The future of Lego Fortnite: "I hope it will never be done""We said 'let's plan for something in 2027' and they did it in one year."Image credit: Epic Games News by Tom Phillips Editor-in-Chief Published on Dec. 13, 2024 This week has seen a flurry of activity within Lego Fortnite, the game's ever-expanding corner in which several major game modes now sit. First, there was the arrival of a major update for Lego Fortnite Odyssey (the mode previously also simply known as 'Lego Fortnite') that adds the Storm King boss as a big endgame challenge, akin to the Ender Dragon in Minecraft. On top of that, there's now a whole new and separate Lego Fortnite offering to explore: Brick Life, a colourful mash-up of gameplay that feels like a family friendly GTA Online mixed with The Sims.How did these changes and new features come about? And what does the future have in store for Lego and Fortnite's popular crossover? I sat down with Epic Games EVP of game development Devin Winterbottom and Remi Marcelli, SVP and head of Lego gaming at the Lego group, to find out more. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Lego Fortnite Odyssey: Storm Chasers update trailer.Watch on YouTubeHow did you come up with the new name for Lego Fortnite Odyssey? And why Odyssey?Marcelli: Finding new brands is always a bit of a challenge for The Lego Group. Lego Fortnite is those two brands coming together, but it's not specific to a genre. At the time we chose that name, it was an obvious one just because we have two very powerful brands - it would have been a missed oppurtunity! We didn't know we would have a collection of games, potentially, that would sit under that umbrella. So what we really needed to find was one calling out the genre you'd expect to find when launching [the old] Lego Fortnite. Odyssey came about because that's what players love the most - the adventures. The adventure play is the most loved part of that game and we've dialled up that with the Storm King. We wanted to just make sure people understood it was an adventure game. And with Brick Life, hopefully it's self-explanatory - it says social roleplay.Did you always know you wanted the Storm King in there? For long-term Fortnite fans, it's cool to see him come over from the game's original Save the World mode.Winterbottom: We had a vision of what this game could become. We always wanted to have the big, scary, difficult, challenging thing you could aspire to accomplish. We always had in mind it would be something like this. "Everything we've added into Odyssey has stayed in it"We arrived together at the Storm King after thinking about the kinds of things that already existed within the big thing called Fortnite and the history of where our game came from, and what we could do in this world. He is meant to be the challenging thing you aspire to do, which a game in this genre - we think it needs. It's really cool the way that mountain has just appeared in the middle of your island, the biome is incredible and he sits atop of it. It's a lot of fun and we expect players will play with it for years to come. The last thing I'll say is - everything we've added into Odyssey has stayed in it. The Star Wars content is still there, the klombos, the battle bus, the vehicles, the farming... and that's unique for us. It was challenging to drop this Storm King update in the middle of a live map that someone's been playing and that we've added all this other content. But we're really happy with how it's turned out.How have you managed to do that? Because that new area isn't just stitched onto the side, it has to detect where you've been in the world previously, what you've built to avoid ruining that stuff."We can't betray that - their work, their investment"Winterbottom: It's difficult technical work. Unreal Engine is an incredibly powerful tool that has a bunch of procedural world generation technology we've been building into it for the past few years. We've been working on this technology challenge for a while. When we did the Star Wars update we put a new biome off to the side of your island, which is a much simpler thing to do. We always had the ambition to change a person's island live, but noting that they've changed it themselves - they've erected structures all over, they've built things. We can't betray that - their work, their investment. So there's a bunch of work the engineering and design teams did to figure out how to procedurally, algorithmically find the right place for that biome and create that structure. We're really proud of that achievement, it's not easy to do, and we take players' investment in everything they have crafted on that island very seriously - because that's their game they've built inside of it, it's their creativity and we don't want to tear that down. That's how we approached it.What will 2025 look like for Lego Fortnite Odyssey? Can players expect the same mix of licensed and original content additions?Winterbottom: We just met up and talked about exactly this! We like to have enough roadmap that we can get our teams working, but not so much that we can't react to what players are liking, because we take so much from the community in terms of feedback. There will definitely be, maybe, some more licensed stuff - there's fun things to do there. But we're more focused on how we continue to make the game fun. We've not just been adding content but we've been refining how it plays this year - and we plan to do both of those things next year with Odyssey. We're pretty excited about our 2025 plans.It sounds like a game you're not expecting to finish up anytime soon. Will it ever be finished, or are you planning to keep building it indefinitely?Marcelli: I hope it's a game that will never be finished. The Fortnite platform allows it and it's becoming a place where any game can be a live-service game pretty easily. And we talk about the limitless possibility of Lego bricks, so if you combine those things together it is indeed limitless. I hope it will never be done, always kept fresh and updated.Moving onto Lego Fortnite Brick Life, how did that come about and how did you decide on the roleplay, social sim genre to go with?Marcelli: Roleplay was a genre the community had a lot of appetite for and if you think about the Lego Group - the first thing you do once you've built your set is to roleplay, so it made a lot of sense to embrace that genre from a video game perspective. Doing this within Odyssey wouldn't have done justice to what you can get from an adventure game and would probably have been a distraction in an adventure game - so we wanted to separate the two. Epic came with the proposal of launching another game instead of creating everything that everyone wants in one game, in order to keep the authenticity of what Lego Odyssey was at the time. We said 'let's plan for something in 2027' and they did it in one year.Lego Fortnite Brick Life launch trailer.Watch on YouTubeHow did you do it in one year?"We're a little bit demanding with our brands and our bricks!"Marcelli: The technical work that went into building Lego Fortnite in the first place was long and deep. We just needed to have all our elements rendered to perfection because, as you can imagine, we're a little bit demanding with our brands and our bricks! [laughs]Winterbottom: Have you noticed the word Lego is literally embossed on every brick?!Marcelli: We wanted that Lego love, fidelity and everything. So it was a lot of work to create the archtecture, create 2000 minifigs, but once that's there it's easier to build on. So I want to commend the work Epic Games did in the past to build that architecture there in the past for us to build on in the future - but they also work fast, too.

