JONATHAN CARLSON: From the beginning, healthcare stood out to us as an important opportunity for general reasoners to improve the lives and experiences of patients and providers. Indeed, in the past two years, there’s been an explosion of scientific papers looking at the application first of text reasoners and medicine, then multi-modal reasoners that can interpret medical images, and now, most recently, healthcare agents that can reason with each other. But even more impressive than the pace of research has been the surprisingly rapid diffusion of this technology into real world clinical workflows.  LUNGREN: So today, we’ll talk about how our cross-company collaboration has shortened that gap and delivered advanced AI capabilities and solutions into the hands of developers and clinicians around the world, empowering everyone in health and life sciences to achieve more. I’m Doctor Matt Lungren, chief scientific officer for Microsoft Health and Life Sciences.  CARLSON: And I’m Jonathan Carlson, vice president and managing director of Microsoft Health Futures.  LUNGREN: And together we brought some key players leading in the space of AI and health CARLSON: We’ve asked these brilliant folks to join us because each of them represents a mission critical group of cutting-edge stakeholders, scaling breakthroughs into purpose-built solutions and capabilities for health LUNGREN: We’ll hear today how generative AI capabilities can unlock reasoning across every data type in medicine: text, images, waveforms, genomics. And further, how multi-agent frameworks in healthcare can accelerate complex workflows, in some cases acting as a specialist team member, safely secured inside the Microsoft 365 tools used by hundreds of millions of healthcare enterprise users across the world. The opportunity to save time today and lives tomorrow with AI has never been larger. [MUSIC FADES]  MATTHEW LUNGREN: Jonathan. You know, it’s been really interesting kind of observing Microsoft Research over the decades. I’ve, you know, been watching you guys in my prior academic career. You are always on the front of innovation, particularly in health  JONATHAN CARLSON: I mean, it’s some of what’s in our DNA, I mean, we’ve been publishing in health and life sciences for two decades here. But when we launched Health Futures as a mission-focused lab about 7 or 8 years ago, we really started with the premise that the way to have impact was to really close the loop between, not just good ideas that get published, but good ideas that can actually be grounded in real problems that clinicians and scientists care about, that then allow us to actually go from that first proof of concept into an incubation, into getting real world feedback that allows us to close that loop. And now with, you know, the HLS organization here as a product group, we have the opportunity to work really closely with you all to not just prove what’s possible in the clinic or in the lab, but actually start scaling that into the broader community.  CAMERON RUNDE: And one thing I’ll add here is that the problems that we’re trying to tackle in health CARLSON: So, Matt, back to you. What are you guys doing in the product group? How do you guys see these models getting into the clinic? LUNGREN: You know, I think a lot of people, you know, think about AI is just, you know, maybe just even a few years old because of GPT and how that really captured the public’s consciousness. Right? And so, you think about the speech-to-text technology of being able to dictate something, for a clinic note or for a visit, that was typically based on Nuance technology. And so there’s a lot of product understanding of the market, how to deliver something that clinicians will use, understanding the pain points and workflows and really that Health IT space, which is sometimes the third rail, I feel like with a lot of innovation in healthcare.  But beyond that, I mean, I think now that we have this really powerful engine of Microsoft and the platform capabilities, we’re seeing, innovations on the healthcare side for data storage, data interoperability, with different types of medical data. You have new applications coming online, the ability, of course, to see generative AI now infused into the speech-to-text and, becoming Dragon Copilot, which is something that has been, you know, tremendously, received by the community.  Physicians are able to now just have a conversation with a patient. They turn to their computer and the note is ready for them. There’s no more this, we call it keyboard liberation. I don’t know if you heard that before. And that’s just been tremendous. And there’s so much more coming from that side. And then there’s other parts of the workflow that we also get engaged in — the diagnostic workflow. So medical imaging, sharing images across different hospital systems, the list goes on. And so now when you move into AI, we feel like there’s a huge opportunity to deliver capabilities into the clinical workflow via the products and solutions we already have. But, I mean, we’ll now that we’ve kind of expanded our team to involve Azure and platform, we’re really able to now focus on the developers. WILL GUYMAN: Yeah. And you’re always telling me as a doctor how frustrating it is to be spending time at the computer instead of with your patients. I think you told me, you know, 4,000 clicks a day for the typical doctor, which is tremendous. And something like Dragon Copilot can save that five minutes per patient. But it can also now take actions after the patient encounter so it can draft the after-visit summary.  It can order labs and medications for the referral. And that’s incredible. And we want to keep building on that. There’s so many other use cases across the ecosystem. And so that’s why in Azure AI Foundry, we have translated a lot of the research from Microsoft Research and made that available to developers to build and customize for their own applications.  SMITHA SALIGRAMA: Yeah. And as you were saying, in our transformation of moving from solutions to platforms and as, scaling solutions to other, multiple scenarios, as we put our models in AI Foundry, we provide these developer capabilities like bring your own data and fine LUNGREN: Well, I want to do a reality check because, you know, I think to us that are now really focused on technology, it seems like, I’ve heard this story before, right. I, I remember even in, my academic clinical days where it felt like technology was always the quick answer and it felt like technology was, there was maybe a disconnect between what my problems were or what I think needed to be done versus kind of the solutions that were kind of, created or offered to us. And I guess at some level, how Jonathan, do you think about this? Because to do things well in the science space is one thing, to do things well in science, but then also have it be something that actually drives health CARLSON: Yeah. I mean, as you said, I think one of the core pathologies of Big Tech is we assume every problem is a technology problem. And that’s all it will take to solve the problem. And I think, look, I was trained as a computational biologist, and that sits in the awkward middle between biology and computation. And the thing that we always have to remember, the thing that we were very acutely aware of when we set out, was that we are not the experts. We do have, you know, you as an M.D., we have everybody on the team, we have biologists on the team.  But this is a big space. And the only way we’re going to have real impact, the only way we’re even going to pick the right problems to work on is if we really partner deeply, with providers, with EHR (electronic health records) vendors, with scientists, and really understand what’s important and again, get that feedback loop.  RUNDE: Yeah, I think we really need to ground the work that we do in the science itself. You need to understand the broader ecosystem and the broader landscape, across healthwe think are important. Because, as Jonathan said, we’re not the experts in health CARLSON: When we really launched this, this mission, 7 or 8 years ago, we really came in with the premise of, if we decide to stop, we want to be sure the world cares. And the only way that’s going to be true is if we’re really deeply embedded with the people that matter–the patients, the providers and the scientists. LUNGREN: And now it really feels like this collaborative effort, you know, really can help start to extend that mission. Right. I think, you know, Will and Smitha, that we definitely feel the passion and the innovation. And we certainly benefit from those collaborations, too. But then we have these other partners and even customers, right, that we can start to tap into and have that flywheel keep spinning.  GUYMAN: Yeah. And the whole industry is an ecosystem. So, we have our own data sets at Microsoft Research that you’ve trained amazing AI models with. And those are in the catalog. But then you’ve also partnered with institutions like Providence or Page AI . And those models are in the catalog with their data. And then there are third parties like Nvidia that have their own specialized proprietary data sets, and their models are there too. So, we have this ecosystem of open source models. And maybe Smitha, you want to talk about how developers can actually customize these.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. So we use the Azure AI Foundry ecosystem. Developers can feel at home if they’re using the AI Foundry. So they can look at our model cards that we publish as part of the models we publish, understand the use cases of these models, how to, quickly, bring up these APIs and, look at different use cases of how to apply these and even fine LUNGREN: Yeah it has been interesting to see we have these health GUYMAN: Well, the general-purpose large language models are amazing for medical general reasoning. So Microsoft Research has shown that that they can perform super well on, for example, like the United States medical licensing exam, they can exceed doctor performance if they’re just picking between different multiple-choice questions. But real medicine we know is messier. It doesn’t always start with the whole patient context provided as text in the prompt. You have to get the source data and that raw data is often non-text. The majority of it is non-text. It’s things like medical imaging, radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, dermatology. It goes on and on. And there’s endless signal data, lab data. And so all of this diverse data type needs to be processed through specialized models because much of that data is not available on the public internet.  And that’s why we’re taking this partner approach, first party and third party models that can interpret all this kind of data and then connect them ultimately back to these general reasoners to reason over that.  LUNGREN: So, you know, I’ve been at this company for a while and, you know, familiar with kind of how long it takes, generally to get, you know, a really good research paper, do all the studies, do all the data analysis, and then go through the process of publishing, right, which takes, as, you know, a long time and it’s, you know, very rigorous.  And one of the things that struck me, last year, I think we, we started this big collaboration and, within a quarter, you had a Nature paper coming out from Microsoft Research, and that model that the Nature paper was describing was ready to be used by anyone on the Azure AI Foundry within that same quarter. It kind of blew my mind when I thought about it, you know, even though we were all, you know, working very hard to get that done. Any thoughts on that? I mean, has this ever happened in your career? And, you know, what’s the secret sauce to that?  CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, the time scale from research to product has been massively compressed. And I’d push that even further, which is to say, the reason why it took a quarter was because we were laying the railroad tracks as we’re driving the train. We have examples right after that when we are launching on Foundry the same day we were publishing the paper.  And frankly, the review times are becoming longer than it takes to actually productize the models. I think there’s two things that are going on with that are really converging. One is that the overall ecosystem is converging on a relatively small number of patterns, and that gives us, as a tech company, a reason to go off and really make those patterns hardened in a way that allows not just us, but third parties as well, to really have a nice workflow to publish these models.  