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Rumour: Call of Duty's $300 Million Xbox Game Pass Gambit Could End
Xbox owners may soon have to buy the game like on PS5
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
Tyson Fury vs. Arslanbek Makhmudov odds, prediction: Picks for April 11 fight from proven boxing expert
Expert Josh Nagel reveals his boxing best bets for the April 11 Tyson Fury vs Arslanbek Makhmudov bout
'I Saw How It Was Getting Damaged': Ex-Bethesda Exec Goes to Town on Xbox's Mistreatment
"That shouldn't be a surprise to you"
Pokemon Center Announces Early Access Program for Preordering! -...
The Pokemon Center has announced a new early access program through an update to its FAQ. Customers subscribed to the Pokemon Center newsletter and
Unique X, Imagica Entertainment Media Services Partner to Transform Japanese Cinema Advertising Business
Digital cinema software provider Unique X and Imagica Entertainment Media Services (Imagica EMS), the market leader in Japan for post-production and media services, today announced the signing of a full long-term agreement, building upon their original Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). This strategic partnership establishes a robust framework for an exclusive collaboration aimed at transforming and […]
Professor Layton and the New World of Steam Adds PC and PS5 Release to 2026 Global Simultaneous Launch — but There’s No Xbox Version
Professor Layton and the New World of Steam is coming to PC via Steam and PlayStation 5 as well as Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, developer Level 5 has confirmed.
Kiln open beta lets you check out the Xbox Game Pass game on Steam before launch
Players on PC can now check out the upcoming multiplayer pottery game Kiln on Steam via Double Fine's new open beta for the upcoming Game Pass title.
Xbox Is Sending Out Project Helix Gift Packages Signed By New Boss Asha Sharma
No console yet, just a bunch of free merch
'Graveyard Keeper' Is Available To Claim For Free On Xbox For A Limited Time
Here's when you can grab it!
What one campaign rally in Michigan reveals about young voters right now
Attendees didn't fit neatly into any ideological box.
Windows and Xbox are now prioritizing user feedback in a huge pivot ... but why now? I can't help but be suspicious — it smells a bit like panic.
Is Microsoft's big AI push falling off the rails? Possibly, but not for the reasons you might think.
Kiln: Double Fine Shares Their Favorite Pots as Open Beta Goes Live
Now’s your chance to sample Kiln before launch on April 23 during the Open Beta Throwdown on Steam – and Double Fine is here to help inspire your creations with some of their most-favorite pots! Pre-order Kiln today on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
The Lift adds PS5 and Xbox Series versions, delayed to 2027
First-person, narrative-driven, supernatural handyman simulator The Lift for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam in 2027, publisher tinyBuild and developer Fantastic Signals announced. The…
Warhammer Survivors adds PS5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and Switch versions
Survivors-like roguelite action game Warhammer Survivors will launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Switch 2, and Switch alongside its previously announced PC (Steam) version in 2026, developer Au…
TNT Sports & DAZN Launch Landmark U.S. Partnership with New Monthly Live Boxing Event Series "The Fight"
TNT Sports and DAZN today announced a groundbreaking new partnership that will bring some of the biggest fights in boxing live to TNT Sports and DAZN
Avec's Tinder-styled email app allows you to swipe through your inbox
Users can use the in-built voice transcription tool to reply to emails
Xbox Boss Reveals New 'Dedicated Team' Focusing On Fan Feedback
Following the rollout of new achievement features
Xbox Achievements are getting some major changes, including the option to hide embarrassing games that you don't want to show off
Xbox is changing the achievement system, allowing for visual customization, hiding specific games, and highlighting others.
Xbox’s New System Update Delivers Overhaul Gamers Have Been Begging For
Xbox has finally listened to console user feedback with a major system update rolling out now.
A Look At AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) Valuation After Record Easter Weekend Box Office Momentum
AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) is back in focus after reporting record Easter weekend results, with more than 6 million guests and strong food, beverage, and merchandise revenue tied to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. See our latest analysis for AMC Entertainment Holdings. The record Easter weekend has arrived alongside a sharp short term rebound, with a 7 day share price return of 30.1% and 1 month share price return of 18.6%. However, this sits against a 1 year total shareholder return...
Sindhu faces tough test in badminton Asia C'ships; medal matches in boxing, Shooting WC, Candidates continue: Indian Sports LIVE, April 9
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on April 9, 2026.