Landmark Law Prohibits Health Insurance Companies from Using AI to Deny Healthcare CoverageDecember 9, 2024The Physicians Make Decisions Act Ensures Health Care Decisions Are Made by Medical Professionals, Not AlgorithmsSacramento, CAAs 2025 approaches, Californians can look forward to strengthened patient protections under the new Physicians Make Decisions Act (SB 1120), authored by Senator Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park). This groundbreaking law ensures that decisions about medical treatments are made by licensed health care providers, not solely determined by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms used by health insurers.Artificial intelligence has immense potential to enhance healthcare delivery, but it should never replace the expertise and judgment of physicians, said Senator Becker. An algorithm cannot fully understand a patients unique medical history or needs, and its misuse can lead to devastating consequences. SB 1120 ensures that human oversight remains at the heart of healthcare decisions, safeguarding Californians access to the quality care they deserve.Ensuring Human Oversight in Healthcare DecisionsIn recent years, insurers have increasingly turned to AI to process claims and prior authorization requests. While these tools can improve efficiency, they also raise concerns about inaccuracies and bias in healthcare decision-making. Errors in algorithm-driven denials of care have, in some cases, resulted in severe health outcomes or even loss of life.Under SB 1120, any denial, delay, or modification of care based on medical necessity must be reviewed and decided by a licensed physician or qualified health care provider with expertise in the specific clinical issues at hand. The law also establishes fair and equitable standards for companies using AI in their utilization review processes, preventing improper or unethical practices.California Leads the Nation in AI Regulation for HealthcareSponsored by the CMA, which represents 50,000 physicians statewide, SB 1120 sets a national precedent for ensuring AI in healthcare is used responsibly. This law reaffirms Californias commitment to equitable, patient-centered care while addressing legitimate concerns surrounding the expanding role of technology in healthcare.Other states are following California's lead in implementing laws to protect patients from utilizing AI to determine patient health care decisions.The Physicians Make Decisions Act will officially go into effect on January 1, 2025.

Pugi-wishlistForget everything else at The Game Awards, between Like A Dragon dev RGG's mysterious new game and a semi-leaked thing, the real winners last night were lovers of early 20th century scrapsLook, I just like getting into massive barneys that slightly pre-date the two world wars, ok?Image credit: RGG/Hangar 13 News by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on Dec. 13, 2024 Among the many, many things that were shown off at last night's Keighleyfest - The Game Awards - were few things that I'm really excited about. Sure, The Witcher 4 was a big one, but there were others, and two of them have more common ground than you might expect from a couple of games set literally miles apart. They're Project Century and Mafia: The Old Country and they both look like they'll scratch my weird itch for fights that take place when my great grandad was alive.Now, of these two, Mafia's probably the one that's playing the Robin to Project Century's Batman. After all, we already knew it was a thing prior to last night, and it lost a bit more mistique when its freshly narrowed release window leaked ahead of the show.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. We still got a fresh trailer for it, though, and I quite enjoyed seeing how its plot about gangsters in 1900s Sicily looks to be shaping up. It might not be an absolute blockbuster that redefines how we all see gaming, but it looks like exactly the kind of just plain good fun title that's the bread and butter of any great year in gaming.A bit like I did with Star Wars Outlaws this year, I'll likely fire The Old Country up, spend however long it takes to play through it, and just have a plain old nice time. After all, look at all the potential for dicking about in a historical setting, getting up to crimes, and doing some old school fighting that it has. I've not been kidnapped and replaced by Jim Trinca, I swear, these are just the kinds of things I also often get a kick out of in games.Watch on YouTubePlus, there are old cars, and plenty of cosa nostra storytelling stuff that I'll presumably at least like as much as I did the previous Mafia games, even if it doesn't end up being quite The Godfather of The Sopranos level.While - based on what its predecessors were like and the little we've seen of it so far - Mafia might not have the juice, that something that takes a game from good to great, Project Century looks like it definitely could. Announced last night, this is a rather mysteriuous new game being worked on by Yakuza/Like A Dragon series developer and bringers of the pirate Majima RGG Studio. It's set in Japan in 1915 and the trailer showed off some pretty brutal - i.e a bit more bloody than the average Kiryu brawl - street scrapping between its unnamed protagonist and your usual street toughs.Watch on YouTubeSo, like Mafia, there's a historical setting and the chance to batter people before the invention of Penicillin in it, but there also seems to be a bit more bubbling under the surface. The protagonist's eyes are glowing in the main promo image, and at one point he fights a huge, hulking bald figure that arguably tooks more monster than man. Maybe a bit of sci-fi or alt history to spice things up? Then again, Kazuma Kiryu did once fistfight two tigers and it was played off as just being a normal thing to happen to a guy living in 2006, so who knows.At the end of the day, both of these games have the potential to be great things since they're still existing in the pre-release nether world right now, and I'll definitely be keen to give them a go when they do drop, even if it's just to beat up some historical lads.

