Red teaming has become the go-to technique for iteratively testing AI models to simulate diverse, lethal, unpredictable attacks.Read More

Meta's Quest Pro headset now no longer availableMeta began phasing out its Pro system in September News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on Jan. 6, 2025 Meta's Quest Pro headset is no longer available.First noted by RoadtoVR, the Quest Pro web page clearly states that "Meta Quest Pro is no longer available," and instead invites consumers to "shop Meta Quest 3 for the ultimate mixed reality experience and premium comfort."The headset - at that time aimed at super users and VR professionals - released in October 2022 and initially sold for $1,500. It came with 256 GB storage and the Pro's optical lenses were 40% lighter with higher-resolution screens than the Meta Quest 2.It also boasted facial and eye tracking capabilities, which the company believed would help improve social presence in apps by having avatars reflect users' expressions.The headset failed to gain traction, however, leading to an announcement in September from Meta that informed players it was phasing out Quest 2, Quest Pro, and the 128GB version of its Quest 3.Meta Quest 3S launched in October, the same month Meta published its third-quarter earnings, recording a loss of $4.4 billion in its AR/VR Reality Labs division. This is the third reported loss of the year in this segment, with Reality Labs reporting a loss of $3.8 billion during its first quarter, and $4.5 billion in the second.

Justin Carter, Contributing EditorJanuary 6, 20251 Min ReadImage via Xbox.At a GlanceXbox first brought its cloud service to Smart TVs with Samsung's line of televisions in 2022.Later this year, LG's new line of Smart TVs will come pre-packaged with an Xbox app, allowing Game Pass Ultimate subscribers who to access Xbox's Cloud Gaming service directly through the TV.Ultimate members could first play their games on Smart TVs via cloud back in 2022. At the time, this was relegated to Samsung TVs, and this marks its latest expansion since the feature was rolled out.Last November, Xbox unveiled a feature for Ultimate members to cloud stream select non-Game Pass titles they own. That will also be part of Xbox's LG collaboration, allowing players to stream "over 50 games." The publisher plans to reveal more specific details in the coming months.Prior to its teamup with LG, Xbox focused on expanding its Cloud Gaming service to different game platforms and hardware, including iOS, Meta Quest, and Google Chromebooks. It's also brought its own internal products, like Microsoft Edge and Bing, into the Cloud Gaming fold.Despite the headway made, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty previously dismissed the cloud game market as "very, very, small" during the company's pursuit to acquire Activision Blizzard in 2023.Despite Booty's comments, leaked documents from its trial against the FTC ahead of that completed acquisition showed Xbox very much sees potential in cloud streaming games. At the time, one of its long-term plans mentioned was a hybrid game platform that could "leverage the combined power of the client and cloud to deliver deeper immersion and entirely new classes of game experiences."This next-gen device was considered a "new innovation" for the Xbox hardware line, and according to those documents, is expected to release in 2028.Read more about:[Company] XboxAbout the AuthorJustin CarterContributing Editor, GameDeveloper.comA Kansas City, MO native, Justin Carter has written for numerous sites including IGN, Polygon, and SyFy Wire. In addition to Game Developer, his writing can be found at io9 over on Gizmodo. Don't ask him about how much gum he's had, because the answer will be more than he's willing to admit.See more from Justin CarterDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like

Justin Carter, Contributing EditorJanuary 6, 20252 Min ReadImage via 2K.At a GlanceAfter less than two years, 2K has killed the servers for the 2023 iteration of its wrestling sim franchise.As of today, the servers for WWE 2K23 are no more. Publisher 2K has shut down online functionality for the wrestling title, which means players can no longer access online game modes, including matches and community creations.Players who purchased the game can still play it offline, which is common for titles that lose their online functionality. Its in-game virtual currency and storefront were previously taken down last November ahead of the servers being sunset.In recent years, 2K pulled online functions for prior games in the popular wrestling series, or just fully delisted them. With 2K23 now among those ranks, last year's WWE 2K24 is the only entry in the franchise with its servers still active.Players are pushing back against games going offlineCompanies like 2K are beginning to face more pushback from players after sunsetting support for online games. One of the more infamous stories was the shutdown for Ubisoft's first The Crew game, which originally released in 2014.The subsequent backlash to the developer announcing a plan to keep its