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SpaceX’s Starlink, lauded for its ambitious global internet service, is reportedly in a financial paradox, burning through cash at a rate that questions its profitability claims, according to Bloomberg reporting. Despite assertions from CEO Elon Musk and SpaceX executives of reaching “profitable territory,” insiders revealed to Bloomberg that the reality of Starlink’s finances is more complex, especially concerning the costs associated with its ground terminals and satellite launches.
Though it boasts over 2.6 million customers, Starlink allegedly omits the significant expenses of satellite deployment in its financial presentations to investors, creating an overly optimistic portrayal of its fiscal health. This accounting practice has led to skepticism about the satellite business’s operational profitability, contrasting Musk’s previous announcements of achieving “breakeven cash flow.”
As SpaceX continues to redefine the aerospace industry with its reusable rockets and the sheer number of satellites deployed, the financial sustainability of its satellite internet service comes under scrutiny. Valued near $180 billion, SpaceX’s reliance on Starlink for revenue is evident, especially as the company seeks to fund Musk’s vision of Mars colonization. Yet, the ambition of reaching millions more customers necessitates a network expansion that could exacerbate existing capacity and cost challenges.
Starlink’s capacity constraints and speed bumps
Starlink’s quest for global coverage faces hurdles, not just in the technological realm but also in market penetration. Urban saturation has begun to affect service performance, a situation SpaceX hopes to alleviate with the introduction of more advanced satellites. However, the promise of improved services with the upcoming Starship rocket launches remains contingent on overcoming significant testing milestones.
While Starlink’s appeal to major airlines has been limited, its success in rural and maritime sectors demonstrates the service’s potential. Partnerships with companies like Carnival Cruise Lines and Anglo-Eastern Ship Management highlight Starlink’s ability to offer vital internet services in areas traditionally underserved by traditional providers.
The path to consistent profitability for Starlink involves reducing manufacturing and operational costs while expanding its subscriber base. With revenue projections optimistic, SpaceX may explore additional financing or an IPO for Starlink, though such plans remain speculative. Yet, as Starlink navigates these financial and operational challenges, its impact on global internet access continues to grow
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Google announced on Wednesday that it will extend its AI-powered editing features in Google Photos, previously exclusive to Pixel devices and paid subscribers, to all users at no additional cost, as per TechCrunch reporting. The suite of tools, including the Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, and Photo Unblur, utilizes machine learning to enhance photo quality and composition.
The rollout of these advanced editing capabilities is set to begin on May 15, with a phased approach expected to reach all Google Photos users over several weeks. Users wishing to access the new features will need to meet specific hardware requirements. For ChromeOS devices, compatibility includes Chromebook Plus models running ChromeOS version 118+ or devices with at least 3GB RAM. Mobile users will require devices operating on Android 8.0 or higher or iOS 15 or higher. The update also extends support to Pixel tablets.
The Magic Editor, first introduced with the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, stands out for its ability to conduct more complex edits through generative AI, such as altering photo backgrounds and enhancing foreground elements. This feature, alongside others, aims to simplify tasks that previously necessitated manual editing in software like Photoshop.
Limitations for non-Pixel users
While all users can enjoy the bulk of the new editing tools without a Google One subscription, there is a caveat for non-Pixel device users regarding the Magic Editor. These users will be limited to 10 Magic Editor saves per month unless they subscribe to a Premium Google One plan, which offers unlimited access among other benefits.
This expansion represents Google’s strategic response to the increasing availability of AI-powered editing tools in the market, aiming to make high-quality photo editing accessible to a broader audience. Despite introducing subscription-based limitations for certain features, the move significantly enhances the value proposition of Google Photos for users worldwide.
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Electronic Arts’ Battlefield franchise now has four studios working on it; the latest is Motive, which made the 2023 remake of Dead Space and Star Wars Squadrons in 2020. Coming with that announcement, however, is confirmation that the seventh season of content in Battlefield 2042 will be its last.
Patrick Klaus, Motive’s general manager, announced the changes in a statement on Tuesday. Motive joins DICE, Criterion, and Ripple Effect as teams underneath Respawn Entertainment founder Vince Zampella to revitalize the long-tenured shooter.
Klaus said the end of seasonal content doesn’t mean all support for Battlefield 2042 is over. “We will continue to support the game with new in-game challenges, events, modes, and of course, ongoing maintenance,” he wrote, “but we are moving away from delivering official seasons.”