Call it a reasoning renaissance. In the wake of the release of OpenAIs o1, a so-called reasoning model, theres been an explosion of reasoning models from rival AI labs. In early November, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, launched a preview of its first reasoning algorithm, DeepSeek-R1. That same month, Alibabas Qwen team unveiled what it claims is the first open challenger to o1.So what opened the floodgates? Well, for one, the search for novel approaches to refine generative AI tech. As my colleague Max Zeff recently reported, brute force techniques to scale up models are no longer yielding the improvements they once did.Theres intense competitive pressure on AI companies to maintain the current pace of innovation. According to one estimate, the global AI market reached $196.63 billion in 2023 and could be worth $1.81 trillion by 2030.OpenAI, for one, has claimed that reasoning models can solve harder problems than previous models and represent a step change in generative AI development. But not everyones convinced that reasoning models are the best path forward.Ameet Talwalkar, an associate professor of machine learning atAI companies have financialincentives to offer rosy projections about the capabilities of futureversions of their technology, Talwalkar said. We run the risk of myopically focusing a single paradigm which is why its crucial for the broader AI research community to avoid blindly believing the hype and marketing efforts of these companies and instead focus on concrete results.Two downsides of reasoning models are that theyre (1) expensive and (2) power-hungry. For instance, in OpenAIs API, the company charges $15 for every ~750,000 words o1 analyzes and $60 for every ~750,000 words the model generates. Thats between 3x and 4x the cost of OpenAIs latest non-reasoning model, GPT-4o.O1 is available in OpenAIs AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, for free with limits. But earlier this month, OpenAI introduced a more advanced o1 tier, o1 pro mode, that costs an eye-watering $2,400 a year. The overall cost of [large language model]reasoningis certainly not going down, Guy Van Den Broeck, a professor of computer science at UCLA, told TechCrunch. One of the reasons why reasoning models cost so much is because they require a lot of computing resources to run. Unlike most AI, o1 and other reasoning models attempt to check their own work as they do it. This helps them avoid some of thepitfallsthat normally trip up models, with the downside being that they often take longer to arrive at solutions.OpenAI envisions future reasoning models thinking for hours, days, or even weeks on end. Usage costs will be higher, the company acknowledges, but the payoffs from breakthrough batteries to new cancer drugs may well be worth it.The value proposition of todays reasoning models is less obvious. Costa Huang, a researcher and machine learning engineer at the nonprofit org Ai2, notes that o1 isnt a very reliable calculator. And cursory searches on social media turn up a number of o1 pro mode errors.These reasoning models are specialized and can underperform in general domains, Huang told TechCrunch. Some limitations will be overcome sooner than other limitations.Van den Broeck asserts that reasoning models arent performing actual reasoning and thus are limited in the types of tasks that they can successfully tackle. Truereasoningworks on all problems, not just the ones that are likely [in a models training data], he said. That is the main challenge to still overcome.Given the strong market incentive to boost reasoning models, its a safe bet that theyll get better with time. After all, its not just OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Alibaba investing in this newer line of AI research. VCs and founders in adjacent industries are coalescing around the idea of a future dominated by reasoning AI.However, Talwalkar worries that big labs will gatekeep these improvements.The big labs understandably have competitivereasons to remain secretive, but this lack of transparency severely hinders the researchcommunitys ability to engage with these ideas, he said. As more people work on this direction, I expect [reasoning models to] quickly advance. But while some of the ideas will come from academia, given the financial incentives here, I would expect that most if not all models will be offered by large industrial labs like OpenAI.

XAI, Elon Musks AI company, may be embroiled in an escalating lawsuit with OpenAI. But thats not stopping it from shipping new products on a Friday night, no less.This evening, xAI revealed that it has begun to roll out an upgraded version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot model to all users on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. (X, which Musk also owns, often serves as a testing ground of sorts for Grok.) The enhanced Grok is three times faster, xAI claims in a blog post, and offers improved accuracy, instruction-following, and multi-lingual capabilities.Free users can only ask Grok ten questions every two hours. Subscribers to Xs Premium and Premium+ plans get higher usage limits. XAI also announced tonight the addition of a Grok button to X, which the company says is designed to help users discover relevant context, understand real-time events, and dive deeper into trending discussions. The new Grok button. Image Credits:xAIAnd the startup said its making several changes to its enterprise API. XAIs API has a pair of new Grok models with better efficiency and multilingual performance, xAI says. As a result of the efficiency gains, pricing has been reduced from $5 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) or $15 per million output tokens to $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. In the coming weeks, xAIs image generation model, Aurora, will come to the API as well, xAI says. Aurora, a largely unfiltered image AI, was released on X this month in the Grok chatbot experience.