Sindhu faces tough test in badminton Asia C'ships; medal matches in boxing, Shooting WC, Candidates continue: Indian Sports LIVE, April 9
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on April 9, 2026.
Zuffa Boxing adds two more to active fighter roster
Zuffa Boxing continues to expand its roster.
No Charges for Wisconsin Mayor Who Removed Ballot Drop Box in 2024
A special prosecutor said a review of the incident found there was not sufficient evidence to charge Doug Diny, the mayor of Wausau.
VIDEO: Suspect steals checks from Upstate business drop box
Police officers in Clemson have asked the public for any information about a theft that occurred at a business early Monday morning.
VIDEO: Suspect forcibly opens drop box, steals checks from Clemson business: Police
Anyone with information on the suspect is asked to call or test (864) 624-2014 and reference Case #2026-000853.
Video shows suspect using crowbar to steal checks from Upstate business
Detectives are asking the public for help identifying a suspect who broke into a drop box and stole checks from a local business.
California Supreme Court orders GOP sheriff to pause election probe and preserve seized ballots
The dispute started earlier this year when Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 1,000 boxes of election materials to investigate a complaint from a local citizens group about the ballot count from a November 2025 special election on redistricting.
Xbox Achievements Get Overdue Update To Address Feedback
It's one of a number of features the platform is spiffing up to address fan feedback
Seattle Mariners vs. Athletics - Live Score
View the Seattle Mariners vs. Athletics game played on September 12, 2026. Box score, stats, play-by-play timeline, highlights, odds & more
Xbox Achievements Are Getting A 'Refresh' With Multiple New Improvements
"We’re excited to hear what you think"
Wausau Mayor Doug Diny won’t face charges over ballot drop box removal case
The review determined that the box didn’t meet the state’s definition of “ballot box” in part because it was sealed and didn’t have any ballots in it.
Invincible VS Open Beta Begins Tomorrow: What You Need to Know
Get ready to suit up – Invincible VS’s Open Beta begins tomorrow, and everything you need to know is inside:
Darren Till signs with BKFC after Misfits split: 'I’m coming to be the face of violence'
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MAGA’s favorite strongman might be on the brink of defeat
We’re about to find out whether an authoritarian can lose at the ballot box.
Forza Horizon 6 Preview: Collectibles, Seamless Races and Open World Design Make for the Most Explorable Adventure Yet
Forza Horizon 6 takes interconnectivity to a new level with seamless races and events, collectibles, and much more, all accessible from the game's stunning open world.
‘The Beast’ is here, plus a base-brawl
The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! I hope you have a favorite fact about yourself ready. Inside: 📘 600 pages of NFL Draft 🥊 Base-brawl 🐘 Behold the Zammoth I come to you this morning with a confession. I find most pre-draft content, for any sport, exhausting. Not because of the specific article or mock draft or report, but because of the cycle itself. We are yammering about the infinite possibilities of something that has not happened yet. At a certain point,...
Indians in action at badminton, boxing, wrestling Asian C'ships; shooting WC, chess Candidates continue: Indian Sports LIVE, April 8
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on April 8, 2026.
Indians in action at badminton, boxing, wrestling Asian C'ships; shooting WC, chess Candidates continue: Indian Sports LIVE, April 8
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on April 8, 2026.
Nothing’s noise-canceling CMF Buds 2A are down to $19.99 for the rest of today
The earbuds check a lot of boxes for the price.
🤯 Too old? Neuer back in prime mode against Real
Manuel Neuer once again came under fire after conceding two goals in Freiburg on Saturday. He did not look particularly good on either goal and even completely missed the ball once in the six-yard box...
The First Reviews Are Going Live For Starfield's Terran Armada Expansion
Is it worth grabbing the new DLC?
The Xbox Game Pass list for April is big and includes Hades 2, FBC: Firebreak, Replaced, and more
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AMC Entertainment Put On A Great Show
AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. stock jumps on record Easter box office results. Click for this updated look at AMC shares following the latest news.
Nate Diaz rejected bigger UFC offer for Netflix MMA return
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Coming to Xbox Game Pass: Kiln, Hades II, Vampire Crawlers, and More
Coming soon to Xbox Game Pass: Kiln, Hades II, Vampire Crawlers, and more!
