Apple is planning to open Siri to third-party artificial intelligence systems to bolster the iPhone's value proposition, as it is falling far behind in the race to develop the best AI-powered personal assistant.

Apple is lagging behind the competition in rolling out its own in-house AI-powered service, as the company initially intended that its AI-infused Siri upgrade would be released alongside the iPhone 16 line-up. However, due to technical difficulties and the product not meeting Apple's exceptionally high standards for uniformity across its product line, the company delayed the release of the new, smarter version of Siri until sometime in 2026.

Now, a report from Apple insider and Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has revealed that the Cupertino company is planning to open up Siri to artificial intelligence systems as part of its Siri overhaul in the upcoming iOS 27 operating system update. Notably, Siri is already capable of pulling up ChatGPT for any answers that it can't work out on-device, but following this update, users will reportedly be able to select from other competing services.

CD Projekt Group's executive management confirms that teams are using AI to help make new games, but humans are firmly in control over the tools and software.

AI is everywhere, especially in games development, but not everyone is using it in the same way. Some firms have gone all-in on AI, generative or otherwise, and other groups and teams see it as an optional tool that can help speed along development. How exactly the tools are used remains a mystery, but in the general sense, AI is used to help automate grueling tasks while also providing visual guidance in pre-production.

Whatever the case may be, it's always interesting to hear major game studios talk about their view of AI. For Polish games-maker CD Projekt, the goal is to experiment with AI and see if it actually helps, while always keeping the developers and creatives in the driver's seat.

Everything is getting more expensive, even smaller-scale niche gaming products like the Nex Playground.

On the heels of an Xbox price hike, and the PS5's suspected 100 Euro price increase across Europe, another lesser-known console-maker is also raising prices.

The kid-friendly Nex Playground mini-console will soon raise prices by $50, going from its current $249 price to a $299. If that price looks familiar, it's actually the same price that the best-selling Nintendo Switch launched at in 2017.

Oasis Management is now the largest singular shareholder in FromSoftware parent Kadokawa, and the group could pressure the company into making changes to its operations.

Sony is no longer the largest shareholder in Kadokawa Corp, and its 10% stake has been surpassed by an investment firm known for its aggressive tactics in obtaining shareholder returns. It's been revealed by video games industry analyst Dr. Serkan Toto that activist investor Oasis Management now has accumulated 11.85% stake in Kadokawa, more than any investor or group.

"Activist investor Oasis' ownership in Kadokawa reached 11.85% today - higher than Sony or anybody else. They could still add more shares. Expect Oasis to make their 'proposals to management' public soon,"Dr. Toto said on Twitter.

New reports indicate that Sony could be raising the price of its PS5 and PS5 Pro consoles in Europe.

Sony's PS5 duo may get more expensive overseas. New reports from French games content creator Gyo indicate that both the PS5 and PS5 Pro could get a steep €100 price hike, leading to a console generation with a mid-gen refresh priced at €900.

Sony has yet to confirm or deny the news, and it currently remains a speculative report, yet the company has already conducted a previous price hike on both PS5 models back in April of last year. That increase tacked on €50 to both the base and Pro systems. If accurate, this will be the second price hike in two years, with the base model having increased by a strong €150 since 2025.

AMD has officially announced the latest entry into its Ryzen 9000 X3D lineup of CPUs, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. The bizarrely named CPU is the world's first CPU with a dual 3D V-Cache design. What this means is that, unlike the previous Ryzen 9000X3D chips, which had 3D V-Cache on only one CCD, the new 9950X3D2 has vertically stacked cache on both core complexes.

Under the hood, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition features a 16-core, 32-thread configuration with a base clock of 4.3 GHz and a boost clock of 5.6 GHz. Notably, the boost clock is 100 MHz lower than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which can be attributed to the additional power required for the second cache stack. Speaking of power, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 CPU has a massive TDP rating of 200W, which is at least 30W higher than any other CPU in AMD's Ryzen 9000 lineup.

