Our analyses indicate that the explorability or reachability assumptions, previously made for the latter two settings, are not necessary statistically for reward-free exploration.

Yes, Google's roster of consumer-facing products is the slickest on offer. The firm is bundling most of its multimodal models into its Gemini app, including the new Imagen 4 image generator and the new Veo 3 video generator. That means you can now access Google's full range of generative models via a single chatbot. It also announced Gemini Live, a feature that lets you share your phone's screen or your camera's view with the chatbot and ask it about what it can see. Those features were previously only seen in demos of Project Astra, a "universal AI assistant" that Google DeepMind is working on.

Despite my enthusiasm, I do not see AI as a panacea which will transform the world only for "the good". The present state of things may be more akin to the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" section of Fantasia. As revolutionary a tool as these visualization applications may be for any number of end uses, they are small potatoes compared to the ways that AI will more broadly change our world -- in weapons, in metacognition (AI assistants), in medicine and biotechnology, in deepfake / disinformation vs detection arms races, and so on. Great and terrible things are likely to result, as Tesla famously said, "You May Live to See Man-Made Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension." Even in the relatively smaller arena of generative imagery, I see potential storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

In a year where Kate Bush and Metallica re-entered the charts, it's fitting that 2022's most intriguing game so far has been plucked from the past. Directed by Takashi Tokita of Chrono Trigger fame, for decades Live a Live appeared destined to remain the RPG that time forgot. Its initial Japanese release on the Super Famicom (SNES) in 1994 was a commercial flop, ensuring it never left its homeland – until now. Resurrected for Nintendo's fittingly anachronistic current console, the Switch, this eyebrow-raising relic has been reanimated using Square Enix's gorgeous 2D-HD engine, a graphical style that melds rich high-definition backgrounds with retro 16-bit sprites. The results are glorious, injecting once-flat environments with a playful, eye-catching charm that never quite loses its magic.

There was a time when it was possible to play pretty much every interesting video game released in a given year, from nailed-down 9/10 blockbusters to that divisive horror curio. That's not the case now – not only because games have gotten longer and more involving, as I wrote about last week, but also because so many of them are released. The publisher model, where a few big companies controlled the release calendar, has given way to a mix of legacy megaliths (Sony, EA, Nintendo, Microsoft), indie publishers (Devolver, Annapurna, Team17), self-releasing developers and everything in between. How is a player supposed to keep up? Good curation is one of the most useful things a games critic can offer in 2022.

Reading our games correspondent Keith Stuart's feature about the joy of game compilations, it struck me that playing five games over a weekend has become almost unthinkable. My friends who grew up in the 1980s consumed as many games on tape as they could, but by the 90s we had slowed down. Games were more sophisticated, they had more to offer, and it would take the whole weekend (or sometimes the week) to get the most out of whatever cartridge you had borrowed from Blockbuster or spent months' worth of pocket money to buy. Things started to change in the 00s: games didn't last 10 or 20 hours, but 50 or more. There have always been long games – think of Japanese role-playing games, which stole many hours of my teenage life through random battles and grinding, or PC strategy games that could swallow about as many hours as you gave them, or indeed Championship Manager and Football Manager – but landmark open-world games such as Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls started to make huge games the norm.

The time is now to build a more gender inclusive Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem in Europe – but how can that be best actualised in practice and at scale? I am delighted to be participating in EU AI Week and especially #breakthebias: Women in AI event Hear tomorrow from Nicole Foster Director of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Global AI ML together with policymakers, business leaders, the European AI #research community and #startups to discuss the policies and actions needed to build a more diverse and inclusive AI sector. I am delighted to provide closing comments too. This is a fantastic'dialogue for action' opportunity – with speakers from OECD - OCDE European Commission European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) French Government Belgian Federal Government and Women in AI. Above all be inspired by the women leading AI start-ups in Europe in the driving seat to develop the #future of this technology, making everything about the way we live and work better!

Fans of "Days of Our Lives" and other NBC shows will have to take a day off from their favorite programs on Thursday, June 7, as the programming schedule has been altered due to coverage of the French Open. According to NBC's programming schedule for the day, "The Today Show" will still air until 11 a.m. EDT with Megyn Kelly's block of the broadcast beginning at 9 a.m., followed by Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb's block at 10 a.m. However, at 11 a.m. EDT, the programming will switch to the network's coverage of the French Open. This will continue until 2 p.m. EDT, preempting the 11:00 News, "New York Live," "Days of Our Lives," and "Access Hollywood Live." A normal Thursday schedule resumes at 2:00 with "Steve." These scheduling changes will also be in effect on Friday, June 8.

When looking for a date online, it can be difficult to get a proper idea of what potential suitors are really like just by looking at their photos. But that could be set to change, with the introduction of a new video feature on Bumble. The dating app is set to launch BumbleVID, allowing users to create a story of 10-second videos, which will delete after 24 hours. Users will record 10-second videos directly within Bumble, which are posted to their profile. The videos can be viewed by anyone who comes across the profile while swiping.

It may sound like the premise of a science fiction film. But, believe it or not, scientists at Boston University claim to have discovered a game-changing blood test that could help predict lifespans. The study, published in the journal Aging Cell on Friday, used biomarker data collected from 5,000 blood samples and analysed it against the donors' health developments over the subsequent eight years. Together, they identified patterns which indicated both good and bad futures. In all, the researchers generated 26 different predictive biomarker signatures.