But the other is actually, I think, a change in how we work, you know, and for most of our history as an industrial research lab, we would do research and then we’d go pitch it to somebody and try and throw it over the fence. We’ve really built a much more integrated team. In fact, if you look at that Nature paper or any of the other papers, there’s folks from product teams. Many of you are on the papers along with our clinical collaborators. RUNDE: Yeah. I think one thing that’s really important to note is that there’s a ton of different ways that you can have impact, right? So I like to think about phasing. In Health Futures at least, I like to think about phasing the work that we do. So first we have research, which is really early innovation. And the impact there is getting our technology and our tools out there and really sharing the learnings that we’ve had.  So that can be through publications like you mentioned. It can be through open-sourcing our models. And then you go to incubation. So, this is, I think, one of the more new spaces that we’re getting into, which is maybe that blurred line between research and product. Right. Which is, how do we take the tools and technologies that we’ve built and get them into the hands of users, typically through our partnerships?  Right. So, we partner very deeply and collaborate very deeply across the industry. And incubation is really important because we get that early feedback. We get an ability to pivot if we need to. And we also get the ability to see what types of impact our technology is having in the real world. And then lastly, when you think about scale, there’s tons of different ways that you can scale. We can scale third-party through our collaborators and really empower them to go to market to commercialize the things that we’ve built together.  You can also think about scaling internally, which is why I’m so thankful that we’ve created this flywheel between research and product, and a lot of the models that we’ve built that have gone through research, have gone through incubation, have been able to scale on the Azure AI Foundry. But that’s not really our expertise. Right? The scale piece in research, that’s research and incubation. Smitha, how do you think about scaling?  SALIGRAMA: So, there are several angles to scaling the models, the state-of-the-art models we see from the research team. The first angle is, the open sourcing, to get developer trust, and very generous commercial licenses so that they can use it and for their own, use cases. The second is, we also allow them to customize these models, fine GUYMAN: And as one example, you know, University of Wisconsin Health, you know, which Matt knows well. They took one of our models, which is highly versatile. They customized it in Foundry and they optimized it to reliably identify abnormal chest X-rays, the most common imaging procedure, so they could improve their turnaround time triage quickly. And that’s just one example. But we have other partners like Sectra who are doing more of operations use cases automatically routing imaging to the radiologists, setting them up to be efficient. And then Page AI is doing, you know, biomarker identification for actually diagnostics and new drug discovery. So, there’s so many use cases that we have partners already who are building and customizing. LUNGREN: The part that’s striking to me is just that, you know, we could all sit in a room and think about all the different ways someone might use these models on the catalog. And I’m still shocked at the stuff that people use them for and how effective they are. And I think part of that is, you know, again, we talk a lot about generative AI and healthcare and all the things you can do. Again, you know, in text, you refer to that earlier and certainly off the shelf, there’s really powerful applications. But there is, you know, kind of this tip of the iceberg effect where under the water, most of the data that we use to take care of our patients is not text. Right. It’s all the different other modalities. And I think that this has been an unlock right, sort of taking these innovations, innovations from the community, putting them in this ecosystem kind of catalog, essentially. Right. And then allowing folks to kind of, you know, build and develop applications with all these different types of data. Again, I’ve been surprised at what I’m seeing.  CARLSON: This has been just one of the most profound shifts that’s happened in the last 12 months, really. I mean, two years ago we had general models in text that really shifted how we think about, I mean, natural language processing got totally upended by that. Turns out the same technology works for images as well. It doesn’t only allow you to automatically extract concepts from images, but allows you to align those image concepts with text concepts, which means that you can have a conversation with that image. And once you’re in that world now, you are a place where you can start stitching together these multimodal models that really change how you can interact with the data, and how you can start getting more information out of the raw primary data that is part of the patient journey. LUNGREN: Well, and we’re going to get to that because I think you just touched on something. And I want to re-emphasize stitching these things together. There’s a lot of different ways to potentially do that. Right? There’s ways that you can literally train the model end to end with adapters and all kinds of other early fusion fusions. All kinds of ways. But one of the things that the word of the I guess the year is going to be agents and an agent is a very interesting term to think about how you might abstract away some of the components or the tasks that you want the model to, to accomplish in the midst of sort of a real human to maybe model interaction. Can you talk a little bit more about, how we’re thinking about agents in this, in this platform approach?  GUYMAN: Well, this is our newest addition to the Azure AI Foundry. So there’s an agent catalog now where we have a set of pre-configured agents for health care. And then we also have a multi-agent orchestrator that can jump LUNGREN: And, and I really like that concept because, you know, as, as a, as a from the user personas, I think about myself as a user. How am I going to interact with these agents? Where does it naturally fit? And I and I sort of, you know, I’ve seen some of the demonstrations and some of the work that’s going on with Stanford in particular, showing that, you know, and literally in a Teams chat, I can have my clinician colleagues and I can have specialized health It is a completely mind-blowing thing for me. And it’s a light bulb moment for me to I wonder, what have we, what have we heard from folks that have, you know, tried out this health care agent orchestrator in this kind of deployment environment via Teams? GUYMAN: Well, someone joked, you know, are you sure you’re not using Teams because you work at Microsoft? [LAUGHS] But, then we actually were meeting with one of the, radiologists at one of our partners, and they said that that morning they had just done a Teams meeting, or they had met with other specialists to talk about a patient’s cancer case, or they were coming up with a treatment plan.  And that was the light bulb moment for us. We realized, actually, Teams is already being used by physicians as an internal communication tool, as a tool to get work done. And especially since the pandemic, a lot of the meetings moved to virtual and telemedicine. And so it’s a great distribution channel for AI, which is often been a struggle for AI to actually get in the hands of clinicians. And so now we’re allowing developers to build and then deploy very easily and extend it into their own workflows.  CARLSON: I think that’s such an important point. I mean, if you think about one of the really important concepts in computer science is an application programing interface, like some set of rules that allow two applications to talk to each other. One of the big pushes, really important pushes, in medicine has been standards that allow us to actually have data standards and APIs that allow these to talk to each other, and yet still we end up with these silos. There’s silos of data. There’s silos of applications. And just like when you and I work on our phone, we have to go back and forth between applications. One of the things that I think agents do is that it takes the idea that now you can use language to understand intent and effectively program an interface, and it creates a whole new abstraction layer that allows us to simplify the interaction between not just humans and the endpoint, but also for developers.  It allows us to have this abstraction layer that lets different developers focus on different types of models, and yet stitch them all together in a very, very natural, way, not just for the users, but for the ability to actually deploy those models.  SALIGRAMA: Just to add to what Jonathan was mentioning, the other cool thing about the Microsoft Teams user interface is it’s also enterprise ready. RUNDE: And one important thing that we’re thinking about, is exactly this from the very early research through incubation and then to scale, obviously. Right. And so early on in research, we are actively working with our partners and our collaborators to make sure that we have the right data privacy and consent in place. We’re doing this in incubation as well. And then obviously in scale. Yep.  LUNGREN: So, I think AI has always been thought of as a savior kind of technology. We talked a little bit about how there’s been some ups and downs in terms of the ability for technology to be effective in health care. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of new innovations that are really making a difference. But then we kind of get, you know, we talked about agents a little bit. It feels like we’re maybe abstracting too far. Maybe it’s things are going too fast, almost. What makes this different? I mean, in your mind is this truly a logical next step or is it going to take some time?  CARLSON: I think there’s a couple things that have happened. I think first, on just a pure technology. What led to ChatGPT? And I like to think of really three major breakthroughs. The first was new mathematical concepts of attention, which really means that we now have a way that a machine can figure out which parts of the context it should actually focus on, just the way our brains do. Right? I mean, if you’re a clinician and somebody is talking to you, the majority of that conversation is not relevant for the diagnosis. But, you know how to zoom in on the parts that matter. That’s a super powerful mathematical concept. The second one is this idea of self-supervision. So, I think one of the fundamental problems of machine learning has been that you have to train on labeled training data and labels are expensive, which means data sets are small, which means the final models are very narrow and brittle. And the idea of self-supervision is that you can just get a model to automatically learn concepts, and the language is just predict the next word. And what’s important about that is that leads to models that can actually manipulate and understand really messy text and pull out what’s important about that, and then and then stitch that back together in interesting ways. And the third concept, that came out of those first two, was just the observational scale. And that’s that more is better, more data, more compute, bigger models. And that really leads to a reason to keep investing. And for these models to keep getting better. So that as a as a groundwork, that’s what led to ChatGPT. That’s what led to our ability now to not just have rule-based systems or simple machine learning based systems to take a messy EHR record, say, and pull out a couple concepts. But to really feed the whole thing in and say, okay, I need you to figure out which concepts are in here. And is this particular attribute there, for example. That’s now led to the next breakthrough, which is all those core ideas apply to images as well. They apply to proteins, to DNA. And so we’re starting to see models that understand images and the concepts of images, and can actually map those back to text as well.  So, you can look at a pathology image and say, not just at the cell, but it appears that there’s some certain sort of cancer in this particular, tissue there. And then you take those two things together and you layer on the fact that now you have a model, or a set of models, that can understand intent, can understand human concepts and biomedical concepts, and you can start stitching them together into specialized agents that can actually reason with each other, which at some level gives you an API as a developer to say, okay, I need to focus on a pathology model and get this really, really, sound while somebody else is focusing on a radiology model, but now allows us to stitch these all together with a user interface that we can now talk to through natural language.  