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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreElvis Presley once said, Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Brendan Greene, the creator of PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds (PUBG), has a lot of ambition. His battle royale game, inspired by the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000), has sold more than 80 million copies.And one of Greenes ambitions is doing something important like that again in video games. And so he just announced that his PlayerUnknown Productions is resurfacing after years of development with a three-game plan to bring on the next generation of survival games. And its ambitious.I talked to Greene, who is known as PlayerUnknown, about it in an exclusive interview. Its down at the bottom of this introduction and I hope you like it. At the end, I asked him about ambition. Greene got the idea from the movie that he could stage a battle where 100 people would compete with each other. With each player eliminated, the battle space would get smaller until the last two were battling it out in a very small circle. The last one standing was the winner. Greene first created a mod called DayZ in the Arma universe. Then he teamed up with South Koreas Krafton to make PUBG. The game debuted in 2017, disrupted shooter games like Call of Duty. On the strength of PUBGs 80 million in sales, Krafton went public and Greene became wealthy from that. That gave him the money to work on something even more ambitious.Brendan Greene is the creator of PUBG and he is on to his next survival project.I had a front row seat to this plan. Greene went off on his own to create a new startup, PlayerUnknown Productions, in 2021 to make a gaming survival world that was a lot like a metaverse. Then he gave me a scoop on his ambitions. Without anything to show me except a screenshot at the time, Greene said was creating a world called Prologue that had a huge amount of terrain about 100 square kilometers. That world, bigger than just about any existing game world, would be a test where players would drop into the world and try to survive until they exited the world in a given spot. It would be different every time they dropped into it.Now Greene has released a video that describes his intentions more concretely. Prologue now has a real preview in the video and the world looks very realistic, with trees and grasses swaying in the wind. And its still a huge world, fashioned with machine learning and AI tools. The aim is to release it sometime in the middle of next year as a single-player game for people to try to survive. AI will generate the terrain of Prologue.The challenge is that the open-world of Prologue will be an emergent place, where anything can happen and the weather will get progressively worse. It may seem simple to get to the exit point on the map, but its likely going to be hell getting there.Then there will be something else. The company will do a shadow drop of the companys free tech demo, called Preface: Undiscovered World, showcasing its in-house game engine called Melba.Preface will be able to generate terrain for an Earth-size virtual world, using very little in the way of computing resources. This demo aims to provide users with an early look at the innovative technology that will power the subsequent titles in the series, and eventually a third game called Project Artemis.Project Artemis is the large-scale end goal project of the series. As described in the past, Greene sees this as an Earth-size world where players can drop in and create their own gaming experiences in different sections of the world. We dont use the word metaverse so much anymore, but thats what it seems like to me. The journey to get there could take another five or ten years.In the video, Greene said he embarked on Prologue three years ago and then life happened and it has taken three years to get it into a solid and breakthrough shape. Now the company can start sharing it and getting feedback to make it into really something different. In our interview, Greene said that the team started pulling together when Laurent Gorga joined as CTO. About a year ago, Gorga started putting in motion a process that enabled the team to make a lot more process. While they were making the tech, the team would now create frequent builds to test the tech on a granular level. They started making enough progress so that they started scheduling the timelines for Prologue and Preface. And they talked about it in a video stream on December 6, during the PC Gaming Show. It made a lot of jaws drop. Prologue is expected to drop into early access on the second quarter of 2025.Heres a view of Preface, another test of technology from PlayerUnknown Productions.When I started this I was trying to make a larger open world experience than most people made, and we tried to provide a couple of years and we found a way to do that, Greene said. We essentially reinvented how you create these worlds using machine learning technology, using natural earth data to generate the terrain.Now the company is ready to test this terrain, which will form the basis for the larger worlds. He said the team broke the journey into three stages. The first job was to fill out the terrain of the world. The second was to fill that terrain with lots of interaction when scaling up. And then third, the goal was to pull a bunch of those players onto the world, Greene said. The company will keep enhancing Prologue with its current game engine and then it will move it over to the next version of its game engine.Prologue started off as an experiment in Unity and then it moved to Unreal a couple of years ago and the tools have proven to be a solid foundation. The proprietary tech will eventually be able to generate a world with millions if not billions of objects in it, with the help of machine learning. Its more about the large scale and again machine learning is very good at it because it will capture the patterns that we teach it, Greene said. The physics will be realistic. If the ground gets wet, the terrain becomes a slippery mud and rivers can form, and these will have repercussions for players as they try to survive in a wilderness. This will make the game challenging, but it cant be unbeatable, Greene said. Were discovering what is fun, what is not fun but at its core it is about survival. I think the more we can test, the more we can get the feedback from the users or the players, and thats one of the reasons why we are going to early access, Greene said. The more we can actually engage with the community and get their feedback the more it can reshape the models in the right way.Meanwhile, the company is working on Melba, the in-house game engine. Using machine learning, it should be able to generate worlds and then regenerate them for the next game.Preface technology will populate a world very quickly.The way that we build the engine is allowing us to scale up to large agent interaction, Greene said. We have an Earth-scale planner with some various biomes and some simple systems to allow you to explore it.The company is working on two projects at once one with Unreal and another with Melba so that it doesnt develop tech in a vacuum, said CTO Laurent Gorga, in the video. Unreal and Prologue will generate a piece of the world. Preface will help achieve the scale, and then Artemis will be the full expression.I want to get our tech into the hands of the people out there to help us perform what this tech will become, Greene said. Like this terrain tech is interesting, but I really need, I want to leave it open. I want to leave it moddable.Greene said this may be a five or 10-year journey, but Prologue could be available on Steam in the second quarter of next year. There were a lot of details about what hes doing that we talked about. Heres an edited transcript of our interview.Prologue: Go Wayback! is the first new game coming from PlayerUnknown.GamesBeat: I was very impressed by your demo. I saw the Discord event, as well as the announcement.Brendan Greene: Its been a busy six months. We finally got it out the door.GamesBeat: I remember the original vision and how you went about doing it. It sounded like there was a big technology pivot or approach pivot you made. What did that involve, from the time you were first talking about it? How has it turned out?Greene: We found Laurent Gorga, who we appointed as our CTO. Hes in the video we released. He wanted to make more of a product, rather than a research experiment. Try to focus our efforts on releasing something. He said he doesnt believe in developing tech in a vacuum. Laurent, Kim, Scott, Petter, they sat down and figured out how we could leverage the great team and tech we had, and the ideas we had, and make it into something we could release.He posted only last week on our Slack. He said, A year ago I joined the company, and said that in a years time we would release something. Not to the day, but in a years time we released something. Its a credit to him and the team for making it work.GamesBeat: Is there an easy way to explain what the approach is, and how it differs from what you had tried before?Greene: It was the approach that Petter brought to the production of Prologue, but also that Laurent broughtwe brought both projects into production rather than keeping them as research experiments. That was the previous tech leads view, that we should prove it all out before we move into a more production stage. Laurent really believedI remember Petter joining and asking the game team, Lets play the build. They said, Play what then? And within a week we had a playable build together.Since then weve shifted mentality, from experimenting and playing with ideas tonow that we have really strong leadership in tech and production. Thats put us on the right path. It brought in more traditional techniques. We have a seven-week sprint. We work fully remote, more or less. Were experimenting with how to make the teams work together well. We have a good synergy between all the different departments now. We have a core engine team. We have our art team. They all work together in conjunction on all the projects.Its a credit to Kim, Laurent, Scott, and Petter. I have the vision. I have the dreams. But theyre the guys that really make it work.GamesBeat: How many people did the team grow to now?Greene: Were 60 people now. Thats fully staffed for Prologue.Preface is part of a very ambitious project by Brendan Greene.GamesBeat: Thats higher than the original plan called for.Greene: Yes, I think we were around 50 or so. But now we have publishing. We have finance. We have a game team of about 30 people. The core engine team is about 10 or 15 people at the moment. Its a really tight team now. The team itselfwe have a presentation and Christmas party in a few days. Were doing five-year anniversary presentations. Thats quite something. A lot of the team have been with us for years. Im very happy now that we have leadership in place that can do what I want to do, rather than telling me we can do what I want to do and then not really having a plan.GamesBeat: The vision sounded the same. Youre going to build this world, and then the players will figure out what the game is.Greene: The vision really hasnt changed. Even when I looked at some old pitches I did from four years ago, when I was first pitching it internally to Kraftonagain, it was a three-game plan. They came back with slightly longer time frames and slightly more realistic goals, but it was still this idea that wed prove each stage of the tech with each game were building. The vision is still the same.I dont think anyone is serious about building a metaverse. I think everyones building IP bubbles that will sometimes have to talk to each other, I guess. I dont really see the metaverse as described by the people building it. What were doing, its open. We have it in Discord. People are already modding and hacking it. I see Artemis or Melba, that engine being hopefully an open-source world creation engine that will power some form of 3D internet. Its not just one world. Its hundreds of worlds, thousands of worlds. I see every world as like a web page.Since we did the releasethey have those things, deep links. You probably saw them in Discord, where you can hop around the planet. I had this flash in my mind. Maybe thats what a hyperlink will be. Theres this idea that you dont have to travel there on the planet. Someone will just send you a link to something cool on their planet or your planet or Toms planet. Then you can click and it will open up the app and bring you there, much like a browser will in todays internet. Its just a 3D location that has something interesting, or not. It might just be beautiful. The vision is still going for that.Its not meant to be like a game world. Its a world with game-like experiences, Im sure, but ultimately its just a huge world for players to come and build or view or share. Im not really sure what theyll do yet. I know Ill give them lots of tools to do stuff. I always thought that the world well provide, or the example well provide, will be like Minecraft survival. That will be our slice in all the worlds. Thats more just a big Earth-shaped thing that looks like Earth and has basic survival mechanics. Lets say civilization mechanics. You can do lots of stuff to eventually build communities. But again, thats 10 years away, I think.GamesBeat: I didnt quite grasp what the three games meant. Prologue is a geographically limited game. Preface is more like a demo. But I didnt know whether you counted that as one of the games. And then you have Artemis.Greene: Preface will be the final game, probably. Prologue was just us testing the small-scale systems, player interaction, and the terrain tech. The reason we have three games is that each is solving one step in the process, or one problem. The first is terrain. Prologue, we have our ML tech that