Future of Mobile Gaming, Tech Job Nightmares, Shipping Software, and Meta AI

Weekly Roundup of AI, Technology, and UX

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Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

• 📱 Mobile Gaming

• 👨‍💻 Tech Jobs

• 🌐 Shipping Software

• 🤖 AI Risks

• 📝 State of AI

• 🤩 Meta Celebrities

• 🏙️ Photoshift

Podcast

Mobile Gaming and the Future of AR, VR, and the Metaverse

With extensive experience in mobile gaming, as well as spatial data and real estate, Beau Button co-founded Atlas Reality, a mobile gaming company that bridges the digital and physical worlds. On this episode, we discuss how he’s created augmented reality games like Atlas Earth, plans for Web3 games like Atlas Mars, and the future of blockchain in gaming, content creation, and beyond. 

We also discuss our favorite old school video game consoles from NeoGeo to Commodore 64. And the future of AR/VR, designing games in VR, and the future of the metaverse as a presentation layer. As well as the use of artificial intelligence in gaming and software development. 

News and Useful Reads

Finding a Tech Job Is Still a Nightmare

Those of use in the industry could tell you this, especially anyone who has been on the job market: it has been incredibly rough. I see similar themes in online groups where discussions about resumes and interviews take place, particularly among product managers (my area of expertise), but certainly affecting all areas of tech.

The past year has brought a reckoning for the once unsinkable industry. Tech companies around the world laid off more than 400,000 workers in 2022 and 2023, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks job losses across the industry. A year after many of those cuts began, job seekers are still facing a tough market, fighting for a smaller number of spots in a job sector that once promised high salaries, lavish perks, and security.

Why We Don’t Ship Software as Fast as We Used To

As I write this, I’m also frantically coordinating software rollout plans, which (unsurprisingly) have stretched beyond our initial target. Like the author of this article mentions, we don’t ship as quickly as we used to. And there are a lot of reasons for that. From higher expectations to better hardware to increased complexity (so much complexity):

software has become more complex, which makes shipping take longer. But you don’t necessarily see the complexity, which is why the speed (or lack thereof) seems hard to explain.

"Godfather of Artificial Intelligence" Geoffrey Hinton on the promise, risks of advanced AI

I posted about this before, but Geoffrey Hinton is in the news again, discussing the potential benefits and dangers of AI, and the need to take action now. Pretty sure I even made the Oppenheimer reference…

Geoffrey Hinton told us he has no regrets because of AI's potential for good. But he says now is the moment to run experiments to understand AI, for governments to impose regulations and for a world treaty to ban the use of military robots. He reminded us of Robert Oppenheimer who after inventing the atomic bomb, campaigned against the hydrogen bomb--a man who changed the world and found the world beyond his control. 

State of AI Report 2023

Looking for a good summary of the state of AI? Check out this report and presentation for some interesting insight and overview of where we are and where we’ve been.

For much of the last year, it’s felt like Large Language Models (LLMs) have been the only game in town. While the State of AI Report predicted that transformers were emerging as a general purpose system back in 2021, significant advances in capabilities caught both the AI community and wider world by surprise, with implications for research, industry dynamics, and geopolitics.

Meta's AI celebrities face more resistance than enthusiasm

Meta seemed to have missed the mark with its celebrity AI profiles:

At Connect 2023 in late September, Meta announced that it would soon offer chatbots that mimic celebrities via WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. The idea is to bring fans closer to their idols. Judging by the reaction on social media, however, the feature has been met with more rejection than enthusiasm.

The profiles are a weird hybrid, which is confusing. They don’t go the celebrity name, which makes everyone wonder if they are meant to be the celebrity, or just a look-alike. And that just makes it weird. Especially in the age of deepfake AI.

Useful Tools and Resources

Photoshift

If you’re looking to enhance some product photos, you may want to check this out. I’m going to play around with it for some of my etsy photos and see how it does. I could see it going either way (like some bad amazon photos I was posting about on tiktok). Let me know if it works for you though.