Xbox’s AI initiative with Muse is an attempt to read the tea leaves, not the room - Related to daredevil:, scene, is, muse, chip

A new Microsoft chip could lead to more stable quantum computers

Microsoft has been on a quest to synthesize this state, called a Majorana fermion, in the form of quasiparticles. The Majorana was first proposed nearly 90 years ago as a particle that is its own antiparticle, which means two Majoranas will annihilate when they encounter one another. With the right conditions and physical setup, the enterprise has been hoping to get behavior matching that of the Majorana fermion within materials.

In the last few years, Microsoft’s approach has centered on creating a very thin wire or "nanowire" from indium arsenide, a semiconductor. This material is placed in close proximity to aluminum, which becomes a superconductor close to absolute zero and can be used to create superconductivity in the nanowire.

Ordinarily you’re not likely to find any unpaired electrons skittering about in a superconductor—electrons like to pair up. But under the right conditions in the nanowire, it’s theoretically possible for an electron to hide itself, with each half hiding at either end of the wire. If these complex entities, called Majorana zero modes, can be coaxed into existence, they will be difficult to destroy, making them intrinsically stable.

”Now you can see the advantage,” says Sankar Das Sarma, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland who did early work on this concept. “You cannot destroy a half electron, right? If you try to destroy a half electron, that means only a half electron is left. That’s not allowed.”.

In 2023, the Microsoft team . This week in Nature, the researchers reported that they can “read out” the information in these nanowires—specifically, whether there are Majorana zero modes hiding at the wires’ ends. If there are, that means the wire has an extra, unpaired electron.

“What we did in the Nature paper is we showed how to measure the even or oddness,” says Nayak. “To be able to tell whether there’s 10 million or 10 million and one electrons in one of these wires.” That’s an key step by itself, because the firm aims to use those two states—an even or odd number of electrons in the nanowire—as the 0s and 1s in its qubits.

If these quasiparticles exist, it should be possible to “braid” the four Majorana zero modes in a pair of nanowires around one another by making specific measurements in a specific order. The result would be a qubit with a mix of these two states, even and odd. Nayak says the team has done just that, creating a two-level quantum system, and that it is currently working on a paper on the results.

Researchers outside the firm say they cannot comment on the qubit results, since that paper is not yet available. But some have hopeful things to say about the findings . “I find it very encouraging,” says Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “It is not yet enough to claim that they have created topological qubits. There’s still more work to be done there,” he says. But “this is a good first step toward validating the type of protection that they hope to create.”.

Xbox’s AI initiative with Muse is an attempt to read the tea leaves, not the room

Earlier today, the heads of Microsoft’s Xbox division revealed Muse, a generative AI model that intends to create both visuals and gameplay for games.

The model, which was trained on the largely forgotten Ninja Theory multiplayer game Bleeding Edge, is not a shocking leap for Microsoft’s Xbox division. The firm as a whole, from CEO Satya Nadella down, has wholeheartedly embraced generative AI in all its initiatives. It was only a matter of time until the Xbox division would have to follow suit.

But it does come after a recent game developer survey of 1500 developers in a State of the Industry findings statin that 30% of developers have a negative opinion of generative AI. It can be argued back and forth whether generative AI is here to stay or not, the developers making games seem to have an increasingly hostile reactions to generative AI replacing ideation processes.

But Microsoft is not alone in pursuing this, either. Capcom in the recent past spoke about using generative AI for the idea phase of game development, arguing that the thousands of small decisions that go into games can be automated so as to phase out the tedium of game development and free up time and bandwidth to focus on the creativity of it. It does stand to reason that a model like Muse, which absorbed hundreds of hours of a game created by people, still needs people to create those ideas for anything to work at all.

It also begs the question: should Microsoft even care what developers think right now? As both a platform holder and arguably the largest third-party publisher in the industry, tackling modern design complexity and trying — like Capcom — to make it both cheaper and more efficient is likely of paramount importance for them in the coming years. As an example, the latest Fable project from Xbox Games Studio supposedly began work in 2018 and, as of writing, still does not have an unveiled date.

Would generative AI fix that or make it faster? Unknown. But games are taking longer and longer to develop and there is only so long that can be tenable for Xbox head Phil Spencer.

For Xbox’s part, “preservation” is a key part of their argument for Muse. In the initial statement, Fatima Kardar, corporate vice president of gaming AI at Microsoft, argued that Muse could make older games accessible to modern audiences without much work regardless of hardware advancements. This would, under Kardar’s reasoning, make the opportunity cost spent on remasters and backwards compatibility engineering moot. But nothing Xbox showed regarding Muse today bore that out.

In coming out publicly with such a big marketing push for Muse, it seems Xbox is trying to serve the two masters of shareholders and futurists. That’s all well and good, but it is critical to remember that Muse had to train off hundreds of hours of a game created by people in Cambridge that the audience mostly did not connect with. If all of the elements in that equation are not happy, what can the end product be called except a compromise?

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Daredevil: Born Again preview scene reunites Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk

The last time that Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk faced off against each other was in Daredevil season 3 in 2018. It’s been the improved part of a decade since these adversaries have seen each other in person, but Murdock and Fisk will cross paths once again in Daredevil: Born Again. However, in a new preview scene from the series, Fisk and Murdock’s reunion is surprisingly cordial, if tense.

This part of the story was briefly seen in the Born Again trailer a few weeks ago, and it recaptures the vibe of Michael Mann’s Heat by bringing such diametrically opposed characters together for an intimate one-on-one discussion. The history between these two is apparent, and as demonstrated at the end of Daredevil season 3, Fisk is fully aware that Murdock is Daredevil… or at least he was.

The clip doesn’t contain the full scene between Fisk and Murdock, so we don’t get to hear more about the latter’s decision to stop being a vigilante. In the meantime, Fisk has ascended to become one of the leading candidates to be the next mayor of New York City, while Murdock has left Hell’s Kitchen behind despite defending his neighborhood so forcefully over the years. The reason why Murdock sought out Fisk for this face-to-face meeting is that he doesn’t believe that the Kingpin has changed. Considering that Murdock will be back in costume soon enough, his fears seem well-founded.

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Daredevil: Born Again will have a two-episode premiere on Disney+ on March 4. The remaining seven episodes of season 1 will be released weekly. Cox in recent times disclosed that the cast will begin filming season 2 soon.

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