Xbox prices are also rising in other countries around the world, with the Series S increasing by 80 in Europe and 50 in Australia. It represents a big change in an industry which would typically see prices go down in the years after a console's launch. "We understand that these changes are challenging," Microsoft said in a blog post. "They were made with careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development." Kedhrin Gonzalez, founder of Rip & Tear studios, told the BBC he felt the price rise was "inevitable" and "catalysed by current tariff disruptions".

Google has updated AI Mode, making it a better fit for planning your summer vacation, shopping trip, or learning more about any topic. Plus, if you're interested in trying the tool, access to it just got a lot easier. Google's new AI Mode takes Search's real-time information access and combines it with the best generative AI capabilities -- such as longer natural queries and personalized answers -- to create an AI search engine experience. It is especially helpful for nuanced questions with many criteria, like shopping and trip planning. Also: New Google Labs experiments help you learn new languages in'bite-sized' lessons "We are really enabling, helping you shop and seek local businesses, and plan your travel much better," said Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, the director of Search product management, to ZDNET.

When Google debuted AI Mode at the start of March, the company promised to work quickly on bringing the feature to more users, and now it's doing exactly. Following a smaller expansion last month, the company says AI Mode is now available to all Labs users, with no wait list in place to limit access. As a reminder, AI Mode is a new chatbot that Google has built directly into Search. Labs, meanwhile, is a program you can sign up for to try out new Search features before they're widely available. With today's expansion, Google is also updating AI Mode to add new visual cards that will appear when you ask the chatbot for information related to places and products.

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to get straggling Windows 10 users to make the jump to Windows 11. Last week, the company published a new blog post (spotted by Windows Central) that shamelessly promotes its new Copilot PCs as the way forward for users still on older Windows 10 PCs that aren't eligible for the Windows 11 upgrade. Among other things, Microsoft is trying to entice you with brand-new AI features such as Recall, which takes periodic screenshots of your screen, analyzes it using AI, then indexes it so you can search through all your past PC activity at a later time. Another big benefit touted in the blog post is that Copilot PCs are purported to be up to five times faster than a five-year-old Windows device, with enhanced security features on top. Yet, while Copilot PCs are certainly novel and do offer plenty of benefits in the battery life and performance departments, they're still in need of some serious improvements.

An industry-standard league table for ranking artificial intelligence models is being deliberately distorted by technology giants, researchers have claimed, leading to a misleading picture of which AIs are the best. Sara Hooker at Cohere Labs, a US non-profit, and her colleagues claim to have found that the popular Chatbot Arena benchmark is a "distorted playing field", with policies that end up giving an advantage to large companies like Meta, Amazon and Google by allowing them to discard models that score poorly.

Starting today, Microsoft will be raising the recommended retail prices of its Xbox consoles and controllers, and video games are next. Microsoft says some new first-party games will see a holiday season price increase to 79.99. The news was announced on a May 1 blog post on the Xbox support blog. The blog post reads, "We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration given market conditions and the rising cost of development. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on offering more ways to play more games across any screen and ensuring value for Xbox players."

Are you tired of paying more and more for video games? Game prices have been creeping up from major publishers for the last few years, with plenty of gamers spotting a recent jump in Nintendo's first-party prices. Microsoft's Xbox brand is following suit, and it's not even waiting for a new console launch to do it. As of today, US prices of every current Xbox game console have shot up. IGN reports that the base model Xbox Series S with 512GB of storage is now 380 (up from 300), and the Series X gets a 100 bump across the board, with the top-end 2TB model going from 600 to 730.

While humans may have cornered the market on writing songs (including public safety inspired bangers), rhythm itself is more widespread across the animal kingdom. And some animals could have better rhythm than us Homo sapiens. One trained California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) named Ronan can keep a beat better than some people, according to a new study published May 1 in the journal Scientific Reports. In lab settings, other non-human animals have shown some ability to move in time to a range of regular rhythms. Some bird species can be very precise, but do not necessarily maintain that persistence over time.

Morrisons has unveiled its newest staff members - in the form of aisle-roaming robots. The retail giant is trialling'Tally' robots at three stores in Wetherby, Redcar and Stockton, to monitor how products are being displayed on shelves. Using advanced AI and computer vision technology, Tally is designed to spot out-of-stock items, pricing errors, and misplaced products. Morrisons' technology manager, Katherine Allanach, called this a'crucial' role. 'It is a crucial but time-consuming task and so Tally aims to allow more time for colleagues to focus on customer service,' she told The Grocer.

At the start of April, an influx of action figure started appearing on social media sites including LinkedIn and X. Each figure depicted the person who had created it with uncanny accuracy, complete with personalized accessories such as reusable coffee cups, yoga mats, and headphones. All this is possible because of OpenAI's new GPT-4o-powered image generator, which supercharges ChatGPT's ability to edit pictures, render text, and more. OpenAI's ChatGPT image generator can also create pictures in the style of Japanese animated film company Studio Ghibli--a trend that quickly went viral, too. The images are fun and easy to make--all you need is a free ChatGPT account and a photo.