RUNDE: I’d like to double click a little bit on that medical abstraction piece that you mentioned. Just the amount of data, clinical data that there is for each individual patient. Let’s think about cancer patients for a second to make this real. Right. For every cancer patient, it could take a couple of hours to structure their information. And why is that important? Because, you have to get that information in a structured way and abstract relevant information to be able to unlock precision health applications right, for each patient. So, to be able to match them to a trial, right, someone has to sit there and go through all of the clinical notes from their entire patient care journey, from the beginning to the end. And that’s not scalable. And so one thing that we’ve been doing in an active project that we’ve been working on with a handful of our partners, but Providence specifically, I’ll call out, is using AI to actually abstract and curate that information. So that gives time back to the health care provider to spend with patients, instead of spending all their time curating this information.  And this is super important because it sets the scene and the backbone for all those precision health applications. Like I mentioned, clinical trial matching, tumor boards is another really important example here. Maybe Matt, you can talk to that a little bit. LUNGREN: It’s a great example. And you know it’s so funny. We’ve talked about this use case and the you know the health And a tumor board is a critical meeting that happens at many cancer centers where specialists all get together, come with their perspective, and make a comment on what would be the best next step in treatment. But the background in preparing for that is you know, again, organizing the data. But to your point, also, what are the clinical trials that are active? There are thousands of clinical trials. There’s hundreds every day added. How can anyone keep up with that? And these are the kinds of use cases that start to bubble up. And you realize that a technology that understands concepts, context and can reason over vast amounts of data with a language interface-that is a powerful tool. Even before we get to some of the, you know, unlocking new insights and even precision medicine, this is that idea of saving time before lives to me. And there’s an enormous amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting that happens in health GUYMAN: And we’ve packaged these agents, the manual abstraction work that, you know, manually takes hours. Now we have an agent. It’s in Foundry along with the clinical trial matching agent, which I think at Providence you showed could double the match rate over the baseline that they were using by using the AI for multiple data sources. So, we have that and then we have this orchestration that is using this really neat technology from Microsoft Research. Semantic Kernel, Magentic There’s turn taking, there’s negotiation between the agents. So, there’s this really interesting system that’s emerging. And again, this is all possible to be used through Teams. And there’s some great extensibility as well. We’ve been talking about that and working on some cool tools.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think if I have to geek out a little bit on how all this agent tech orchestrations are coming up, like I’ve been in software engineering for decades, it’s kind of a next version of distributed systems where you have these services that talk to each other. It’s a more natural way because LLMs are giving these natural ways instead of a structured API ways of conversing. We have these agents which can naturally understand how to talk to each other. Right. So this is like the next evolution of our systems now. And the way we’re packaging all of this is multiple ways based on all the standards and innovation that’s happening in this space. So, first of all, we are building these agents that are very good at specific tasks, like, Will was saying like, a trial matching agent or patient timeline agents.  So, we take all of these, and then we package it in a workflow and an orchestration. We use the standard, some of these coming from research. The Semantic Kernel, the Magentic-One. And then, all of these also allow us to extend these agents with custom agents that can be plugged in. So, we are open sourcing the entire agent orchestration in AI Foundry templates, so that developers can extend their own agents, and make their own workflows out of it. So, a lot of cool innovation happening to apply this technology to specific scenarios and workflows.  LUNGREN: Well, I was going to ask you, like, so as part of that extension. So, like, you know, folks can say, hey, I have maybe a really specific part of my workflow that I want to use some agents for, maybe one of the agents that can do PubMed literature search, for example. But then there’s also agents that, come in from the outside, you know, sort of like I could, I can imagine a software company or AI company that has a built-in agent that plugs in as well.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you can bring your own agent. And then we have these, standard ways of communicating with agents and integrating with the orchestration language so you can bring your own agent and extend this health care agent, agent orchestrator to your own needs.  LUNGREN: I can just think of, like, in a group chat, like a bunch of different specialist agents. And I really would want an orchestrator to help find the right tool, to your point earlier, because I’m guessing this ecosystem is going to expand quickly. Yeah. And I may not know which tool is best for which question. I just want to ask the question. Right.  SALIGRAMA: Yeah. Yeah.  CARLSON: Well, I think to that point to I mean, you said an important point here, which is tools, and these are not necessarily just AI tools. Right? I mean, we’ve known this for a while, right? LLMS are not very good at math, but you can have it use a calculator and then it works very well. And you know you guys both brought up the universal medical abstraction a couple times.  And one of the things that I find so powerful about that is we’ve long had this vision within the precision health community that we should be able to have a learning hospital system. We should be able to actually learn from the actual real clinical experiences that are happening every day, so that we can stop practicing medicine based off averages.  There’s a lot of work that’s gone on for the last 20 years about how to actually do causal inference. That’s not an AI question. That’s a statistical question. The bottleneck, the reason why we haven’t been able to do that is because most of that information is locked up in unstructured text. And these other tools need essentially a table.  And so now you can decompose this problem, say, well, what if I can use AI not to get to the causal answer, but to just structure the information. So now I can put it into the causal inference tool. And these sorts of patterns I think again become very, not just powerful for a programmer, but they start pulling together different specialties. And I think we’ll really see an acceleration, really, of collaboration across disciplines because of this.  CARLSON: So, when I joined Microsoft Research 18 years ago, I was doing work in computational biology. And I would always have to answer the question: why is Microsoft in biomedicine? And I would always kind of joke saying, well, it is. We sell Office and Windows to every health SALIGRAMA: A lot of healthcare organizations already use Microsoft productivity tools, as you mentioned. So, they asked the developers, build these agents, and use our healthcare orchestrations, to plug in these agents and expose these in these productivity tools. They will get access to all these healthcare workers. So the healthcare agent orchestrator we have today integrates with Microsoft Teams, and it showcases an example of how you can at (@) mention these agents and talk to them like you were talking to another person in a Teams chat. And then it also provides examples of these agents and how they can use these productivity tools. One of the examples we have there is how they can summarize the assessments of this whole chat into a Word Doc, or even convert that into a PowerPoint presentation, for later on. CARLSON: One of the things that has struck me is how easy it is to do. I mean, Will, I don’t know if you’ve worked with folks that have gone from 0 to 60, like, how fast? What does that look like?  GUYMAN: Yeah, it’s funny for us, the technology to transfer all this context into a Word Document or PowerPoint presentation for a doctor to take to a meeting is relatively straightforward compared to the complicated clinical trial matching multimodal processing. The feedback has been tremendous in terms of, wow, that saves so much time to have this organized report that then I can show up to meeting with and the agents can come with me to that meeting because they’re literally having a Teams meeting, often with other human specialists. And the agents can be there and ask and answer questions and fact check and source all the right information on the fly. So, there’s a nice integration into these existing tools.  LUNGREN: We worked with several different centers just to kind of understand, you know, where this might be useful. And, like, as I think we talked about before, the ideas that we’ve come up with again, this is a great one because it’s complex. It’s kind of hairy. There’s a lot of things happening under the hood that don’t necessarily require a medical license to do, right, to prepare for a tumor board and to organize data. But, it’s fascinating, actually. So, you know, folks have come up with ideas of, could I have an agent that can operate an MRI machine, and I can ask the agent to change some parameters or redo a protocol. We thought that was a pretty powerful use case. We’ve had others that have just said, you know, I really want to have a specific agent that’s able to kind of act like deep research does for the consumer side, but based on the context of my patient, so that it can search all the literature and pull the data in the papers that are relevant to this case. And the list goes on and on from operations all the way to clinical, you know, sort of decision making at some level. And I think that the research community that’s going to sprout around this will help us, guide us, I guess, to see what is the most high-impact use cases. Where is this effective? And maybe where it’s not effective. But to me, the part that makes me so, I guess excited about this is just that I don’t have to think about, okay, well, then we have to figure out Health IT. Because it’s always, you know, we always have great ideas and research, and it always feels like there’s such a huge chasm to get it in front of the health care workers that might want to test this out. And it feels like, again, this productivity tool use case again with the enterprise security, the possibility for bringing in third parties to contribute really does feel like it’s a new surface area for innovation. CARLSON: Yeah, I love that. Look. Let me end by putting you all on the spot. So, in three years, multimodal agents will do what? Matt, I’ll start with you.  LUNGREN: I am convinced that it’s going to save massive amount of time before it saves many lives.  RUNDE: I’ll focus on the patient care journey and diagnostic journey. I think it will kind of transform that process for the patient itself and shorten that process.  GUYMAN: Yeah, I think we’ve seen already papers recently showing that different modalities surfaced complementary information. And so we’ll see kind of this AI and these agents becoming an essential companion to the physician, surfacing insights that would have been overlooked otherwise.  SALIGRAMA: And similar to what you guys were saying, agents will become important assistants to healthcare workers, reducing a lot of documentation and workflow, excess work they have to do.  CARLSON: I love that. And I guess for my part, I think really what we’re going to see is a massive unleash of creativity. We’ve had a lot of folks that have been innovating in this space, but they haven’t had a way to actually get it into the hands of early adopters. And I think we’re going to see that really lead to an explosion of creativity across the ecosystem.  LUNGREN: So, where do we get started? Like where are the developers who are listening to this? The folks that are at, you know, labs, research labs and developing health care solutions. Where do they go to get started with the Foundry, the models we’ve talked about, the healthcare agent orchestrator. Where do they go? GUYMAN: So AI.azure.com is the AI Foundry. It’s a website you can go as a developer. You can sign in with your Azure subscription, get your Azure account, your own VM, all that stuff. And you have an agent catalog, the model catalog. You can start from there. There is documentation and templates that you can then deploy to Teams or other applications.  LUNGREN: And tutorials are coming. Right. We have recordings of tutorials. We’ll have Hackathons, some sessions and then more to come. Yeah, we’re really excited.  [MUSIC]  LUNGREN: Thank you so much, guys for joining us.  CARLSON: Yes. Yeah. Thanks.  SALIGRAMA: Thanks for having us.  [MUSIC FADES] 

