Month: July 2021

Eyeing an even bigger slice of the media pie, Netflix is planning an imminent expansion into the video game space, and has reportedly tapped a former Electronic Arts and Facebook executive to helm the initiative.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg News was the first to report that Netflix had selected Mike Verdu — most recently vice president of augmented reality and virtual reality content at Facebook — to serve as vice president of game development. Once installed at the platform, Verdu will report to Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, according to Bloomberg.

The announcement represents just the latest push by Netflix into a space beyond streaming content like television shows and movies — a realm that the platform has signaled to its 200 million subscribers for years that it was eager to delve into. Netflix first hinted at a potential market expansion during the E3 gaming conference in 2019, when it announced a planned mobile game based on the “Stranger Things” franchise.

Since then, Netflix has been less than coy about its proposed expansion: In a 2019 letter to shareholders, the company named — Fortnite — a popular video game known that has something to do with dancing, if I’m not mistaken — as its primary competition. And in May of 2021, The Information first reported that Netflix was seeking an executive to boost its investments in the gaming space. It’s also not the first time Netflix has sought to blur the line between traditional streaming content and more avant-garde media, including recent interactive features like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Carmen Sandiego.

If the stock market is to be trusted — and let’s face it, it’s not — Netflix is making moves that appeal to stakeholders, with shares rising 2% in extended trading on Wednesday following the announcement of Verdu’s appointment. If all this keeps going apace, it looks like we’d all better brace ourselves for My Octopus Teacher: The Interactive Deep Sea Experience by 2025.

Valve has revealed a new portable PC platform called Steam Deck, letting you take and play Steam games on the go with onboard storage rather than cloud streaming. Starting at $399 for the 64GB model and going to up to $649 for the 512GB version, the Steam Deck releases this December, and fortunately, you’ll be able to reserve one for yourself starting tomorrow, July 16, at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET.

How to preorder the Valve Steam Deck

Rather than traditional preorders, Valve is rolling out Steam Deck orders with a reservation system that will cost you $5 upfront. Once reservations open tomorrow, you can reserve the model of your choice for $5, and when inventory becomes available in December, Valve says customers will be notified in the order in which reservations were made. At that point, you’ll then be prompted to make the full purchase. You’ll only be able to purchase the Steam Deck model you reserved (no changes will be available in December), so choose wisely. Only one Steam Deck can be reserved and ordered per customer.

When Steam Deck preorders open on Friday, you’ll be able to reserve one through the link below. You can set an email reminder there as well.

Steam Deck preorder qualifications

In order to reserve the Valve Steam Deck, your Steam account must be in an eligible region: the US, Canada, European Union, or the United Kingdom. (More info about availability in other regions is coming soon, Steam says.) Your Steam account must also be in good standing for the first 48 hours of reservations availability, and you must have made a purchase on Steam prior to June 2021.

Steam Deck pricing

Here are the Steam Deck options you’ll be able to reserve/preorder and what they include:

Steam Deck, 64GB eMMC | $399

Steam Deck, 256GB NVMe SSD | $529

• Faster storage
• Carrying case
• Exclusive Steam Community Profile bundle

Steam Deck, 512GB NVMe SSD | $649

• Fastest storage
• Premium anti-glare etched glass
• Exclusive carrying case
• Exclusive Steam Community profile bundle
• Exclusive virtual keyboard theme

The Steam Deck features a 7-inch touchscreen, two thumbsticks, a D-pad, and a four-button layout. It somewhat resembles a Nintendo Switch, but its “controllers” are slightly thicker with more of a curved grip that presumably will be more comfortable using in handheld mode.

An official dock will be available too, allowing you to prop up the Steam Deck while connecting to a monitor or TV (you can also use a powered USB-C hub for this, Steam says). The dock will be sold separately, and there’s no information on price for that.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

As the billionaire space race heats up, it’s easy to get the wrong message. Having no understanding of how we got to this point, the media often frame it as an elite group of rich boys trying to literally one-up each other as they thrust themselves into the sky.

They are. But what is missing from these reports, editorials, and opinions is any understanding of what is really happening, why it is happening, and where it may lead us — all of us — not just them.

For 40 years, a group of space revolutionaries have been fighting to get America and the world to exactly this point. To us this is a victory. What those from the outside see as a group of poster children for the evils of the rich, we see as people enabling a huge breakthrough to create a better future for everyone on the planet. What some characterize as the in your face waste of money better spent on their own versions of public service, we see as a significant investment in the one area of human endeavor that has the possibility of helping solve a host of human problems, ranging from the intangibles of inspiration to the very real effects of human industry on the Earth.

