GeForce Now is available… now
Nvidia’s GeForce Now — the cloud gaming service that’s been waiting in South Africa’s wings since November of last year — is finally making good on its word and has officially launched locally through a partnership with rain. It’s spent the past few months undergoing a considerable beta but is now open to the public in the form of two packages – down from the US’ three packages.
Those are Priority and Ultra — here’s what each will cost and get you:
- Priority: R200/m — “Three-hour gaming sessions with uninterrupted play time and Nvidia RTX switched on for all applicable titles,”
- Ultra: R400/m — “Eight-hour gaming sessions with exclusive access to GeForce RTX™ 3080 servers, enabling gameplay at up to 4K at 60fps or 1440p at 120fps on PCs and Macs, native 4K resolution on LG and Samsung smart TVs, and up to 120fps on selected Android devices.”
Customers currently hooked up to the company’s rainOne tier will automatically get a 20% discount on Priority and Ultra packages. Non-rain members can sign up for GeForce Now, though the internet provider noted that sign-ups are “limited for now” and are assigned on a first-come first-serve basis.
Google’s Gemini AI just launched and it’s already faking its way to the top
Google isn’t a stranger to controversy when it comes to artificial intelligence. Less than 48 hours after announcing Bard, the AI chatbot was caught providing inaccurate info — a major error for an industry that’s marketed as all-knowing — and ended up costing Alphabet over $100 million. Now, Google has unveiled Gemini, a suite of AI models, and it’s already been tossed in hot water.
Specifically, Google is being accused of faking a demonstration during a recent video showing off Gemini’s supposed power. It was Bloomberg doing all the blaming, over the search giant’s six-minute hands-on video covering Gemini’s capabilities — including image recognition and a faster-than-expected response time. That’s all well and good, but Bloomberg wasn’t happy with a note lodged in the video’s description:
“For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity. ”
That means that Gemini’s ‘demonstration’ was sped up to make things feel faster than they are. It didn’t even feature spoken prompts. Instead, Google replaced those with still frames obtained from raw footage and wrote out the text prompts itself. It’s not the sort of power that Google was implying, and it knows it.
X.com streaming is about to get a massive boost
When Elon Musk said he wanted X.com to turn into an ‘everything app’, he wasn’t joking. So far, we’ve heard grand visions of banking and dating functionality, with the app already getting live streaming and job application features. Musk’s first live stream on his $44 billion platform wasn’t the prettiest, consisting of 53 minutes of Diablo IV gameplay. That’s growing pains for you, though. Two months later, Streamlabs is looking to optimize the site and make it a real contender within the space.
That’s according to Streamlabs, which has officially partnered with X.com to offer a “seamless go-live experience” – a much-needed tool considering Musk said it “took, like, hours to set this up,” during that first stream. With Streamlabs’ tech involved, users streaming on the platform will no longer need to manually input stream keys and can sign into the Streamlabs app using their social media login info.
Streamlabs is also integrating itself with X.com’s chat, meaning messages can be monitored from the Streamlabs desktop app while streaming. Users will also be able to adjust any monetization settings as necessary, with specific settings to configure alerts for tips and overlays if you’re shilling out to ExpressVPN or something similar.
YouTube is putting a pause on comments
YouTube is going through some changes. It has begun rolling out a new feature for creators that’ll let them ‘pause’ comments on a video, rather than turning them off entirely. It’s a feature that almost feels custom-built for James Somerton’s YouTube channel. You can’t have people figuring out you’re a plagiarist, right?
When pausing a video’s comments, Creators are preventing the “creation of new comments at the video level while preserving comments that were already published.” It’s supposedly spent the last few months of its life in beta, finally making its way to the platform thanks to the “positive feedback we received while testing it…”
You’ll be able to find the new ‘Pause’ setting embedded in the comment section (if you’re the video’s creator) right in the YouTube app, or by going through YouTube Studio via a web browser of the mobile app.