In brief: Shares of Electronic Arts are down nearly 20 percent after the company warned that earnings for the fiscal third quarter would be lower than initially forecasted due in large part to two franchises that underperformed during the holidays. As of writing, shares of EA are trading for $115.80. Ahead of the announcement, the stock was changing hands at $142.35.EA said its global football franchise, which had experienced two consecutive fiscal years of double-digit net bookings growth, hit a rough patch in the fiscal third quarter. Dragon Age also underperformed during the quarter; its 1.5 million players were nearly 50 percent less than EA had anticipated.As a result, EA revised its third quarter preliminary net bookings. The company now expects approximately $2.215 billion, down from the previous forecast of between $2.4 billion and $2.55 billion. Net revenue, meanwhile, should check in around $1.883 billion; previously, EA had forecasted net revenue in the range of $1.875 billion to $2.025 billion.EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that despite the hiccups, they remain confident in their long-term strategy and expect a full return to growth in FY26. The executive added that this month, teams conducted a comprehensive gameplay refresh in addition to their annual team of the year update in FC 25, and that early feedback has been encouraging.CFO Stuart Canfield concurred, adding that as they look to FY26, they expect grow with the launch of more iconic franchises.Electronic Arts had been at the forefront of soccer games with its popular FIFA franchise, which dates back to 1993. A licensing dispute with FIFA in 2022, however, brought an end to the popular series. The company still makes soccer games, but they're now under the EA Sports FC brand. The most recent, EA Sports FC 25, launched on September 27, 2024, for most major platforms.EA is scheduled to release its next earnings report on February 4, and will host a conference call do discuss the results at 5 pm Eastern. // Related Stories

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The AI-merican dream? AI startup founder allegedly faked profits to trick investors, buy fancy houses FBI claims GameOn founder forged six years of financial records in brazen scheme. Ashley Belanger Jan 24, 2025 3:12 pm | 6 Credit: Feodora Chiosea | iStock / Getty Images Plus Credit: Feodora Chiosea | iStock / Getty Images Plus Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million.According to a press release from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California, Alexander Beckmanfounder of GameOn Technology (now known as ON Platform)and Valerie Lau Beckmanan attorney hired by GameOn who later became his wifewere charged with 25 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, identity theft, and other offenses. Lau also faces one charge of obstruction of justice after allegedly deleting evidence.If convicted, the maximum penalties for Beckman, 41, could exceed 60 years and for Lau, 38, potentially 80 years.GameOn was founded in 2014 and later became known for developing a popular customer service chatbot functionality that today is used by major sports leagues like the NFL and high-end luxury brands like Valentino and Armani Exchange.In the indictment, it's alleged that Beckman's business plan for GameOn was unsustainable. The AI startup initially offered its chatbot as a "free pilot without any contract" and seemingly only rarely benefited from revenue-sharing agreements. GameOn even sometimes would pay large annual fees to customers without receiving anything in return, including in one year paying "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to a sports league while receiving "no payments and no revenue sharing," an FBI investigation found.To keep the business afloat, Beckman depended entirely on investors, the indictment alleged. Seeking millions to cover both business and personal expenses, Beckman allegedly dreamed up a "brazen and wide-ranging" scheme to defraud investors starting in 2018, the indictment said.To further the alleged scheme, he "often described non-existent revenue, inflated cash balances," and "otherwise exaggerated customer relationships," the US Attorney's Office said, to convince investors to spend millions. As Beckman's accomplice, Lau allegedly manipulated documents, including documents allegedly stolen from the venture capital firm that employed her while supposedly hiding her work for GameOn.The scheme apparently also included forging audits and bank statements, as well as using "the names of at least seven real peopleincluding fake emails and signatureswithout their permission to distribute false and fraudulent GameOn financial and business information and documents with the intent to defraud GameOn and its investors," the US Attorney's Office said.At perhaps the furthest extreme, Lau allegedly falsified account statements, including once faking a balance of over $13 million when that account only had $25 in it. The FBI found that GameOn's revenues never exceeded $1 million in any year, while Beckman allegedly inflated sales to investors, including claiming that sales in one quarter in 2023 got as high as $72 million.Beckman and Lau allegedly went to great lengths to hide the scheme while diverting investor funds to their personal accounts. While GameOn employees allegedly sometimes went without paychecks, Beckman and Lau allegedly stole funds to buy expensive San Francisco real estate and pay for their wedding in 2023. If convicted, they may be forced to forfeit a $4.2 million house, a Tesla Model X, and other real estate and property purchased with their allegedly ill-gotten gains, the indictment said.It took about five years for the cracks to begin to show in Beckman's scheme. Beginning in 2023, Beckman