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Microsoft has officially hired Sam Altman, who will lead a new advanced artificial intelligence team after he was fired from OpenAI by the board, and then within hours of Microsoft hiring him, OpenAI tried to rehire and reinstate him as CEO.

In a new tweet, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said: "We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners".

"We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI's new leadership team and working with them. And we're extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success".

In little over six years' time, Fortnite has become one of the best-earning video game franchises in history.

A new updated profile for ex-Epic Games exec Donald Mustard gives valuable data and insight on just how big Fortnite really is. According to the profile, Fortnite has made over $20 billion in revenues, a figure that rivals the top echelon of gaming breadwinners. For context, in just six years, Fortnite has made lifetime revenues that are impressively close to the $31 billion+ that Call of Duty has generated in 20 years.

"During his previous tenure as Chief Creative Officer of Epic Games, Donald's direction and guidance built Fortnite into a cultural phenomenon that currently boasts over 650 million players with over 20 billion dollars in revenue. Fortnite has more than 250 million average monthly players as of 2023 and 25 million players use Fortnite daily," reads Mustard's new profile on AGBO's website (AGBO is the Russo brothers' production company that worked on a myriad of projects).

OpenAI's board of directors recently fired CEO Sam Altman, triggering massive controversy in the growing billion-dollar sector. Analysts believe Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will help calm the tumult and restore morale to the company.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been fired, with the board citing that Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

It's believed that Altman's side project Tigris is to blame for his termination--the OpenAI CEO had been seeking to raise billions of dollars to create new chips to unseat NVIDIA's dominant market position.

It's that time of the year again, with Amazon offering up crazy good discounts on tech products. Ah, yes - Black Friday!

Below, we have hand-selected what we feel are the top 16 best Black Friday 2023 tech deals on Amazon. We guarantee (well, pretty much guarantee!) that the tech lover in your life will appreciate every gift on the list. If you are unsure what to buy for that tech lover in your life, you've come to the right place. Everything below is on the list, from consumer tech, TVs, monitors, and headphones to PC parts. Some of the prices are over 50% off and definitely deserve some attention.

In order to be listed, the product had to have a great discount and something a tech lover would actually love. Let's go!

In order to gain a foothold in gaming, Google once floated the idea of teaming up with Tencent to buy 100% of Epic Games.

Driven primarily by Stadia, Google once had a roaring flame of ambition to break into video games. The search giant made a big splash in gaming throughout 2018 with its now-defunct game streaming platform-and-storefront Stadia, and to help fortify its billion-dollar disruption, Google planned to invest more into content infrastructure. Google had originally eyed some high-profile deals for Stadia before eventually settling on opening its own first-party labels and entreating third-party publishers.

According to new findings in the Epic v Google trial, ex-Stadia lead Phil Harrison had proposed an interesting idea: What if Google could ally with Tencent and completely buy Epic Games' shares? This would help supercharge Google's position with co-ownership of Fortnite, which was practically the biggest game in the world in 2018 thanks to the battle royale's astronomically-high $5.5 billion in revenues.

With Black Friday just around the corner, November could be your best opportunity of the year to snag yourself Microsoft software keys. If you have a new computer or want to upgrade your old PC, today is definitely the great time to buy Microsoft software keys at the lowest price of this year from GoDeal24's Black Friday Sale.

You can get Microsoft Office Pro 2021 on sale for only $24.24 right now (reg. $239) from today, the cheapest this year. To save more, buying Office 2021 5 PCs with friends for $74.24 (only $14.85/PC) is suggested by GoDeal24. Microsoft Office for Windows includes eight apps -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Teams, Outlook, Access, and Publisher -- and unlike Microsoft 365, you only have to pay once, with no monthly fees needed. As soon as you've submitted payment, you'll get a personal activation code via email and download instructions to start using Microsoft Office immediately.

Windows 11 Professional is now available at a whopping 90% discount, bringing the price down to $11.24 during the GoDeal24 Black Friday Sale. Windows 11 Professional brings huge improvements designed to streamline and enhance remote work. If you have multiple computers at home or want to buy with friends, you can choose a combination of multiple Keys, which is more cost-effective!