You can now visit the Viking world of How to Train Your Dragon and walk among the dragon trainers from the hit DreamWorks Animation franchise. io9 was on hand for opening week’s media preview in advance of this Friday’s first day for the newest theme park to join Universal Orlando’s offerings: Epic Universe. Of the portal realms we have visited so far, the Isle of Berk has probably the most impressive tech when it comes to bringing the fantasy franchise’s main component to life. As Hiccup says, they have dragons, and boy, will they blow you away. The first encounter we had when arriving was meeting one of the NightLights, the offspring of the franchise’s hero dragon Toothless and the Lightfury, Pouncer. Gizmodo has written about those scary-looking robot dogs in the past—and what struck me when the baby dragon walked out on its own (without a person, on all fours, in the scorching humid heat) is that its legs looked to move very similarly to the Boston Dynamics models. The flame-throwing version of the robot style makes a whole lot of sense now—kidding, these don’t breathe fire, but they could, though theme parks don’t have a good track record with fire breathing dragons, just ask the other guys. But isn’t it so darn cute? We got to see it do a little wiggle and strut with the face of a precious pure little guy who totally wouldn’t hurt us, unlike its military cousins. There’s more dragons throughout the land, which highlight various areas. Near the outdoor dining stations serving Viking fare like grilled meats, veggies, and mac and cheese in bread horns, you get to witness the snow wraith emit its icy blast at unsuspecting passers-by. It’s delightful when it catches people off guard. Then of course dragons are placed in various areas that correspond with their abilities, so you really get a sense of the co-op way they live with the Vikings of Berk. Character meet and greets with the dragon riders from the films such as Hiccup and Astrid also include their winged friends. Meeting Toothless is totally magical because of the seamless tech; various functions of articulation really work within the role they play. When you have your one-on-one moment with a dragon, they react and respond in such a life-like manner, it’s kind of alarming how quickly you let your guard down with the blink of those two big adorable eyes. They make the noises that give you the same cuteness aggression you’d get from a dog or cat. I really thought I needed a dragon’s nod of approval when Toothless sent me off on a high-flying ride on what’s probably my favorite family-friendly thrill coaster, Hiccup’s Winged Gliders. And it being set to John Powell’s movie score, is chef’s kiss. I really felt like I was soaring. So far on this visit, we haven’t gotten a chance to watch The Untrainable Dragon, the land’s stage show, which is set to feature a flying dragon as part of the production. But if all the other dragons make you feel like you’re right at home in Berk, we’ve got a good feeling about it. I don’t think any other land has gone to the lengths Berk does to incorporate the film’s fantasy creatures in this way. Sure, at lands such as Jurassic World-themed ones, there are some creatures beyond the boat raft, and it’s crazy cool to witness their simulated escape or get to meet in scheduled moments with the gentler giants. Berk just takes it to a new level. The dragons don’t just come out like your average characters at any park, they feel like an active part of the land that you can encounter within the story-play of Berk’s immersion. And that’s a high-flying feat. Epic Universe opens this Friday at Universal Studios Orlando. Travel and accommodations were provided for the purposes of this review. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

From an extensive line-up of fun indie games to incredible blockbusters, the consistent quality of releases this year is something to behold. If you haven’t gotten lost in the gorgeous world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or discovered the brilliance of Cyrodiil in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, then maybe you experienced the Forza Horizon 5 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5 for the first time. Such is the range of quality that I almost forgot about Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Dynasty Warriors Origins, and Steel Seed. The next six weeks will be even more enticing with Elden Ring Nightreign, Mario Kart World (and the Switch 2 launch), and the long-awaited Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. The year’s second half is still TBD, with publishers doubtless scrambling to fill the void after Grand Theft Auto 6’s delay. However, with all the showcases coming in June, we could see several potential release date announcements. Amid all this hype, one game has seemingly slipped under the radar, made all the more bizarre by the time left before its release. We’re talking about MindsEye, an action-adventure title developed by Build a Rocket Boy, founded by Leslie Benzies of Rockstar North fame. It’s out June 10th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC, and the initial trailer gave the vibe of a GTA-coded playground with all the explosiveness and action to appeal to the franchise’s fans. Or at least those who only want the explosiveness and action because that’s more or less what the “reveal gameplay trailer” from February showcased. Lots of running around. Lots of blowing up cars with guns. Some driving. Some blowing up of cars while driving. Honestly, the amount of vehicular destruction is borderline concerning. Of course, the developer later clarified that the narrative is more linear than emergent or sandboxy. However, we’re a little over three weeks out from launch, and the only gameplay seen thus far has been that trailer and two recent gameplay teasers. One shows protagonist Jacob Diaz gunning down some enemies in a sequence more than a little reminiscent of Trevor attacking The Lost MC’s hideout in GTA 5. Eventually, he pursues them through the streets while a dust storm is in effect. The second teaser is longer but less exciting, showcasing some driving through Redrock City at night. No overview trailer. No walkthrough of a mission. Not even much by way of what makes the gameplay of MindsEye special or unique. It’s a marketing strategy garnering attention almost exclusively for its lack of marketing. This isn’t to say that Build a Rocket Boy isn’t advertising something different with MindsEye. You may remember the studio’s first announced project, Everywhere, an MMO more geared towards acting as a content platform where users can create and share different experiences. It also consists of a few districts, each with gameplay elements like racing and third-person shooting, while ARCADIA, its editor, lets you create different components. All of this attracted skepticism, especially given the controversy surrounding Metaverse-style games. If you watch its trailer from last year, it’s seemingly going for a Fortnite-style content platform experience. And MindsEye? It’s purportedly an experience within Everywhere developed by the studio, likely to showcase what ARCADIA is capable of. But it can also be modified to create different versions of MindsEye to mess around in. Associate game director Adam Whiting told Edge magazine likened it to Minecraft servers. “There are the official servers, but there are custom servers with wacky stuff. Maybe there’s a zombie apocalypse server you go on or one where they wipe the map of our story and characters and tell their own narrative using our tools.” There’s at least some potential, however small, of a sandbox-like experience kind of, sort of like GTA (but not really). There are also the bonus missions created with ARCADIA included in the Digital Deluxe Edition. So it’s possible, at least based on what Build a Rocket Boy is saying, to infuse MindsEye with more content to keep it going beyond the standard launch experience. How does it all work, at least in layman’s terms? Why isn’t the developer showcasing it in trailers or hyping up the same? It doesn’t seem like you need Everywhere to play MindsEye, seeing as it’s launching as a standalone product, but will that change down the line? To recap then: Not only does MindsEye not have any extensive official gameplay – and what we’ve seen thus far hardly seems all that special – but there’s an entire user-generated content side for it that Build a Rocket Boy hasn’t even touched on. Again, about three weeks out from launch. No pressure and all that, but if you’re charging $60 for an experience, the least you could offer is more extensive details and gameplay. And no, shooting cars and watching them explode isn’t going to cut it. Of course, some would give the benefit of the doubt to Benzies. On top of being the former president of Rockstar North, the core developer behind the Grand Theft Auto titles – including the upcoming GTA 6 – he’s been involved in every single one of Rockstar’s biggest releases. A producer on every title in the series, starting from Grand Theft Auto 3. An executive producer on Max Payne 3 and L.A. Noire. A producer and game designer on Grand Theft Auto 5. At one point, Benzies was synonymous with Rockstar North almost as much as Dan Houser was with Rockstar as a whole. Maybe he’s earned some reprieve, given his illustrious history. However, remember that Grand Theft Auto 5, his last project, was released in 2013. Everywhere was announced in January 2017, starting development on Amazon’s Lumberyard engine before switching to Unreal Engine in 2020. It was slated to launch in 2023 but saw delays – in 2024, Build a Rocket Boy laid off an unknown number of employees. Though it began in Edinburgh, the developer has two other studios in Montpelier and Budapest. This isn’t implying that either project has seen development troubles, but with the long development cycle for Everywhere, you would expect a more concrete release window or assurance at this point. As for MindsEye, it was first teased in 2022, making it almost three years since. It’s possible that the developer won’t share anything until the final polishing stage. It could be going down to the wire, maybe announcing a last-minute delay if things don’t work out. The problem is that aside from these gameplay teasers and “narrative” trailers, which haven’t given us a reason to care about any of the characters, aside from that one dancing robot, there’s been very little communication from the studio this close to launch. It’s ironic considering how it touted this as a “meaningful, well-crafted story” or how the camera during high-speed driving would make you feel like you were in a Fast and Furious film. If that’s a tease for going into space at some point, it would be one of the few intriguing things in MindsEye. Finally, and I can’t emphasize this enough, not everyone sets out from the studio where they made their name to become a success. With all the talk around user-generated content, the launch of MindsEye may not be what defines it down the line. However, Build a Rocket Boy needs to detail what makes this a worthwhile experience on its own and fast. Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