powers the terrain, generates the terrain. We can leverage Unreal to test that in this box called Prologue. We can test out lots of player interaction systems. How do we store that? How do we have persistence? All this using this ML agent.A screenshot of Prologues wilderness.Game two will be testing the ML agent on a bigger scale, making bigger terrain. Hopefully the terrain tech will be relatively mature at that stage. And then thinking about multiplayer. Not on a crazy scale. Just whats usual at the time. But then lots of agent interaction. Its going bigger and testing the terrain, the systems, stuff like marketplaces on a slightly bigger world, before we finally go to massive multiplayer, where I hope hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, in 10 years, on this massive terrain, which should be generated locallythat should be well mature with all these other systems that weve tested through Prologue and game two. Its all just iterating on the vision.GamesBeat: Will each game then be a separate product that gets to market? Or do you see them more as demos?Greene: Prologue will be a product, for sure. Theres a story that we have, that I would like to leverage during early access, or after we launch into a full product. But it serves a purpose. I dont want to put every bell and whistle on it, but it will still be a product. Then, once its life cycle is over, well evolve it into the next stage. Prologue will move into the next game. Maybe you can play Prologue in the next game. I dont know. But its kind of like Rust. As we go bigger, the products will be separate products, but theyll bleed into each other and iterate on top of each other. Theyll stand on each others shoulders, so to speak.GamesBeat: If you have a story, it sounds like youre going to make your game within that game world. But youll also make it moddable so that other people can play with it and figure out what kind of game they want to make. Prologue can be that directed game whereit seems like its important for you to design a game, as opposed to leaving it all up to consumers.Greene: When I thought about this many years ago, when we were thinking about whether we could generate a terrain every time you press playthats an interesting idea. Whats the easiest thing to do here? I thought about a simple survival game where you get from A to B across a map. Its you every time. The weather gets worse, wave-based weather. It just keeps hitting you. Prologue is essentially that. Its not that Im making a game. I said in the Discord chat that I want to build games with the community, not for the community.This is an interesting way of generating game worlds. We have some simple systems in it, but already, during the playtest, people are suggesting, How about this? How about that? I want to stay in a cabin for four hours and play guitar and watch the weather outside and not do anything else. Im not trying to make people play a game. There are things you can do within Prologue to get to the other side of the map, get to the finish, and learn a bit of what the game may be about. But otherwise you can just sit in the cabin for five or six hours if you want.Im not trying to force people down a particular path. Thats why I want to get the community involved early. This way of creating game worlds is interesting and exciting to me. People who love survival games more than me will give some really good ideas when they get a chance to play it. Thats why we have playtests already. People are already finding weird and wonderful things about the game. That excites me. Sharing this tech early with the community and getting their input now is how we make this a great game. Its not just me directing everything. Its pulling feedback from people who really care about these games in ways that I havent thought about.Trees blow in the wind in Prologue.GamesBeat: One thing that I wonder is what kind of variations you can have if the game isI dont know if you call it procedural. You regenerate the world every time you log in, is that what youre actually doing?Greene: Its machine learning procedural, but its machine learning. The ML agent generates a low-res map at the start of the game. Technically, mathematically, we can do 4.2 billion-odd maps, or generations. If a million of those are interesting, Ill be happy. But you can see in the background, this is the ML map, but with us generating mountains. These are going to be impossible to create. You wont be able to traverse them. But the idea was, we want to get the weather station up here. How can we make it more interesting and get it up in the clouds? They got very excited when we generated this, but no, its not going to be traversable.The idea that it gives us a base to work on in Unrealthe maps we have, Ive seen a good deal of variation. Even now, its very early days with this tech. The guys are discovering new ways to manipulate the PGC system, the procedural generation system in Unreal, to create more interesting biomes, to leverage our tech to create different rivers, masks for rivers and mountains. It gives a pretty good variation of worlds. Weve seen some interesting worlds from the generations already, and that can only get better over the next six months.Before we did our very first playtest with the Dutch Game Association, we had gotten cabins spawning in the week previous. This is all very new for us. But its still exciting. This looks cool. Its not going to make it into the game because its far too high, but still, this kind of landscape, to meyes, I want to go explore that. I want to get up to the top of that. Thats why were doing it.GamesBeat: Theres the thrill of exploration that you can have in a world that generates over and over. What about the feeling of familiarity that some people may want? I can see myself thinking that I just want Earth, so I know where everything is. Or something that remains persistent that I can go back to and explore different parts of it. Is that going to be possible? Or will it be different every time you log in?Greene: Melba and Preface is meant to be persistent and deterministic. If you go back to the same place, youll see the same things, always. Thats the aim. With Prologue, its seed-generated. We can hopefully eventually share the seed of the map you just played with friends, and you can play that same map. There will hopefully be a meta-game. Maybe you can even race people. But thats probably DLC content down the road, because for the first launch its too much to expect from the dev team. This is not a fully-featured product. I dont want to split dev resources. I want to focus Prologue on what its there to do, which is test the terrain tech and make an interesting systemic survival mechanic or game loop that we can carry over.Itll never duplicate the Earth. Nvidias Earth 2, that kind of thing, our terrain tech isnt designed like that. Its not designed for replication. Its designed for Earth 5, Earth 10. It looks like the Earth. It might have the same feeling, the same biomes. But if you go to Barcelona itll look a lot different. Its not Barcelona. Its just that part of the world generated in a new way. Also, I just think Earths been done. So many other people are generating duplications of these things. Go on Google Maps and you can see the world. I want to create unique spaces. This is going to be Earth-like, of course, but itll be not-Earth-like as well, depending on whos putting in the design input. This will all be open.PlayerUnknown Productions team members: Alexander Helliwell and Hakan Kumar.GamesBeat: Some of the variety is going to come from how many biomes you can create, then? If you come up with 1,000 biomes, you can have wide variation in the terrain.Greene: Exactly. But again, you look at NASA data, and there are 20 defined biomes on the Earth. That fills the whole Earth. Theyre very high-level definitions of what a biome is, though. Tundra, this kind of stuff. Within these youll have sub-biomes and so on. Earth data already provides us with a huge amount of data to try to train these agents to give us the right combination and depth. We still style and theme the worlds. We decide on how many biomes, how frequently they should mix. That kind of thing is still decided by us rather than agents. Were still guiding their hands, so to speak.GamesBeat: If somebody wanted to re-create your battle royale inside Prologue, do you think that would work?Greene: Prologue, you wont be able to do that. Its Unreal. Its a single-player game. This is a survival game. Wed like to open it up for modding, but I dont know if thats on the table right now. Whereas Preface, the tech demo we released, thats being released with an open mind. Were leaving the files unencrypted. The models are there for you to play with if you can. Were not trying to hide that. I like to say its HTTP version 0.01.Its funny. If you think about biomes, there are already people in our Discord who say, Ive been going for hours and its still just the same rocky desert. Yes, because the Earth is big. The true scale of the Earth is massive. Its going to take time. The internet was pretty empty at the very start. I see the same thing with Preface. Right now its empty. Theres not much happening. But people in the Discord really see the possibility. You can see them getting what it is, or what it could be.GamesBeat: By Artemis, then, you have that world where anybody could create anything. You could do your battle royale there. But maybe you want to rope off territory and say, You can only play in this area.Greene: No, not necessarily. One of my earlier ideassay I discover this forested area here, and I want to do a motocross race. I should be able to just pull up something on my wrist, paint where I want the track, and the game provides the rest. The game enacts a motocross race for me, adds everything there. Thats what I would like. Were probably 10 years away from getting there, if not longer. But ultimately I would like that ease of creation. You can just wander around this big planet, fly around doing whatever, see something cool, and say, Yes, I want a battle royale there. Or a motocross race or whatever. The game should make that easy for you.A cabin in the woods.That requires whole layers of thinking, different networking layers specific for those types of game modes. Theyll probably lift and shard off that part of the world from the main world. As I said, five or 10 years. Probably longer.GamesBeat: If you look at what everyone else is trying in these different ways, theres the Nvidia Earth 2. Theres Hello Games trying something with a planet-sized world. Theres Flight Simulator doing it by adapting photos of the Earth that planes or satellites can take, getting their hands on all that available data to generate an Earth. Are there any approaches youve seen that youve thought about or found interesting? It seems like everyone is doing something different.Greene: As I said, I like our approach. I think we have a pretty good one. We use three agents to generate the world locally. Most of the stuff Ive seen from even Epics big world stuff is server-client. I dont think thats how you create massive worlds. Youre always dependent on a performant internet connection and all kinds of things that a kid in Africa doesnt have. How do you generate a world for everyone that half the world cant access?Our view on it, which is, you do the simulation as much as possible locally on the device, rather than worrying about server farms handling that for youI just think the future is local anyway. Ultimately I would like to have all my data stored locally and give it out to the network when I need to. Otherwise its here, rather than worrying about what server its on. Again, five or 10 yearsfor what were trying to create with Melba and the platform, these kinds of things are important to think about. They will come into play in a very big way. Trying to solve them with Band-Aids is not the way to do this.GamesBeat: The good thing is well have much more storage by the time this is ready. The interesting thing I talked to the Flight Simulator people about, if you added up everything they created for Flight Simulator 2020, it was about 500 gigabytes. Then they decided to shift almost completely to the Azure cloud. Now they have just 50 gigs on the local machine, and everything else streams in. That led to some hiccups at the beginning, trying to deal with so many players coming in, but that seems to be under control. But I wonder, why would that way of building a world be harder to do than the approach youre taking, where it sounds like most of it will be on the local machine?Biomes will provide the foundation for each section of a world. Greene: Im not familiar with how they do things. I guess the core difference between their tech and our tech is that its still generating game worlds in an old way, where you need to understand what they look like. Our tech understands that inherently. It understands what terrain is, what mountainous regions are, what biome placement is, what trees to place in various areas. Thats all done generatively and in real time around the player, rather than having everything baked. Thats why you have so much data, whether 50 gigabytes or 500. Our world, which is 500 million square kilometers, is 3.6 gigs. Thats all generated locally on the players side. Its just the way theyre thinking about doing it.We have three patents on what were doing because were making these breakthroughs. How were doing this is a new way. Weve seen other attempts at using inpainting and all kinds of stuff, using ML in other ways to create these worlds. But Ive been happy with what weve been able to do. Were generating millions of worlds in Unreal now, eight by eight, and they look pretty good, pretty high detail, not super fake. They look natural. It really excites me. I think this can open up games to a lot more varied experiences, rather than replaying the same map over again.I saw