Apple's Vision Pro headset was announced during the WWDC event on June 5 and at the time the company said that we should expect it to be made available to buy in early 2024. We're still waiting for a more concrete timeframe with which to work and it hasn't been forthcoming. However, a new report appears to suggest that we shouldn't expect the headset to break cover until a little later in the year than some of us had hoped.

Apple's vague early 2024 window does leave plenty of wiggle room of course and it could realistically mean anything in the first six months of the year. Still, some would hope for a release in the first few weeks of 2024 but that now seems unlikely based on a report by the normally well-connected Mark Gurman.

Gurman was writing in the weekly Power On newsletter for Bloomberg when he poured cold water on any hopes for a Vision Pro release in January or February. According to him, we should look towards March instead.

Apple only announced the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro a few weeks ago, but it's already working on what comes next - and likely what comes after that, too. In terms of the iPhone 16 Pro, expectations are already high, and now a new leak claims to have shared information about what will go inside that high-end model. Specifically, it appears to have leaked the battery that will power the iPhone 16 Pro.

While we can likely expect a different part to be used in the iPhone 16 Pro Max, the smaller iPhone 16 Pro is now rumored to have a larger battery than the iPhone 15 Pro that is on sale currently. However, the difference in size isn't going to be a huge one which means we shouldn't expect any huge improvements in how long iPhone 16 Pro buyers can go between charges.

The leak itself comes via a post to X by an account called Kosutami which has had a relatively solid track record when it comes to sharing accurate information about Apple devices in the past. However, it's important to remember that this doesn't necessarily mean that we can guarantee that this leak is legitimate. We might have to wait until September next year before we can know for certain.

GEEKOM is back again with another incredible deal for TweakTown readers just in time for Black Friday. This time around, its Mini IT11 small form factor mini PC powered by Intel's 11th Gen Core i7-11390H CPU, 1TB SSD, 32GB of RAM (expandable to 64GB) is up for grabs for just $449, and Microsoft Windows 11 Pro comes installed.

When not on sale, this highly capable little system sells for $849, but right now, you can save a huge $400 when buying it from GEEKOM. That's half price! Just enter coupon code tweaktown25 at checkout to remove $25 from the price between November 20 and 30th, 2023.

GEEKOM's Mini IT11 is a tiny PC weighing just 565 grams and measuring 117 x 112 x 45.6mm - it's small enough to almost fit in your pants pocket. It is powered by Intel's 11th Gen Core i7-11390H processor (4 Cores, 8 Threads, 12MB Smart Cache, and up to 5GHz Max Turbo Frequency) with a TDP of just 35 watts and Intel Iris Xe graphics. It comes installed with 32GB DDR4 SO-DIMM memory modules in dual-channel mode, with upgradability up to 64GB if required. Also included is a 1TB 2280 M.2 PCIe/SATA SSD, which is upgradable to a 2TB drive in a system which costs $50 more for the larger storage option.

The week of Black Friday deals are here and Amazon has a variety of discounts across its online marketplace, with a few select companies slapping big discounts on products.

Two companies that have gotten out ahead with crazy deals are Western Digital and Sandisk, both of which have heavily discounted a healthy range of products. Western Digital has slapped discounts ranging from 17% all the way up to nearly 30% on select NVME M.2 SSD's, and storage expansion cards for the Xbox Series X. As for Sandisk, the memory company has led the charge with insane discounts of more than 60% across a variety of microSD cards and SDXC memory cards.

The Sandisk sales also include portable SSDs of various capacities, thumb drives, SATA SSD's, USB SSD drives. If you are considering purchasing extra storage for your gaming system, I'd recommend taking advantage of these limited time deals as now would be a great time to pick up a high quality drive for a very good price. Below you will find some of the best deals from Western Digital and Sandisk.

The early Black Friday deals are here, with Samsung cutting prices across a variety of different memory cards and drives on Amazon.