increasingly started facing "questions about specific customers and specific revenue from those customers," the indictment said. By February 2024, Beckman at last "acknowledged to at least one GameOn consultant" that a flagged audit report "did not contain accurate financial information," but allegedly he "attempted to shift blame to others for the inaccuracies."His alleged deflections, however, perhaps got him caught after he supposedly started creating fake email addresses of real financial institution employees to continue to raise money while questions were still swirling. Around June 2024, an investor partner serving on GameOn's board of directors asked to visit a bank branch to see a statement. Allegedly, Lau planted a fake statement at the bank to continue to cover up the scheme, a visit that the FBI showed in the indictment was caught on security cameras.Soon after, Beckman resigned from GameOn in July 2024, the indictment suggested.Employees, customers allegedly also harmedON Platform did not respond to Ars' request to comment, even though GameOn employees and customers were also allegedly harmed by the scheme."Beckman and Lau knew that GameOn depended on new investor funds to operate, burned through its funds, received overdraft notices from banks, was delinquent in paying certain customers, and often was on the brink of not having enough money in the bank to operate and make payroll," the indictment said. And they "knew that GameOn was late to pay payroll on multiple occasions and used individual bank accounts and credit cards to pay their employees."Further, Beckman "misled GameOn investors by describing certain customer relationships as producing revenue for GameOn when in fact Beckman knew that GameOn owed those customers money and was regularly late in paying them."Ars reached out to several ON Platform customers listed on the company's site, including the NFL, the United Soccer League, Valentino, Armani Exchange, and Live Nation, to find out how some of the biggest brands are responding to the indictment. None of the brands contacted responded by the time of this writing.Ashley BelangerSenior Policy ReporterAshley BelangerSenior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 6 Comments

The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAIs ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. This could be a truly equalizing breakthrough that is great for researchers and developers with limited resources, especially those from the Global South, says Hancheng Cao, an assistant professor in information systems at Emory University. DeepSeeks success is even more remarkable given the constraints facing Chinese AI companies in the form of increasing US export controls on cutting-edge chips. But early evidence shows that these measures are not working as intended. Rather than weakening Chinas AI capabilities, the sanctions appear to be driving startups like DeepSeek to innovate in ways that prioritize efficiency, resource-pooling, and collaboration. To create R1, DeepSeek had to rework its training process to reduce the strain on its GPUs, a variety released by Nvidia for the Chinese market that have their performance capped at half the speed of its top products, according to Zihan Wang, a former DeepSeek employee and current PhD student in computer science at Northwestern University. DeepSeek R1 has been praised by researchers for its ability to tackle complex reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics and coding. The model employs a chain of thought approach similar to that used by ChatGPT o1, which lets it solve problems by processing queries step by step. Dimitris Papailiopoulos, principal researcher at Microsofts AI Frontiers research lab, says what surprised him the most about R1 is its engineering simplicity. DeepSeek aimed for accurate answers rather than detailing every logical step, significantly reducing computing time while maintaining a high level of effectiveness, he says. DeepSeek has also released six smaller versions of R1 that are small enough to run locally on laptops. It claims that one of them even outperforms OpenAIs o1-mini on certain benchmarks.DeepSeek has largely replicated o1-mini and has open sourced it, tweeted Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. DeepSeek did not reply to MIT Technology Reviews request for comments. Despite the buzz around R1, DeepSeek remains relatively unknown. Based in Hangzhou, China, it was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, an alumnus of Zhejiang University with a background in information and electronic engineering. It was incubated by High-Flyer, a hedge fund that Liang founded in 2015. Like Sam Altman of OpenAI, Liang aims to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a form of AI that can match or even beat humans on a range of tasks. Training large language models (LLMs) requires a team of highly trained researchers and substantial computing power. In a recent interview with the Chinese media outlet LatePost, Kai-Fu Lee, a veteran entrepreneur and former head of Google China, said that only front-row players typically engage in building foundation models such as ChatGPT, as its so resource-intensive. The situation is further complicated by the US export controls on advanced semiconductors. High-Flyers decision to venture into AI is directly related to these constraints, however. Long before the anticipated sanctions, Liang acquired a substantial stockpile of Nvidia A100 chips, a type now banned from export to China. The Chinese media outlet 36Kr estimates that the company has over 10,000 units in stock, but Dylan Patel, founder of the AI research consultancy SemiAnalysis, estimates that it has at least 50,000. Recognizing the potential of this stockpile for AI training is what led Liang to establish