Sony & PS Return Helldivers 2 to Steam After Negative Reviews - 1

Sony & PS Return Helldivers 2 to Steam After Negative Reviews

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert

Sony and PlayStation announced that the decision to require a PlayStation Network (PSN) account to play the popular video game Helldivers 2 has been reversed after hundreds of thousands of users across the world complained, leaving over 200,000 negative reviews on the game’s Steam page.

Sony, the publisher of the game, announced on May 3 that customers playing on PC would be required to have a PSN account to continue playing and removed Helldivers 2 from Steam in over 170 countries, some of which the PlayStation service isn’t even available. All of this occurred three months after releasing Helldivers 2 to players worldwide.

The company explained that it was planned from the beginning and hadn’t been required before “due to technical issues”.

The decision made thousands of players rage, request their money back, and ally to bring down the stellar reputation of the Arrowhead Games Studio game, which was said to have already sold around 8 million copies by mid-March.

According to Forbes , Sony made a “truly terrible mistake,” calling it an unfair decision toward its customers. “Players might not have purchased the game or might have returned it if they’d known”.

Just a few minutes after Sony’s announcement, thousands of players shared thoughts on social media channels, notably Reddit. They started writing poor reviews on Steam that quickly snowballed into 200,000, as confirmed by The Verge .

“Greatly disappointed with the additional forced change of requiring a PSN account in order to play the game,” wrote one user on Steam the day after the announcement.

The reputation of the esteemed game was severely affected, and the companies reconsidered. PlayStation posted an official announcement on its X account on May 6, telling customers that the PSN account requirement will not be necessary anymore.

“Helldivers fans — we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward”.

Customers were content with the reconsideration and even wrote positive reviews to get the game’s great reputation back. “Democracy has prevailed,” said one user on Steam. “This game is so good that we even had a campaign mission in real life,” wrote another.

Microsoft Training New AI Model Big Enough to Compete With Major LLMs - 2

Microsoft Training New AI Model Big Enough to Compete With Major LLMs

  • Written by Shipra Sanganeria Cybersecurity & Tech Writer
  • Fact-Checked by

Microsoft is developing a new AI large language model (LLM) codenamed MAI-1, which has the potential to compete with the AI LLMs developed by Google and OpenAI.

It’s the first time that Microsoft has developed such a large-scale LLM since investing billions of dollars in OpenAI for the rights to deploy the latter’s technology across its suite of productivity software.

The development of MAI-1 is being overseen by Google DeepMind and Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, a report by The Information revealed . In March 2024, Microsoft acquired a number of Inflection’s staff in a $650 million deal.

According to the report, which was released on May 6, MAI-1 will have approximately 500 billion parameters, placing it somewhere between the reported one trillion parameters of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 70 billion parameters of Meta’s Llama 3 AI model .

It is also expected to be “far larger” and more expensive than any of Microsoft’s previous, smaller, open-source AIs (Phi-3 and WizardLM-2), as it will require more computing power and training data.

While MAI-1 may leverage techniques and training data from Inflection, it remains distinct from any models or technologies produced by OpenAI or Inflection. According to Microsoft employees who are acquainted with the project, MAI-1 is a completely novel LLM developed internally by Microsoft.

Microsoft has not yet announced the exact purpose of MAI-1, and its exact use will depend on its performance. In the meantime, the company has been allocating a large cluster of servers with Nvidia GPUs and using large amounts of data from various sources to improve the model.

Depending on its progress, reports say the company may preview MAI-1 at the Build developer conference later this month, but this isn’t confirmed .