Black Friday is the perfect time to keep an eye out for a really good deal on some new technology, or even to secure and early Christmas present for that lucky someone else. If you have a gamer that you need to buy a gift for, and you don't want to spend a whole lot of money, pick up an SSD. Gamers that can take advantage of multiple M.2 slots will always appreciate having additional storage.

The same principle goes for content creators, specifically camera users. Samsung has slashed prices across a variety of different micro-SD memory cards, with some discounts even reaching as high as 42%. Below you will find some of the best deals that are currently available on Amazon. Happy bargain shopping!

In what seems to be a completely unexpected departure from the hottest company in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired from his position on Friday.

The departure of Altman seemingly came out of nowhere, with no inkling of the firing being found anywhere online. The board of OpenAI took to its website to announce that it has lost faith in Altman's ability to continue leading the company and that he was "not consistently candid in his communications". OpenAI's board gave a statement and said that it's "grateful for Sam's many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," while adding, "At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward."

Altman responded a few hours later with a post on X, saying, "i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. Will have more to say about what's next later." Altman described the experience as feeling like "reading your own eulogy while you're still alive."

Elon Musk has taken to his personal X account to announce that X Corp will be filing a lawsuit against Media Matters and all those that participated in what Musk describes as a "fraudulent attack on our company".

The controversy began when the owner of the social media platform formerly called Twitter, now called X, replied to a post that stated Jewish communities support "dialectical hatred against whites". The divisiveness of this post had more fuel added to the fire when Media Matters, a nonprofit media watchdog group, published a story that reported X was placing ads next to pro-Nazi content. The initial post from Musk led to reports of major advertisers temporarily pausing advertising expenditure with X, which was further exacerbated following Media Matters' report.

Musk took to his personal X account with a response to these reports, stating that as soon as the courts open on Monday morning, X Corp will be filing a "thermonuclear" lawsuit against Media Matters and "ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company". Musk followed up with another post, adding, "Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them ..." The lengthy statement that Musk had attached to his post claims Media Matters' report attempted to "misrepresent the real user experience" on X, "undermine freedom of speech," and "mislead advertisers".

Intel's Core i3-14100 CPU is already on sale over in China - well, in a manner of speaking, as we're told that this is prerelease silicon.

VideoCardz has the scoop on this one, with the site noticing that leaker Harukaze5719 posted a photo of the chip on X (formerly Twitter). Apparently it's on sale via Goofish, priced at an equivalent of around $120.

This Core i3-14100 is apparently an engineering sample, though it has the same specs as the finished version will - meaning it's a quad-core (8-thread) CPU with a base clock speed of 3.5GHz (as previously rumored).

Reports indicate that Meta has disbanded its Responsible AI (RAI) team, which was dedicated to ensuring Meta develops AI-powered systems responsibly.

The splitting up of the team was discovered through a new report published in The Information, which cited an internal post it gained access to. The report stated that the majority of the now-former RAI team was to be moved to the generative AI product team, which is currently working on various projects with AI-generated content such as text, video, images, and audio. Some of the other former members of the RAI team have been moved to the AI infrastructure team, which is a more technical-based position.

These changes are hardly a surprise as company CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that tough times were ahead for the company as it would be undergoing a cleaning house and complete reshuffling as a result of the economic climate. Zuckerberg said back in February that 2023 was the "year of efficiency" that will be honed in on identifying Meta's key strengths and doubling down on them. That year-long and ongoing process has seen many rounds of layoffs, internal mergers, and various company restructurings.

AOC has launched its newest gaming monitor, adding another eye-catching display to its stack of offerings. Introducing the U27G3XM, a 4K 160Hz QD-MiniLED gaming monitor that's priced at $480.

AOC is no stranger to the gaming monitor market and has made its name a staple for making affordable low to mid-range displays that can be both used strictly for gaming, as well as work activities. Earlier this month AOC announced it was launching U27G3XM in Chinese markets for a price of 3499 yuan, or approximately $480 USD. The U27G3XM is a 27-inch display with a 3840 x 2160 resolution, smooth 160Hz refresh rate, a peak brightness of 1200 nits thanks to its MiniLED technology which ushers in 2304 precise LED light sources.