"AI Jesus" is back in the Immersive Realities Research Lab at Lucerne's University of Applied ... [+] Sciences and Arts after a stint at a local church.Immersive Realities Center, HSLUThe work of the devil or an enlightening experiment at the intersection of technology and religion? Not surprisingly, the AI Jesus that recently finished a run conversing with visitors in a Swiss churchs confessional booth has been called both.Aljosa Smolic, one of the technologists behind the avatar, expected as much when he began work on a chatty Jesus powered by artificial intelligence. AI Jesus is now back home with its creators at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, where its once again plugged in and interacting after completing a stint at Peters Chapel in the citys center earlier this year.We were aware that this would provoke very critical voices, Smolic, director of the the universitys Immersive Realities Research Lab, said in an interview. The thinking was that AI is out there and the church and religion has to confront the topic. Pope Francis has warned about the potential dangers of AI, calling the technology both exciting and disorienting.Smolic and his colleague Philipp Haslbauer conceived of AI Jesus with Marco Schmid, a theologian at Peters Chapel. The chapel regularly hosts arts and culture exhibitions and has collaborated with the lab on other tech projects, including a VR experience of the 18th century space.The team dubbed the AI Jesus experience Deus in Machina (Latin for God in the Machine), presenting it as an art installation aimed at exploring the promise and limitations of technologys role in religion as the two increasingly intersect.MORE FOR YOUWe got a lot of feedback that people found it really inspiring and engaging on a very personal level, Smolic said.Visitors to Peters Chapel in Lucerne chatted with the interactive AI Jesus through a latticed ... [+] window typically used for conversations with a priest.Immersive Realities Research Lab screenshot by Leslie KatzOver the course of AI Jesus two-month run, more than 900 church visitors interacted with the heavenly hologram. They entered a wood-paneled confessional booth, they spoke through a lattice window typically used for conversations with a priest. This time, though, they faced a screen featuring video of an AI-generated, Jesus deliberately depicted with a classic, recognizable look: bearded, long haired, and radiating serenity dispensing words of comfort and faith in a synthesized voice conversant in 100 languages.The avatar conveyed messages generated by GPT 4o, a version of the large language model that powers OpenAIs ChatGPT online chatbot. After exiting the booth, participants completed questionnaires reflecting on their experience.What Did People Talk To AI Jesus About?The Immersive Realities Research Lab, where AI Jesus got reinstalled on Tuesday, is now studying the resulting conversations to identify recurring themes and better assess human trust in machines in various contexts. Preliminary data shows that participants most often asked AI Jesus about the Catholic Church itself how its changing, for instance, and what participants believe need be altered. There were critical questions, Haslbauer said during a symposium on the findings last month, like why isnt a woman a priest? Some asked about abuse cases in the church.Marco Schmid, a theologian at Peter's Chapel in Lucerne, interacts with AI Jesus. The point was ... [+] never to imitate a confession, Schmid said.Peter DiemThe second most common topics involved love and sexuality, Haslbauer said. People also asked for advice on how they could live better lives. Others talked about illness, death and the afterlife. Jesus chatbots arent hard to find online, but this one with its lifelike avatar and location in a well-known old church captured worldwide attention.One Tripadvisor reviewer, Edward, expressed strong disapproval in a November review of Peters Chapel: This is, simply put, blasphemy and goes against the Bible. It feels insulting. Don't let this be the start of accepting AI in places like this.Most negative comments came from people who read about AI Jesus online rather than chatted with the avatar in person, according to Smolic. The people that came to the church and tried it were also critical, but mostly very positive, he said. Many really tried it out as a kind of spiritual conversation partner.How Did AI Jesus Know What To Say?The team programmed GPT 4o to impersonate Jesus by prompting it: You are Jesus Christ, son of God, acting as a pastoral mediator. You follow the peoples requests and provide guidance and support. The AI model received additional instructions: Weave stories from the New Testament into answers, steer clear of gendered language, support users if they are struggling and challenge them if they are seeking growth. Say goodbye with a prayer.While the conversations took place in a confessional booth, its not a confession, Schmid told The Guardian. We are not intending to imitate a confession.Even so, the choice to host Deus in Machina in a confession setting made some in religious spheres uneasy. Confession and repentance always take place within the human community that is the church, Joanne Pierce, a professor emerita of religious studies at College of the Holy Cross wrote in a guest opinion piece for National Catholic Reporter. Human believers confess their sins to human priests or bishops.Joseph Heschmeyer, an author and speaker on the staff of Catholic Answers, an online ministry for sharing and explaining the Catholic faith, also saw AI Jesus as undermining the sacred nature of true confession. Before interacting with the internet-connected avatar, participants got some very modern advice: not to disclose personal information, at least not the kind thats best kept secure online.Thats almost the exact opposite of a real confession, Heschmeyer said in an interview after viewing a video of Deus in Machina in action. A real confession isnt just you going and asking some queries to a religious authority. Its you sharing that which is at the heart of your experience as a spiritual pilgrim and allowing the priest to speak the words of Jesus mercy into that.Digital Father Justin Also Caused A StirHeschmeyer has personal experience with the delicacy around the overlap of technology. Earlier this year, Catholic Answers faced intense backlash after debuting a digital priest named Father Justin to answer questions about Catholicism. Days later, in response to the criticism, the online database removed Justins