Of course, having a unique dual-cache design has its drawbacks as well, and the power draw certainly seems like a major one. The main selling point of the CPU is its massive 208MB cache pool, distributed across the two CCDs. Both core complexes have 64 MB of 3D V-cache each, in addition to 32 MB on-CCD cache, for a total of 192 MB of L3 cache. Adding L2 cache brings the total to 208MB for this single CPU.

A new benchmark has surfaced on Geekbench, thanks to BenchLeaks on X (formerly Twitter), showcasing the Core 3 304, another supposed Wildcat Lake (WCL) chip caught in the wild. The chip demonstrates a near doubling in performance versus Intel's incumbent Twin Lake (Nx50), a series of low-power E-core only processors.

Intel officially unveiled Wildcat Lake at CES this year under the Core 300 series branding. These chips omit the "Ultra" designation reserved for the flagship Panther Lake lineup. Wildcat Lake features (up to) a 2P+4LPE design, employing the same core architecture as Panther Lake: Cougar Cove for the P-cores and Darkmont for the LPE-cores. Intel is equipping these chips with a 2 Xe3 core integrated GPU, which is accompanied by an 18 TOPS NPU for on-device AI.

Unlike the complex Foveros 3D-stacking used in premium tiers, Wildcat Lake features a traditional multi-chip design (likely through UCIe), including the Compute Tile hosting the CPU, iGPU, Memory Controller, NPU, and Media Engines, fabricated on Intel 18A, while the Platform Controller tile is dedicated to I/O and connectivity, built on an external node, believed to be TSMC's N6.

Industry insider and Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier has revealed in a recent post that AAA game development costs exceed $300 million, and in some cases, much more.

Schreier revealed the details in a recent report explaining why video games now cost so much money to develop. Within this report, Schreier outlines the current state of the industry, explaining that budgets for AAA titles have been sharply increasing for quite some time, with the reporter pointing to Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which was released in 2009, costing $20 million, while The Last of Us Part 2, released in 2020, cost $220 million.

The report goes on to note that video game budgets have ballooned, mainly due to the combination of development time and salaries. Schreier writes that one employee in Los Angeles could cost the studio anywhere between $15,000 and $20,000 a month, when taking into account salary, benefits, and overhead. If the studio has 100 employees, it will be spending as much as $18 million per year. Now consider studios with thousands of employees.

Amazon has unveiled the actress who will step into Freya's shoes in the upcoming God of War live-action TV show, which recently showcased the actors playing Kratos and Atreus in costume, only to receive immediate backlash from fans.

A new report from Variety has claimed Sonya Walger, known for her role as Penny Widmore in ABC's "Lost", who joined the show in the second season and remained part of it until the sixth and final season, will be playing Freya in the upcoming God of War TV show. Additionally, Walger appeared in Apple TV series "For All Mankind" as Molly Cobb, and has been in other shows such as "The Catch", "Get Shorty", and "Night Sky".

Walger will join the other cast members, such as Ryan Hurst as Kratos, Callum Vinson as Atreus, Max Parker as Heimdall, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as Thor, Mandy Patinkin as Odin, Alastair Duncan as Mimir, Danny Woodburn and Jeff Gulka as brothers Brok and Sindri, and Ed Skrein as Baldur.

The last Jak and Daxter game was released in 2009, and since then, fans of the Naughty Dog-created franchise have been patiently waiting to hear whether a new game or a remaster was in development. The latter is more likely than the former.

Previously unseen footage has been released by Travis Howe, a senior animator at Sanzaru, who wrote in a LinkedIn post that the footage is from a pitch in which the team created a shot-for-shot remake of the beginning of the first Jak and Daxter game, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. The sequence is when Daxter falls into a dark eco silo, transforming him into the iconic sidekick that sits atop Jak's shoulder.