Badminton Asia C'ship, Billie Jean Cup ties begin; medal chances at boxing, wrestling Asian C'ship; Candidates continues: Indian Sports LIVE, April 7
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on April 7, 2026.
Syracuse Common Council will make vendors disclose if they do business with ICE
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Toronto Tempo vs. Minnesota Lynx - Live Score
View the Toronto Tempo vs. Minnesota Lynx game played on May 01, 2026. Box score, stats, odds, highlights, play-by-play, social & more
AMC Entertainment Delivers Best Ever Global Revenue for a 5-Day Easter Weekend, Led by THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE, Strong Merchandise Sales, and Other Solid Performances
AMC Entertainment announced that it delivered a record-setting performance over the 5-day Easter holiday weekend, achieving the highest combined global admissions and food & beverage revenue for the holiday frame in AMC’s 106-year history. From Wednesday, April 1 through Sunday, April 5, more than 6.0 million guests attended AMC locations in the U.S. or Odeon […]
Gene Editing Institute Receives $500K Federal Grant to Expand CRISPR Learning Lab
ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute has received a $500,000 federal grant secured by Delaware’s congressional delegation to expand its Learning Lab, a hands-on program that introduces high school and college students to gene editing. The Learning Lab is powered by CRISPR in a Box™, a teaching toolkit developed by Institute scientists that lets students try gene […]
Mario’s box office boom reveals a bigger trend in themed entertainment
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The State Of Decay 3 Reveal Trailer Was Basically Fake
A 2020 Xbox reveal trailer was a hype video for a game that didn't even sort of exist yet
Warhammer 40K: New Vanguard Veterans From Armageddon Box Revealed
The new Armageddon box is coming with a bunch of updated and new miniatures. Today we get a look at the new Vanguard Veterans!
Long Awaited Xbox Game Will Finally Be Playable For Free Next Month
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Starfield's Huge Update Arrives On Xbox This Week, And Here Are The Release Times
For both the Free Lanes and Terran Armada content
AMC Entertainment Delivers Best Ever Global Revenue Mark for a 5-Day Easter Weekend, Led by THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE, Strong Merchandise Sales, and Solid Performances by Other Titles
Led by a media-reported global box office debut of $372 million for THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE, AMC Entertainment posted its largest combined…...
Nikhat, Lovlina in Asian Boxing Championships semifinals; Asian Wrestling Championships begin; IFL continues: Indian Sports LIVE, April 6
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on April 6, 2026.
Nikhat, Lovlina in Asian Boxing Championships semifinals; Asian Wrestling Championships begin; IFL continues: Indian Sports LIVE, April 6
Here are all the updates from Indian sports on April 6, 2026.
Miami Marlins vs. Athletics - Live Score
View the Miami Marlins vs. Athletics game played on July 04, 2026. Box score, stats, play-by-play timeline, highlights, odds & more
Roki Sasaki stumbles, Dodgers bail him out in comeback win
WASHINGTON — The box score will remember it as another comeback.
It’s-a hit! Mario movie leads Easter weekend box office
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” scored the biggest opening of the year for a Hollywood movie.
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
a e n media-and-entertainment-industry entertainment movies u-s-news general-news | WBEN
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
a e n media-and-entertainment-industry entertainment movies u-s-news general-news | KNSS Radio
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
a e n media-and-entertainment-industry entertainment movies u-s-news general-news | 100.1 FM and AM 1020 KDKA
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
a e n media-and-entertainment-industry entertainment movies u-s-news general-news | KCBS All News 106.9FM and 740AM
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
a e n media-and-entertainment-industry entertainment movies u-s-news general-news | Talk 1370
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
a e n media-and-entertainment-industry entertainment movies u-s-news general-news | WWL
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
a e n media-and-entertainment-industry entertainment movies u-s-news general-news | KCBS All News 106.9FM and 740AM
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” has scored the biggest opening of the year for a Hollywood film.
It’s-a-hit: ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’ box office blasts off with $372.5 million globally
“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” has scored the biggest opening of the year for a Hollywood film.
“I couldn’t enjoy it fully until now”: Crimson Desert’s once‑exclusive PS5 mode finally arrives on Xbox — and I’m ready to dive back in
Crimson Desert’s 4K update arrived on PlayStation 5 first, leaving Xbox Series X users waiting, with Pearl Abyss declining to explain the temporary lack of parity.