Related: How to watch Virgin Galactic launch Richard Branson to space
More: The long road to spaceflight for Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin

Yes, I do get that there are massively over-bloated egos involved here. I also get that in their businesses, some of these men (and yes, they are unfortunately all men — for now) do not apply the correct levels of compassion, fairness, and generosity to those who helped them earn the money they are spending on space projects.  I also conceded they might not be the personal role models one might wish to see leading such important work. I get it. I know or have met them all. And they exhibit the common flaws of almost all who have created massive wealth. They are socially awkward, impatient, and, thanks to the circles of sycophants and managers around them, at times out of touch with the realities of ordinary life.

Yet we live in a society that glorifies money and fame, one in which utterly useless influencers milk the masses for money, and cash cows like the Kardashians become idols.  We forgive the scandals of stars, and worship multi-millionaire athletes for no other reason than their fabulousness and physical prowess. I find it a bit ludicrous in such a society, where the quest for power and money is The defining paradigm, that when a few of the most successful among us put some of their hard-earned wealth into projects to break us out into a new level of being, they become targeted as icons of evil.

Related: Meet the crew launching on Virgin Galactic’s 1st fully crewed flight

Let’s be very clear. Whatever mechanism these folks use to launch themselves or their machines into space, whoever they may be in their personal lives, these people are trying to do something good for humanity and the planet. They are investing in a better future. They are developing systems and technologies to break us out of the cage of gravity and allow us to open this little backwater of a planet to the rest of the universe.

While, for obvious reasons, the word itself is a bit hard for those in the space field to use, they are making the ultimate “impact” investment. They are investing billions in opening a railroad to space we will all be able to travel — billions they could have used to buy sports teams, palaces, and pet politicians. Instead, they are putting the future where their mouths are.

If they succeed, we will be able to shift what has been a civilization-long attack on the Earth’s resources to support our growing society into the emergence of a new space economy that can attack the problems of global warming. By investing the profits made selling us media, cars, and the cornucopia of everything else they deliver to our doors, we get the chance to reverse the rape of our Mother World.  Instead of ripping the metals and minerals we use in our materialistic society out of her sacred soil, we can harvest them from the dead rocks of space. And as we get out there ourselves, as we have seen in almost every human-to-human interaction in space, they can help us model new ways of being, new ways to be together, and new ways to appreciate each other. Also, by simply looking back down and experiencing the Overview Effect, being up there creates new ways of thinking about our delicate and beautiful planet down here.

When I speak to reporters and groups, I also like to make one badly misunderstood yet important point about Elon, Jeff and Richard, who are pouring their money into opening the Frontier.

At least when it comes to them, these billionaires are not doing space to make money. They made their money to do space.

Look at their life history. These are not the robber barons of the 1800s. Jeff Bezos gave a high school commencement speech where he talked of settling space. Elon Musk tried to send a symbolic living sample of Earth life to Mars with his fortune from eBay buying PayPal. And Richard Branson’s ongoing social and environmental work is well known. They are Apollo’s children. Raised on images of humans both ready to destroy the Earth and yet exploring the cosmos, who chose to use their massive fortunes to free us to try new ways of living together in new societies out there, and fire the dreams of the next generation, rather than conquer others and fill the sky with the smoke of industry.

As to those who might buy tickets to take rides to space, it is and has always been true that the spending of the rich as early technology adopters often subsidizes the development of things that make all of our lives better. For example, there’s that massive flat screen on your wall, which now costs less than the first tiny TVs only the rich could once afford. Or consider your ability to fly anywhere, once only available to the wealthy “Jet Set.” Or, more directly, that Tesla in a suburban driveway. Or a thousand other things we now take for granted.

In this case, the tech is that of spaceflight, the improvement is making it cheap and affordable, and the result will be access to the rest of the universe — for the rest of us.

Yes, we have a society warped by its design to drive wealth upwards to a tiny percent of our population. Yes, those who sit at such pinnacles of power need to do a much better job sharing their bounty — preferably with the employees who made them rich. Yes, watching the playing out of a battle of egos to see whose rocket ship is bigger, can go further, and stay up longer is as ridiculous at times as most of the other things that a bunch of male nerds often do. And yes, the society that produces such focused financial power needs to be reformed.

I get it. In their Earthly works, they need to be more kind, more friendly, pay their people more, and generally be better humans.