that The Long Dark is coming out. But also Dont Starve. That was a great game, super procedural, a different map every time. It was exciting to play. But weve never really had that in a single-player game. Maybe we have and the internet will shoot me down. But I really want to create this kind of replayable single-player game that focuses on exploration. We were even putting maybe a tent into the game, because people had said, Maybe I want to sit on a hill until the weather changes and see the vista. So lets put a tent in so people can survive there instead of being cold. Theres this kind of lovely back-and-forth with the community already.The dev team is excited. The community Discord is excited. I cant wait to see what we can do in the next six months as we ramp up to Q2.GamesBeat: I remember when we were talking about the metaverse before and what happens when you try to go between worlds, different worlds. Theres one question there. Did you consider breaking up something like Artemis into a bunch of worlds? You have so much territory here, something planet-sizedGreene: But I think it will be eventually. It will be millions of worlds. Its like the internet. It wont be one single page.GamesBeat: You mentioned that when you cross a border, AI is going to translate your stuff from one world into the next world.Greene: I would hope so.Laurent Gorga is CTO of PlayerUnknown Productions.GamesBeat: I thought that was crazy at the time. But the last year or two years of generative AIit seems like its made that possible. Has that become important for your plans?Greene: I wouldnt say very important, but theres definitely been some advances that we can leverage. For example, texture generation. For a whole planet, to ensure we have a variety of textures, ML generation is great. It gives you infinite variety, basically. It also speeds it up and lowers the cost. You dont need to store hundreds of texture files. Its all generated on the fly as you go through the world. Stuff like this, we can find specific ways for it to make the world run better, with a smaller footprint.Doing the photo to a 3D object, that kind of stuff is exciting to watch, but Im not all in on AI yet. Even though Im working on it quite a bit. There are some great possibilities. Its an exciting future. But we want to be careful about committing too hard in one way or another. Were pretty happy with what we have right now. But some advances in the last few years have filled me with a bit of excitement as well.GamesBeat: I was trying to think of game spaces within these different projects you have. With Artemis, it seems like youd have those millions of different kinds of spaces. People can choose to have very small game spaces, like a town where you could have a gunfight, or very large ones too. How many people do you envision in one game space? Is there a maximum youre thinking about?Greene: I dont know. In the shared experience I want millions of people. Having a massive Earth-scale world, you need millions if not billions of people. But I dont think thatsagain, solving the network problem. Weve solved the terrain issue, generating massive planets. Thats not that hard. Its not that costly anymore. We can do it locally. It doesnt ask for a lot of disc space. It generates pretty nicely. Its the same for multiplayer. We want to make sure the protocol, the layer we have works well allowing multiple people to get on the same space together.I would love to see a 1,000-player team deathmatch, with teams of 50 or 100 players going against each other. Why not? As long as the play space is big enough. With game two its something well try to explore, upping the player count to something thats still reasonably possible and then seeing how that large-scale interaction works. Again, if its a systemic world, if its emergent, like a lot of the spaces I like creating, its easier to build. But these kinds of large-scale interactions excite me because no ones really pursuing them. Everyones still happy with 20 or 30 or 100 players. Come on! Its been 20 years already. Give me millions of players, please.GamesBeat: A lot of game designers have said that thats all they can see as being fun. Would that many players in a game be fun for the individual? The Call of Duty designers are perfectly happy with six-on-six.Preface is the second project of PlayerUnknown Productions.Greene: Again, 100-player battle royale probably wasnt seen as fun before it happened, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I dont think we can say something isnt fun if weve never experienced it. I struggle with that kind ofit can never be fun if its over whatever number? Lets try it. Maybe its fun and maybe its not.Im not trying to make games with millions of players. Im just trying to create these shared social spaces for millions of players to have experiences together. Maybe theyre games. Maybe theyre concerts. Maybe theyre all kinds of things. But its more that you have large-scale interaction. But hell, bring on 1,000-player battle royale and see what happens. Bring on 1,000-player search and destroy. Look at the real world. You see nowpaintball games used to be six-on-six, but now you have whole teams of hundreds of players going at each other in some of these massive paintball tournaments.I dont know. Any new technology scares the stalwarts, right? You saw it with that lovely ILM documentary, Light and Dark, about moving from puppetry to computer graphics. We cant do it? Oh, shit, we can do it. Of course puppetry has now evolved into something even more special. Its been forced to evolve because of other tech taking away the low-hanging fruit. Its always an evolution. You should want to see it move forward, rather than just trying to trap it in a box.GamesBeat: I remember games like World War II Online. They were trying to get 100,000 people or more into an MMO, so that they could replay historical battles. Would something like that be doable inside this kind of world?Greene: Wouldnt it be great? We could get 100,000 people all playing together. That would be great. The tech should hold up. But again, this is what game two and game three are intended to test and prove, to make sure that we have multiplayer, that we have interaction systems, that we have all these AI systems that work well together. By AI I mean bots in games, so you can control stuff. Having all this level of interaction and scale all working. As I said, Melba, Preface, its all open. Not open source technically right now, because that comes with certain responsibilities were not ready to commit to yet. We need time to work. But were still doing it with this open mentality, where nothings encrypted. It has to be built with the community. The internet was, and I think the metaverse has to be the same.GamesBeat: In this kind of game world, does the concept of shards still exist?Greene: No, because I dont see servers. Thats the thing. I think it will be peer to peer. Well have a hybrid peer system, where youll have peers that handleyou could be one of these peers if you have a decent enough system, handling the high-level simulation for physics, weather, ballistics, these other heavy needed simulations. That sends data to lower-end devices. Thats how I see this working. Well have some kind of peer to peer system that will self-validate or self-auth rather than being reliant on servers.I still think well have a hybrid peer-server type of model that will hopefully be able to distribute across both users and a more commercial grade. But again, I dont thinkit cant be based on servers, or else well never get to hundreds of thousands of players. It just doesnt work like that.GamesBeat: Is it starting to look more like a decentralized blockchain infrastructure?PlayerUnknown Productions team.Greene: No. Its decentralized in the sense of that word. I still think federated is better than decentralized. It achieves the same general goals. There was that interview I did a year ago with Nathan where he asked me about blockchain, and then the next day it was PUBG guy making blockchain game! That filled me with joy.Blockchain or hashgraph or whatever, decentralized ledgers are useful in certain regards, especially when youre trying to build a decentralized network. Whether well use them, we dont know. Were years away from actively investigating that. Its an interesting space, but I dont see us using it in a similar way to how its been used so far. As a tech stack or a tech layer its interesting, but its not something Im going to build games on. I dont get that part. Im building our own engine. It may incorporate some level of the tech as a layer to facilitate digital bookkeeping, but for me, thats about the usefulness of it.GamesBeat: Are you confident in the ability of a peer to peer system to handle something so large?Greene: Just brash confidence, right? With reckless abandon I say yes. I think weve seen, with Bittorrent and blockchain, that decentralized peer to peer can be secure. There are some new blockchains that do this kind of self-auth stuff quite well. Im relatively confident, as confident as I can be with the knowledge I have, that something will be there that can work.Because were not building a game, so to speak were building a world then theres certainwe dont have to make it as performant, for example, as an FPS game. There are certain things we dont need to ensure at that level. But then if you want to have an FPS game within our world, well probably have to use a more known network protocol to enable a good experience there.GamesBeat: What if the player is requesting a certain world? You have a great wilderness world, but I want a city. Can you generate that for me? Instead of getting a random world, can they wish for a certain kind of world?Greene: With Preface, everyone gets the same world. With Artemis, everyone will get the same world. If you want to create your own world, the tech stack will be there for you to do that. Maybe well provide a way where you can give us some money and we can create a world for you. I dont know. This is 10 years away. But for me its always been like Minecraft. Well give you Minecraft survival. You can go there, explore, create, do things in the world using the tools we provide, but if you want to create your own world, you have to put it together yourself, host it from your own machine, rather than relying on us.Well provide one layer, and experiences for lots of parts of the world, but you wont be creating a new world when you press play locally. Youll just be entering our world. Also, it may not be just our browser that you use to enter this world. Maybe someone has already created a new browser, better than the one we have, that allows you to do more in the world.GamesBeat: Do you think that your world is going to be a contiguous world, an actual 3D planet, as opposed to something likeSecond Life is this collection of places you can go, but its not the map of a world.Greene: I would like our world to be contiguous. I would like that it seems to be the one world. But again, I dont know. Ultimately I want to create a contiguous world. Thats what I would like to do. I would like something like this you see in the background, a massive world thats there to explore. Theres lots of stuff to do. People can do whatever they want with it. Great. Thats the aim. Lets talk again in a few years and see where its going. But thats the aim, to provide a contiguous, unique 3D planet that allows you to spawn at various locations and create some stuff. It might have some urbanization. Early on itll probably have very little. But as we add more systems it should get more interesting.PlayerUnknown Productions is generating terrain on a massive scale.GamesBeat: Would you get something like the actual physics of the Earth?Greene: Why not? Exactly. Then maybe we have a more extreme world, or a more playful world. It should be easy sliders for me. Thats ultimately what we want to create with Melba. It should be that easy. We can just change a slider and the gravity changes. The world is created in real time, so if the data slightly changes, we should be able to do that.GamesBeat: I think I know the answer to this, but others might be wondering. How do you build something this big without 10,000 game developers?Greene: That was always the aim. When we sat down to do a 100 kilometer by 100 kilometer map initially, when I was still at Krafton, we discoveredokay, you need that many game devs to build that world, because it takes so much time. Thats why we tried to solvehow do you create a world in real time and generate it? Thats how were doing it. We already have the terrain part of that solved. We still have to figure out how you store persistent data in an efficient way, but at least weve solved the terrain generation part.Now comes the gameplay and other systems. But since theyre always systemic, theyre pretty simple, especially in the real world. I hesitate to say I dont see this as much of a problem, but I think were solving the bigger problems. The terrain was a big challenge. Weve solved it in a pretty unique way, in a breakthrough way. Theres still a lot to do, a lot I dont know, but I think the vision is clear. Im confident about getting there.GamesBeat: Financially, is your situation still pretty similar to what it was a year ago? You had your own money. You had money from a couple of companies.Greene: We have funding to get us through launch and after. Of course we would like more money, but we prefer to make that from selling the game and using that to reinvest in the studio, rather than looking for another round. My aim with all of this, always, is to make sure the team can pursue the vision without having to worry about just pumping out products for sale. Whatever we choose to do moving forward, its always with that priority in mind. I have to give the team that safe space to dream, to be able to be psychologically safe. This is a good place to work. Were doing some