SSRN Meet the Author: Robert Bird Robert Bird is a professor of business law and the Eversource Energy Chair in Business Ethicsat the University of Connecticut. He conducts research in legal strategy, business ethics, compliance, employment law, and related fields. Bird has authored over eighty academic publications, including articles in the American Business Law Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, Law and Society Review, Boston University Law Review, Boston College Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Robert has received sixteen research-related awards – including the Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) best international paper award, distinguished proceedings award, and the Holmes-Cardozo best overall conference paper award – and various teaching-related awards, such as the outstanding article of the year award two years in a row from the Journal of Legal Studies Education, and the student-selected Alpha Kappa Psi Teacher of the Year award. Robert is also a manuscript reviewer for several journals and is a past president of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business, the international academic organization for professors of law in schools of business. He spoke with SSRN about the importance of legal education within business schools and how legal knowledge provides value to organizations, both for their bottom line and for creating businesses for good. Q: Your main research and teaching focus has surrounded the intersection of business and law. What is it about the relationship between these two that led you to explore it further? A: As an undergraduate management information systems major at Fairfield University, I became interested in how legal issues impacted the development of new technologies. I remember writing a paper in the early 1990s on the legal and ethical implications of expert systems, a predecessor to today’s artificial intelligence. When I began my dual JD/MBA degree at Boston University, I found both fields fascinating. Business rewards people who have effective problem-solving skills, strong communication skills, and the ability to lead. Legal studies emphasize thinking on your feet, clear and persuasive legal writing, and an enduring sense of justice and fairness. Law school helped me to connect disparate ideas in a novel and creative way. Business school helped me solve complex problems and connect thought to action. The disciplines, at least to me, seemed to naturally work together, and I found it irresistible to explore more deeply. I do not teach in a law school. I’m a lawyer in a business school. For years I felt like a cat in a dog show. The disciplines think in a fundamentally different manner. Traditionally, business faculty research as social scientists, while law faculty emphasize the humanist side of knowledge. Business faculty are skilled at statistical analysis and modeling, while law faculty are adept with abstract ideas and interpretation of textual knowledge. This has its challenges and its opportunities. In a law school, I doubt any professor questions the importance of law in business. In a business school, I initially had to address fundamental questions: “Why do our business students need to know the law? Can’t they just call a lawyer?” Having to respond to these kinds of questions has made me a better teacher and scholar. Initially, my standard answer was that “lawyers are important because they keep our students out of trouble, and they prevent companies from being investigated by regulators that result in costly penalties.” No less important, however, is that lawyers can’t be present for every decision a manager makes, and some bad business decisions result in irreversible liability. Businesspeople need to know how the law works in order to minimize their legal risks. Today, I very much value my business school affiliation. Legal knowledge can also be used as a source of strategic value for the company. If business people see law as a domain that is just as value-creating as finance and marketing and operations, they will take the law more seriously. They will increase their respect for the rule of law. As a result, you’ll have a company that is inherently primed to act with integrity, follow ethical values, and be socially responsible. That is valuable because what is unethical today is often illegal tomorrow. I think studying business is interesting because company operations are intertwined with some of the most important issues in society. Companies are making money, but they’re also impacting the societies in which they sell products. Law focuses on justice, equity and fairness, and I was interested in how companies can not only add value to their bottom line but also help build a better world: business that respects human rights, business that aspires to ethical and sustainable goals. Business schools that know the importance of legal knowledge will give their students a legal education, and those students are more likely to graduate as moral agents for change. Q: In your new book, “Legal Knowledge in Organizations,” [which was released in March 2025,] you discuss how legal knowledge can greatly benefit firms by providing them with a distinct competitive advantage. In doing so, you lay out five pathways that firms use to pursue legal strategies. So now going back a ways, in your paper “Pathways of Legal Strategy,” which was included in the Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance in 2008 and was later posted on SSRN, you talk similarly about five pathways. How have you developed the concept of these pathways over time, leading now to your recent book? A: I have been interested in how legal knowledge can be a source of value since 2001, when I just started full-time teaching. I still have an inexplicably pink sheet of paper upon which I scribbled the date and title “Ideas for Managerial Law for Strategic Advantage.” Because legal knowledge is so important in the organization, I was interested in how legal knowledge is used by companies, how it can be a source of value for companies, and how legal experts within organizations can deploy legal knowledge. So much of what is written about law in business relates to litigation and conflict. I wanted to learn more about how legal and business experts can work together successfully. Those ideas scribbled on that sheet of paper later became the foundation for my recently published book. However, twenty years ago there was limited research on how to use legal knowledge as a source of value for organizations. I looked at a number of companies and how they behaved, and I noticed that there were five different pathways – or patterns – that companies seemed to follow. There’s an avoidance pathway, where the companies ignore legal rules and circumvent enforcement. A firm following the conformance pathway perceives law as little more than a box to be checked, after which you move on to the more important aspects of business. In the prevention pathway, firms will take business steps to avoid legal problems, such as implementing business policies that prevent legal liability from appearing in the first place. This is where most companies believe their best practices are, with legal and compliance experts. However, there are two additional pathways: the value pathway perceives law as a source of competitive advantage and shows how legal knowledge can help you open up new markets, manage legal risk more efficiently and have more resources than your competitors do. Then finally, the transformative pathway uses legal knowledge to fundamentally change how the organization works. That means building a culture of integrity in the organization, enduring respect for legal rules, and supporting a close partnership between legal experts and businesspeople that generates a long-term competitive advantage that rivals cannot easily match. These pathways are explored in more detail in my book. The book also highlights how legal knowledge helps managers better understand and manage legal risk in a dynamic fashion. This can result in a first mover advantage in a new market. Companies can use the law to capture value in a way their rivals haven’t, and sustain that advantage, because they’re more versed in how the laws work than their competitors. I have applied these pathways of legal strategy to business challenges ranging from whistleblower laws to cannabis regulation. There’s a rich volume of information in this book. I also focus on legal risk management, and I apply an acronym called VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Each of those four risk management techniques presents a distinct risk but also a distinct opportunity that can help companies assess risk, effectively avoid legal liability, and generate value through a well-coordinated response. The VUCA method perceives legal risk in a novel way, enabling firms to manage legal risk better than their rivals. Q: Of the five pathways you just discussed, the fifth, transformation, can bring significant benefits, but it is one that you’ve said few companies can successfully achieve, as it requires the company to rethink the way the entire organization works. What are some of the barriers that might prevent well-meaning companies from following the transformation pathway? A: The transformation pathway requires a fundamental change in the culture of the organization that fully embraces the value of legal knowledge as a strategic asset. However, there are two primary barriers that prevent this from happening. One barrier is that lawyers will sometimes be too risk averse and will focus on the technical nature of law rather than integrating their decisions into the strategy of the firm. The other barrier is that managers do not receive sufficient legal education to appreciate the importance of law or productively communicate with their legal team. If a manager does not know what the law is or how the law works, the manager can’t ask questions of their legal counsel such as, “Can you build me a legal strategy? Can you work with me as a strategic partner?” One of my key missions is to highlight the critical importance of legal education in business schools. At schools like the University of Connecticut, we are committed to that legal education. Every student that earns an undergraduate degree or an MBA receives at least one course in business law and ethics. These students understand what law is, how law works, and why it’s important to companies. Some business schools don’t require legal knowledge to get an MBA. Their students graduate with their business degree, and even though they have this elite pedigree, they don’t understand the law. They have not learned how to read a contract, legally hire and fire an employee, avoid insider trading, deal with regulators, negotiate with counter parties, protect the environment, and a variety of other legal issues that companies face every day. No business school should bestow a business degree on a student whose entire legal knowledge comes from watching reruns of Law & Order. Law is a critical part of business education. If they don’t get legal education, they’re not going to think of their lawyers as anything more than litigators. Lawyers can be so much more valuable than that: they can be strategic partners, they can be thought leaders, they can help change the culture of the organization to one that’s committed to integrity, which is not only good for society, but improves the bottom line. Legal knowledge is the last great untapped source of competitive advantage in organizations. My recently published book helps unlock that value for anyone who wants to read it. Q: What aspects of the book do you think are especially timely now? A: Right now, regulations are more complex, more comprehensive, and more punitive than at any other time in business history. Changes in presidential administrations, and radical shifts in how legal rules are enforced, do not create a steady state for companies. All that does is create turbulence for firms and increase their cost of operations. Companies can’t take efficient risks, and they can’t optimally plan for the future. Managers need legal knowledge now more than ever in order to handle the legal standards that are in a state of almost constant change. In addition, law is critical for the global economy. Today, respect for the rule of law and the adherence to following the rule of law is being challenged in a way that it hasn’t in decades. Companies need the rule of law to survive. Unwise firms see the rule of law as just another burden or obligation or another box that needs to be checked. In fact, legal mandates establish the rules of global markets. Legal rules provide certainty in terms of their regulatory obligations, especially when they’re well written. Legal knowledge also helps companies understand how to manage their workforce and how to protect the environment. Q: You’ve said in previous discussions, regarding why rules and regulations are so complex, that “words are finite and imprecise tools that are trying to govern and account for an infinite number of situations.” How would you suggest laws be structured in order to be succinct while still managing to capture an array of scenarios and account for possible loopholes? Where is that balance? A: Legal regulation needs to be as simple as it needs to be, and no simpler. What does that mean? That means there are a bunch of ways to make laws functional and effective. First is that legislators need to be careful to draft rules that do not have deliberate opacity. The more specificity you can provide, the more guidance you have for firms. That said, if there is too much specificity, where firms lack the flexibility to respond to mandates, then the law becomes convoluted. Complex laws aren’t necessarily bad. Sometimes laws have to be complex to meet their goals. Convoluted laws, however, are unnecessarily complex, and that’s the kind of law that drafters need to avoid. This may sound counterintuitive, but Americans enjoy the significant freedom where there is strong, consistent, and well-written regulation. For example, almost every city and town in the U.S. has traffic lights. Laws that require