But I ask you to get this. The last space race was between nations that wanted to blow each other up and take the planet with them. Even now, there is another, much more ominous space race shaping up between the world’s democracies and dictatorships like China and Russia to control the moon and the rest of the solar system. I ask you to get that we, the taxpayers, collectively invest trillions in races to develop weapons of death and destruction that can fly further and blow up more stuff. And look in the mirror and get that in the name of our own egos, we dump billions into bigger, badder, gas-guzzling greenhouse growing metal boxes on wheels, and ever bigger billboard-like boxes than we could ever need to live in – just because we have the money. We are human. So are they.

These visionary billionaires could dissolve their fortunes and hand each of us a few dollars that would quickly vanish into the sea of spending we all do every day to no noticeable effect. Why not let them put that money into doing the heavy lifting that can help build a future that might well give us the tools to save us all? That is an inspiration to us all, and offers the possibility to reinvent ourselves as we all eventually get the chance to fly tomorrow where they fly today?

There are many icons and egos out there whose power and fortunes come from worse places and are being used to do much worse things. And there have been and are other races going on right now, be it in arms, energy, and government vs. government space races that highlight the worst in us and offer nothing in return to humanity for the waste they create.

I say let’s let them run this one. Gravity be damned, don’t spare the egos. After all, No matter who wins, we all will win in the end.

Rick Tumlinson is the founder of SpaceFund, a venture capital firm investing in space startups. He also founded the Space Frontier Foundation, Earthlight Foundation and New Worlds Institute and is a founding board member of the X Prize Foundation. 

 Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Artificial intelligence is now helping to design computer chips—including the very ones needed to run the most powerful AI code.

Sketching out a computer chip is both complex and intricate, requiring designers to arrange billions of components on a surface smaller than a fingernail. Decisions at each step can affect a chip’s eventual performance and reliability, so the best chip designers rely on years of experience and hard-won know-how to lay out circuits that squeeze the best performance and power efficiency from nanoscopic devices. Previous efforts to automate chip design over several decades have come to little.

But recent advances in AI have made it possible for algorithms to learn some of the dark arts involved in chip design. This should help companies draw up more powerful and efficient blueprints in much less time. Importantly, the approach may also help engineers co-design AI software, experimenting with different tweaks to the code along with different circuit layouts to find the optimal configuration of both.

At the same time, the rise of AI has sparked new interest in all sorts of novel chip designs. Cutting-edge chips are increasingly important to just about all corners of the economy, from cars to medical devices to scientific research.

Chipmakers, including Nvidia, Google, and IBM, are all testing AI tools that help arrange components and wiring on complex chips. The approach may shake up the chip industry, but it could also introduce new engineering complexities, because the type of algorithms being deployed can sometimes behave in unpredictable ways.

At Nvidia, principal research scientist Haoxing “Mark” Ren is testing how an AI concept known as reinforcement learning can help arrange components on a chip and how to wire them together. The approach, which lets a machine learn from experience and experimentation, has been key to some major advances in AI.

The AI tools Ren is testing explore different chip designs in simulation, training a large artificial neural network to recognize which decisions ultimately produce a high-performing chip. Ren says the approach should cut the engineering effort needed to produce a chip in half while producing a chip that matches or exceeds the performance of a human-designed one.

“You can design chips more efficiently,” Ren says. “Also, it gives you the opportunity to explore more design space, which means you can make better chips.”

Nvidia started out making graphics cards for gamers but quickly saw the potential of the same chips for running powerful machine-learning algorithms, and it is now a leading maker of high-end AI chips. Ren says Nvidia plans to bring chips to market that have been crafted using AI but declined to say how soon. In the more distant future, he says, “you will probably see a major part of the chips that are designed with AI.”

Reinforcement learning was used most famously to train computers to play complex games, including the board game Go, with superhuman skill, without any explicit instruction regarding a game’s rules or principles of good play. It shows promise for various practical applications, including training robots to grasp new objects, flying fighter jets, and algorithmic stock trading.

Song Han, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, says reinforcement learning shows significant potential for improving the design of chips, because, as with a game like Go, it can be difficult to predict good decisions without years of experience and practice.

His research group recently developed a tool that uses reinforcement learning to identify the optimal size for different transistors on a computer chip, by exploring different chip designs in simulation. Importantly, it can also transfer what it has learned from one type of chip to another, which promises to lower the cost of automating the process. In experiments, the AI tool produced circuit designs that were 2.3 times more energy-efficient while generating one-fifth as much interference as ones designed by human engineers. The MIT researchers are working on AI algorithms at the same time as novel chip designs to make the most of both.

Other industry players—especially those that are heavily invested in developing and using AI—also are looking to adopt AI as a tool for chip design.