sequels, The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest, alive through separate offline modes. Despite that, a pair of players filed a lawsuit in November against Ubisoft for the first Crew's shutdown.Elsewhere, European players launched a "Stop Killing Games" movement that calls for developers to make their games fully offline from the start instead of via post-launch patch. Meanwhile, a California bill recently went into effect requiring sellers of digital items to stop using terms like "purchase" or "buy" in transactions, and must instead disclose people are buying licenses to digital items.Major publishers like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are required to comply with this bill, which is part of a larger effort by the state to protect consumers and curb false advertising.But unlike the Undertaker, WWE 2K23 will not be returning from the dead.About the AuthorJustin CarterContributing Editor, GameDeveloper.comA Kansas City, MO native, Justin Carter has written for numerous sites including IGN, Polygon, and SyFy Wire. In addition to Game Developer, his writing can be found at io9 over on Gizmodo. Don't ask him about how much gum he's had, because the answer will be more than he's willing to admit.See more from Justin CarterDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like

Justin Carter, Contributing EditorJanuary 6, 20252 Min ReadImage via Meta.At a GlanceThe Quest Pro's retirement comes months after the launch of Meta's cheaper Quest 3S headset.Three months after Meta started phasing out its Quest Pro headset, the company has officially stopped selling the mixed realitydevice.UploadVR noticed that the Meta Quest Pro's store page now says it's "no longer available." Last October, Meta said it would continue to sell the Pro, Quest 2, and 128 GB Quest 3 until the end of 2024 or when stock ran out. The Quest 2's page has a similar heading of being "no longer available."Game Developer also observed the 128 GB Quest 3 headsets is unavailable through Meta's store. The listing does not indicate if it was permanently discontinued or not.The Quest Pro launched in October 2022 at $1,500. Unlike the company's other headsets, this one was made for more business and professional settings, and several features were geared toward collaborating during virtual meetings.At the time of its announcement, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg called mixed reality "the next major step to VR." He said it would "power some of the most interesting experiences you can have in VR," and help the company achieve its metaverse dreams.Last year, the company's metaverse division consistently lost money, according to its earnings during the financial year. Its Reality Labs division has publicly struggled for some time now, and those struggles led to the closure of VR developer Ready at Dawn.Before putting the Pro and the two numbered Quest headsets to bed, Meta tried lowering their prices to make them more enticing to prospective buyers.The VR game industry faced economic headwinds everywhere in 2024, which led to studio layoffs and closures across the globe. Meanwhile, new devices like the PlayStation VR2 didn't take off.Meta is still selling three mixed reality headsets: the 512 GB version of the Quest 3, and 128 GB and 256 GB versions of the Quest 3S.Read more about:[Company] MetaAbout the AuthorJustin CarterContributing Editor, GameDeveloper.comA Kansas City, MO native, Justin Carter has written for numerous sites including IGN, Polygon, and SyFy Wire. In addition to Game Developer, his writing can be found at io9 over on Gizmodo. Don't ask him about how much gum he's had, because the answer will be more than he's willing to admit.See more from Justin CarterDaily news, dev blogs, and stories from Game Developer straight to your inboxStay UpdatedYou May Also Like

Disaggregated systems are a new type of architecture designed to meet the high resource demands of modern applications like social networking, search, and in-memory databases. The systems intend to overcome the physical restrictions of the traditional servers by pooling and managing resources like memory and CPUs among multiple machines. Flexibility, better utilization of resources, and cost-effectiveness make this approach suitable for scalable cloud infrastructure, but this distributed design introduces significant challenges. Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and remote resource access create latency and performance issues, which are hard to optimize. Contention for shared resources, memory locality problems, and scalability limits further complicate the use of disaggregated systems, leading to unpredictable application performance and resource management difficulties.Currently, the resource contention in memory hierarchies and locality optimizations through UMA and NUMA-aware techniques in modern systems face major drawbacks. UMA does not consider the impact of remote memory and, thus, cannot be effective on large-scale architectures. However, NUMA-based techniques are aimed at small settings or simulations instead of the real world. As single-core performance stagnated, multicore