good stuff. Weve achieved that pretty well over the last year. People feel good coming to work and excited about the project. I want to continue that. We need to sell games, but were pretty good right now.GamesBeat: When you look down on the micro level of things like the cabin you had, it was pretty detailed in there. On that side, do you envisiondo you have to have an army of creators making these small things that could be useful for players in this kind of world? How much work is that?Greene: Id love for our art director to give you a proper answer on this, but its more that the tools these days, for example Houdini, are allowing us to do a lot more variation on stuff like cabinets. Ultimately there will be some kind of blueprint that can generate multiple different variations. We have something like 300 variations of the cabin spawned across the world, because its relatively easy to do. It doesnt take a lot of dev time. The cabins still look pretty good. With the variation theyre relatively believable.It does take time. Im not going to say it doesnt take time. But Im impressed by how far theyve come in the last six months. When Petter, our producer, joined about nine months ago, he asked, Wheres the build? Where can I play the game? There werent many responses. Within a week he got a playable build up and running. Since then, the progress has been remarkable. We have a game that I get excited to start up, excited to run and try to find my way through it. I cant wait to get it in the hands of more people.GamesBeat: It sounded like one thing you were asking players to give feedback on was the level of detail in the world, if it was enough. Do you think youll have a difference in the quality of what you can generate compared to the quality theyd expect in single-player Unreal Engine 5 games?Greene: I think it looks pretty good already. The forest landscapeswe still need some more detail, for sure. Especially the terrain level, to make it a bit smoother. But its keeping me happy. Im pretty pleased with how it looks. The forests look natural enough. Its still early days. We still have six months of work to focus down on the look and feel. But Im pretty happy with what we have already. I think players should be excited to explore the world. Theres enough detail already that it doesnt look bad. Lets put it that way.GamesBeat: The Flight Simulator people said that compared to 2020, the 2024 game has 4,000 times more detail in the landscape. That suggests a rate of progress they can continue to ride on. Is that something you can do? If players do demand it, is that a curve you can ride in some way?Greene: Were trying to build the engine in a very generic way, so that as new tech comes on stream, we should be able to update that part or add it in. It shouldnt be much of a problem. The world were building in Prologue behind me, weve already gone through various iterations on the terrain uprezzing tech. Weve already gotten it down to finer detail. As our agents improve, as the training improves, it will get better and better. As youve seen with a lot of AI image generation, video generation it will always improve. Were building the engine with that in mind, that it will constantly be iterated. If a new thing comes online, we should be able to adopt it as quickly as possible.If people want more detail, sure. I dont know if youve played the playtest yet, the build, Im pretty happy with how the world looks. Its a bit rough still, but the forests look pretty good. Im excited.GamesBeat: Well, Im still very impressed with the scope of the ambition here.Greene: I try to be consistent with my madness, right?GamesBeat: Would you have advice for people around sticking with their ambitions?Greene: Just be stubborn. Or, well, no. Someone told me Im not stubborn. Im single-minded. Im in a privileged position to be able to do this. I know the games space right now is not the most wonderful place to work. Theres been a shit-ton of layoffs. Theres this conglomeration of IP where studios are just being thrown out the door. Were in a privileged place right now, that we can pursue this and have me in a position where I dont have to worry about anything else other than pursuing it. But being single-minded about what you doif someone tells me no, I look for a way around it. If you really believe and think its reasonable and possible, then you should pursue it.There are always going to be people that tell you no. Like you said about game designers whove decided that games of 1,000 people are probably not going to be interesting. They said that about games of 100 people, and now those are some of the most popular games out there. If youre sure about something, if youre confident and optimistic, just pursue it. Be single-minded about it.Thats not very wise stuff. Thats what everyone says. Its hard, though. Youre going to get knocked down a lot. But its having that anger inside you, the spite inside you, to say, Im going to prove you wrong. Just going and doing it. It takes a lot of work. We were lucky with battle royale. It took about three years to form a genre. Counter-Strike took a lot longer. DOTA took some time as well. Things take years to cement and become something. Thats the other thing to remember. It doesnt happen overnight. It might seem like it does, but it took me a year and a half or two years to make sure battle royale was in a place where it was picked up by someone bigger and went somewhere crazy. It does take time. Dont give up. Keep going.GamesBeat: The metaverse seemed to inspire a lot of people, including you, some years ago. Its gone out of fashion now. Do you still believe in the metaverse, or has your view of that changed?Greene: I just dont see the metaverse that everyone else is building. This idea that its an IP bubbleeven in the interviews that have been going around, that the biggest challenge is the business to business. The metaverse isnt controlled by companies. Its not my metaverse and your metaverse and this metaverse and that metaverse. Its the metaverse, I believe. Thats only achievable if someone builds an open-source platform or protocol that everyone can use. Theres no partnerships needed. Its just there, like HTTP. We tried to monetize that with AOL and other things, but really the metaverse just has to be an open-source platform.Thats what Im trying to provide with Melba, which is just this open-source tool that creates digital places, much like HTTP generates web pages. Thats where I think the metaverse is. I havent gone off it. Im still plugging forward toward it. I think thats what it should be, rather than what everyone else is trying to build, which seems to be just a funnel to sell you skins.I dont think we should be thinking about what fits in the world. Theres always going to be a joker in a crazy costume running the ultramarathon. This world might have billboards put up because someone can afford to do it. This is a beautiful world. What people make of it? Well, we dont know. But lets see.Daily insights on business use cases with VB DailyIf you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. 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It is redundant to the point of comedy to say 2024 was a difficult year to be a game developer (or a human being in general, but right now, we're talking about workers in an industry undergoing such turmoil). With layoffs, drought-like funding environments, and every other nasty thing implied by the changing market conditions we see referenced in the layoff announcements, it's a minor miracle that games still get made, still launch, and still make players smile (or think, or feel something).It's not especially easy to make gamesor game-making tools, or strong, inclusive workplace culturesin the best of times, let alone now.These are a few of the developers wed like to send some kudos, for working through the current reality and making some kind of positive impact on the industry.Image via Godot.Godot, the vanguard of a big-box game engine revolutionGodot isnt just one company. The Godot Foundation shepherds the engine, W4 Games is the corporate entity run by several Foundation board members that makes key contributions to the engine, and its open-source userbase has the collective power of a large workforce at commercial entities like Epic Games and Unity. But however you compartmentalize the engines architects, its stewards were among the standout developers of 2024.This was a game engine made for a moment like the Unity Runtime Fee debacle of 2023. It wasnt a competitor fiercely biting at Unitys heels, it was another toolmaker quietly working in the background to serve its existing audience. As Rmi Verschelde and Juan Linietsky told us at Gamescom 2024, they were never excited at the idea of a mass Unity exodus, worried both that Godot wouldnt be ready for primetime and that a flood of new users would expect it to behave like the tools theyd been trained on.The hard work they and their peers put into improving the engine paid off. Developers found Godot so flexible they could begin porting games made in Unity to the new engine, and frustrated new users found a network of independent contributors who could walk them through the changes in the engineor help create features that would bring parity for the two platforms.Godots success validated the idea that no one company guards the gates to the world of game development. If it or any other game engine fails its users, developers can breathe a little easier knowing somewhere out there will be another tool just as capable for their needs. Bryant Francis, senior editorImage via GSC Game World (via X)GSC Game World, launching a major game from a warzoneBringing a video game to market under normal circumstances is considered nothing short of a miracle. So, how do you describe the achievement of Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, which developed and launched massive open-world survival shooter Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl in the midst of a warzone.The team has been working in unimaginable circumstances since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, marking a significant escalation in the war that began in 2014. At the time, GSC was one of many Ukrainian studios to express defiance but acknowledged "our work will be impacted and our lives can be destroyed." Stalker 2 has since launched and sold over 1 million copies in two days. GSC is working hard to support the title by addressing a number of issuesreleasing three notable patches in the space of a week. Meanwhile, the fighting continues."The war is not over, and the enemy is not stopping," reads a statement on the GSC website. "Right now our families and friends are either trying to find shelter from bombings or are actively assisting those who has already suffered from the occupants. We need all the help we can get. Through pain, death, war, fear and inhuman cruelty, Ukraine will persevere. As it always does!" Chris Kerr, news editorImage via Xbox WireMicrosoft Gaming Accessibility Team, a stalwart champion of accessible playThe Microsoft Gaming Accessibility Team continues to fly the flag for inclusivity and accessibility within the game industry. The division has released a bounty of accessibility hardware and software over the years, and 2024 saw it continue that trend by unveiling the Xbox Adaptive Joystick to help those with limited mobility enjoy video games in a way that works for them.It also debuted additional accessibility devices and accessories, including adaptive thumbtacks that can be 3D printed at home, and two customizable wireless controllers created in tandem with 'Designed for Xbox' partners ByoWave and 8BitDo. The company's ongoing commitment to accessible design is well worth championing, not least because Microsoft remains focused on developing that technology alongside the communities it serves.Discussing that philosophy in a conversation with Game Developer earlier this year, Xbox senior accessibility product manager Kaitlyn Jones said the company believes a "rising tide floats all boats," which is why it doesn't view accessible design as a competitive undertaking. "We just want anyone to play regardless of the title or platform," said Jones. Microsoft isn't alone in advocating for accessibility. There are numerous individuals across the industry who help steer and shape the conversation, but it remains vital that a company with the visibility and resources of Microsoft continues to amplify the message. In a year dominated by hardship, there's some hope in that. Chris Kerr, news editorImage via Capcom.Capcom, the model for sustainable triple-A developmentOn paper, Capcom should have been among the many companies laying people off in 2024. It has over 3,000 employees and a business model led by premium triple-A games. Surely, the slowing growth of player spending that other companies have blamed on their business downturns on would have left it vulnerable for a body blow, right?Wrong. In March, the company announced it was raising its base starting salary and giving existing employees an average of 5 percent raises. And in May it reported its seventh consecutive year of record-high profits, and its next year is looking just as strong. Capcom may as well be asking "Downturn? What downturn?" while it pursues the same multipronged business model thats served it well for much of its lifetime.It didnt need billion-dollar franchises like Grand Theft Auto or Roblox to hit those numbers, either. This year, Capcom released Dragons Dogma 2, Monster Hunter Stories, and Ace Attorney Anthology. Its portfolio juggles a blend of series with cult followings, fan-favorite franchises, and older titles it can remake or re-release in "HD Editions." Companies with similar profiles have stumbled, but its stayed sustainable.At Gamescom 2024, Monster Hunter Wilds game director Yuya Tokuda, executive producer Ryozo Tsujimoto, and art director Kaname Fujioka explained to