DeepSeek, which was able to use them in combination with the lower-power chips to develop its models. Tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance, as well as a handful of startups with deep-pocketed investors, dominate the Chinese AI space, making it challenging for small or medium-sized enterprises to compete. A company like DeepSeek, which has no plans to raise funds, is rare. Zihan Wang, the former DeepSeek employee, told MIT Technology Review that he had access to abundant computing resources and was given freedom to experiment when working at DeepSeek, a luxury that few fresh graduates would get at any company. In an interview with the Chinese media outlet 36Kr in July 2024 Liang said that an additional challenge Chinese companies face on top of chip sanctions, is that their AI engineering techniques tend to be less efficient. We [most Chinese companies] have to consume twice the computing power to achieve the same results. Combined with data efficiency gaps, this could mean needing up to four times more computing power. Our goal is to continuously close these gaps, he said. But DeepSeek found ways to reduce memory usage and speed up calculation without significantly sacrificing accuracy. The team loves turning a hardware challenge into an opportunity for innovation, says Wang. Liang himself remains deeply involved in DeepSeeks research process, running experiments alongside his team. The whole team shares a collaborative culture and dedication to hardcore research, Wang says. As well as prioritizing efficiency, Chinese companies are increasingly embracing open-source principles. Alibaba Cloud has released over 100 new open-source AI models, supporting 29 languages and catering to various applications, including coding and mathematics. Similarly, startups like Minimax and 01.AI have open-sourced their models. According to a white paper released last year by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a state-affiliated research institute, the number of AI large language models worldwide has reached 1,328, with 36% originating in China. This positions China as the second-largest contributor to AI, behind the United States. This generation of young Chinese researchers identify strongly with open-source culture because they benefit so much from it, says Thomas Qitong Cao, an assistant professor of technology policy at Tufts University. The US export control has essentially backed Chinese companies into a corner where they have to be far more efficient with their limited computing resources, says Matt Sheehan, an AI researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. We are probably going to see a lot of consolidation in the future related to the lack of compute. That might already have started to happen. Two weeks ago, Alibaba Cloud announced that it has partnered with the Beijing-based startup 01.AI, founded by Kai-Fu Lee, to merge research teams and establish an industrial large model laboratory. It is energy-efficient and natural for some kind of division of labor to emerge in the AI industry, says Cao, the Tufts professor. The rapid evolution of AI demands agility from Chinese firms to survive.

A special planetary alignment is occurring in January and February.Four planets are visible to the naked eye, with two more faintly showing.Here's how, where, and when to see the planets line up including a bonus appearance from Mercury.The planets are lining up, forming a rare and special parade across the night sky in January and February.Four planets Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars are bright enough to see with the naked eye this month. Uranus and Neptune are visible with a telescope.They'll be "strewn across" the sky and look like extra bright stars, the astrophotographer Dan Bartlett told Business Insider."Mars is brighter than any of the stars right now," he added. "Jupiter is bright. Venus is spectacular."In late February, as Saturn and Neptune descend into the glare of the sun, Mercury will rise above the nighttime horizon. So you can see every planet in our solar system over the next month.Here's what you need to know to spot each planet.What is the planetary alignment?Though they appear in an arc across the sky, the planets aren't actually arranged in a straight line in space.In fact, according to the stargazing website EarthSky, a perfect straight-line alignment of all the planets will probably never happen. The planets may never line up like this. Steve Allen/Getty Images Rather, since the planets all orbit along or near the plane of our solar system, called the ecliptic, they appear in a line across the sky. It's the same reason the sun always follows the same path across the sky. That's nothing special.However, it's uncommon for so many planets to be on the same side of the sun, visible in the night sky, at once.Where and when to see the planet paradeSince all the planets will be following the same general path across the sky, they're easier to spot than a random comet or supernova. You can see them all in the first few hours after sunset.Find a safe and comfortable spot with a clear, wide view of the sky, far from city lights. The top of a hill might be a good option. If you have binoculars or a telescope, bring them with you. You'll catch a lot more detail that way.Even from the city with a pair of binoculars, Jupiter is "fantastic," Bartlett said, adding that you can often see its four biggest moons appearing as "little stars around it."How to find the planets after sunsetStart by looking to the west. Venus is the brightest "star" in the sky, with Saturn just below it. Draw a line between the two planets, then follow that line upwards Sky chart showing the planets visible to the naked eye after dark in January. NASA/JPL-Caltech Keep following the line, and you'll see Mars