Battlefield 2042’s most recent season, “Turning Point” launched last month. Its first season, Zero Hour, was delayed into the summer of 2022. The game launched in November 2021 and was the lowest-rated game in the 22-year-old series, with fan reaction far more disappointed than the critical reception.
Battlefield 2042 was troubled by numerous bugs at launch, requiring developers to hurry out two quick patches within three weeks of each other. That, plus the battle pass delay, and the lack of even a multiplayer scoreboard until the following spring, led to dramatic declines in the player base.
Zampella was brought on just weeks after Battlefield 2042 launched, another sign Electronic Arts saw a franchise in serious trouble. The shakeup also cost DICE general manager Oskar Gabrielson his job.
What about the Iron Man video game?
In a separate announcement made on Motive’s studio website, Klaus reported in on Motive’s Iron Man project, for those concerned that Battlefield duties might impinge on that. “The team made excellent progress this year, hitting a major internal milestone and laying a robust foundation for the journey ahead,” Klaus wrote. “Iron man is an important priority for Motive, and I’m very proud of the work we’ve accomplished so far.”
Klaus specified that the team working on Iron Man is separate from the one on Battlefield, and that the latter will expand to meet its new duties.
The Iron Man game Motive is working on was announced in 2022; at the time it was said to be in pre-production. The project’s executive producer is Olivier Proulx, who was a producer on 2021’s Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy for Eidos Montreal, as well as Marvel’s Avengers in 2020, for Crystal Dynamics.
Featured image via Steam
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The peak of the AI chatbot boom may have passed, but now there exists a variety of competitive generative AI chatbots.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the first to captivate the world with its impressive, human-like chatbot that was able to both tell jokes and explain detailed and complicated scientific research. All from simple human-written text prompts. It was a revelation and sparked an intense AI arms race as the world’s biggest companies sought to grab a piece of the pie, as well as new companies popping up with their own AI products.
Google and Microsoft are just two examples of huge tech companies entering the AI space over the last few years.
One of ChatGPT’s big rivals in the generative chatbot industry is Claude AI, which was launched in 2023.
Who owns Claude AI?
Claude AI is owned by California-based AI startup Anthropoic and was founded in 2021 by former senior members of OpenAI, Daniella and Dario Amodei. Dario was previously OpenAI’s Vice President of Research. They were among several OpenAI employees who left the business in 2019 over direction businesses, including the company’s work alongside Microsoft.
Within a few years, the company had raised $700 million in funding and towards the end of 2023, Amazon was announced as a minority stakeholder after investing up to $4 billion. Since then, Google has also invested $400 million in Anthropic.
The business, which now has more than 150 employees, has created a family of large language models (LLM) called Claude.
Anthropic’s USP is what they call ‘Constitutional AI’, which is an approach developed for training LLMs to be as ethical as possible. The chatbot is trained on the principles taken from the likes of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights so that it can behave in a safe, accurate and secure way.
Anthropic launched the first iteration of Claude in March 2023, and followed that up with Claude 2 in July 2023. Claude 2 stood out in the marketplace because of the ability to upload PDFs and other documents for summary and analysis purposes.
In March 2024, Anthropic launched Claude 3, which the business claimed set new industry benchmarks across a wide range of cognitive tasks. Claude 3 is a family – Haiku, Sonnet and Opus – of models that have differing levels of capabilities, knowledge levels and sophistication.
Anthropic is now valued at around $20 billion and is a public benefits corporation, which is a business that intends to make a profit but in a way that benefits the public and its users.
What is Claude AI?
In its most basic form, Claude AI is Anthropic’s very own version of ChatGPT. Similar to ChatGPT 3.5, its dataset has a cut-off point – 2022 – and it can’t connect to the internet, so it has limitations to how accurate it can be when responding to prompts related to events that have happened after 2022.
The chatbot is trained to have natural, human-like text-based conversations and is best used for summarization, Q&A, decision-making, code writing and summarization.

Claude is also the name of the underlying LLM that powers the Claude models. Alongside Claude, there is also Claude Instant, which is a lighter and faster iteration of Claude, and Claude 3, which is the latest addition to the family.
Several features make Claude stand out from its competitors. It excels at conversational fluency and it can hold its own when involved in engaging conversations and it prides itself on factual accuracy and transparency.