us that its sustainability has to do with a tight culture of communication and the shared use of RE Engine across several series. These processes have made the development of Wilds (which is gone on for almost six years!) to be a modest gamble for the company, instead of a teetering financial tower ready to collapse.Capcom is not a company without stains on its recordthe closure of Capcom Vancouver in 2018 shows its management can make missteps that cost developers their jobs. You also cant just copy and paste its operations onto another companymaking it to this point in 2024 took years of work. But its success should be a shining light for developers who want to make ambitious games on ambitious budgets. Bryant Francis, senior editorvia Epic GamesThe developers working on UGC platformsThe User Generated Content (UGC) development community made a huge impact in 2024, one we sometimes struggle to discuss on a site like game developer. There are many who deserve praise, but to describe their impact, we must stare the flaws of this demographic dead in the eye.When industry players sing the praises of UGC platforms they struggle to explain why they're so popular. For the most part Roblox Corporation has soaked up all the attention we'd normally heap on developers. It'd be like if we praised the App Store instead of Ustwo Games for the making of Monument Valley. There is some difference. Players move more fluidly between games in the Roblox ecosystem than they do on other app stores, but that fluidity leaves many developers making great games on the service on the sidelines.Praising this wide group of workers comes with complications. A minority of them are under the age of 18, caught in the Robux ecosystem that sells itself both as "baby's first game project" and "the ultimate way to self-monetize." People Make Games and other reporters have documented the stress these young folks have been through, and though the company promises ever-improving protections, they are still a part of the system powering its profits. Some might even say they're exploited.And then we must turn our gaze further up the age range, because many successful developers on these platforms are the ones doing the exploiting. Some take advantage of young folks to underpay them for popular games; others steal their suddenly successful ideas and clone titles, blurring the line between inspiration and theft. And an absolutely vile lot of them are the ones behind the horrendous experiences like "Escape to Epstein Island" and "Diddy Party" spotted by Hindenburg research in its blistering report explaining why it is shorting Roblox Corporation. It is the corporation's responsibility to moderate these games, but damnit, if you make one of these games, you should be permanently cut off from access to the internet.Without these developers, the dream of UGC, the metaverse, or whatever you call it, doesn't exist. As Roblox, UEFN, and other platforms enjoyed notable growth in 2024, we'd like to recognize the positiveand where needed, negativeimpact these workers made. With enough effort, the work of the former can outshine the latter. But the best time to make that happen is now.Bryant Francis, senior editorThank you for celebrating the years amazing devs with us! This article is one of many 2024 reflections hitting GameDeveloper.com this month, with more to come! For even more thoughts and insights on the best of 2024, check out our Game Developers 2024 Wrap-Up keyword to catch up on all our End of Year content.

Here are the shipping and return policies for all the big-name retailersHere are the shipping and return policies for all the big-name retailers / Weve read the fine print and rounded up the policies for each major retailer to make things simpler.Updated Dec 20, 2024, 9:10 PM UTCShare this storyIf you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty ImagesAs people scramble for last-minute gifts and late-year bargains, everyone is double-checking their lists and figuring out the fastest way to get their purchases. Thankfully, many retailers are offering generous shipping policies for their products, with some offering free two-day shipping or even same-day delivery if you pay extra. And just in case the gift you choose isnt quite right, many retailers are also offering extended return policies so your giftee can get something more to their liking.RelatedFor your convenience, weve collected the current holiday shipping cutoff windows for items that can still arrive by Christmas. Weve also checked the latest return policies for several major retailers below, highlighting which will give you a little more time to place that order or start a return. Hopefully, knowing more about how much leeway you have will help lessen that inevitable holiday angst (fingers crossed).AmazonShipping: Same-day delivery is not available on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. However, Prime members can get free same-day delivery on select products in qualifying ZIP codes through December 24th, provided they meet the minimum threshold (which varies by location) of eligible items in their cart. One-Day Delivery with no minimum purchase amount required is also available to Prime members for qualifying products through December 23rd, while Two-Day Delivery is available through December 22nd. Non-Prime buyers will find shipping options on the order page of each specific product. Returns: During the holidays, most items purchased between November 1st and December 31st can be returned until January 31st, 2025. Apple products, however, must be returned by January 15th, 2025. Note that this policy applies to both Prime and non-Prime buyers.Apple Store BeijingAppleShipping: Apple offers free delivery of in-stock items by Christmas Eve if you order by 9PM ET on December 21st, though engraved items wont ship in time by Christmas. Apple also offers two-hour delivery for an added fee from local stores in most metro areas, or you can opt to pick up purchases yourself by visiting your local Apple Store. Returns: Except for T-Mobile- and Verizon-financed iPhones, all products purchased online between November 8th and December 25th can be returned through January 8th, 2025. Purchases made after December 25th are subject to the usual terms and conditions, and must be returned within 14 calendar days of your initial purchase date.TargetShipping: Target offers free two-day shipping on many orders if you spend $35 or more or use your Target RedCard. Select purchases made by December 23rd at 1PM ET will arrive before Christmas. You may also be able to take advantage of same-day shipping or in-store pickup on December 24th. Same-day delivery costs $9.99 per order, but its included with a Target Circle 360 membership ($10.99 a month or $99 a year). Your mileage may vary for same-day delivery availability based on the item and your location.Returns: Target allows electronics and entertainment items (excluding Apple products) purchased from November 7th through December 24th to be returned as late as January 24th, 2025, for a full refund. Mobile phones and Apple products (including Beats products) purchased during the same window must be returned by January 8th, 2025. Targets standard return policy applies for most other items, with a generous 90-day window for third-party products and up to a year for Target-branded products with a receipt.WalmartShipping: For eligible orders of $35 or more, Walmart provides free next-day delivery in eligible ZIP codes, free two-day delivery, or free standard shipping. However, be aware you must order your gifts by 12:30PM local time on December 23rd to get them in time for Christmas. Walmart Plus subscribers also get free next-day and two-day shipping with no order minimum.Same-day delivery and pickup is available on December 24th for orders made by 12PM local time. If youre willing to pay a $10 Express Delivery fee and order by 4PM local time, Walmart will also deliver your packages in less than two hours on Christmas Eve. Walmart Plus subscribers may be exempt from paying this fee, however, as members get one Express Delivery for free during the month of December.Returns: Most items purchased between October 1st and December 31st may be returned until January 31st, 2025. Some exceptions, like phones, may apply.B&HShipping: During the holidays, B&H offers free two-day and next-day shipping on select items, including discounted products. Most other products are eligible for free standard shipping (thats one to seven business days), and free expedited shipping (one to three business days) is generally available for items over $49. Returns: B&H allows purchases bought after November 3rd through December 31st to be returned or exchanged through January 30th, 2025 (with the usual exceptions of non-returnable items such as computers or TVs whose packaging has been opened). Photo by Umar ShakirBest BuyShipping: Best Buy is offering free next-day and two-day shipping on qualifying orders for My Best Buy Plus andMy Best Buy Total members. Non-members, meanwhile, can get free next-day shipping on qualifying orders totaling $35 or more. If youre ordering a gift for Christmas, Best Buys extended holiday shipping window gives you until 11:30AM ET on December 23rd if you want your gift to ship for free and arrive before December 25th.You can also get free same-day delivery by 7PM on December 24th if you place an order by 12PM local time. The cutoff for placing curbside or in-store pickup orders is 5PM local time through December 24th. Stores will close at 7PM that day.Returns: Purchases made November 1st through December 31st can be returned through January 14th, 2025. This doesnt include items that come with a third-party contract, such as phones, cellular tablets, and wearables (which have a 14-day return period), or holiday products, such as tree decorations and major appliances, which have a 15-day return window. My Best Buy Plus and My Best Buy Total members also have until January 14th, 2025, to return any purchases made between October 24th and November 16th; otherwise, theres a 60-day return window for purchases made on November 17th or later.CostcoShipping: At Costco, shipping fees depend on the product and the shipping method, though in many cases, shipping is free. The wholesale retailer also offers a variety of delivery options, including white glove service for larger appliances. You can get your gift in time for Christmas without paying for shipping when you place a qualifying order by 5:59PM ET on December 20th. Same-day delivery is also available on some items via Costcos partnership with Instacart. Returns: Costco generally has an open return policy, except for electronics such as TVs and computers, which have a 90-day return window. There are other exceptions, though, which are listed on its return page. Photo by Sean Hollister / The VergeGameStopShipping: GameStop currently offers free shipping on orders over $35. It also offers same-day delivery in certain locations if you order from your local store at least three hours before closing.Returns: Products purchased between November 17th and December 24th can be returned until January 18th, 2025. The package must be unopened, however, and certain items like trading cards, clearance items, and seasonal products cant be returned.DellShipping: Most of Dells products come with free standard shipping (no minimum purchase necessary), and some gifts may ship for free in time for Christmas if you place your order by December 21st. The delivery window can vary based on your order, but Dell does offer expedited shipping options as well as a delivery date estimate based on the zip code you provide at checkout. Orders placed by December 23rd with qualifying express delivery windows should arrive before December 25th.Returns: Dell offers a 30-day return policy with some exceptions; a restocking fee of up to 15 percent may be charged.DJIShipping: DJI offers free shipping on purchases of $149 or more. Otherwise, shipping fees are specified on the order form. Shipment times can vary for each product depending on availability.Returns: DJI offers returns within 14 days of receiving the purchase, provided it remains in like-new condition or suffers from some type of manufacturing defect.GoogleShipping: All standard orders qualify for free shipping with no minimum. Just note that this applies to the lowest-cost shipping available, which may not be the fastest.Returns: Google will accept returns through January 15th, 2025, for all purchases made between November 21st and December 31st. Standard return dates for products purchased within that window that extend beyond January 15th will be eligible for the later return date. All purchases made after January 1st, 2025, are subject to the standard return policy, which allows you to return most items up to 15 days after receipt (or 14 days for AT&T phones). However, Nest Thermostats and Verizon contract phones have an extended, 30-day return window. HPShipping: For many items, standard (three- to six-day) shipping is free. You can get ready-to-ship gifts in time for Christmas with free express shipping if you place an order by 3AM ET on December 21st. Orders placed by December 23rd can still arrive by Christmas, though youll have to pay extra for priority shipping. HP will not ship or deliver items on Christmas, Thanksgiving, or New Years Day.Returns: Items purchased between December 1st and December 25th can be returned until January 15th, 2025, or 30 days after delivery, whichever is later. There are exceptions, however, and select items may be subject to a restocking fee of up to 15 percent. Returns totaling more than $250 may also require additional review before your return request is approved.MicrosoftShipping: Most products sold through the online Microsoft Store include free two- to three-day shipping with express shipping available for an additional fee. To receive your gifts by Christmas Eve, however, youll have to place your order by 2PM ET on December 23rd.Returns:NeweggShipping: Many of Neweggs items come with free shipping and are delivered within one to five business days; for details, check the individual product page. If you want your gifts to arrive in time for Christmas, youll have to place your order by 12PM local time on December 23rd and opt for next-day delivery.Returns: Qualifying items purchased between October 7th and December 31st can be returned or replaced until January 31st, 2025.Sams ClubShipping: According to the Sams Club FAQ, the shipping cost for most items varies based on the items size, weight, shipping method, and delivery address. Plus Members get free shipping on many online items, and same-day delivery or curbside pickup is available for free if youre a Plus member ($110 a year) and place a qualifying order totaling $50 or more by 1PM local time. Club members ($50 a year) can pay $12 for same-day or next-day shipping, or get free curbside pickup on orders of $50 or more.Returns: Sams Club has no specified return period; some return periods may be stated for specific products. For example, electronics and major appliances have a 90-day return window, while phones are subject to a 14-day return policy.SonosShipping: Sonos offers free shipping on all of its products, with in-stock items typically shipping the same day if theyre purchased by 11AM local time. If you want to receive your items by Christmas, though, youll likely have to pay extra for two-day or express shipping.Returns: Sonos gives you 30 days to return a purchase and even offers free return shipping. However, you must have bought the product directly from Sonos and the return must be initiated within 30 days of receiving your purchase. The product must also include the original packaging and be in new or as-new condition to be eligible.Update, December 20th: Updated the shipping deadlines and return policies as they pertain to the 2024 holiday season.Most PopularMost Popular