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition Starts Appearing In Retail Stores At Nearly $1000
AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU is listed for CAD $1,373.99 in Canada and £905.82 in the UK, launching April 22.
OH WOW! Science Center will host interactive, augmented sandbox exhibit
OH WOW! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology will host an interactive, augmented exhibit beginning Monday, April 6, 2026.
Miami Marlins vs. Athletics - Live Score
View the Miami Marlins vs. Athletics game played on July 03, 2026. Box score, stats, play-by-play timeline, highlights, odds & more
5 Gadgets You Can Plug Into Your TV's HDMI 2.0 Port
Discover the best gadgets to plug into your TV's HDMI 2.0 port. We detail top devices like streaming sticks, sync boxes, and gaming consoles.
With 2025's GOTY Now In The Library, Xbox Game Pass Premium Is Becoming Too Good To Ignore
A serious value for Xbox players
LIVE! Watch ‘Wilder Vs. Chisora’ Official Video Stream
Two of the hardest hitting heavyweights in boxing will duke it out later tonight (Sat., April 4, 2026) LIVE on DAZN pay-per-view (PPV) from inside the O2 Arena in London, England, as former WBC heavyweight king Deontay Wilder meets British veteran Derek Chisora in the main event. Wilder, who made some outlandish comments earlier this […]
Xbox's State Of Decay 3 Finally Returns, Signups Now Live For Alpha Playtests
"A mysterious broadcast calls to all survivors of the blood plague"
Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Having written a lot of model release blog posts, there’s something much harder about reviewing open models when they drop relative to closed models, especially in 2026. In recent years, there were so few open models, so when Llama 3 was released most people were still doing research on Llama 2 and super happy to get an update. When Qwen 3 was released, the Llama 4 fiasco had just gone down, and a whole research community was emerging to study RL on Qwen 2.5 — it was a no brainer to upgrade. Today, when an open model releases, it’s competing with Qwen 3.5, Kimi K2.5, GLM 5, MiniMax M2.5, GPT-OSS, Arcee Large, Nemotron 3, Olmo 3, and others. The space is populated, but still feels full of hidden opportunity. The potential of open models feels like a dark matter, a potential we know is huge, but few clear recipes and examples for how to unlock it are out there. Agentic AI, OpenClaw, and everything brewing in that space is going to spur mass experimentation in open models to complement the likes of Claude and Codex, not replace them. Especially with open models, the benchmarks at release are an extremely incomplete story. In some ways this is exciting, as new open models have a much higher variance and ability to surprise, but it also points at some structural reasons that make building businesses and great AI experiences around open models harder than the closed alternatives. When a new Claude Opus or GPT drops, spending a few hours with them in my agentic workflows is genuinely a good vibe test. For open models, putting them through this test is a category error. Something else to be said about open models in the era of agents is that they get out of the debate of integration, harnesses, and tools and let us see close to the ground on what exactly is the ability of just a model. Of course, we can’t test some things like search abilities without some tool, but being able to measure exactly the pace of progress of the model alone is a welcome simplification to a systematically opaque AI space. Share The list of factors I’d use to assess a new open-weight model I’m considering investing in includes: Model performance (and size) — how this model performs on benchmarks I care about and how it compares to other models of a similar size. Country of origin — some businesses care deeply about provenance, and if a model was built in China or not. Model license — if a model needs legal approval for use, uptake will be slower at mid-sized and large companies. Tooling at release — many models release with half-broken, or at least substantially slower, implementations in popular software like vLLM, Transformers, SGLANG, etc due to pushing the envelope of architectures or tools. Model fine-tunability — how easy or hard it is to modify the given model to your use-case when you actually try and use it. The core problem is that some of these are immediately available at release, e.g. general performance, license, origin, etc. but others such as tooling take day(s) to week(s) to stabilize, and others are open research questions — with no group systematically monitoring fine-tunability. In the early era of open models, the days of Llama 2 or 3 and Qwen pre v3.5, the architectures were fairly simple and the models tended to work out of the box. Some of this was due to the extremely hard work of the Llama, Qwen, Mistral, etc. developer teams. Some is due to the new models being genuinely harder to work with. When it comes to something like Qwen 3.5 or Nemotron 3, with hybrid models (either gated delta net or mamba layers), the tooling is very rough at release. Things you would expect to “just work” often don’t. I’ve been following this area closely since we released Olmo Hybrid with a similar