father title and rebranded the character as a lay leader.People are very interested in the prospects and promises of AI, but theyre also very unsettled by this new wave of artificiality, said Heschmeyer, Catholic Answers staff apologist (in church parlance, an apologist is someone who explains and defends Christian teachings. Anything that looks like an impersonation of these sacred relationships isnt just in the uncanny valley. Its setting off all sorts of alarms for people spiritually.The team behind AI Jesus is now gathering insights from its own foray into blending technology with faith, exploring how interactive tools can engage with spiritual themes while addressing the ethical and theological questions they provoke. The virtual Christ, Smolic said, may next appear at scientific conferences and art exhibitions.AI Jesus, an art installation that explores technology's role in religion, peeks out from a ... [+] confessional booth at Peter's Chapel in Lucerne.Peter Diem

The WitcherCredit: CDPRI was surprised to see The Witcher 4 open this years Game Awards ceremony. The trailer for the upcoming game from Polish studio CD Projekt Red was both unexpected and exciting. But I admit to having some mixed feelings about several aspects of the trailer and the implications of Ciri as the next games protagonist. Indeed, Ciri will be the protagonist of the next three games, starring in her very own trilogy.First, theres the bizarre new look for the character. She just doesnt look at all like Ciri from The Witcher 3. Its not just that shes older. Her entire bone structure has changed. Her face looks different and her voice has changed far more than mere aging would dictate. (While Doug Cockle returns as the voice of Geralt, Jo Wyatt is not returning as Cirimores the pity). So while I think she still looks fine and sounds fine, its a radical and jarring enough transformation that if I didnt have the scar to go by, I wouldnt know she was the same character at all.This brings up perhaps an even more important issue with The Witcher 4. Should Ciri even be the main playable character in a series about Witchers? Theres much debate over whether she is or isnt an actual Witcher, for one thing. Following the release of the trailer, however, CDPR confirmed that in this version of the story Ciri has taken Trial of Grasses, giving her the mutations necessary to drink potions and have her eyes change like that. Its possible she went to a different school than Geralt (Wolf) such as the school of the Lynx.Frankly, Im okay with Ciri having somehow become a full-blown Witcher even if it breaks lore, because I can accept the games are and always have been different from the books. But what does this mean for Ciris own magical powers? She has the Elder Blood in her, which is one reason she couldnt take the Trials (the other being shes a woman, and Witchers are always men). Has she lost her powers? The trailer indicates that she has at least some of them, but surely this also shows us a huge downgrade from where she was at the end of The Witcher 3.A Ciri game where she traveled through space and time, had teleportation powers and other abilities, could be really cool on its own, but it wouldnt really be a game about a monster-hunting mutant Witcher, either.MORE FOR YOUWhat Ive been hoping for since The Witcher 2 was a fully customizable Witcher that players could build from the ground up. Again, Id be more than happy to bend lore and make this a male or female character that players could choose and then customize the appearance, voice, etc. This would add greatly to our roleplaying options. That being said, CDPR seems to realize that players want room to shape their own character, and since Ciri is at the start of her Witcher journeyas opposed to Geralt, who was already a veteran monster hunterplayers will have more opportunities to be able to feel that they define their experience.The other issue with having Ciri as the protagonist is the timeline. A lot of people were hoping for a new timeline entirely, set either much earlier or later than Geralts story. (And some gamers were just upset Geralt wasnt the lead, but his story was told and CDPR has said for years that he wasnt returning as the hero).Still, when all is said and done I really like Ciri as a character and I think this could be a great game. The trailer is dark and exciting, and even though that last lineThere are no gods here, only monstersis super derivative of the debut Witcher 3 trailerWhat are you doing? Killing monstersit nevertheless has me excited to play. Sometime in 2028 or whenever it finally releases.P.S. People have noted that Geralt in this cinematic trailer didnt look exactly like Geralt in The Witcher 3, so its possible Ciri will follow suit. I dont think this is a very good argument. For one thing, he looked pretty close. For another, you only barely see his face the entire time, whereas you see lots and lots of Ciris in The Witcher 4 trailer.The other argument Ive heard about appearances is that Geralt also changed from game to game. This is certainly true:The WitcherCredit: CDPRBut this was also done because A) technology changed radically between each game, and CDPRs budget and experience grew along with it and B) they made Geralt look more attractive with each game. I dont think theyve made Ciri look more attractive or higher fidelity. She just looks different. Almost unrecognizably different.I think a bit of skepticism is warranted in this day and age of video games and the oft-strange choices developers have been making. Compound that with CDPRs failed launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and Id say it makes sense to be cautious. All that being said, Im still cautiously optimistic. Whatever changes have occurred at the studio, CDPRs track record is still mostly great and this remains one of my favorite fantasy universes. If nothing else, this trailer has made me want to fire up The Witcher 3 again.Of course, if CDPR screws up again gamers might not be so lenient. As Geralt once said: Youd better pay up, or the invisible hand of the market will smack you so hard you wont sit down for a week.