For my last issue of the year, Im focusing on the AI talent war, which is a theme Ive been covering since this newsletter launched almost two years ago. And keep reading for the latest from inside Google and Meta this week.But first, I need your questions for a mailbag issue Im planning for my first issue of 2025. You can submit questions via this form or leave them in the comments.Its like looking for LeBron JamesThis week, Databricks announced the largest known funding round for any private tech company in history. The AI enterprise firm is in the final stretch of raising $10 billion, almost all of which is going to go to buying back vested employee stock.How companies approach compensation is often undercovered in the tech industry, even though the strategies play a crucial role in determining which company gets ahead faster. Nowhere is this dynamic as intense as the war for AI talent, as Ive covered before.To better understand whats driving the state of play going into 2025, this week I spoke with Naveen Rao, VP of AI at Databricks. Rao is one of my favorite people to talk to about the AI industry. Hes deeply technical but also business-minded, having successfully sold multiple startups. His last company, MosaicML, sold to Databricks for $1.3 billion in 2023. Now, he oversees the AI products for Databricks and is closely involved with its recruiting efforts for top talent.Our conversation below touches on the logic behind Databrickss massive funding round, what specific AI talent remains scarce, why he thinks AGI is not imminent, and more.The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity:Why is this round mostly to help employees sell stock? Because $10 billion is a lot. You can do a lot with that.The company is a little over 11 years old. There have been employees that have been here for a long time. This is a way to get them liquidity.Most people dont understand that this is not going into the balance sheet of Databricks. This is largely going to provide liquidity for past employees, [and] liquidity going forward for current and new employees. It ends up being neutral on dilution because theyre shares that already exist. Theyve been allocated to employees and this allows them to sell those to cover the tax associated with those shares.How much of the rapid increases in AI company valuations have to do with the talent war?Its real. The key thing here is that its not just pure AI talent people who come up with the next big thing, the next big paper. We are definitely trying to hire those people. There is an entire infrastructure of software and cloud that needs to be built to support those things. When you build a model and you want to scale it, that actually is not AI talent, per se. Its infrastructure talent.The perceived bubble that were in around AI has created an environment where all of those talents are getting recruited heavily. We need to stay competitive.Who is being the most aggressive with setting market rates for AI talent?OpenAI is certainly there. Anthropic. Amazon. Google. Meta. xAI. Microsoft. Were in constant competition with all of these companies.Would you put the number of researchers who can build a new frontier model under 1,000?Yeah. Thats why the talent war is so hot. The leverage that a researcher has in an organization is unprecedented. One researchers ideas can completely change the product. Thats kind of new. In semiconductors, people who came up with a new transistor architecture had that kind of leverage.Thats why these researchers are so sought after. Somebody who comes up with the next big idea and the next big unlock can have a massive influence on the ability of a company to win.Do you see that talent pool expanding in the near future or is it going to stay constrained?I see some aspects of the pool expanding. Being able to build the appropriate infrastructure and manage it, those roles are expanding. The top-tier researcher side is the hard part. Its like looking for LeBron James. There are just not very many humans who are capable of that.I would say the Inflection-style acquisitions were largely driven by this kind of mentality. You have these concentrations of top-tier talent in these startups and it sounds ridiculous how much people pay. But its not ridiculous. I think thats why you see Google hiring back Noam Shazeer. Its very hard to find another Noam Shazeer.A guy we had at my previous company that I started, Nervana, is arguably the best GPU programmer in the world. Hes at OpenAI now. Every inference that happens on an OpenAI model is running through his code. You start computing the downstream cost and its like, Holy shit, this one guy saved us $4 billion.You start computing the downstream cost and its like, Holy shit, this one guy saved us $4 billion.Whats the edge you have when youre trying to hire a researcher to Databricks?You start to see some selection bias of different candidates. Some are AGI or bust, and thats okay. Its a great motivation for some of the smartest people out there. We think were going to get to AGI through building products. When people use technology, it gets better. Thats part of our pitch.AI is in a massive growth base but its also hit peak hype and is on the way down the Gartner hype curve. I think were on that downward slope right now, whereas Databricks has established a very strong business. Thats very attractive to some because I dont think were so susceptible to the hype.Do the researchers you talk to really believe that AGI is right around the corner? Is there any consensus of when its coming?Honestly, theres not a great consensus. Ive been in this field for a very long time and Ive been pretty vocal in saying that its not right around the corner. The large language model is a great piece of technology. It has massive amounts of economic uplift and efficiencies that can be gained by building great products around it. But its not the spirit of what we used to call AGI, which was human or even animal-like intelligence.These things are not creating magical intelligence. Theyre able to slice up the space that were calling facts and patterns more easily. Its not the same as building a causal learner. They dont really understand how the world works.You may have seen Ilya Sutskevers talk. Were all kind of groping in the dark. Scaling was a big unlock. It was natural for a lot of people to feel enthusiastic about that. It turns out that we werent solving the right problem.Is the new idea thats going to get to AGI the test-time compute or reasoning approach?No. I think its going to be an important thing for performance. We can improve the quality of answers, probably reduce the probability of hallucinations, and increase the probability of having responses that are grounded in fact. Its definitely a positive for the field. But is it going to solve the fundamental problem of the spirit of AGI? I dont believe so. Im happy to be wrong, too.Do you agree with the sentiment that theres a lot of room to build more good products with existing models, since they are so capable but still constrained by compute and access?Yeah. Meta started years later than OpenAI and Anthropic and they basically caught up, and xAI caught up extremely fast. I think its because the rate of improvement has essentially stopped.Nilay Patel compares the AI model race to early Bluetooth. Everyone keeps saying theres a fancier Bluetooth but my phone still wont connect.You see this with every product cycle. The first few versions of the iPhone were drastically better than the previous versions. Now, I cant tell the difference between a three-year-old phone and a new phone.I think thats what we see here. How we utilize these LLMs and the distribution that has been built into them to solve business problems is the next frontier.ElsewhereGoogle gets flatter. CEO Sundar Pichai told employees this week that the companys drip-drip series of layoffs have reduced the number of managers, directors, and VPs by 10 percent, according to Business Insider and multiple employees I spoke with who also heard the remarks. Relatedly, Pichai also took the opportunity to add being scrappy as a character trait to the internal definition of Googleyness. (Yes, thats a real thing.) He demurred on the most upvoted employee question about whether layoffs will continue, though Im told he did note that there will be overall headcount growth next year.Meta cuts a perk. File this one under sad violin: Im told that, starting in early January, Meta will stop offering free EV charging at its Bay Area campuses. Keep your heads held high, Metamates.What else you should know aboutOpenAI teased its next o3 reasoning model (yes, o2 was skipped) with impressive evals.TikTok convinced the Supreme Court to hear its case just before its US ban is set to take effect. Meanwhile, CEO Shou Chew met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago to (Im assuming) get a sense of what his other options are should TikTok lose its case.More tech-meets-Mar-a-Lago news: Elon Musk inserted himself into the meeting between Jeff Bezos and Trump. Robinhood donated $2 million to Trumps inauguration. And Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son pledged to invest $100 billion into AI tech in the US, which happens to be the same number he has floated for a chip venture to compete with Nvidia.Apple complained about Meta pressuring the EU to make iOS more compatible with third-party hardware. Anyone who has synced photos from the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to an iPhone will understand why this is a battle that is very important for Meta to win, especially as it gears up to release its own pair of AR glasses with a controller wristband next year.Amazon is delaying its return-to-office mandate in some cities because it doesnt have enough office space.Perplexity, which is projected to make $127 million in revenue next year, recently raised $500 million at a valuation of $9 billion. It also acquired another AI startup called Carbon to help it hook into other services, like Notion and Google Docs.Job boardA few notable moves this week:Meta promoted John Hegeman to chief revenue officer, reporting to COO Javier Olivan. Another one of Olivans reports, Justin Osofsky, was also promoted to be head of partnerships for the whole company, including the companys go-to-market strategy for Llama.Alec Radford, an influential, veteran OpenAI researcher who authored its original GPT research paper, is leaving but will apparently continue working with the company in some capacity. And Shivakumar Venkataraman, who was recently brought in from Google to lead OpenAIs search efforts, has also left.Coda co-founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra will also run Grammarly now that the two companies are merging, with Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury staying on as a board member.Tencent removed two directors, David Wallerstein and Ben Feder, from the board of Epic Games after the Justice Department said their involvement violated antitrust law.Former Twitter CFO Ned Segal has been tapped to be chief of housing and economic development for the city of San Francisco.More linksMy full Decoder interview with Arm CEO Rene Haas about the AI chip race, Intel, and more.Waymos new report shows that its AV system is far safer than human drivers.The US AI task forces recommendations and policy proposals.Apples most downloaded app of the year was Temu, followed by Threads, TikTok, and ChatGPT.Global spending on mobile apps increased 15.7 percent this year while overall downloads decreased 2.3 percent.If you arent already getting new issues of Command Line, dont forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to all of our stories and an improved ad experience on the web. Youll also get access to the full archive of past issues.As always, I want to hear from you, especially if you have a tip or feedback. Respond here, and Ill get back to you, or ping me securely on Signal.Thanks for subscribing.