architecture, and Qwen 3.5 is just starting to work well in the various open-source tools that need to all play nice together for RL research. That’s 1.5 months after the release date! This is just to start really investing more into understanding the behavior of the models. Of course, others started working on these models sooner by investing more engineering resources or relying on partially closed software. The fully open and distributed ecosystem takes a long time to get going on some new models. All of this is lead-in for the most important question for open models — how easy is it to adapt to specific use-cases? This is a different problem for different model sizes. Large MoE open-weight models may be used by entities like Cursor who need complex capabilities in their domain, e.g. Composer 2 trained on Kimi K2.5. Other applications can be built on much smaller models, such as Chroma’s Context-1 model for agentic search, built on GPT-OSS 20B. The question of “which models are fine-tunable” is largely background knowledge known by engineers across the industry. There should be a thriving research area here to support the open ecosystem model. The first step is to understand characteristics of different base and post-trained models to understand what they look like. The second step is to tune pretraining recipes for open models so they’re more flexible. Interconnects AI is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe For The ATOM Project and other Interconnects endeavors, we’ve put in substantial effort to measuring adoption trends in the open ecosystem. Everything takes a long time to unfold after a model is first publicly available — and adaptability is why. What we know for sure now, when Qwen has been going from strength to strength with its releases, is that technical staff across the industry has gotten comfortable working with Qwen models. Countless research methods and datasets were made to work with Qwen. It’ll take patience for any other model family to get to this point — a patience I’m not sure many open model builders have. This takes us to Gemma 4, Google’s latest open models. Gemma 3 was released more than a year ago, in March of 2025, and is a bit underrated. Gemma 4 comes in 4 sizes for now, with a bigger, MoE model of over 100B total parameters rumored but not released yet. The models we have today come in sizes of ~5B dense, 8B dense, 26B total 4B active MoE, and 31B dense. I’m most excited that they’re finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. This’ll massively boost adoption. The standard of better licenses for strong open-weight LLMs was set by mostly Chinese open model labs in the last 1-2 years, and now U.S. companies are following suit. I will personally be so happy if the horrible Llama licenses and Gemma terms of service were an ~18-month transient dynamic of the industry being nervous about releasing strong open models. The Gemma 4 scores look very solid, the small models have incredible benchmark scores (especially in general domains like LMArena) and the 31B model rivals the recent Qwen 3.5 27B, which is the leading member of that class. The ~30B size range is an important one, as it’s accessible both to researchers and to enterprises looking to deploy the model in real use-cases. Where the 7B model scale is the default for tinkering and research, a 30B model is the default for seeing if an open model can unlock substantial value in your specific workflow — a good mix of intelligence, low price, tractability for downstream training, etc. This takes us back to the above adoption criteria I mentioned for open models and the bigger question — do I think Gemma 4 will be an overwhelming success? Previous Gemma models have been plagued by tooling issues and poorer performance when being finetuned. Gemma 4’s success is going to be entirely determined by ease of use, to a point where a 5-10% swing on benchmarks wouldn’t matter at all. It’s strong enough, small enough, with the right license, and from the U.S., so many companies are going to slot it in. I’m cautiously optimistic that Gemma 4 is going to work better here. Winds are shifting for open models built in America. We saw GPT-OSS go through a bumpy launch to become an overwhelming success. There’s a collective energy around the likes of Reflection, Arcee, Nemotron, Gemma, Olmo, and peers that show substantial demand for building new stacks around open models. There’s capital to be spent on AI stacks across the economy by those who want more ownership of everything, including the model. After launching The ATOM Project 240 days ago, the conversation is shifting into the next stage. Summer of 2025 was a crisis moment where the U.S. AI scene realized it can’t wait and figure out open models after building AGI. The two markets will capture different areas and proceed in parallel. Now that more companies in the U.S. are releasing strong models, we need to improve the ecosystem so that these models are easy to use, understand, and build value around. It’s the hard work to build another inflection point in these adoption plots I’ve been updating consistently, but that’s the work to be done. Join me in it. More data coming soon! Here’s a sneak peek:
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