Day: 7 December 2023

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Gaming giant EPIC launches Minecraft rival: Fortnite Lego

Epic Games

Epic Games and The Lego Group have teamed up to create a LEGO® Fortnite® Video Game, which was released inside Fortnite 7th December 2023. 

This new survival game will allow players to explore vast, open worlds where the magic of LEGO building and Fortnite collide. It’s designed for people of all ages and encourages creativity, experimentation, and collaboration through play. It seems to be based on Minecraft – a Lego-style block-building and crafting game – which is the best-selling game of all time.

Additionally, there are some LEGO Fortnite-themed products available for purchase, such as realistic LEGO guns and other building sets compatible with LEGO.

Popular Battle Royale

Fortnite technically has multiple game modes, but its online Battle Royale is by far its most popular, where up to 100 players compete to be the last one standing.

But the extraordinary popularity of Fortnite‘s Battle Royale completely dwarfed the game’s other modes, and Fortnite is now known to most as an online ultimate shooter game with crafting elements.

Minecraft

Minecraft, which is owned by Microsoft, is a survival game in which players build structures as well as craft tools and weapons. When Fortnite first released it came with a similar crafting survival mode, named Fortnite: Save the World, which was released before its battle royale mode even existed.

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Google releases Gemini, its latest AI venture

Chatbot

Pressure mounts on the Google to demonstrate how it plans monetize AI.

Google has launched its largest and most capable (by its own admission) artificial intelligence (AI) model on Wednesday 6th December 2023 pressure mounts on the company to answer how it’ll monetize AI.

Gemini

The large language model Gemini will include a suite of three different sizes: Gemini Ultra, its largest, most capable category; Gemini Pro, which scales across a wide range of tasks; and Gemini Nano, which it will use for specific tasks and mobile devices.

Cloud

Google is reportedly planning to licence Gemini to clients through Google Cloud to use in their own applications. Developers and enterprise customers can access Gemini Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vertex AI.

Android

Android developers will also be able to build with Gemini Nano. Gemini will also be used to power Google products like its Bard Chatbot and Search Generative Experience, which tries to answer search queries with conversational-style text.

Ultra

Gemini Ultra is reportedly the first model to outperform human experts on MMLU (massive multitask language understanding), which uses a combination of 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine and ethics for testing both world knowledge and problem-solving abilities, the company said in a blog post Wednesday 6th December 2023. 

It can supposedly understand nuance and reasoning in complex subjects.

Advanced

The company gave examples demonstrating Gemini being able to take a screenshot of a chart and analyse hundreds of pages from research and then updating the chart.

Another example was analyzing a photo of a person’s math homework and identifying correct answers and pointing out incorrect ones.

The future is artificial.

Definition of the word Gemini: Constellation, Astrological Sign or Twins in Latin.

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America and its $1 trillion credit card debt

Debt

U.S. citizens have accumulated a record-breaking $1 trillion in credit card debt.

The Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes through 2023 have caused average interest rates for credit cards to spike to more than 22%. Rates on retail credit cards are even higher, nearing 29% on average.

Despite rising costs and higher borrowing rates, a record number of consumers shopped over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The National Retail Federation found that more than 200 million consumers went shopping that weekend, more than the 196.7 million shoppers who turned out in 2022.

Retailers Macy’s and other larger retailers have issued warnings about a slowdown in repayments on their credit cards, highlighting a potential risk to retail revenue this holiday season.

The resilience of the American consumer will continue to be tested by the still-rising costs of groceries, fuel, energy and housing.

Interesting fact

The U.S. credit card debt is approximately equal to the size of Apple’s market cap of $1 trillion.

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McDonald’s unveils CosMc’s in U.S.

Mcdonalds coffee shop

McDonald’s has announced its new restaurant idea, CosMc’s, which would operate in the same market section as Starbucks.

Its pilot will open this month in a part of Chicago, with a plan to be in about ten locations by the end of 2024. The fast-food chain also plans to open about 10,000 McDonald’s restaurants globally by 2027, with many of those in China.

The first CosMc’s is due to open in Illinois, U.S. later this week, with about 10 more to open in Texas in 2024.

The expansion would boost the number of stores to about 50,000.