Hey Sainsbury's, I'm cooking for everyone this Easter but I don't want to break the bank. Got any tasty offers? Well with Nectar there's half price on selected sides of salmon and selected beef joints and whole legs of lamb are better than half price. Ooh they'll be as happy as my wallet. Sainsbury's good food for all of us. 18 plus Nectar required excludes locals N7th of April subject to availability, teas and seas apply. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday April 3rd, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context and help each other understand. Today, SOTY Interactive Entertainment bought Cinemercive Labs to level up PS5 Pro's game rendering. Ooh what does that mean? Well we'll talk about it. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Jen Cutter. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story. All right Sony Interactive Entertainment, which is a mouthful in itself, I'm realizing I just want to say Sony but that's wrong, has acquired UK based Cinemercive Labs which is a startup that uses custom AI tools to turn standard 2D photos and videos into 3D volumes, volumetric data. The Cinemercive team will join Sony's visual computing group. They're going to help with its next-gen rendering and its visual technology. The core product from the Cinemercive Labs team, at least at this stage, is a VR app called Parallax that lets users view parallax photos in lifelike three-dimensional scenes using standard smartphones and stereo lens cameras. So that's kind of the foundational layer of what they've been working on, how that will fit into Sony and its work on the PS5 Pro remains to be seen. But I mean we have some clues. Sony says this is part of a larger machine learning strategy that already uses or rather includes PlayStation spectral super resolution, or you may see it referred to as PSSR on the PS5 Pro that renders at lower resolutions and then uses AI upscaling to hit 4K and by doing that it frees up performance headroom, right? Well, in fact, along those lines, Sony also just shipped a new update to PSSR a few days ago that is accessible on Assassin's Creed Shadows on the PS5 Pro and there is sharpening pixels, it's stabilizing images, reducing visual artifacts, that sort of stuff. It's definitely an upgraded improvement with the PSSR. So one could imagine, or at least I would imagine, that maybe this technology feeds into PSSR as a technology. I'm curious to know your thoughts. You're definitely more of a gamer than I am these days. What's your thinking, Jen? Well, I've been asked about this, but several years ago when PlayStation's were more affordable, I bought the disc version of the original PlayStation. So I have not been able to see this myself just in videos from like digital foundry and such. This kind of like ties into the whole like, Nvidia issue that we covered on the show a couple of days ago where it's like, oh, is this inventing pixels and stuff? Right. But this stuff seems a little less extreme, let's say. It's like, OK, here's more hair. Here's white teeth kind of thing. But I kind of love the whole parallax thing because like I was first introduced to the term parallax back on the like Super Nintendo when like backgrounds scrolled differently. So it looked more cool when you were running. And I don't know why reading this. I remembered. Do you remember like the binocular type things like the View Master? We stuck in like a film. Yeah. I think I'm like, oh, 2D photos to 3D volumes. Is that like how you could look at the view? Master. It's just like it's just like the View Master, Jen. That's the perfect analogy. Oh, they should they should make one in someone. Yeah. Hey, I mean, you know, this is totally off topic, but there was a View Master update. I don't know how many years ago when VR on mobile phones was a thing and you could get it for your Android device and slot your smartphone in there. It was like shaped like a View Master. I always total sides. There was some innovation in View Master. That's all I'm saying. I totally agree. You were you were kind of comparing this to the video news from a few weeks ago. That was the DLSS for announcement. That involved AI generated frames over the top of those intentional game renders. Gamers, as you know, you were kind of alluding to did not care so much. They were kind of calling the improvements in air quotes AI slop because it was really just kind of like regenerating the graphics and how much is intentional versus just AI interpretation or whatever. In this case, Sin immersive seems to focus more closely on 360 degree image generation. That parallax correction that we were talking about as a camera moves in a scene, so it's a little bit more isolated. It can do things like reducing judder. It can improve how a rendered scene looks as the viewpoint shifts. So it's kind of comparable, but I think in the sense of the Nvidia comparison, the DLSS for there's a lot more generation happening where it's like, let's take this and let's interpret it. That might be happening here as well. If I'm understanding things, but I think on a much more isolated scale, it's not suddenly turning your entire image into a fully AI generated slot machine. No one has complained because like PSSR, like PS5 Pro users have had experience with this by now and you have not heard the same kind of complaints. It's not redrawing faces into Instagram filters kind of thing. It is. Yeah. I like that it's minor is the wrong word because like going to 4K is not minor. It is an upgrade and yes, freeing up the processor for other things, faster load