Howe writes that developers remastered the scene from the original game to showcase what a full remaster would look like if it were designed for current-generation consoles. Notably, Howe says the remaster wasn't commissioned by Sony, meaning the publisher didn't direct the developers to create the remaster. It was a "fan pitch" to get Sony's permission to go ahead with a remaster.

Meta and YouTube have been found liable in a landmark US court case in which a jury found that social media platforms, specifically those run by Meta and Google, can be held legally responsible for any harm that is caused to a young user's mental health.

The case was presented by a 20-year-old woman who claimed she was exposed to social media platforms from a young age, such as Instagram and YouTube, and that prolonged exposure to these platforms contributed to negative mental health effects, such as depression and even self-harm. The jury ruled in favor of the woman and found that social media platforms played a meaningful role in causing the harm.

What makes this case quite significant is that it didn't focus on the impact of users seeing harmful content, but rather on how they are designed, such as infinite scrolling, autoplaying videos, algorithm-driven recommendations, and notifications designed to draw users back to the platform. The jury agreed that these design choices can assist in developing addictive behavior, particularly in children, and the companies behind these platforms failed to warn users of their potential harm.

A new report has highlighted how much more reliable Macs are than Windows PCs in an enterprise setting.

The Register brought the report from Omnissa to our attention, which is officially entitled the 'State of Digital Workspace' (with the company, which was formerly a VMware business, offering a 'digital work platform').

There are a whole bunch of findings, as you might imagine, but the real eyebrow raiser here is just how much more prone to crashing Windows systems are than macOS, at least going by Omnissa's telemetry data.

Microsoft's console sales have been in decline since the last generation. VGChartz estimates the company sold just 34.1 million Xbox Series X and S units worldwide in 2025, compared to 86.1 million for the PS5. Rumors started circulating that the end of Xbox consoles is near. There were even doubts that Microsoft would step away from the hardware scene, but then it announced Project Helix.

Project Helix aims to deliver a PC-console hybrid that solves the age-old "console or PC" debate by merging both ecosystems. This meant that the company's next-gen console would be unlike anything seen before. Despite how promising it looked on paper, many called it Microsoft's exit plan and its last hardware endeavor. But not everyone believes that's the future of Microsoft.

In the latest episode of the XB2 podcast, Jez Corden from Windows Central stated that despite ongoing rumors, he knows Project Helix won't be the company's last Xbox console.

Samsung has a new 8TB model of its 870 Evo SATA SSD, although it's been stealthily launched with no formal announcement.

Tom's Hardware noticed that ComputerBase spotted the release of the 8TB version of the Samsung 870 Evo in Europe, and this drive is now actually on sale at some retailers (with the model number MZ-77E8T0B/EU).

This 8TB model wasn't mentioned on the Samsung web page for the 870 Evo when the German tech site wrote about its findings, although it has now just been added. So, this is now official, even though Samsung hasn't declared it as such - and it looks like retailers jumped the gun in terms of offering the drive for sale early.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently sat down for an interview where he asked about his estimated timeline on a company achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), to which he answered, "I think we've achieved AGI," albeit with some caveats.

For quite some time, Huang has been an advocate for the achievement of AGI being determined by the definition of AGI, and that definition is entirely dependent on how any given person would describe what an AGI is. In the instance of the interview with Huang, Lex Fridman proposes that an AGI would be capable of replacing Huang at the helm of NVIDIA, or be able to achieve what Huang has achieved with the company.

For example, Fridman says this particular AGI would be capable of starting, growing, and running a successful technology company, and that company needs to be worth more than $1 billion. Fridman asked Huang how long he thinks an artificial system such as this is away. In response, Huang said sharply, "I think it's now. I think we have achieved AGI". Fridman followed up by asking if it's possible for a company to run on an AI system. Huang replied, "Possible. And the reason for that is this. You $1 billion, and you didn't say forever."

If there was any doubt about whether Intel might sneak out a revamped flagship as part of Arrow Lake Refresh, we've heard news that this definitely isn't happening.