people to listen to traffic lights restrict freedom because they stop you from getting where you need to go, while others can cross the road. But if everyone just ignored traffic lights, there would be more traffic jams, accidents, and even deaths. Getting from one place to another would be much harder. Delivering goods and services would be more difficult. So, while traffic lights restrict freedom on one level, they actually increase the freedom of people overall to get where they need to go safely and quickly. The same goes for markets. Without strong and well-written regulation, you create chaos. Law is an accelerant for commercial transactions. Laws help prevent corruption in markets. Laws enable companies to make and enforce contracts. Laws protect intellectual property rights. Laws enable free and fair global trade. Laws keep the peace so that business can flourish. You want strong business; you need strong legal rules. You want an efficient market; you need efficient regulation. Law and business go hand-in-hand to make a functioning society and global market thrive. Q: You have many papers on SSRN, which have been frequently downloaded over the past twenty-plus years. Are there any in particular that you’d like to highlight? A: I am currently studying the harmful impact that corporate tax avoidance has on society, and how tax avoidance can be more effectively prevented. I have an article talking about the moral economy against tax avoidance. A moral economy in this context is a network of beliefs that society has about certain economic practices. These beliefs arise from collectively held notions of fairness and equitable opportunity. When a wealthy taxpayer uses aggressive tax avoidance to squeeze through loopholes of legal rules and avoid paying taxes, that hurts everyone in society. A moral economy against tax avoidance would empower individuals in society to condemn the practice, thereby discouraging all but the most aggressive avoiders from circumventing their obligations to contribute to the public good. I have also co-authored an article on an organization-centered approach to whistleblowing law. Most scholars study whistleblowing law from a legal perspective and how it applies to the organization. This article focuses on how organizations can engage in self-regulation in order to better manage whistleblowing risks. Whistleblowers may be perceived as just another cost of doing business, but whistleblowing laws can be a source of competitive advantage. Applying the five pathways of legal strategy researched earlier, this article shows how companies can leverage employees who are potential whistleblowers into valuable allies that create value for the organization. Q: In addition to business law, you also have an interest in business ethics. What are the essential principles that companies must know in order to be ethical? A: There are four principles of values-driven management that every organization should fully embrace. These four principles serve as four legs of a platform of responsible business practice. The first principle is business ethics, the internal values of the firm. Business ethics focuses on the individual decision-making in the organization that shapes how the organization functions on a day-to-day basis. Strong ethical principles can be the basis of a culture of integrity. By a culture of integrity, I mean ethical values that are so strong that employees comply with those values because they believe in them and not because they have to be asked to do so. The absence of ethical principles leaves companies morally adrift and prone to mistakes that can hurt the company’s reputation or trigger legal liability. The second principle is corporate social responsibility, which focuses on a company’s obligation to its stakeholders. These include shareholders, employees, neighbors, community, society, regulators, suppliers, creditors, the environment, and others. The third principle is sustainability. Sustainability focuses on management of collective resources over time. What responsibility do organizations have not just today, but also next year, 20 years, and 50 years from now? How do we sustain an environment that will be preserved for our grandchildren and our great grandchildren? The fourth principle is business and human rights. This focuses on inalienable rights that all persons have regardless of wealth or nationality. All people have a right to life, a right to education, a right to a fair wage, and a right to be able to raise a family in a safe environment, free from war and conflict. These rights are so strong they override the economic interests of corporations. Human rights are the vanguard of these values-driven principles. Finally, my colleagues and I have developed a new program at UConn, a Master’s in Social Responsibility & Impact in Business. The program trains students not only in business principles, but also in how companies can be a source of good for society. They can also be agents for cultural change, promoting sustainability and human rights, and advancing goals of business ethics. We’re training both change makers and change accelerators in organizations. We can show them not only that acting responsibly is good for society, but also that it’s good for business in the long term. An ethical company is a profitable company. A sustainable company is a profitable company. That’s something that we are showing our students now. Q: How do you think SSRN fits into the broader research and scholarship landscape? A: I joined SSRN over 20 years ago, and it has been my go-to mechanism to distribute scholarship to the wider academic community. Virtually every manuscript that I’ve drafted goes on SSRN before it gets submitted to publication. I find it to be a key vector for disseminating my research before it eventually gets published. SSRN is a living embodiment of tomorrow’s research today. Instead of waiting potentially years to be formally published, through SSRN my working paper is shared with a wide audience in a short time. I’m just a few quick clicks away from sharing my work with interested colleagues who will be able to easily find it. I don’t have to wait until publication. When you’re on SSRN, you’re in an ecosystem where people are looking for current knowledge, and if they find your work, they’re going to cite it before it gets to publication. SSRN also brings research to me. The eJournals are one of the primary ways that I learn about research that’s not within my immediate network. SSRN is also excellent for accessing international scholarship. There are scholars in other countries that I may never hear about except for on SSRN. SSRN is a gateway to world scholarship. You can see more work by Robert Bird on his SSRN Author page here

Did you know an entire video game is dedicated to virtual pressure washing? It’s called Power Wash Simulator, and it’s weirdly compelling. Actual pressure washing is even more fun and practical, especially when you get a powerful Sun Joe Electric Pressure Power Washer for just $159 right now at Amazon. Most Prime subscribers can get free shipping in plenty of time for Memorial Day, so you can spend a long weekend obliterating dirt, grime, and algae off of everything you own. Sun Joe Electric Pressure Power Washer, 2030 PSI — $159 (was $294) Sunjoe This electric washer offers 2,030 PSI of working pressure and a 1.2 gallons-per-minute flow rate. That’s plenty of power for common tasks like cleaning a car or scrubbing your siding. It comes with a set of five different tips depending on how focused you want your water beam to be. They go from a laser-like zero-degree spread to a more casual 55-degree spray. An onboard detergent tank allows for easy soap distribution, and the 34-inch stainless steel wand provides precise control. The whole thing weighs less than 25 pounds, but a chunky handle and built-in wheels make it even easier to move than other similar models. This is a great option for someone who wants enough power to clean just about everything without the risk of causing a gnarly injection wound should you screw it up. Sun Joe 24V-PP350-LTE-P1 24-Volt IONMAX Power Cleaner Kit $68 (was $90) Sun Joe Electric Lawn Dethatcher & Scarifier with 8-Gal Bag $179 (was $229) Sun Joe Jet Leaf Blower with Cordless Compact Turbine $68 (was $100) Sun Joe GTS4001C Garden Tool System $129 (was $179) Sun Joe 24V-HCS-LTE-P1 24-Volt iON+ Cordless Mini Chainsaw $52 (was $90)

Macworld It would be inaccurate to claim that either Apple or Epic Games has decisively won their acrimonious and long-running legal dispute over the use of external payment links in iPhone apps: courts have sided with both companies at various times and in various aspects of the case. But Epic seems to be getting the better of things, after a judge angrily ruled at the end of April that Apple must allow such links and called its previous response “insubordination.” That sounds conclusive, and is a potential financial hammer blow: Apple makes a great deal of money from transactions in iOS apps, and its cut may be about to shrink. But the question remains of what now happens to Fortnite, the game that triggered the dispute back in 2020. Epic thinks it should be allowed back on the App Store, because it was banned for something that must now be allowed, but Apple thinks it was within its rights to ban the game under the rules at the time and won’t even consider a reversal until all litigation is over. Whether Apple is wise to behave in this way is debatable. Refusing to allow Fortnite to return hurts iPhone owners as much as it hurts Epic, and it feels like petty retaliation. But whether it’s legally justifiable is a different matter—one which Epic decided to test by asking the judge in the case to force Apple’s hand and arguing that the company is in contempt of that April ruling. And the judge has now responded… rather ominously. “The Court is in receipt of Epic Games, Inc.’s Motion to Enforce the Injunction,” writes Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, in a document shared by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. “The Court thus issues this Order to Show Cause as to why the motion should not be granted. Briefing […] shall include the legal authority upon which Apple contends that it can ignore this Court’s order having not received a stay from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal even though its request was filed twelve days ago on May 7, 2025.” Not the most promising start for Apple, which is instructed to explain why it hasn’t complied with the order despite receiving no encouragement from the appeals court. But it gets worse: “Obviously, Apple is fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing or a hearing. However, if the parties do not file a joint notice that this issue is resolved, and this Court’s intervention is required, the Apple official who is personally responsible for ensuring compliance shall personally appear at the hearing hereby set for Tuesday, May 27.” It’s not clear who the “official who is personally responsible for ensuring compliance” would be. MacRumors speculates that it could be an executive as high-ranking as Phil Schiller, who has responsibility for the App Store, but Apple may try to get away with someone with a lower profile. But it does seem that individual penalties, rather than or as well as more easily disregarded corporate fines, could be in the cards if the company pushes its luck much further. And it may be worth pointing out that, while obviously an extreme option in this case, contempt of court can be punished with jail time. That doesn’t mean that Apple would necessarily lose that May 27 hearing. One of the remedies given in 2021’s original judgment (see page 179, section G) by the same judge was “a declaration that (i) Apple’s termination of the DPLA [Developer Product Licensing Agreement] and the related agreements between Epic Games and Apple was valid, lawful, and enforceable, and (ii) Apple has the contractual right to terminate its DPLA with any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.” None of the rulings since then suggest a change in the judge’s position on whether Apple is allowed to boot companies from the App Store as and when it pleases. The problem is that Apple is specifically not allowed to “prohibit” the use of external payment links. It can reject apps, or ban developer accounts, at its own discretion. But if it rejects an app or bans a dev for no reason other than its use of such links, does that amount to a de facto prohibition? Again, that’s debatable. If Apple can come up with some other reason for Fortnite’s exclusion, it might be okay–and it could be helpful that the company has, in compliance with the ruling, approved updates to other high-profile apps such as Spotify and Patreon which add the links. But if it can’t, the penalties could be severe. The stakes just got a lot higher.