The U27G3XM also features HDR1000 certification, 10-Bit color, 1.07 billion colors and a 98% DCI-P3 color gamut. Moving onto connectivity, the U27G3XM comes with a 3.5mm audio output, two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4, one USB upstream port, and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports. Furthermore, the U27G3XM comes with Adaptive Sync technology and a 1ms GTG response time. If you are interested in reading more about the U27G3XM, check out this link here.

A ground-based telescope in Chile has shared its highest-resolution image ever, showcasing the final stages of star evolution within our galaxy 1,350 light-years from Earth.

The telescope is officially called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and is the largest millimeter-wave telescope in the world. Recently, the ground-based telescope pushed its capabilities by capturing its highest-resolution image to date, with researchers pointing its sensitive instruments at a star called R Leporis. To push ALMA to new levels, researchers devised a new calibration technique called band-to-band, enabling astronomers to probe objects with a level of precision that was once beyond their reach.

The new image was released on November 15 and was captured using ALMA's highest frequency Band 10 receiver. This array configuration spans some 10 miles, and allows the telescope to see objects at an angular resolution of 5 milli-arcseconds, or the equivalent of seeing a 33-foot-long bus on the surface of the moon from Earth.

On Friday, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, Starship, took off from the surface of Earth in its second orbital launch attempt.

The historic launch marks the second time SpaceX's Starship has attempted to reach orbit, and while the launch did end with the Starship vehicle exploding, it was deemed a success as many mission objectives were reached. Starship is the world's largest and most powerful rocket, and during its development phase, there will be catastrophic failures. With each failure, more is learned about how to fly such a massive rocket (394 ft fully stacked), with the ultimate goal being able to send Starship to orbit and safely back down to the surface of Earth reliably - much like Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy.

The first orbital launch attempt took place on April 20, 2023, and Starship was unable to complete hot-staging, or the part of the mission where the first stage, or booster (called Super Heavy), separates from the second stage, Starship. That was the main objective of the second orbital launch attempt, and SpaceX was able to achieve a safe separation, continuing the mission for many minutes until a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) was initiated.

Designed for its lineup of Radeon RX 7000 GPUS, ASRock AI QuickSet is a new software tool from the company that allows you to download and install popular AI applications like Shark Studio AI and Stable Diffusion web UI and frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch - and then fire them up!

ASRock has created the application to alleviate the complexities and unknowns surrounding running AI tools on modern PCs, and it's compatible with all Intel 13th and 14th gen systems and AMD Ryzen 7000 and 5000 series systems running ASRock Radeon RX 7000 Series GPUs. Software-wise, in addition to the latest Radeon driver release from AMD, you'll also need Windows 11 22H2 64-bit or later.

It's a very cool tool and something we're surprised hasn't been put together until now. With a simple installation window that lets you pick and choose which AI applications to install, all you need to do from there is fire up the AI applications via ASRock's launcher, and you're good to go.

With a crowdfunding early bird price of $699 USD, the AYANEO Slide is the latest PC gaming handheld from the company to feature the impressive Phoenix APU-tech from AMD - the Ryzen 7 7840U - with a max power consumption of 28W. What makes this handheld a little different from other AYANEO products and systems like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally is that the 6-inch 1080p IPS display is a "floating screen" that slides up to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard.

The official MSRP for the AYANEO Slide is $899 USD, so the competitive price point of $699 USD is limited to the crowdfunding period. Although the display panel technology is IPS over OLED, the specs are impressive.

In addition to the Full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, the 368PPI pixel density, 400-nit brightness, and 100% sRGB color coverage should make for a wonderful display. On top of this, you've got the full keyboard, ergonomic design utilizing PC and glass fiber materials, plus gamer-friendly hall-sensing analog sticks and hall effect triggers.