As noticed by VideoCardz, German tech site PC Games Hardware got word from Intel directly that the Core Ultra 9 290K Plus won't be inbound, and there won't be a 'special edition' of Intel's top chip (typically labelled a 'KS').

Intel told PC Games Hardware:

President Trump has announced a list of appointees to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The newly formed council will have one goal: advising the President and providing recommendations on strengthening American leadership in both scientific and technological fields.

The council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. Sacks, a general partner in Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund, and Kratsios, the current Science Advisor to the President of the United States, will be at the helm of the council, which includes some extremely notable names in the technology space, particularly, NVIDIA's Jensen Huang, AMD's CEO Lisa Su, and Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Additionally, Marc Andreessen, former software engineer and venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, is a named member, alongside Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, David Friedberg, founder of Climate Corporation, and others. Notably, since the PCAST council was formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, each President has chosen their own PCAST advisory board, which typically consists of scientists, engineers, and industry leaders at the current time.

YouTuber Stephen McCullagh has been convicted of murdering his pregnant girlfriend, Natalie McNally, in her home in Lurgan, Northern Ireland.

In December 2022, McCullagh went "live" on YouTube to play Rockstar Games' popular franchise Grand Theft Auto, but it was discovered this livestream wasn't "live" at all; it was pre-recorded footage McCullagh was trying to use as an alibi. Cyber experts determined the stream was pre-recorded, which coincides with McCullagh's written statement admitting it was fake. On March 23, 2026, McCullagh was found guilty of murder at a court in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

On the day of the murder, McCullagh disguised himself and took a bus to McNally's home, and returned to his home via a cab. The jury was informed of the faked GTA livestream that McCullagh was trying to use as an alibi, and after only two hours of discussion, the jury reached a guilty verdict. The judge convicted McCullagh of murder, and with that crime comes a life sentence.

It seems like we've been waiting for Intel to formally announce its 'Big Battlemage' graphics card for a couple of years now, with the good news being that the wait is finally over. However, according to recent rumors, the "bad" news is that 'Big Battlemage' isn't an Arc-based gaming product but an AI-focused workstation with an Intel Arc Pro B70 GPU that will ship with 32GB of GDDR6 memory and 608 GB/s of bandwidth.

It's set to launch with a $949 MSRP for the reference design, with third-party cards from ARKN, ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, Sparkle, and others on the way. Compared to the existing Arc Pro B60, the new Arc Pro B70 features 50% more memory and 60% more Xe cores, bringing the total to 32 Xe cores. And with that, AI performance across a wide range of workloads is said to be up to 60% higher.

In terms of the card's position in the market, Intel is pitting it against the more expensive NVIDIA RTX Pro 4000 graphics card, where, in a single-GPU setup, it offers up to 2X "tokens per dollar" on Linux with 367 TOPS of AI performance. In addition to the Intel Arc Pro B70, the company has announced the Intel Arc Pro B65, which is essentially the Arc Pro B60 with 32GB of VRAM instead of 24GB.

Playground Games and Xbox Game Studios' Forza Horizon 6 is one of the most highly anticipated games of the year. With the May 19 launch fast approaching, NVIDIA has confirmed that the game will launch with full DLSS 4 support and Multi Frame Generation on day one. This includes NVIDIA Reflex to reduce latency, as well as the latest DLSS Super Resolution for all GeForce RTX gamers.

In addition to support for ultrawide displays and uncapped frame rates, the game will also launch with real-time ray-traced reflections and ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) to enhance visuals for those with capable hardware. According to Playground Games, to experience the game's digital Japan with ray tracing at 1440p at 60 FPS, you'll need a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. And for 4K, a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

Forza Horizon 6 isn't the only racing game getting DLSS support this week, as the neon anime-inspired drifting of Milestone's Screamer is launching on PC on March 26th with DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation. The game will also support the latest DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution. Here's a look at DLSS gameplay from Screamer.