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SummaryAnima Flux is now available on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One.Play solo or team up in two-player co-op.Check out our survival tips to get the most out of your first run. The mutant apocalypse has arrived — and Anima Flux drops you right in the middle of it. Now available on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, this action-packed dystopian adventure invites players to step into the roles of Roy and Eileen, genetically enhanced soldiers of a failing theocratic regime. Their mission? Fight through waves of bio-mutants and uncover the haunting truths behind the collapse of humanity’s last space city. Whether you’re taking on this brutal world solo or with a partner in two-player co-op, survival will depend on how well you understand your characters’ strengths — and how you adapt your strategy to the challenges ahead. Playing in Co-op Mode: Roy and Eileen as a Team In Anima Flux, the heart of co-op play lies in the synergy between Roy and Eileen. Roy is your melee powerhouse — a close-range combatant who can take hits and dish them out. Eileen, in contrast, is an agile archer, delivering devastating damage from a distance while offering cover and tactical flexibility. Key Tips for Co-op Success Stick together, but play your roles. Roy should lead the charge and draw enemy attention, while Eileen positions herself to snipe from behind cover. Use Eileen’s mobility to kite or flank. Her ranged attacks can soften enemies before they reach Roy, and she’s great for clearing out flying enemy clusters from safe spots. Revive wisely. If one of you goes down, you can bring them back to life, but make sure the path is clear before attempting a revive. Stay united. Co-op is key — some obstacles, like pressure plates and locked lifts, can only be bypassed through teamwork. Playing Solo: One Mind, Two Warriors If you’re braving Anima Flux on your own, don’t worry — the solo experience has been carefully tuned to be just as rewarding. You’ll be able to swap between Roy and Eileen on the fly, using their abilities to respond to whatever horrors the game throws your way. Top Strategies for Solo Play Switch strategically. Roy is perfect for crowd control and absorbing damage, while Eileen excels at taking down priority targets from afar. Use the right character for each scenario. Learn enemy patterns. Managing two characters means efficiency is everything. Knowing when and where enemies spawn gives you the edge to position both characters effectively. Use the AI to your advantage. While controlling one character, the other will act based on your positioning — try leading enemies into ambush zones or using one character to distract while the other unleashes abilities. Keep moving. Especially early on, when dash abilities are limited, positioning is critical. Jump-dodging and terrain awareness can help you avoid incoming damage. A World That Doesn’t Forgive — But Rewards Mastery At its core, Anima Flux isn’t just about hacking and slashing through mutants. It’s about mastering rhythm and strategy — learning how to survive in a world that’s falling apart. Whether you’re playing with a friend or taking it on alone, every choice matters, every encounter is dangerous, and every victory feels earned. This is a world where death is always looming — but that just makes survival sweeter. Ready to Fight? Anima Flux is available now on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One. Download it today and step into a world of tactical combat, haunting beauty, and unforgiving odds. Roy and Eileen are waiting — will you survive? Anima Flux JollyCo ☆☆☆☆☆ 3 ★★★★★ $19.99 Get it now Anima Flux is a co-op metroidvania with two genetically enhanced soldiers, special agents of a theocratic dictatorial regime. Fight your way through swarms of mutants through a desolate, dystopian space city and save humanity's last stronghold, if, of course, anyone is still alive… The only human city located on the space ark is subjected to an organized mutant invasion. For the sake of survival, a theocratic totalitarian regime sends its best troops to rescue the city and eliminate the threat. Take control of two elite soldiers, combine their unique abilities and skills. Finesse your way around through the most ferocious foes. Act bravely and fearlessly. After all, you can trick death, by transferring your anima with the latest implant technology. Don’t get consumed by fear of death, because the truth is grimmer. Co-Op Metroidvania The unusual spin of the genre, turns the classic metroidvania into a fun, couch co-op adventure. Both characters develop differently as the game goes on. Explore the grim locations of the space ark, rescue an ambushed or seriously injured partner. Get challenged by dangerous mutants and build your own boss-fight strategies together with a friend. And the best part is that you can always switch to single player mode if your pal is not around. A mind-blowing dystopia The story is set in a highly detailed game world, told in stunning hand-drawn animated cutscenes, and elaborated in dialogs full of irony. Tragic and intriguing fates of the supporting characters will immerse you into the human world of the far future, where moral and ethical issues trouble the mind more than ever. Search for the truth and prepare for incredible twists and turns. Unique visual style Through the artistic lens of 80-90 retro sci-fi aesthetics, the game carefully renders a variety of futuristic 2D visuals mixed with the dark cosmic atmosphere. The post Anima Flux: How to Survive the Dystopia – Top Tips for Playing Solo or in Co-op appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Akiba756 Member Oct 1, 2020 1,600 Sao Paolo, Brazil So, there was a dumb controversy a few months ago, when E33 unveiled its MSRP of 50 dollars, some were wondering if there was a "catch" (the game is super short, unpolished, etc.) to the point that it's developer had to came foward to clarify things (which goes to show how cynical everyone is now). Expedition 33 Dev Confirms $50 Price Is Correct, '30+ Hours of Main Game' Wants as many people as possible to play RPG www.pushsquare.com So obviously, we now know that there is no catch, the game is a serious goty contender, but that had me curious, had the game been sold for 60 or even 70 bucks, do you think it would have achieved the same financial success? Obviously, less people would've bought it at launch, but considering the latest sales figure, 2 million, had it been sold at 70 bucks, it would need to sell roughly 1,43 million units to result in the same revenue, could it have reached that?  Last edited: Today at 9:02 PM Pikagreg Member Feb 5, 2018 513 I think the cheaper price definitely helped a lot of people but I think the game is worth full price a lot more than a lot of other things I end up buying.   DontHateTheBacon Unshakable Resolve Member Oct 27, 2017 14,472 Short answer: critically it would still be hugely successful and commercially, less successful but still a huge success.   808s & Villainy Member Oct 27, 2017 46,629 Of course anew IP from an unknown first time indie studio wouldn't do as well at $70 as it did at $50...   colorboy Member Apr 5, 2025 169 If by "successful" you mean "units sold" then no.   PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,763 No. Absolutely not. I think it still would've wound up in the zeitgeist but it would not have sold nearly as many copies.  Stone Ocean Member Oct 25, 2017 3,354 For me the price made it go from keeping an eye on it to an instant impulse purchase so I'd go with "no"   Khanimus Avenger Oct 25, 2017 46,440 Greater Vancouver It still would've sold, but obviously not as many as it has so far.   R3ndezvous Member Dec 17, 2024 1,338 As quick? No I don't think so. The price and word of mouth regarding the game being amazing, just made it a easy instant buy with that price being the threshold Moreover, I got the game for less than €44.95 at launch and the "gamble" paid off :)  cursed knowledge Member Mar 15, 2019 3,594 Brazil hell nah dawg the cheaper you go the more units you sell  Dyno AVALANCHE The Fallen Oct 25, 2017 16,779 I mean, I probably wouldn't have bitten at that price since I had other options then too, but that said I also think there's some, I guess shortcomings compared to AAA, where I'd have been much more critical if it was full priced. The level design for one doesn't feel up to AAA standards even at the lower end. It would still be successful is my guess but I also don't think it quite holds up for AAA pricing in some areas if it were to have launched at it.  Vincent Grayson Member Oct 27, 2017 7,356 Mount Airy, MD I got far more than 30 hours out of it, and wouldn't have balked at paying "full" price. But I think it's a given that at a higher price fewer people would check out a new title from a new developer. Perhaps moreso with it also being on Game Pass. I often wonder how much the game's price factors into the GP effect. Like, if I try something I wouldn't have bought otherwise and like it, I might buy it to support the developer further. That's *far* less likely with a game that's $70, simply on a practical level.  Xando Member Oct 28, 2017 37,600 No but probably would still have sold somewhat decent based on reviews   Mobius and Pet Octopus Member Oct 25, 2017 16,771 The game is definitely worth 70 or more, so people who bought it basically got a really good deal. Obviously value is subjective, and I'm not commenting on the hypothetical, but I wouldn't be complaining if I bought the game for 70 or even 80 because it's that special.   AAION Member Dec 28, 2018 2,006 I would have waited at $70   jitteryzeitgeist Member May 26, 2023 9,115 A quiet place I think it would've had less initial sales, but relatively the same given enough time. What really helped Sandfall was the sprint to 2 million, though. That's huge.  kami_sama Member Oct 26, 2017 7,543 I bought it the day reviews hit because it was cheap. Even if it's a great game, were it more expensive I'd have waited.  UraMallas Member Nov 1, 2017 24,425 United States Absolutely yes.   Geode Keeper of the White Materia Member Oct 27, 2017 5,476 Nope.   Lord Vatek Avenger Jan 18, 2018 24,722 Still successful but definitely not as much, nope.   Mekanos ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 17, 2018 48,536 I think $50 was impulse buy territory with the strong WOM. $70 I'm not sure. Only the studio could probably tell you the ROI.   Z-Brownie Member Nov 6, 2017 4,347 it sold quite well but i think the word of mouth and the reveals would make it sucessful anyway.   Shryke Member Oct 26, 2017 3,350 Hell no. I got it at $40. Easy choice right there. If it was higher, I'd wait for a long while. I'm sure others would too.   NotLiquid One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 37,848 Eventually. Probably. Hard to tell from my own perspective because despite people gassing up that it launched at an economical price, I already didn't buy it at $50.  Linus815 Member Oct 29, 2017 24,084 obviously not lower price = more impulse buys, lower barrier of entry  -orion- Member Oct 27, 2017 132 Anecdotally, I wouldn't buy before a sale if it was $70... so I think the price maybe plays a small part in the success  Yerffej Prophet of Regret Member Oct 25, 2017 29,419 um no   Joule Member Nov 19, 2017 4,947 Yep, sales would've been nigh identical. This is the 2025 version of that *one* game that seems to catch that "wave" and blows up thanks to WoM, internet discussion, twitter, streamers and just the general cultural zeitgeist. Nothing was gonna stop this train from reaching 2(?) million sales [as of this post]. Incredibly lucky and seems to happen to 1-2 games per year. This one also happens to be well received by critics.   