systems became standard, introducing programming and scaling challenges. Technologies such as NumaConnect unify resources with shared memory and cache coherency but depend highly on workload characteristics. Application classification schemes, such as animal classes, simplify the categorization of workloads but lack adaptability, failing to address variability in resource sensitivity.To address challenges posed by complex NUMA topologies on application performance, researchers from Umea University, Sweden, proposed a NUMA-aware resource mapping algorithm for virtualized environments on disaggregated systems. Researchers conducted detailed research to explore resource contention in shared environments. Researchers analyzed cache contention, memory hierarchy latency differences, and NUMA distances, all influencing performance.The NUMA-aware algorithm optimized resource allocation by pinning virtual cores and migrating memory, thereby reducing memory slicing across nodes and minimizing application interference. Applications were categorized (e.g., Sheep, Rabbit, Devil) and carefully placed based on compatibility matrices to minimize contention. The response time, clock rate, and power usage were tracked in real-time along with IPC and MPI to enable the necessary changes in resource allocation. Evaluations performed on a disaggregated sixnode system demonstrated that significant improvements in application performance could be realized with memory-intensive workloads compared to default schedulers.Researchers conducted experiments with various VM types, small, medium, large, and huge running workloads like Neo4j, Sockshop, SPECjvm2008, and Stream, to simulate real-world applications. The shared memory algorithm optimized virtual-to-physical resource mapping, reduced the NUMA distance and resource contention, and ensured affinity between cores and memory. It differed from the default Linux scheduler, where the core mappings are random, and performance is variable. The algorithm provided stable mappings and minimized interference.Results showed significant performance improvements with the shared memory algorithm variants (SM-IPC and SM-MPI), achieving up to 241x enhancement in cases like Derby and Neo4j. While the vanilla scheduler exhibited unpredictable performance with standard deviation ratios above 0.4, the shared memory algorithms maintained consistent performance with ratios below 0.04. In addition, VM size affected the performance of the vanilla scheduler but had little effect on the shared memory algorithms, which reflected their efficiency in resource allocation across diverse environments.In conclusion, the algorithm proposed by researchers enables resource composition from disaggregated servers, resulting in up to a 50x improvement in application performance compared to the default Linux scheduler. Results proved that the algorithm increases resource efficiency, application co-location, and user capacity. This method can act as a baseline for future advancements in resource mapping and performance optimization in NUMA disaggregated systems.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. Divyesh Vitthal Jawkhede+ postsDivyesh is a consulting intern at Marktechpost. He is pursuing a BTech in Agricultural and Food Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He is a Data Science and Machine learning enthusiast who wants to integrate these leading technologies into the agricultural domain and solve challenges. [ FREE AI Webinar] Join this webinar to gain actionable insights into boosting LLM model performance and accuracy while safeguarding data privacy. (Promoted)

Boxes, Violins and Contours Conclude the Exploratory Data Analysis Process. 0 like January 6, 2025Share this postAuthor(s): Chandra Prakash Bathula Originally published on Towards AI. This member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.Photo by Stefany Andrade on UnsplashDealing with Box Plots, Violin Plots and Contour Plots reveals a lot about Data before Machine Learning Modeling,Welcome back to the wrap up article for the prerequisites of ML modeling.Now, we can continue with the rest of the concepts in this article. Previously in the series we have discussed about Plotting in the first article, Densities and Deviation in the next one.Lets start with the alternatives of mean,For mean we have the Median, which is simply the middle value in the array.print(np.median(iris_setosa["petal_length"]))#Median with an outlierprint(np.median(np.append(iris_setosa["petal_length"],50)));print(np.median(iris_virginica["petal_length"]))print(np.median(iris_versicolor["petal_length"]))The Median for Setosa is 1.5; with the outlier, it is still the same at 1.5. But this is not the case with the mean; there is a significant difference. For Versicolor, Virginica, we have 5.55 and 4.35, which are closer to their means.Intuitively, these medians are very similar to their mean or central tendency, but it has the nice property that one or a few points do not significantly affect the value.Lets say we have seven observations. X = {1.1,1.2,1,1.2,1.6,2.1,1.8}; let them be any observations like Sepal Length or Petal Length.The Median can be computed as the following:Step 1: Read the full blog for free on Medium.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

