations," said Panic."We're so extremely happy and proud to be working with so many amazing developers from all around the globe and helping them sell the amazing things they make! And thank you for buying them."Catalog has been bolstered with the addition of 262 hand-selected titles since it debuted, although that doesn't comprise the entire Playdate library given the ditty device also supports third-party storefronts such as itch.io via sideloading.Panic continues championing Playdate developers through CatalogLast year, Panic told Game Developer it wanted Playdate developers to take centre stage after selling over 70,000 consoles worldwide and addressing a string of manufacturing and logistical challenges."It's beyond our wildest dreams in terms of how many developers have embraced [the platform] and the quality of the titles that we're seeing," said Panic's head of special projects, Greg Maletic. "We want to make sure people know about that and can see what kind of market this has blossomed into."Related:More recently, Panic announced a $30 price increase for Playdate due to rising manufacturing costs—which seemingly caught the company unawares."Guess what: after getting up and running at our new factory, they soon let us know that it would cost quite a bit more to make a Playdate than it did at our previous factory," it said in an email to customers. "We were not very excited to hear this! (What next?!) But as a result, on March 25th (2025), brand new Playdate systems will be priced at $229."At the same time, Panic confirmed it would be offering shoppers the chance to purchase a certified refurbished Playdate for $179, but noted stock would be "extremely limited."Panic will announce what's next for Playdate during an update video containing more details about its next seasonal release slate on April 17. About the AuthorChris KerrNews Editor, GameDeveloper.comGame Developer news editor Chris Kerr is an award-winning journalist and reporter with over a decade of experience in the game industry. His byline has appeared in notable print and digital publications including Edge, Stuff, Wireframe, International Business Times, and PocketGamer.biz. Throughout his career, Chris has covered major industry events including GDC, PAX Australia, Gamescom, Paris Games Week, and Develop Brighton. He has featured on the judging panel at The Develop Star Awards on multiple occasions and appeared on BBC Radio 5 Live to discuss breaking news.See more from Chris KerrDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like

Spotify is down according to widespread user reports across the US and Europe, with issues preventing the platform from loading or streaming music. At 8:45AM ET on Wednesday morning, the Spotify Status account on X said it was “aware of some issues” affecting the service right now, and is currently “checking them out.” While most of the early outage reports were made in Europe, the issues have since escalated across the US. Downdetector is reporting a spike in US outages, and various colleagues at The Verge across the UK and US are currently unable to access the Spotify service. The outage map provided by ThousandEyes suggests the issues are impacting users globally. The issues are affecting the Spotify web player, desktop app, and iOS app. Some desktop users are being met with a black screen that refuses to load entirely, while others are able to select songs, but are unable to play them. Some songs may be playable on iOS, but only if Spotify cached them before the outage. It’s unclear what is causing the outages, or when users can expect regular service to be restored. Developing…

The transformer architecture has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling models like GPT to predict the next token in a sequence efficiently. However, these models suffer from a fundamental limitation of performing a one-pass projection of all previous tokens to predict the next token, which restricts their capacity for iterative refinement. Transformers apply constant computational effort regardless of the complexity or ambiguity of the predicted token, lacking mechanisms to reconsider or refine their predictions. Traditional neural networks, including transformers, map input sequences to predict in a single forward pass, processing inputs through multiple layers to refine internal representations. Universal Transformers introduced the recurrent application of transformer layers to capture short-term and long-term dependencies by iteratively refining representations. However, experiments were limited to smaller models and datasets rather than large-scale language models like GPT-2. Adaptive Computation Time models allowed dynamic determination of computational steps per input but are mainly applied to simple RNN architectures and tested on small-scale tasks without using transformer architecture or large-scale pretraining. Depth-Adaptive Transformers adjusted network depth based on input, enabling dynamic inference by selecting the number of layers to apply per input sequence. However, these approaches lack the predictive residual design found in more advanced architectures. Researchers from HKU have proposed a novel Loop-Residual Neural Network that revisits input multiple times, refining predictions by iteratively looping over a subset of the model with residual connections. It improves transformer performance with longer inference times using a novel loop architecture with residual prediction. This approach works effectively for large neural networks without requiring extra training data, extending the model’s approximation capacity. Its effectiveness is shown through experiments comparing standard GPT-2 versions with Loop-Residual models. Notably, their GPT-2-81M model achieves a validation loss of 3.11 on the OpenWebText dataset, comparable to the GPT-2-124M model’s loss of 3.12. The Loop-Residual involves two experiments. First, a Loop-Residual GPT-2 model with 81M parameters (GPT2-81M) is compared with the GPT-2 model with 124M parameters (GPT2-124M). While GPT2-124M consists of 12 transformer layers as the baseline, the Loop-Residual GPT2-81M uses 6 loops over 6 transformer layers. The second experiment compares a Loop-Residual GPT-2 with 45M parameters (GPT2-45M) to a Lite GPT-2 model of identical size (GPT2-45M-Lite). The GPT2-45M-Lite features a single transformer block layer for one-pass prediction, while the Loop-Residual version loops twice over a single transformer block. Both experiments use the OpenWebText dataset with measured training epoch times of 150ms for GPT2-45M-Lite, 177ms for Loop-Residual GPT2-45M, and 1,377ms for GPT2-81M. In the first experiment, the Loop-Residual GPT2-81M model achieves a validation loss of 3.11 on the OpenWebText dataset, comparable to the GPT2-124M model’s loss of 3.12. This result is significant because the Loop-Residual model uses 35% fewer parameters and half the number of unique layers compared to the GPT2-124M model. This shows that iterative refinement through the loop-residual mechanism enhances the model’s approximation capacity. In the second experiment, the Loop-Residual model achieves a validation loss of 3.67 compared to 3.98 and a training loss of 3.65 compared to 3.96. By looping twice over a single transformer block, the model effectively simulates a deeper network, resulting in substantial performance gains over the one-pass baseline without increasing model size. In conclusion, researchers introduced the Loop-Residual Neural Network, which enables smaller neural network models to achieve better results on lower-end devices by utilizing longer inference times through iterative refinement. This method captures complex patterns and dependencies more effectively than conventional one-pass models. Experiments show that Loop-Residual models can achieve improved performance over baseline models of the same size and comparable performance to larger models with fewer parameters. The future direction includes new possibilities for neural network architectures, especially for tasks that benefit from deeper computational reasoning on resource-constrained devices. Here is the Paper. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. Sajjad AnsariSajjad Ansari is a final year undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur. As a Tech enthusiast, he delves into the practical applications of AI with a focus on understanding the impact of AI technologies and their real-world implications. He aims to articulate complex AI concepts in a clear and accessible manner.Sajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/Underdamped Diffusion Samplers Outperform Traditional Methods: Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, NVIDIA, and Zuse Institute Berlin Introduce a New Framework for Efficient Sampling from Complex Distributions with Degenerate NoiseSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/NVIDIA AI Releases UltraLong-8B: A Series of Ultra-Long Context Language Models Designed to Process Extensive Sequences of Text (up to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens)Sajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/LightPROF: A Lightweight AI Framework that Enables Small-Scale Language Models to Perform Complex Reasoning Over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) Using Structured PromptsSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/ByteDance Introduces VAPO: A Novel Reinforcement Learning Framework for Advanced Reasoning Tasks