Desma "This guy are sick" Member Oct 27, 2017 6,754 I wouldn't had brought it, but I think it would   Rosebud Two Pieces Member Apr 16, 2018 51,162 Nope. In US it's "only" $20, but in my country for example Clair Obscur is half the price of Doom. Insane difference.  Nano-Nandy Member Mar 26, 2019 2,840 Game's really good, but there's no denying that the price helped.   ElFly Member Oct 27, 2017 3,736 no at full price people wouldn't have overlooked the many limitations and technical faults of the game  Renteka-Bond Chicken Chaser Member Dec 28, 2017 6,030 Clearwater, Florida No and anyone saying yes, I think, has not been paying attention. It is absolutely worth the $70 bucks. People will not buy it for $70 though AND people will judge it more harshly at $70 since a lot of the facets of the game that are adorably quaint in a cheaper 'indie' dark horse story would be reviled at a higher pricepoint. Edit: It's a large part of why the narrative of "Square / Big devs should just copy Clair, look at how this worked out!" is annoying, because people are seemingly either unaware or unable to admit the obvious generosity they're giving Clair here.  Dust C H A O S Member Oct 25, 2017 40,978 $50 is impulse price point, the WoM is absolutely insane so it's really easy to jump in.   RpgN Member Oct 25, 2017 1,796 The Netherlands Nope, I would have waited on the game with a deep sale. The price along with the word of mouth is what got me to play day one. Word of mouth would have not been enough alone.   Mason56 Member Feb 8, 2024 153 I mean in terms of pure numbers sold…no. Just about everything would be more successful it were cheaper   tucah Member Oct 25, 2017 1,501 AS successful? No. Still successful? Absolutely   HellofaMouse Member Oct 27, 2017 8,360 i sure wouldnt buy it week 1 as soon as the reviews were out   Raskol Member Sep 5, 2018 845 No. Its price was one of the main reasons I picked it up now instead of later.   Alek Games User Researcher Verified Oct 28, 2017 9,797 Higher priced items very obviously tend to sell less units. I don't think this is a sensible question. The question is, if the game was one of those higher priced titles, would it still have sold enough units to generate the same revenue, as it has at the lower price. And the answer is not one that anyone on this forum can give. Because we can't know. But, to try and answer this I think it's worth considering the appeal of the lower price tag the factors that consumers are considering when making a purchase. So, most consumers are inherently risk averse by default, so they'll avoid spending if they think there might be a risk that they won't have a good time. In relation to that there are a couple of components worth discussing. 1) It's a new IP. So this means that people aren't coming into it with strong expectations about the games quality. 2) It was received very well by critics and social media influencers. I think people are more guarded with new IPs but because it was received so well, that component that would encourage a risk aversive attitude towards the game, actually gets flipped. Suddenly, people are very excited to play a new IP that's good, because they haven't had that experience in some time. I think this also heightened excitement around the game on social media, allowing it to reach more people as influencers were keen to talk about this game that seemed to come out of nowhere. So, I think in this case, it would have been likely to perform well at a higher price point too. Obviously it would have sold fewer units as some players were literally priced out, but I suspect it would have seen similar revenue. Because they've built that relationship with players, I would probably expect a sequel to target a higher price point.  Brawly Likes to Brawl Member Oct 25, 2017 16,523 Ryohei Suzuki's bedroom No. It being in the impulse buy range on top of the WoM gave it crazy momentum. I fully expect the sequel to be $70 because now it's a known and highly regarded property.  Gestault Member Oct 26, 2017 14,681 I don't think we can ever really know, but speaking personally, I don't buy $70 games unless there's some major draw (which is almost never), so I definitely wouldn't have grabbed it during this launch window. I happily grabbed a hard copy after loving what I played through Game Pass.   Mekanos ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 17, 2018 48,536 NotLiquid said: Eventually. Probably. Hard to tell from my own perspective because despite people gassing up that it launched at an economical price, I already didn't buy it at $50. Click to expand... Click to shrink... I didn't either, but that was more a function of already having too many RPGs to play. If it hits $30 that's probably my impulse buy range.   OnionPowder Member Oct 25, 2017 10,838 Orlando, FL No way. I think the $50 price tag is a bigger factor than people realize. Especially right as Nintendo and Microsoft announce $80 games.   carlsojo Shinra Employee Member Oct 28, 2017 37,551 San Francisco I think word of mouth would have carried it to commercial success regardless of the price.   HolyJonte AVALANCHE Member Aug 31, 2023 1,290 From Stockholm but now living in Padova, Italy Nope. The game is fantastic but a very big part of the record breaking user score that made much of the hype is the goodwill behind it being a new developer, old ubisoft employees, small team and the price tag. With a full price title it would probably have been much less talk about it.   kowhite Member May 14, 2019 7,454 I don't know. I don't necessarily believe it couldn't have succeeded at that price. I mean they didn't price it at 50 bucks cause they knew it would be received this way.   Splinky Member Jul 12, 2023 133 Obviously it would sell fewer copies guys. The real question is if it would've ended up with more or less revenue overall I lean toward "no". And I think a lower price point + GP makes a lot of sense for a debut studio that wants to get their name out there.  JRedCX Member Nov 10, 2020 1,277 Yeah   Universal Acclaim Member Oct 5, 2024 2,292 Alek said: Higher priced items very obviously tend to sell less units. I don't think this is a sensible question. The question is, if the game was one of those higher priced titles, would it still have sold enough units to generate the same revenue, as it has at the lower price. And the answer is not one that anyone on this forum can give. Because we can't know. But, to try and answer this I think it's worth considering the appeal of the lower price tag the factors that consumers are considering when making a purchase. So, most consumers are inherently risk averse by default, so they'll avoid spending if they think there might be a risk that they won't have a good time. In relation to that there are a couple of components worth discussing. 1) It's a new IP. So this means that people aren't coming into it with strong expectations about the games quality. 2) It was received very well by critics and social media influencers. I think people are more guarded with new IPs but because it was received so well, that component that would encourage a risk aversive attitude towards the game, actually gets flipped. Suddenly, people are very excited to play a new IP that's good, because they haven't had that experience in some time. I think this also heightened excitement around the game on social media, allowing it to reach more people as influencers were keen to talk about this game that seemed to come out of nowhere. So, I think in this case, it would have been likely to perform well at a higher price point too. Obviously it would have sold fewer units as some players were literally priced out, but I suspect it would have seen similar revenue. Because they've built that relationship with players, I would probably expect a sequel to target a higher price point. Click to expand... Click to shrink... This is what I'm thinking. Maybe slightly lower revenue, but still very successful.  

Whatever Naughty Dog is cooking it doesn’t seem to be more The Last Of Us (Sony Interactive Entertainment) The makers of The Last Of Us are working a second new game that doesn’t seem to be a sequel and is by the creative director of Mavel’s Avengers. It’s now five years since Naughty Dog has released a brand new game. That means they haven’t launched anything entirely new on the PlayStation 5, just remakes like The Last Of Us Part 1. They did announce Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet last year, but they didn’t say when it would be out or show anything other than a few seconds of gameplay. The assumption is that Intergalactic will be their next game, but studio head Neil Druckmann has revealed that he’s also working on a second unannocued new game. Naughty Dog has said before that they’re making ‘multiple’ new single-player games at the moment, but there’s no clue as to what they are. However, whatever this second title is it’s very unlikely to be The Last Of Us Part 3, because Druckmann says he is not the director. Druckmann has been inconsistent when discussing The Last Of Us Part 3, at times implying it has little chance of ever being made and at other times admitting he has an outline for the story. Sony would no doubt love a third game, but Naughty Dog’s fame and level of success appears to give them the freedom to do whatever they want, including cancelling plans for The Last Of Us Online. Druckmann’s comments were made as part of a Press X to Continue podcast, where he revealed that, ‘there’s another game that’s being worked on at Naughty Dog where I am more of a producer role.’ ‘I get to mentor and watch this other team, and give feedback and be the executive in the room,’ he added. Unless he feels it’s something Sony has forced upon the studio, it seems very unlikely that Druckmann would take such a back seat role for The Last Of Us Part 3, considering he was a director on the first two games (and heavily involved in the TV show). His comments give no clue as to what this secret game is but back in March movie insider DanielRPK suggested that Naughty Dog has a second game underway, that’s not The Last Of Us Part 3, and is being led by Shaun Escayg. More Trending That matches very closely with what Druckmann said, with DanielRPK suggesting that the new game has already been in development for three years (a triple-A game usually needs at least five years nowadays). Escayg started as an animator, before directing half-sequel Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and becoming creative director for Marvel’s Avengers and then The Last Of Us Part 1 (as that implies, he left and then rejoined Naughty Dog). Although there have been rumours of a remake, Naughty Dog has stated multiple times that it is done with the Uncharted franchise, with reports that Sony has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get other studios to work on it instead. That’s where the solid rumours dry up but there has been fan talk for some time now that Naughty Dog is working on a new fantasy IP, possibly one involving dragons. There’s little evidence for that, but if the new game has been in development for three years, that could be the source of those rumours… Uncharted: The Lost Legacy was pretty good for what it was (Sony Interactive Entertainment) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy