The world's most powerful people have started to realise that games have immense influence - why else would the White House post an image of Trump as Halo's Master Chief? The world's most powerful people have started to realise that games have immense influence - why else would the White House post an image of Trump as Halo's Master Chief? State of play: who holds the power in the video games industry in 2025? I love playing video games, but what interests me most as a journalist are the ways in which games intersect with real life. One of the joys of spending 20 years on this beat has been meeting hundreds of people whose lives have been meaningfully enhanced by games, and as their cultural influence has grown, these stories have become more and more plentiful. There is another side to this, however.

The camera zooms too close to the president's face; the table at which the tech executives are seated seems far too long. Mark Zuckerberg is there, and Bill Gates and Tim Cook and Satya Nadella and Sam Altman and on and on, a baker's dozen or so of Silicon Valley's most powerful people--cutthroat competitors all--united here to pledge allegiance to Donald Trump. The introduction from Trump is characteristically both overgilded and confusing: "It's an honor to be here with this group of people. And then, about 90 seconds in, the pandering begins. This was Donald Trump's dinner with tech leaders at the State Dining Room in the White House on Thursday evening, broadcast in part for all to see on C-SPAN.

On 16 May 2023, Sam Altman, OpenAI's charming, softly spoken, eternally optimistic billionaire CEO, and I stood in front of the US Senate judiciary subcommittee meeting on AI oversight. We were in Washington DC, and it was at the height of AI mania. Altman, then 38, was the poster boy for it all. Raised in St Louis, Missouri, Altman was the Stanford dropout who had become the president of the massively successful Y Combinator startup incubator before he was 30. A few months before the hearing, his company's product ChatGPT had taken the world by storm. All through the summer of 2023, Altman was treated like a Beatle, stopping by DC as part of a world tour, meeting prime ministers and presidents around the globe. US Senator Kyrsten Sinema gushed: "I've never met anyone as smart as Sam… He's an introvert and shy and humble… But… very good at forming relationships with people on the Hill and… can help folks in government understand AI." Glowing portraits at the time painted the youthful Altman as sincere, talented, rich and interested in nothing more than fostering humanity.

The prevalence of unwarranted beliefs, spanning pseudoscience, logical fallacies, and conspiracy theories, presents substantial societal hurdles and the risk of disseminating misinformation. Utilizing established psychometric assessments, this study explores the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) vis-a-vis the average human in detecting prevalent logical pitfalls. We undertake a philosophical inquiry, juxtaposing the rationality of humans against that of LLMs. Furthermore, we propose methodologies for harnessing LLMs to counter misconceptions, drawing upon psychological models of persuasion such as cognitive dissonance theory and elaboration likelihood theory. Through this endeavor, we highlight the potential of LLMs as personalized misinformation debunking agents.

Meredith Whittaker is the president of Signal – the not-for-profit secure messaging app. The service, along with WhatsApp and similar messaging platforms, is opposing the UK government's online safety bill which, among other things, seeks to scan users' messages for harmful content. Prior to Signal, Whittaker worked at Google, co-founded NYU's AI Now Institute and was an adviser to the Federal Trade Commission. After 10 years at Google you organised the walkout over the company's attitude to sexual harassment accusations, after which in 2019 you were forced out. How did you feel about that?

In the past two years, I have been exposed to the basics of statistics and mathematical concepts that go on to lay the foundation of the complex AI machinery we see in the form of Alexa, Jarvis, Siri, etc. I feel some of these concepts are so much easier to visualize in real life. These things are pretty clear intuitively if we think about them practically based on what we experience in the world. The concept of Markov Chains -- "The future is conditionally independent of the past given the present". At any point in our life, we can only control our present and our present is reflective of the entire past i.e. the knowledge and experiences from our past define our present condition and our future progress is solely dependent on what we are today and how much effort we put into transition to a more desirable state in the future.

Artificial Intelligence is probably the greatest technological achievement in history. It's subjective, of course, but I've been obsessed with technology ever since I was a kid, and while I'm sure there are many technical advances I am unaware of, AI, or machine learning, surpasses them all. An exception could perhaps be made for the invention of language or perhaps the wheel, however I doubt few other things will have such a profound effect on the human species. AI has been a stable component of contemporary culture for multiple generations now. From time traveling machines hell-bent on destroying humanity to friendly and lovable robots adventuring through space, we've anthropomorphized machines in preparation for what we all know is coming.

Pope Simulator will let you step in to the shoes of one of the most powerful people on Earth to see if you can bring about world peace. Polish publishers, Ultimate Games, haven't set a launch date for the game but have uploaded a preview of the software to Steam and say it is'coming soon'. A new trailer for the game opens with white smoke coming from a chimney, signifying the election of a Pope - likely a cutscene before the game begins with you as the new Pontiff. The stunning trailer gives some insight into how the user will step into papal life and live out the daily duties of the Pope - including prayer and blessings. This is just an illustrative trailer as Ultimate Games have only just started working on the new simulator game - saying it will be some time before it is released.

November was all about testing for our article page group. We've been running A/B tests on a small percentage of the mobile audience; testing new commenting and site socialization features, variations on UX treatments and relevancy matching on ad units, as well as some improvements aimed at streamlining page flow and better surfacing of related content. We've also begun discovery on an overhaul of our registration and user account management experience, with an eye towards enhanced consumer identity management and a tighter platform alignment strategy. As we move towards the end of the year we'll be continuing and expanding our testing of new commenting and social engagement features, and planning a new and more scalable approach to prototyping and testing in 2017. This month was an exciting one for our new mobile products team.

The idea that computers will soon steal our jobs is an article of faith among many of the world's most powerful people. The argument goes like this: breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence will make it possible to automate various kinds of labour. Self-driving cars will replace taxi and truck drivers; software will replace lawyers and accountants. We'll end up with a world where machines do almost all of the work. Over the last few years, a growing chorus of pundits, academics and executives have made this scenario seem inevitable – and imminent. There are many reasons to be sceptical of their claims.