Valve's Half-Life 2 is still a wonderful milestone of PC gaming more than 20 years after its original release, but it recently got its dated visuals pumped up with a mod that lets you flex the power of a cutting-edge graphics card. In a video sponsored by Nvidia, PCWorld's Adam goes through the new ray tracing and graphical enhancements and talks with the developers who implemented them. Half-Life 2 RTX is a free upgrade if you already own the original (and after a million Steam sales, who doesn't?), though you won't get all the enhanced goodies unless you're lucky enough to have an RTX 50-series card. We're talking ray tracing and path tracing for incredible lighting, plus new in-game assets with more polygons and better textures so you have something nice for those rays to bounce off. Naturally, this is going to make your gaming PC sweat a little more than the unmodified 20-year-old game.

While the improvements feel as incremental as its name suggests, GPT-4.5 is still OpenAI's most ambitious drop to date. Released in late February as a research preview--which essentially means OpenAI sees this as a beta version--GPT-4.5 uses more computing power than its previous models and was trained on more data. So, just how big is the GPT-4.5 research preview? And where did this additional training data come from? Their lips are zipped on that as well.

Did you know that computers have artificial intelligence now? We've been subjected to an absolute avalanche of marketing touting AI from seemingly every tech company, from Microsoft and Nvidia to laptop makers and even thermal paste sellers. Well if you've somehow avoided the AI blitz, possibly by using a Chromebook, you're about to get it in spades from Google. The company has been pushing its Gemini (nee Bard) AI tools into most of its high-profile products, most notably Chrome and Android. Now Chromebook Plus, Google's higher tier of ChromeOS laptops revealed last year, are slated to be Google's flagship platform for the best and brightest of Gemini, with a few tools and options that aren't available elsewhere.

Google is counting on its very own GPT-4 competitor, Gemini, so much that it staged parts of a recent demo video. In an opinion piece, Bloomberg says Google admits that for its video titled "Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI," not only was it edited to speed up the outputs (which was declared in the video description), but the implied voice interaction between the human user and the AI was actually non-existent. Instead, the actual demo was made by "using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text," rather than having Gemini respond to -- or even predict -- a drawing or change of objects on the table in real time. This is far less impressive than the video wants to mislead us into thinking, and worse yet, the lack of disclaimer about the actual input method makes Gemini's readiness rather questionable. It comes as no surprise that Google denies any wrongdoing here, as it referred The Verge to an X post written by Gemini's co-lead, Oriol Vinyals, which says "all the user prompts and outputs in the video are real," and that his team made the video "to inspire developers." Given the industry and authorities' attention on AI lately, perhaps the tech giant should be more sensitive about its presentations in this field.

AI will change the way that we work. Or so says the most fervent purveyors of the tech, which now includes Microsoft. But after seeing ChatGPT, Dall-E, and other AI systems integrated into the latest versions of Windows 11, Office, and the company's Microsoft 365 platform, I can't say that I agree. Make no mistake, Microsoft is pushing new tools like its Copilot system hard, integrating it into systems that are staples for the company and hundreds of millions of users. But speaking as a power user -- and accepting the limited perspective that gives me for many who are not -- I can't see these new tools being anything more than an occasional curiosity.

After this week, there's no question about it: AI will definitely be a big part of the future of PCs. That was shouted loud and clear during Microsoft's Surface event on Thursday, where the company spent the entire keynote talking about how AI will make Windows 11 smarter, make Office smarter, and make the Surface Laptop Studio 2 better. But while software will determine the AI PC's future, it's just part of the equation. This week, Intel formally unveiled its radically reconstructed, AI-infused Core Ultra processors, built using the Meteor Lake architecture. These mix-and-match chips were built from the ground up with AI in mind, and Intel is also providing plenty of API and framework support for developers to create applications that leverage Core Ultra's hardware to unlock new AI possibilities right on your PC, not in the cloud.

Today, Microsoft begins integrating AI art into its AI-powered Bing Chat chatbot with Bing Image Creator…and it's surprisingly good. Microsoft began previewing Image Creator last fall in select markets, and its generative AI art later became the foundation for Microsoft Designer, the excellent design application that also uses AI art to help create templates, flyers, and simple greeting cards. Today, Bing Image Creator will begin integrating with Bing Chat's textual chatbot, but also generate images at its own site, Bing.com/create . Put another way, that means that you'll be able to ask Bing's chatbot to create your own images from an integrated text prompt within Bing Chat, or else use the dedicated site. There's a third option, too: Use the new Edge Copilot sidebar within Microsoft Edge, which has been used for textual generation via AI.

Bing's new AI-powered chatbot is basically ChatGPT with ads…and one that refuses to do your homework for you. That's not necessarily a derogatory criticism; the new Bing is pretty amazing. In your first few minutes with the new Bing chat interface, you'll probably see even more sophistication than the free version of ChatGPT currently offers, with lengthy, detailed responses that can help you in many walks of life. But they may end with a jarring ad that looks (and probably is) ripped straight from Bing. That said, the fresh AI experience already work shockingly well more often than not.

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