It’s also very fast. For example, I uploaded a copy of my CV and asked Claude to summarize it for me. It took less than a few seconds to return seven bullet points about my CV, including a career timeline and an overall summary of my expertise and experience.
Claude currently has a context window of 200,000 tokens, which means it can handle text inputs of around 150,000 words or 500 pages of written material. This makes it far less likely for users to experience hallucinations – which is when a chatbot responds with something that isn’t factually correct – and allows businesses to use the chatbot to analyze and summarise large documents quickly and accurately.
How to use Claude AI: step by step

Sign up
Using Claude AI is simple. Simply go to claude.ai and sign up using an email address. From there, you will be prompted to give your name and acknowledge Anthropic’s Acceptable Use Policy and the fact that Claude isn’t perfect and may generate incorrect or misleading information. Standard stuff.
Once the formalities are out of the way, you’re taken to Claude’s landing page. The model you’re automatically given access to is Claude 3 Sonnet, which is Anthropic’s second-most intelligent Claude model.
Enter prompts
Sonnet can understand and work with images, as well as text and documents, so you can upload an image for Claude to extract text from, convert UI design to front-end code, ask Claude to recommend style improvements to a photo of a particular setting or generate a recipe from a photo of a plate of food – perfect for interior designers, coders and budding chefs for example.
To start engaging with Claude 3 Sonnet, you simply have to either enter a prompt in the text box or upload a file and give it some instructions on what you want the model to do with it. Claude can read PDFs, Word docs and more.
Be clear and specific
To get the best results when using Claude AI, it’s advised to ask clear and specific questions. The more detailed your query, the better response you will likely get in return. Additionally, always try to provide context where possible, which allows Claude to understand relevant details.
And it’s also good to follow up on your initial queries for further clarification. Claude will always seek to explain topics in more detail when prompted. You can also ask Claude if it needs any more information or has any questions for you before it undertakes your request.
Practice
Beyond that, it’s worth just testing Claude and seeing where its limitations are and how it can be useful for your own purposes. Try uploading documents and having general conversations with it to get a feel for its capabilities. This will allow you to know how best to utilise Claude AI in your everyday tasks, either for work or personal uses.
Is Claude AI free to use?
Claude AI is free with limitations, which is currently around 30 messages a day. All you need is an email address to gain access to the free version.
To upgrade for access to Anthropic’s faster and more intelligent Claude AI models, it costs $20-a-month, billed annually.
Claude Pro gives you a lot more functionality, including having a fully customizable persona and integrating Claude into third-party apps, such as Slack, 5x more messaging than the free plan and early access to new features.
Featured Image: Anthropic
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Star Wars Outlaws got a confirmed launch date and two special edition options on April 9, among them an eye-watering $129.99 “Ultimate Edition” that is drawing pushback from suspicious gamers.
Though not a record for special editions of AAA video games by any stretch, it is a bit stiff for one that has no physical premiums. The Ultimate Edition is a bundle of all-digital tchotchkes and VIP treatment, one of which is three days of early access, which means it must be pre-ordered, too.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, also developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft, had a $129.99, digital-only Ultimate Edition when that launched in December. If this is becoming a trend, some are unhappy with it, and what it means.
“On the one hand, we don’t need the special edition. On the other hand, it’s still a pretty weak special edition for that price,” said Redditor GuyFromYarnham in r/saltierthankrayt, the subreddit for Star Wars fandom. 
“Massive being the lead on this game is keeping me hopeful, given their work on the Division,” added ShoArts. “It’s Ubisoft pulling stuff like this that’s making me wait til long after release.”
Others echoed the buy-later advice. “The secret ingredient to buying Ubisoft games is wait for the inevitable sale a month after it drops,” said Razgriz_101, in an r/gaming thread headlined, “Can we please not normalize 130$ dollars for deluxe edition of games.”
What’s in the Star Wars Outlaws Ultimate Edition?
Star Wars Outlaws’ Ultimate Edition includes the base game (of course); a Season Pass, which means post-release story expansions are on the table; three days of early access to the game (if pre-ordered); the “Sabacc Shark bundle” of skins, and the “Rogue Infiltrator bundle. There’s also a digital art book, which few gamers today seem to get excited about.
We haven’t seen images of what the skins are. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor had different skins, but in order to be narratively consistent, they were homages to fan favorite characters, rather than the characters themselves.
