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Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios

BBC News

Ubisoft has cancelled six video games - including its long-awaited Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake - as part of a major reset of its operations. The French developer and publisher, known for popular games such as Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Just Dance, has closed two studios and delayed seven titles as part of its changes. Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot said the move would create the conditions for a return to sustainable growth. The firm's shares plunged by 33% on Thursday morning following the announcement. The move comes at a time when studios are increasingly turning to video game remakes and remasters, with new versions of Super Mario Galaxy, Oblivion and Metal Gear Solid 3 proving popular in 2025.


A Wikipedia Group Made a Guide to Detect AI Writing. Now a Plug-In Uses It to 'Humanize' Chatbots

WIRED

A Wikipedia Group Made a Guide to Detect AI Writing. The web's best resource for spotting AI writing has ironically become a manual for AI models to hide it. On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plug-in for Anthropic's Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called Humanizer, the simple prompt plug-in feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plug-in on GitHub, where it has picked up more than 1,600 stars as of Monday.


Google Acquires Top Talent From AI Voice Startup Hume AI in Licensing Deal

WIRED

Hume AI's CEO, Alan Cowen, will join Google DeepMind along with several top engineers as part of a major licensing deal. Google DeepMind is hiring the CEO and several top engineers from Hume AI, a startup working on emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, as part of a new licensing agreement, WIRED has learned. Financial details of the deal are confidential, but Hume AI says the company will continue to supply its technology to other frontier AI labs. The deal is the latest sign that AI companies expect voice mode to become an increasingly important interface for interacting with customers--and that understanding a user's emotions and mood based on their voice interactions is key. Hume AI expects to bring in $100 million in revenue in 2026 as it works with AI labs on tuning AI models to be more capable and useful voice helpers, says John Beadle, cofounder and managing partner of AEGIS Ventures, which invested in Hume AI.


How to Meditate (Without an Om in Sight) (2026)

WIRED

There's no need for an expensive retreat to practice meditation. Try it on your lunch break to recharge your mind and body. Launching straight back into work in the New Year can be challenging, but learning how to meditate can help you stay focused. Feel free to roll your eyes right about now, but numerous studies have shown that meditation can boost creativity, improve sleep quality, and manage stress . "Meditation is a practice to calm the brain by recentering our attention, most often on our breath," says Mel Mah, an instructor at the meditation app Calm .


We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower

WIRED

With Donald Trump's actions in Greenland, Minneapolis, and Venezuela, a foreign enemy could not invent a better chain of events to wreck the standing of the United States. Imagine you were Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping and you woke up a year ago having magically been given command of puppet strings that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine trust in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the Western rules-based order that has preserved peace and security for 80 years, which allowed the US to triumph as an economic superpower and beacon of hope and innovation for the world. What exactly would you do differently with your marionette other than enact the ever more reckless agenda that Donald Trump has pursued since he became president last year?


Yann LeCun's new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models

MIT Technology Review

Yann LeCun's new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models In an exclusive interview, the AI pioneer shares his plans for his new Paris-based company, AMI Labs. Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry's current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems. Instead, he thinks we should be betting on world models--a different type of AI that accurately reflects the dynamics of the real world. He is also a staunch advocate for open-source AI and criticizes the closed approach of frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that he recently left Meta, where he had served as chief scientist for FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), the company's influential research lab that he founded. Meta has struggled to gain much traction with its open-source AI model Llama and has seen internal shake-ups, including the controversial acquisition of ScaleAI. LeCun sat down with in an exclusive online interview from his Paris apartment to discuss his new venture, life after Meta, the future of artificial intelligence, and why he thinks the industry is chasing the wrong ideas.


Israeli Strikes in Gaza Kill 11, Including Three Journalists

NYT > Middle East

Israeli forces killed at least 11 people in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, Gaza health officials said, including three Palestinian journalists who the Israeli military said were flying a drone. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a labor union, said the three men were documenting the "suffering of civilians in displacement camps." The Israeli military said they were operating a drone that was "affiliated with Hamas" and that its forces believed it posed a threat. The Israeli military said the details of the incident were under examination. The three journalists were identified as Abdel Raouf Shaath, Mohammad Salah Qishta and Anas Ghneim by the journalists' union.


Pay 75 once, use multiple AI models forever

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. AI tools are everywhere now--but using them efficiently is a different story. Most people end up bouncing between chatbots, image generators, writing tools, and video apps, each with its own subscription. For $74.97 through January 31, you get lifetime access to a multi-model AI platform powered by names you already recognize, including GPT-4o, Claude 3, Gemini Pro, Llama, Mistral, and Cohere. Different models excel at different tasks, and 1min.AI lets you switch between them without extra costs or logins.


'Ridiculous amount of games' - has Haaland played too much football?

BBC News

'Ridiculous amount of games' - has Haaland played too much football? The robot is malfunctioning and in need of a reset. Erling Haaland made a blistering start to the season but that prolific run of form has suffered a glitch. Though the Manchester City and Norway striker has scored a remarkable 39 goals in just 36 games for club and country this season, he has hit a sticky patch of form with only one goal in his past eight games. This has coincided with Pep Guardiola's men falling off the pace in the Premier League title race and suffering a monumental shock at Bodo/Glimt in the Champions League.


The Crimean Tatar movement trying to ruin Russia's army from within

Al Jazeera

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' The Crimean Tatar movement trying to ruin Russia's army from within On the weekend, a power cut shut down a train line carrying Russian weapons and supplies to the front line through the region of Bryansk in western Russia near the Ukrainian border. But this was no ordinary blackout.