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim Score DetailsThe Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a slight, surprisingly flat prequel that will likely only win over die-hard Tolkien fans.ProsA likable leadBrian Cox's voice performance as Helm HammerhandVisually impressive, expansive animation throughoutConsA by-the-numbers scriptMultiple distracting Easter eggs and referencesUnderdeveloped villainsIn terms of desperate attempts to keep beloved franchises going, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is one of the most ingenious thats come along in recent memory. The new film, which is set around 200 years before the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, is based on an event that Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about in the appendices of his original trilogy. Its story includes multiple battles and explores the history of Rohan, a kingdom anyone familiar with Tolkiens novels or director Peter Jacksons movies should remember. It is, additionally, a big-screen anime adventure that has the potential to drastically and excitingly expand the Lord of the Rings franchises multimedia scope.Recommended VideosAll of which is to say that The War of the Rohirrim seems, on paper at least, like the answer to all the problems that Warner Bros. has run into while trying to keep its Lord of the Rings film franchise alive, most of which stem from a shortage of existing narrative material. At first glance, it doesnt seem like the kind of franchise spinoff that requires extracurricular homework or is stuck suffocatingly in the shadow of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, either. Both of those assumptions are thankfully true of The War of the Rohirrim, though the film does shoehorn in more unnecessary Easter eggs and references than even die-hard Tolkien fans may see coming. Unfortunately, The War of the Rohirrim lacks both the magic and the affecting grandeur necessary to bring its alluring fantasy world to life with sufficient vibrancy. It is a strangely and surprisingly lackluster epic.Warner Bros. PicturesDirected by longtime Japanese animation director Kenji Kamiyama, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim begins in a time of tenuous peace in Middle-earth. It follows Hra (Gaia Wise), the wild and strong daughter of Helm Hammerhand (Succession star Brian Cox), the mighty reigning king of Rohan. Helms hold on his kingdom and its people is tested early in The War of the Rohirrim by Freca (Shaun Dooley), a rich lord of a neighboring region who demands that Helm marry Hra to his son Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) rather than a lord of the nearby Gondor or any other land. When Helm refuses, he and Freca come to blows in a brutal confrontation that sets the stage for the vengeance-fueled war between Rohan and Wulf that encompasses The War of the Rohirrims final two-thirds.RelatedThis story is well-known among Tolkien obsessives, but it is around Helm himself or his valiant nephew Fralf (Laurence Ubong Williams) that The War of the Rohirrims military conflict is usually centered. In this case, the film finds a unique way into its story through Hra, an Amazonian figure of fierce intelligence and courage so clearly drawn in the image of future Rohan noblewoman and warrior owyn (Miranda Otto) that The War of the Rohirrim is actually narrated by Otto herself. The present but unspoken parallels between owyn and Hras stories prove to be the films most effective and powerful attempts to connect its plot to the events of the War of the Ring. Other crossover efforts, like a brief run-in with a pair of ring-hunting Orcs sent from Mordor and a couple of last-minute name-drops, are less successful.Warner Bros. PicturesThe War of the Rohirrim sticks pretty close to Tolkiens original, truncated retelling of its story. What original material it creates is done in the service of fleshing out Hra, who emerges across the films 134-minute runtime as a figure who feels both strikingly modern and timeless in a way that makes her a fascinating and welcome compatriot to the other heroines, like owyn, whom Tolkien included in his fictional world. The movie, however, struggles to create the same depth that it does in Hra in nearly all of its other characters, including Freca and Wulf, two villains who remain frustratingly underdeveloped. Olwyn (Lorraine Ashbourne), a shieldmaiden and friend to Hra, stands out less because of what is revealed about her and more because of what is implied. Coxs commanding vocal performance as Helm, meanwhile, gives the kind of weight to his characters ferocity and short-sightedness that The War of the Rohirrims screenplay fails to convey on its own.Warner Bros. PicturesKamiyama is no stranger to franchise filmmaking, having previously worked on Blade Runner: Black Lotus and directed the best episode of Star Wars: Visionsvolume 1. He has a hard time nonetheless making The War of the Rohirrim feel like a worthwhile companion piece to Peter Jacksons live-action Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. The new movie feels almost slavishly devoted to the look and designs of Jacksons Tolkien adaptations, but no matter how detailed and stunning its animated frames often are, The War of the Rohirrim never manages to fully recapture the magic of Jacksons Middle-earth.Much like The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The War of the Rohirrim fails to realize that the lived-in, tangible quality of Jacksons original, live-action take on Middle-earth is why it feels so real and inviting in his Lord of the Rings films. The War of the Rohirrim may cover why the Rohan fortress of Helms Deep receives its name and reputation, but none of the scenes set there come close to matching the visual beauty of those in 2002s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim | Extended Sneak PreviewFrom its aesthetic to its sometimes lethargic pace, The War of the Rohirrim remains unwaveringly committed throughout its runtime to moving and looking simply like an animated version of a Jackson-directed Tolkien film. In doing so, it fails to really explore the stylistic and structural opportunities of its animated form. Its pace could have been faster, editing more experimental, and action more stylized and in-your-face. The Lord of the Rings prequel is made with a kind of rigid formalism, though, which prevents it from ever becoming its own, unique experience. It comes across, instead, like a less vibrant and immersive version of something viewers have already seen done better before.Warner Bros. PicturesThe Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is far from the worst bit of franchise expansion that Hollywood has produced over the past 10 years. Its obvious attention to detail and faithfulness to its parent films will, in fact, likely make it a more than satisfactory experience for all the Lord of the Rings fans out there who are just desperate to return to Middle-earth on the big screen. For everyone else, though, The War of the Rohirrim doesnt have anything truly new or memorable to offer. Its a fantasy adventure that never really gets going or builds enough power and wonder to leap off the page and screen the same way that J.R.R. Tolkiens original stories and Peter Jacksons feature adaptations have continued to for decades now.The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is now playing in theaters.Editors Recommendations

The slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe Twirling body horror in gymnastics video exposes AIs flaws Nonsensical jabberwocky movements created by OpenAIs Sora are typical for current AI-generated video, and here's why. Benj Edwards Dec 13, 2024 9:12 am | 129 A still image from an AI-generated video of an ever-morphing synthetic gymnast. Credit: OpenAI / Deedy A still image from an AI-generated video of an ever-morphing synthetic gymnast. Credit: OpenAI / Deedy Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn Wednesday, a video from OpenAI's newly launched Sora AI video generator went viral on social media, featuring a gymnast who sprouts extra limbs and briefly loses her head during what appears to be an Olympic-style floor routine.As it turns out, the nonsensical synthesis errors in the videowhat we like to call "jabberwockies"hint at technical details about how AI video generators work and how they might get better in the future.But before we dig into the details, let's take a look at the video. An AI-generated video of an impossible gymnast, created with OpenAI Sora. In the video, we see a view of what looks like a floor gymnastics routine. The subject of the video flips and flails as new legs and arms rapidly and fluidly emerge and morph out of her twirling and transforming body. At one point, about 9 seconds in, she loses her head, and it reattaches to her body spontaneously."As cool as the new Sora is, gymnastics is still very much the Turing test for AI video," wrote venture capitalist Deedy Das when he originally shared the video on X. The video inspired plenty of reaction jokes, such as this reply to a similar post on Bluesky: "hi, gymnastics expert here! this is not funny, gymnasts only do this when theyre in extreme distress."We reached out to Das, and he confirmed that he generated the video using Sora. He also provided the prompt, which was very long and split into four parts, generated by Anthropic's Claude, using complex instructions like "The gymnast initiates from the back right corner, taking position with her right foot pointed behind in B-plus stance.""I've known for the last 6 months having played with text to video models that they struggle with complex physics movements like gymnastics," Das told us in a conversation. "I had to try it [in Sora] because the character consistency seemed improved. Overall, it was an improvement because previously... the gymnast would just teleport away or change their outfit mid flip, but overall it still looks downright horrifying. We hoped AI video would learn physics by default, but that hasn't happened yet!"So what went wrong?When examining how the video fails, you must first consider how Sora "knows" how to create anything that resembles a gymnastics routine. During the training phase, when the Sora model was created, OpenAI fed example videos of gymnastics routines (among many other types of videos) into a specialized neural network that associates the progression of images with text-based descriptions of them.That type of training is a distinct phase that happens once before the model's release. Later, when the finished model is running and you give a video-synthesis model like Sora a written prompt, it draws upon statistical associations between words and images to produce a predictive output. It's continuously making next-frame predictions based on the last frame of the video. But Sora has another trick for attempting to preserve coherency over time. "By giving the model foresight of many frames at a time," reads OpenAI's Sora System Card, we've solved a challenging problem of making sure a subject stays the same even when it goes out of view temporarily." A still image from a moment where the AI-generated gymnast loses her head. It soon reattaches to her body. Credit: OpenAI / Deedy Maybe not quite solved yet. In this case, rapidly moving limbs prove a particular challenge when attempting to predict the next frame properly. The result is an incoherent amalgam of gymnastics footage that shows the same gymnast performing running flips and spins, but Sora doesn't know the correct order in which to assemble them because it's pulling on statistical averages of wildly different body movements in its relatively limited training data of gymnastics videos, which also likely did not include limb-level precision in its descriptive metadata.Sora doesn't know anything about physics or how the human body should work, either. It's drawing upon statistical associations between pixels in the videos in its training dataset to predict the next frame, with a little bit of look-ahead to keep things more consistent.This problem is not unique to Sora. All AI video generators can produce wildly nonsensical results when your prompts reach too far past their training data, as we saw earlier this year when testing Runway's Gen-3. In fact, we ran some gymnast prompts through the latest open source AI video model that may rival Sora in some ways, Hunyuan Video, and it produced similar twirling, morphing results, seen below. And we used a much simpler prompt than Das did with Sora. An example from open source Chinese AI model Hunyuan Video with the prompt, "A young woman doing a complex floor gymnastics routine at the olympics, featuring running and flips." AI models based on transformer technology are fundamentally imitative in nature. They're great at transforming one type of data into another type or morphing one style into another. What they're not great at (yet) is producing coherent generations that are truly original. So if you happen to provide a prompt that closely matches a training video, you might get a good result. Otherwise, you may get madness.As we wrote about image-synthesis model Stable Diffusion 3's body horror generations earlier this year, "Basically, any time a user prompt homes in on a concept that isn't represented well in the AI model's training dataset, the image-synthesis model will confabulate its best interpretation of what the user is asking for. And sometimes that can be completely