Introducing Deepseek Artifacts 0 like January 6, 2025Share this postAuthor(s): Thomas Reid Originally published on Towards AI. Easily create, run, and share React/Tailwind applications with this new AI coding assistantThis member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.Everyone and their granny is talking about the latest open-source LLM model from the folks over at Deepseek, called Deepseek V3.As I write this story, Deepseek V3 is currently sitting in seventh place on the Chatbot Arena leaderboard and is currently the top open-source LLM there.With this as background, naturally, it wasnt long before someone decided to create an AI software development tool that would use the new Deepseek LLM.That tool is called Deepseek Artifacts and is available using the link at the end of this article.Image by AI (Dalle-3)In a nutshell, its an online tool that takes in a prompt provided by the user and creates a React and Tailwind web application based on what the user requests in their prompt. Once the initial app has been created, the source code is available to view, and a preview is available to test.From here, you can manually edit the source code if desired, and any changes you make will result in the preview being immediately updated, too.Its also possible to open the app in a VSCODE-like sandbox environment where you can edit the source or download the project as Read the full blog for free on Medium.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

Forget Year of Luigi. 2025 is the Year of Eevee. At least, according to The Pokmon Center, the official merch arm of The Pokmon Company.This was announced today via the official Pokmon website, which christened the year by announcing an array of Eevee-themed merchandise such as plush toys and Eeveelution statuettes.Notably, the "Year of Eevee" thus far appears only to impact The Pokmon Center, the official merchandise store for Pokmon. So it's entirely possible this is purely a marketing thing to sell more Eevee plush, and won't impact anything else.2025 is the Year of Eevee according to The Pokmon Center. Image credit: The Pokmon Company.But it's also possible this celebration ends up extending to other parts of Pokmon. For instance, we know for a fact that a new Pokmon game is planned for later this year: Pokmon Legends: Z-A. We don't have a ton of information about the game so far, apart from its setting (Lumiose City) and its placement in the "Pokmon Legends" series alongside Pokmon Legends: Arceus. A Year of Eevee could portend exciting things for Z-A... dare I predict, a new Eeveelution? There hasn't been one of those since Sylveon was added in Pokmon X and Y (where Lumiose City was introduced) over a decade ago. We're long overdue for a new variation. Unfortunately, we probably can't expect an entirely Eevee-focused game. We've already basically had one of those in Pokmon Let's Go! Pikachu and Eevee.And it's worth noting that the Eevee theming has already invaded the Pokmon TCG via the recent Prismatic Evolution expansion. The new expansion, which releases next week, centers around Terastal Pokmon like in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, but notably includes some absolutely gorgeous Eeveelution cards and even features a Terastal on the cover. Every Eeveelution is included in the set in multiple forms, including an Umbreon that some are predicting will be very, very coveted by collectors.A new Umbreon ex card is already being listed online for absurd amounts of money for a single card.Beyond that, I'm really hoping this means we'll see some exciting Eevee-themed updates to other games. Pokmon's been juggling quite a few ongoing games lately, including Pokmon Sleep, Pokmon Unite, Pokmon Masters EX, and of course Pokmon Go. Between all of those, surely there will be room for some interesting Eevee-themed updates over the next year to tie into the merch plays. We'll have to see how far The Pokmon Company chooses to take things while we eagerly away for more news about Pokmon Legends Z-A. Don't forget, Pokmon Day is on February 27!Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Typically over the holidays, thousands of people will look in their stockings or under the tree to find brand new Nintendo games waiting for them. But this year, a number of Nintendo Switch fans are claiming they unwrapped a far less pleasant surprise on Christmas morning: instead of a Switch cartridge in their game box, some are claiming they found a single googly eye staring at them.Over the holidays, a number of posts popped up across Reddit and Twitter/X from individuals claiming their seemingly sealed, brand new Nintendo Switch cases contained a googly eye and a black piece of plastic instead of the actual game cartridge. Why a googly eye? The running theory is that the googly eye will rattle if you shake the Switch box, similar to how the box rattles with an actual game inside. And the black plastic around the side fools individuals trying to