The Gold Edition at $109.99 lacks the art book and character skins. The $69.99 standard edition is just the game. Pre-order it, and get in three days early. The price difference between the Gold Edition and standard edition means the Season Pass will probably cost $40 if bought separately after launch.
For those who aren’t sure about the game, there’s another way in: subscribe to Ubisoft Plus, one of the pricier publisher-only subscription services at $17.99 per month. That gets gamers everything in the Star Wars Outlaws Ultimate Edition (although it’s a good bet the Season Pass content won’t make it into the game for some months). If it doesn’t float their boat, quit the subscription.
Featured image via Ubisoft
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VanEck CEO Jan van Eck has voiced his skepticism regarding the approval of spot Ethereum (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in May.
During a recent interview with CNBC on April 9, the boss of the multi-billion dollar investment company stated that he believes his firm’s spot Ethereum ETF application will “probably be rejected.” VanEck and ARK Invest, led by Cathie Wood, were among the pioneers in filing for a spot in Ethereum ETF in the United States. Both companies are currently awaiting the SEC’s final decision, which is scheduled for May 23 and May 24, respectively.
Van Eck: Lack of Feedback from Regulators
Van Eck shed light on the regulatory process, explaining that regulators typically provide comments on ETF applications. However, in the case of Ethereum, there has been a notable absence of feedback. CoinShares CEO Jean-Marie Mognetti shared a similar pessimistic outlook, stating that he does not anticipate any approvals in the near future.
The SEC has been silent on the seven pending applications for spot Ethereum ETFs, contributing to the decreasing likelihood of an ETF approval in May. This “radio silence” between the regulator and prospective fund issuers has been noted by commentators, including Senior Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas.
At the same time, the SEC has initiated a three-week comment period for three Ethereum spot ETF proposals submitted by Grayscale Investments, Fidelity, and Bitwise earlier this month. The announcement also follows the SEC discussing the Ethereum spot ETF proposed by asset manager Grayscale Investments with Coinbase back in March.
VanEck’s Ethereum ETF application is one of seven awaiting approval, alongside those from Grayscale, BlackRock, and Fidelity. Balchunas, who initially assigned a 70% chance of approval in May, has since revised his odds to 35%. He echoed van Eck’s sentiments, emphasizing the need for the SEC to provide comments and critical feedback.
ETF analyst James Seyffart also expressed concern over the SEC’s months-long inaction, questioning the reasons behind the lack of communication when the applications were anticipated.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs Experience Outflows
Meanwhile, spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs in the United States have experienced a shift in investor sentiment, with net outflows recorded since the start of the week following four consecutive days of inflows and a day seeing over $1 billion of inflows. Grayscale’s GBTC spot ETF was the primary contributor to this reversal, with single-day net outflows exceeding $303 million on Monday and an additional $154 million on Tuesday.
Despite the outflows from GBTC, other Bitcoin ETFs have seen net inflows during this period, with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and Bitwise Bitcoin ETF leading the charge. VanEck’s spot Bitcoin ETF, traded under the ticker HODL, currently ranks as the fifth largest among the ten recently launched funds, excluding Grayscale. Since its mid-January launch, HODL has attracted an inflow of $461.7 million, according to Farside Investors data.
Van Eck highlighted the success of Bitcoin ETFs, describing Bitcoin as a “maturing asset” and noting that there are still many investors who have yet to gain exposure to the cryptocurrency.
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Prince of Persia fans should “forget everything they know” about the beleaguered remake of 2003’s Sands of Time, according to a report that the game has been “remade from scratch.”
Tom Henderson reported these details in a post published April 9 by Insider Gaming. Henderson said he had been provided footage of the remake project on condition that he not make it public.
Still, after seeing proof of life in a troubled game first announced in 2021, the journalist said missing textures and assets suggests it’s a ways from release and is likely still in the early stage.
Ubisoft declined to comment on the story. Insider Gaming has more details.
Development on the Sands of Time remake has taken many twists and turns
The remake certainly isn’t a secret as it was first announced more than three years ago. But in May 2022, it became apparent that development would moving from Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai to Ubisoft Montreal. At the time, Ubisoft released an update on the game saying it had passed an ‘important milestone.’
While updates have been provided and the official website’s Prince of Persia page is branded with a ‘Coming Soon’ banner, there is no known release date at this time.
Featured Image: Via Ideogram
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