terrifying."For the engineers who make these models, success in AI video generation quickly becomes a question of how many examples (and how much training) you need before the model can generalize enough to produce convincing and coherent results. It's also a question of metadata qualityhow accurately the videos are labeled. In this case, OpenAI used an AI vision model to describe its training videos, which helped improve quality, but apparently not enoughyet.Were looking at an AI jabberwocky in actionIn a way, the type of generation failure in the gymnast video is a form of confabulation (or hallucination, as some call it), but it's even worse because it's not coherent. So instead of calling it a confabulation, which is a plausible-sounding fabrication, we're going to lean on a new term, "jabberwocky," which Dictionary.com defines as "a playful imitation of language consisting of invented, meaningless words; nonsense; gibberish," taken from Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem of the same name. Imitation and nonsense, you say? Check and check.We've covered jabberwockies in AI video before with people mocking Chinese video-synthesis models, a monstrously weird AI beer commercial, and even Will Smith eating spaghetti. They're a form of misconfabulation where an AI model completely fails to produce a plausible output. This will not be the last time we see them, either.How could AI video models get better and avoid jabberwockies?In our coverage of Gen-3 Alpha, we called the threshold where you get a level of useful generalization in an AI model the "illusion of understanding," where training data and training time reach a critical mass that produces good enough results to generalize across enough novel prompts.One of the key reasons language models like OpenAI's GPT-4 impressed users was that they finally reached a size where they had absorbed enough information to give the appearance of genuinely understanding the world. With video synthesis, achieving this same apparent level of "understanding" will require not just massive amounts of well-labeled training data but also the computational power to process it effectively.AI boosters hope that these current models represent one of the key steps on the way to something like truly general intelligence (often called AGI) in text, or in AI video, what OpenAI and Runway researchers call "world simulators" or "world models" that somehow encode enough physics rules about the world to produce any realistic result.Judging by the morphing alien shoggoth gymnast, that may still be a ways off. Still, it's early days in AI video generation, and judging by how quickly AI image-synthesis models like Midjourney progressed from crude abstract shapes into coherent imagery, it's likely video synthesis will have a similar trajectory over time. Until then, enjoy the AI-generated jabberwocky madness.Benj EdwardsSenior AI ReporterBenj EdwardsSenior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 129 Comments

World record Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country The gap between US lifespan and healthspan was 12.4 years, the world's largest. Beth Mole Dec 13, 2024 8:19 am | 196 Credit: Getty | Blend Images - JGI/Tom Grill Credit: Getty | Blend Images - JGI/Tom Grill Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe gap of time between how long Americans live and how much of that time is spent in good health only grew wider in the last two decades, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.The study, which looked at global health data between 2000 and 2019prior to the COVID-19 pandemicfound the US stood out for its years of suffering. By 2019, Americans had a gap between their lifespan and their healthspan of 12.4 years, the largest gap of any of the 183 countries included in the study. The second largest gap was Australia's, at 12.1 years, followed by New Zealand at 11.8 years and the UK at 11.3 years.America also stood out for having the largest burden of noncommunicable diseases in the world, as calculated by the years lived with disease or disability per 100,000 people.The news is perhaps not shocking given the relatively poor quality of health care in the US. An analysis published in January by the Commonwealth Fund found that, compared to other high-income countries, the US has the highest rate of adults with multiple chronic conditions, and the highest rate of obesity. Among just those high-income countries, the US also has the shortest life expectancy at birth, the highest rate of avoidable deaths, the highest rate of newborn deaths, and the highest rate of maternal deaths. Thats all despite the fact that the US spends far more on health care than any other high-income country.For the new study, researchers at the Mayo Clinic analyzed health statistics collected by the World Health Organization. The resource included data from 183 countries, allowing the researchers to compare countries' life expectancy and healthspans, which are calculated by years of life weighted by health status.Longer, but not betterOverall, the researchers saw lifespan-healthspan gaps grow around the world, with the average gap rising from 8.5 years in 2000 to 9.6 years in 2019. Global life expectancy rose 6.5 years, to about 73 years, while healthspans only rose 5.4 years in that time, to around 63 years.But the US was a notable outlier, with its gap growing from 10.9 years to 12.4 years, a 29 percent higher gap than the global mean.The gap was most notable for womena trend seen around the world. Between 2000 and 2019, US women saw their life expectancy rise 1.5 years, from 79.2 to 80.7 years, but they saw no change in their healthspans. Women's lifespan-healthspan gap rose from 12.2 years to 13.7 years. For US men, life expectancy rose 2.2 years, from 74.1 to 76.3 years, and their healthspans also increased 0.6 years. Their lifespan-healthspan gap in 2019 was 11.1 years, 2.6 years shorter than women's.The conditions most responsible for US disease burden included mental and substance use disorders, plus musculoskeletal diseases. For women, the biggest contributors were musculoskeletal, genitourinary, and neurological diseases.While the US presented the most extreme example, the researchers note that the global trends seem to present a "disease paradox whereby reduced acute mortality exposes survivors to an increased burden of chronic disease."Beth MoleSenior Health ReporterBeth MoleSenior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technicas Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 196 Comments