For education research, access to high-quality educational resources is critical for learners and educators. Often perceived as one of the most challenging subjects, mathematics requires clear explanations and well-structured resources to make learning more effective. However, creating and curating datasets focusing on mathematical education remains a formidable challenge. Many datasets for training machine learning models are proprietary, leaving little transparency in how educational content is selected, structured, or optimized for learning. The scarcity of accessible, open-source datasets addressing the complexity of mathematics leaves a gap in developing AI-driven educational tools.Recognizing the above issues, Hugging Face has introduced FineMath, a groundbreaking initiative aimed at democratizing access to high-quality mathematical content for both learners and researchers. FineMath represents a comprehensive and open dataset tailored for mathematical education and reasoning. FineMath addresses the core challenges of sourcing, curating, and refining mathematical content from diverse online repositories. This dataset is meticulously constructed to meet the needs of machine learning models aiming to excel in mathematical problem-solving and reasoning tasks.The dataset is divided into two primary versions:FineMath-3+: FineMath-3+ comprises 34 billion tokens derived from 21.4 million documents, formatted in Markdown and LaTeX to maintain mathematical integrity.FineMath-4+: FineMath-4+, a subset of FineMath-3+, boasts 9.6 billion tokens across 6.7 million documents, emphasizing higher-quality content with detailed explanations.These curated subsets ensure that both general learners and advanced models benefit from FineMaths robust framework.Creating FineMath required a multi-phase approach to extract and refine content effectively. It started with extracting raw data from CommonCrawl, leveraging advanced tools such as Resiliparse to capture text and formatting precisely. The initial dataset was evaluated using a custom classifier based on Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct. This classifier scored pages based on logical reasoning and the clarity of step-by-step solutions. Subsequent phases focused on expanding the datasets breadth while maintaining its quality. Challenges like the improper filtering of LaTeX notation in earlier datasets were addressed, ensuring better preservation of mathematical expressions. Deduplication and multilingual evaluation further enhanced the datasets relevance and usability.Image SourceFineMath has demonstrated superior performance on established benchmarks like GSM8k and MATH. Models trained on FineMath-3+ and FineMath-4+ showed significant mathematical reasoning and accuracy improvements. By combining FineMath with other datasets, such as InfiMM-WebMath, researchers can achieve a larger dataset with approximately 50 billion tokens while maintaining exceptional performance. FineMaths structure is optimized for seamless integration into machine learning pipelines. Developers can load subsets of the dataset using Hugging Faces robust library support, enabling easy experimentation and deployment for various educational AI applications.Image SourceIn conclusion, Hugging Faces FineMath dataset is a transformative contribution to mathematical education and AI. Addressing the gaps in accessibility, quality, and transparency sets a new benchmark for open educational resources. Future work for FineMath includes expanding language support beyond English, enhancing mathematical notation extraction and preservation, developing advanced quality metrics, and creating specialized subsets tailored to different educational levels.Check out the Collection and Dataset. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our60k+ ML SubReddit. Trending: LG AI Research Releases EXAONE 3.5: Three Open-Source Bilingual Frontier AI-level Models Delivering Unmatched Instruction Following and Long Context Understanding for Global Leadership in Generative AI Excellence.The post Hugging Face Releases FineMath: The Ultimate Open Math Pre-Training Dataset with 50B+ Tokens appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Autoregressive protein language models (pLMs) have become transformative tools for designing functional proteins with remarkable diversity, demonstrating success in creating enzyme families like lysozymes and carbonic anhydrases. These models generate protein sequences by sampling from learned probability distributions, uncovering intrinsic patterns within training datasets. Despite their ability to explore high-quality subspaces of the sequence landscape, pLMs struggle to target rare and valuable regions, limiting their effectiveness in tasks like engineering enzymatic activity or binding affinity. This challenge, compounded by the vast sequence space and expensive wet lab validation, makes protein optimization a complex problem. Traditional methods like directed evolution, which iteratively select desired traits, are limited to local exploration and lack tools for steering long-term evolutionary trajectories toward specific biological functions.RL offers a promising framework to guide pLMs toward optimizing specific properties by aligning model outputs with feedback from an external oracle, such as predicted stability or binding affinities. Drawing inspiration from RL applications in robotics and gaming, recent efforts have applied RL techniques to protein design, demonstrating the potential to explore rare events and balance exploration-exploitation trade-offs efficiently. Examples include Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for DNA and protein design and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for thermostability prediction and binder design. While these studies showcase RLs potential, there remains a need for experimentally validated, publicly available RL frameworks tailored to generative pLMs, which could advance the field of protein engineering.Researchers from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Centre for Genomic Regulation, and other leading institutions developed DPO_pLM, an RL framework for optimizing protein sequences with generative pLMs. By fine-tuning pLMs using rewards from external oracles, DPO_pLM optimizes diverse user-defined properties without additional data while preserving sequence diversity. It outperforms traditional fine-tuning methods by reducing computational demands, mitigating catastrophic forgetting, and leveraging negative data. Demonstrating its effectiveness, DPO_pLM successfully designed nanomolar-affinity EGFR binders within hours.The study introduces DPO and self-fine-tuning (s-FT) for optimizing protein sequences. DPO minimizes loss functions, including ranked and weighted forms, with negative log-likelihood proving effective. s-FT refines ZymCTRL iteratively, generating, ranking, and fine-tuning top sequences across 30 iterations. Model training uses Hugging Faces transformers API, employing batch sizes of 4, a learning rate of 810, and evaluation every 10 steps. Structural similarity is assessed using ESMFold and Foldseek, while functional annotations rely on ESM1b embeddings and cosine similarity with CLEAN clusters. EGFR binder design applies fine-tuning on BLAST-retrieved sequences, followed by AlphaFold folding and optimization to enhance binder performance.pLMs generate sequences resembling their training data and often achieve high functionality despite significant sequence deviations. For instance, ZymCTRL, trained on enzyme data with EC labels, created carbonic anhydrases with wild-type activity but only 39% sequence identity. Similarly, generated -amylases outperformed wild-type activity. However, pLMs primarily replicate training set distributions, lacking precise control for optimizing specific properties like activity or stability. By applying RL, particularly methods like DPO, pLMs can be fine-tuned iteratively using feedback from oracles, enabling the generation of sequences with targeted properties while preserving diversity and quality.In conclusion, pLMs excel at sampling from distributions but struggle to optimize specific properties. DPO_pLM overcomes this limitation by utilizing Direct Preference Optimization DPO, which refines sequences through external oracles without additional training data. ZymCTRL evaluations showed rapid and robust performance, enriching enzyme classes and folds in multi-objective tasks. In an EGFR binder design experiment, DPO_pLM achieved a 50% success rate, generating three nanomolar binders after 12 iterations in just hours. Unlike fine-tuning, DPO maximizes preference rewards, improving global predictions efficiently. Future work will focus on integrating DPO_pLM into automated labs for protein design innovations.Check out the Paper. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our60k+ ML SubReddit. Sana Hassan+ postsSana Hassan, a consulting intern at Marktechpost and dual-degree student at IIT Madras, is passionate about applying technology and AI to address real-world challenges. With a keen interest in solving practical problems, he brings a fresh perspective to the intersection of AI and real-life solutions. [Download] Evaluation of Large Language Model Vulnerabilities Report (Promoted)

LatestMachine LearningIs AI Worth the Cost? ROI Insights for CEOs Targeting 2025 Growth 0 like December 20, 2024Share this postAuthor(s): Konstantin Babenko Originally published on Towards AI. Source: Image by ImageFlow on Shutterstock74% of companies fail at AI ROI discover what you can do to drive real results.According to a current NTT Data digital business survey, nearly all companies have implemented generative AI solutions, while 83% have created expert or advanced teams for the technology. The Global GenAI Report, spanning respondents within 34 countries and 12 industries, showed that 97% of CEOs expect a material change from generative AI adoption. The same report states that knowledge management, service recommendation, quality assurance, and research and development are the most valuable areas for implementing generative AI.These findings present how generative AI is perceived in a collective sense as the enabler for change. Carlos Galve,Having put a lot of effort into building their AI capabilities, recruiting AI talent, and experimenting with AI pilots, todays CEOs expect ROI from the innovation. Nevertheless, the full realization of AIs potential still presents a challenge. Current research shows that only 26% of companies are equipped with the relevant capabilities to convert AI from proof of concept into value creation (Boston Consulting Group, 2024).This article focuses on the current AI implementation in 2024 and the future trends for 2025 based on the analysis of the latest industry research. The piece will empower CEOs and C-level executives to proactively adapt their business strategies, ensuring they stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace.AI Value DistributionAs per the BCG report, organizations derive as high as 60% of the generative AI value from the core business functions:23% Operations20% Sales and Marketing13% R&D38% Support functions12% Customer service7% IT7% Procurement.It also reveals a wide divergence between industries. Sales and marketing are reported to drive the most value from AI in software, travel and tourism, media, and telecommunications industries. Customer service appears as a prime area where the value of AI usage is tangible in the insurance and banking spheres, whereas consumer goods and retail industries are experiencing massive growth in personalization through AI.Source: Image by SuPatMaN on ShutterstockWhat Separates AI Leaders from the RestThe BCG report covers a major disconnect between AI adoption. Only 4% of companies have cutting-edge AI capabilities that provide major value and another 22% (AI leaders) are reaping big benefits from advanced strategies. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 74% of companies have not yet seen tangible benefits from AI.According to Nicolas de Bellefonds, senior partner at BCG, AI leaders are raising the bar with more ambitious goals. They focus on finding meaningful outcomes on cost and topline, and they focus on core function transformation, not diffuse productivity gains.Lets take a closer look at what makes AI leaders excel:1. Core business focus. Core processes generate 62% of leaders AI value, with leaders optimizing support functions to deliver a broader impact.2. Ambitious goals. By 2027, they plan to invest twice as much in AI and workforce enablement, scale twice as many AI solutions, and generate 60% more revenue growth and 50% more cost reductions.3. Balanced approach. Over half of leaders are using AI to transform the cost of their business and a third are using AI to generate revenue compared to their peers.4. Strategic prioritization. Leaders focus on fewer, higher-impact opportunities to double their ROI and scale twice as many AI solutions as others.5. People over technology. Leaders allocate 70% of resources to people and processes, thus assuring sustainable AI integration.6. Early adoption of GenAI. Generative AI is quickly adopted by leaders emerging as a modern tool for content creation, reasoning, and system orchestration, leading the curve.Results That Speak VolumesOver the past 3 years, AI leaders have demonstrated 1.5x revenue growth, 1.6x shareholder returns, and 1.4x ROI, outperforming their peers. In addition to superior financial performance, they are also crushing in nonfinancial areas such as patent filings and employee satisfaction, demonstrating how their people-first, core-focused strategies are driving transformational outcomes.Challenges Faced in the Process of AI IntegrationAccording to the BCG report, organizations experience different issues with the implementation of AI; among them, 70% are linked to people and processes. The remaining 30% covers such categories as technology (20%) and AI algorithms (10%). The survey underlines that many companies tend to think of themselves as primarily technical organizations while the human aspect is what should not be overlooked if an enterprise wants its AI endeavors to succeed.The Human-Centric GapAI integration is not just about deploying the latest technology; it is about having a workforce that is prepared to accept AI-driven changes. Lack of AI literacy, resistance to change and unclear roles in AI initiatives can often derail progress. The way leaders overcome these challenges is by investing in workforce enablement and training programs as well as building a culture in which data-backed decisions are valued.Technology and AlgorithmsOn the technical side, it is difficult to integrate AI into existing systems, scale solutions across departments and keep data of the right quality. Leaders tackle these issues by strategically prioritizing a few high-value opportunities, with robust infrastructure and data governance practices.Bridging the GapHow well you balance the technical and human parts is key to success in AI integration. Leaders put the wheels in motion for sustainable AI adoption by placing 70% of resources in people and processes, proving that its not just algorithms that unlock AIs potential, but also the technology with human capital and operational processes.Source: Image by SuPatMaN on ShutterstockEnterprise AI Perspective for 2025The role of AI in the enterprise environment will make further progress in 2025 as an influential element of changes in business development strategies and operational activities. Therefore, as technology advances, automation will become complementary to human talent and the way organizations manage human capital will change further. In the future, the primary competitive advantage will not lie in developing or tuning LLMs, but in their applications.Technology complement will be one of the significant trends to be noticed in the adoption of AI because of the need to have human talent plus technology talent in an organization. Instead of outsourcing jobs to robotics, enterprises will look for tools that increase the competency and efficiency of their workers. This approach keeps the tacit knowledge of the employees within the organization as a key resource.Data assets will remain or may even become more important as we move into 2025, as the efficiency of utilizing company-specific information will turn into a competitive advantage. Therefore, organizations need to make their data AI-prepared, which goes through several stages including cleaning, validating, structuring, and checking the ownership of the data set. AI governance software adoption will also be equally important, estimated to have four times more spending by 2030.As the adoption of AI continues to rise, questions about its use, costs and return on investment will also increase. By 2025, a new issue will enter the picture: determining how much more it could cost to expand the use of AI and how much value organizations will be getting from these investments. Solving such issues requires finding new modern frameworks and methodologies, which will supplant already known simple KPIs, and measure customer satisfaction, decision-making, and innovation acceleration.To sum up, the role of AI in the enterprise landscape of 2025 leads to certain challenges, such as workforce augmentation, data asset management, defining cost and ROI, and dealing with disruption.Final ThoughtsFor CEOs navigating the complexities of AI integration, the insights from this article provide a clear takeaway: AI future isnt just about technology, its about leveraging the power of AI to make business value real and meaningful, aligning AI capabilities with human potential.Looking into 2025, leaders will need to think about AI not as a standalone innovation but as an integral part of the driving force of an organizations strategy.There is a wide gap between the leaders and laggards in AI adoption. The difference between leaders and the rest is that they are able to prioritize high-impact opportunities, invest in workforce enablement and treat AI as a tool to drive transformation, not incremental improvement. CEOs should ask themselves:Are we placing bets on AI initiatives directly touching our core business functions? Leaders here get 60% of their AI value, optimizing operations, sales and marketing.Are we ready for AI-driven change in our workforce? To bridge the human-technology gap, resources will continue to be allocated to upskilling employees and developing a data-first culture.Do we have the infrastructure to scale AI solutions effectively? Robust data governance and scalable systems are important because scattered pilots wont yield tangible value.From my experience, enterprise AI deployments show the best results when organizations think of AI adoption as a collaboration of human expertise and technological progress. This requires CEOs to implement a long-term, strategic approach: define ambitious but achievable goals, focus on fewer, high-value AI initiatives, and create a culture open to change.Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming asponsor. Published via Towards AITowards AI - Medium Share this post

As part of its last minute Christmas sale, Best Buy is offering a great deal on our favorite budget gaming chair. Right now, you can pick up a Corsair TC100 Relaxed Chair in Black Leatherette upholstery for30% Off Corsair TC100 Relaxed Gaming ChairCorsair TC100 Relaxed Gaming ChairThe TC100 Relaxed is Corsair's least expensive gaming chair available. The "Relaxed" series offers a broader seat width and minimal bolstering on the sides to fit a wider range of body sizes. This gaming chair can hold up to 264lbs, accommodate heights up to 6' 2" tall, and features a height adjustment range of 45-65cm (21.725.5"). It is available in either fabric or leatherette, (although the leatherette model is a bit more affordable at the moment). Although the chair doesn't have any internal lumbar adjustments, it does include a headrest and lumbar pillow in the package. This chair is reclinable up to 160 degrees and has 2D armrests. It's also backed by a two-year warranty. If you don't want to spend $400 or more on a gaming chair, then the TC100 Relaxed is seriously a gaming chair worth buying.Why Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.

The best Black Friday deal I saw on Apple AirTags is back, and you can even get it before Christmas. Amazon and Best Buy are both offering a four-pack of Apple AirTags keyfinders for only $69.99. That's $30 off the retail price and only $16.50 for each AirTag. This would make an excellent last-minute stocking stuffer gift idea for anyone who owns an iPhone and tends to lose small wearables like wallets, keys, or remotes. Both Amazon and Best Buy can deliver this item before 12/25.4-Pack Apple AirTags for $69.994-Pack Apple AirTagsThe Apple Airtag is a small coin-shaped device that you can put in your wallet or attach to your phones, keys, remote, or anything small enough to be easily misplaced. It works as a little Wi-Fi keyfinder that helps locate your lost objects by pinging its general location to your iPhone using Bluetooth 5.0. However, if your iPhone model has a U1 chip with Ultra Wideband, then you can take advantage of the "Precision Finding" mode. This gives you numerical distance and direction guidance when your lost item is close by. It points you right to it. The CR2032 coin battery is also user-replaceable.Why Should You Trust IGN's Deals Team?IGN's deals team has a combined 30+ years of experience finding the best discounts in gaming, tech, and just about every other category. We don't try to trick our readers into buying things they don't need at prices that aren't worth buying something at. Our ultimate goal is to surface the best possible deals from brands we trust and our editorial team has personal experience with. You can check out our deals standards here for more information on our process, or keep up with the latest deals we find on IGN's Deals account on Twitter.Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.