glowing red to the east. It's extra bright in January because it's directly opposite the sun from our position. As a result, we're mostly seeing Mars' day side, with the sun reflecting brightly off its surface.For guidance to spot each planet, consult an app like SkySafari ($4.99 in the Apple App Store) or Stellarium (free).Bartlett recommends finding out when the International Space Station will pass overhead at your location. If it coincides with planet-viewing hours, you can go at that time and grab a view of the planets while you're out. The ISS is "as bright as Venus, sometimes many times brighter," he said.Check spotthestation.nasa.gov to find sighting opportunities near you. A telescope will show much moreWith a telescope and some practice, you can spot two more planets: Neptune glowing blue just above and south of Venus, then Uranus just to the west of Jupiter.A telescope also reveals more detail on the other planets. Bartlett said he can often see canals on Mars, clouds circling Jupiter, and the faint sheen of Saturn's rings.Mercury's appearanceMercury can be tough to spot because it's closest to the sun. On February 28, though, it will start to peek above the horizon just after sunset, then rise to meet Venus in early March.By then, Saturn will have sunk out of view into the sunset, with Neptune following a few days later.Watch the planetary parade onlineFor an at-home peek at the planetary parade, the Virtual Telescope Project plans to broadcast a live feed from its telescopes in Tuscany.The livestream, below, is set for Saturday beginning at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time.Even so, if you're out after sunset in the next month, take a moment to look up. The four naked-eye planets should be clear to anybody even in the city if you have binoculars. "You'll see these bright stars, and most of them are planets," Bartlett said.

Some federal websites and webpages went dark after President Donald Trump took office.Among them were La Casa Blanca, the Spanish-language White House site, and some federal DEI sites.The government website for reproductive rights also returned error messages.Several federal government webpages and entire websites went down this week after President Donald Trump took office.Some of the sites were related to political flashpoints, including reproductive rights and diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.The White House has addressed some of the changes and said that several pages were temporarily down as part of the transition to the new administration's website, but would be restored.Here are the sites that went dark this week and what the White House has said about them. Press representatives from the White House did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.La Casa BlancaThe Spanish-language White House website, La Casa Blanca, was returning a 404 page after Trump took office. The 404 page initially included a button that said "Go Home," but it was updated to read "Go To Home Page."A White House spokesperson told The Associated Press the administration was "committed to bringing back online the Spanish translation section of the website."NBC reported that the Spanish-language version of the White House website took months to relaunch at the start of President Barack Obama's term and Trump's first term.Reproductiverights.govReproductiverights.gov was returning an error message as of Friday. The public awareness website was launched in 2022 by the Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration.A version of the website still visible on internet archives showed it included information on birth control, abortion, and preventative health services, like breast and cervical cancer screenings.The White House did not respond to a request for comment on why the site was down.Federal agencies' DEI webpagesThe DEI pages on several federal agencies' websites disappeared this week. Trump on Tuesday ordered all federal DEI employees to be placed on leave as the agencies work on dismantling their DEI efforts.Trump's memo also instructed agencies to remove any public-facing webpages on DEI to be removed by Wednesday evening. Some agencies removed their DEI pages even before the memo was issued.During a speech delivered Thursday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said, "My administration has taken action to abolish all discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion nonsense. And these are policies that were absolute nonsense throughout the government and the private sector."White House pages on the Constitution and Presidential biographiesSeveral former pages on the White House website were returning 404 messages, including pages on the Constitution and on presidential biographies. In a statement to USA Today, a White House spokesperson said the removals were not intentional and were temporary."It's day two. We are in the process of developing, editing and tweaking the White House website. As part of this ongoing work, some of the archived content on the website went dormant. We are committed to reloading that content in a short timeline," Harrison Fields, principal White House deputy press secretary, told the outlet.Page for White House Office of Gun Violence PreventionThe page for the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was also returning a 404 message this week, the gun-violence prevention organization Brady said, raising questions about whether the office was being shut entirely.Some members of Congress expressed concern over the webpage being shuttered, including New York Rep. Tim Kennedy and Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost.NRA posted on X in favor of the move and called the office "misleading" in an X post.The White House did not respond to a request for comment from BI about the site.