look through the cracks on the top or bottom to see if the outline of a game is visible without unwrapping it. Without these items, someone might be tipped off that a game has been stolen from the package, but this method ensures that no one notices the crime until they open the case.It's unclear at the moment how or why this is happening, on what scale, or at what point in the distribution process. Games reportedly impacted included Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Mario Party Jamboree, Echoes of Wisdom, and others. The reports also seem to go back several months, though there's been a higher influx of them recently likely due to more games being purchased over the holiday. And all of them seem to include a googly eye and the same black piece of plastic, though at least one person is claiming to have only gotten the plastic, no eye included.IGN reached out to several individuals claiming they had received googly eyes instead of games over the last year and a half, but no one we spoke to had taken a video of them unwrapping the shrink wrap and discovering the eye, as they (understandably) didn't know they were unwrapping a googly eye to begin with. As long as all these reports remain unconfirmed, it's always possible this is just some sort of viral prank. Still, through our conversations with the individuals claiming they were impacted, all seemed to be legitimate accounts. A few had return receipts or were able to direct me to specific Walmart, Best Buy, and Target store locations where googly eyes had been acquired, all located in the western United States. One person said they purchased their googly eye game online. Timeline-wise, googly eye claims went back as far as June 2023, though most took place in the last six months. In an effort to confirm these reports, I tried to reach specific stores where googly eyes were allegedly found. One of the Reddit posters claimed in private messages with me that they had returned their googly eye box to a specific Walmart store, so I gave them a call. I was unable to get anyone to answer the phone at the store for over an hour despite calling various different departments. When I finally reached someone in a completely unrelated department, they transferred me to Loss Prevention, who upon hearing what I was calling about offered to have me speak to a higher manager, before hanging up the phone entirely. Multiple calls back to the same departments did not glean any further responses. I tried a second Walmart location identified by posters, where I eventually reached an employee in electronics who had never heard of this happening. However, the incident taking place at their store allegedly happened months ago, and would have been handled by returns and not electronics, so their lack of awareness wasn't much of a debunking.PlayIGN's Twenty Questions - Guess the game!IGN's Twenty Questions - Guess the game!To start:...try asking a question that can be answered with a "Yes" or "No".000/250A very similar scenario unfolded when I tried to reach a specific Target location where someone claimed to have successfully returned a googly eye game. Repeated calls to relevant departments went unanswered, until I finally reached someone in an unrelated department who transferred me to Guest Services. Guest Services then directed me to Target's corporate media line, which I have already contacted and did not receive a response from. All told, I spent about three hours on a Friday afternoon calling various big box stores, but learned absolutely nothing about googly eyes.With the direct route failing, I reached out to Nintendo for comment, but did not hear back in time for publication. I also reached out to Best Buy corporate for comment on this story, but similarly did not hear back in time for publication.Walmart corporate PR did get back to me on Friday, but the PR representative I spoke to seemed baffled. They told me over the phone that the company had not heard anything about this, and we spent the better part of the afternoon going back and forth over email trying to investigate. The representative said they'd look into some specific stores where googly eyes had been reported over the weekend and return to me with a statement by first-thing Monday, but IGN did not receive any further response to our inquiry by our deadline. We'll update if that changes.The takeaway from all this, then, is just a PSA that your recently-purchased Nintendo Switch cartridge may or may not contain a game, or a googly eye. It's unclear if this is a real problem affecting many people, a real problem affecting a very small number of people caught up in a supply chain that has poor communication and no way to confirm these things, or a joke problem invented by the internet. Fortunately though, if it is indeed a real problem, it sounds like most stores are exchanging googly eyes for games if you find yourself the victim of this weird but admittedly quite frustrating switcheroo. Hopefully they manage to catch this Googly Eye Bandit, if they're indeed real, and save future Christmases from disaster.Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.