times. Like that's the one thing I wish I had a pro for is like, I wouldn't. Oh, I'm not opposed to faster load times. That would be something I like. But yes, the fact that this is more minor, more. Again, saying undetectable is a little over-sating. But it's not a thing that draws your attention away from the thing you do. You play the game and you're playing the game and it's not a distraction. And that might be one of the differences, right? Like everything by all accounts, what people were reacting to with the LSS4 is it's unmistakable. The amount of changes and the amount of difference it underwent from what, you know, what the rendering without it versus with it was. You can't just kind of like look at it and be like, oh, that was that was a little improvement. I can abide by that. It's like everything looks pretty different versus something like this. I guess we'll even find out like we we don't truly know exactly how this particular acquisition is going to feed into tools like PSSR. But but you can imagine, you know, this is just another one of those steps to kind of improve things. And when I think about kind of where technology is right now and gaming. And again, I will just, you know, admit like I haven't I don't play these games as much as I used to. So I might not be in tune and in lockstep with a lot of the gamer community that probably holds, you know, holds dear and close to the intentions of the game designers. But I have to imagine the technology and where it's at right now. This like AI upscaling thing, especially when you're talking about performance gains, this has to be the way that these things are heading. Maybe though they can do it in a way that isn't so all or nothing, you know, it isn't so in your face. It's it's like minor improvements, but not let's redraw the entire screen. Well, so a game like Assassin's Creed Shadows is a thing that you can put let's say almost 100 hours in easy. So if you out there have the PS5 Pro and have played Assassin's Creed Shadows, boot it up again. Let us know at feedback at Daily Tech News Show.com. I want to hear if you notice anything in the update or whether it just kind of feels the same. And if you'd like it, like if you do notice it, did it help or was it distracting? You know, yeah. So DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. So let's send a thanks to Bella or Erwin Stur, Ken Hayes and Philip Shane. Thank you so, so much. Thank you. At GrapeTree, you'll find fantastic deals like our best selling Supreme Almonds now for just eight ninety nine a kilogram or three for twenty five pounds. Plus use code PIC15 for 15 percent of a thirty five pound or more spend or code PIC20 for 20 percent of a fifty pound or more spend on selected products when you order online or shop at one of over one hundred ninety of our stores nationwide. If you're looking for big bags and big value, GrapeTree is the place to go. GrapeTree, your health, our products. All right, there is more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Open AI is buying the technology business programming network or TVPN out of Los Angeles in a deal worth low hundreds of millions of dollars. The 11 person team, including co-host Jordy Hayes and John Cougan, will be brought in-house while keeping its content on air. And according to Open AI, editorially independent, the TVPN network has become popular among founders and investors in Silicon Valley with around seventy thousand average viewers of the Daily Show. It was already on track to earn around thirty million in ad based revenue this year. This move follows Open AI project chief Fiji Seymour's internal push for the team to focus on core products like chat, GPT and its coding tools. A few weeks ago, Seymour urged staff not to get distracted by side quests, but that appears to be largely focused on new app and social products like Sora, we know what happened there. Here, Seymour is positioning this as a way to use media talent to shape the conversation around AI with TVPN sitting in the strategy and global affairs org at the company. I think what I was immediately reminded of here, whether right or wrong was, you know, other big tech media buyouts, right? We've got Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. We've got Benioff, Mark Benioff, Salesforce buying time. And there's there's other examples. But I mean, this is clearly this is different, right? Like those other examples are huge, you know, full fledged newsrooms. This is kind of a smaller content network, but a very popular one nonetheless. So, you know, very niche by comparison, but very influential. So, yeah, this this you couldn't have seen this one coming, right? No, it was so out of nowhere. I'm looking at the news today, you're like, they did what? Yeah, totally. I get incredible to do 11 person teams. You can do a lot with 11 people. Heck yeah. 11 really smart people. You know what it works. So I'm saying that on personal experience as you well know. Yeah, I mean, I give them a lot of credit for what they've been able to build and the influence that they have. I mean, 70,000 average viewers that that isn't even like an insanely large number. I think it's just that they they are so influential, like the who those people are. Right. Exactly. It's kind of a proof of you don't have to have millions upon millions. You just have to know who your people are. And you've got a very valuable company or entity or media company, whatever. But this really does sound at least the way Cimo is positioning it. More of a like a corporate comms like corporate communication asset sort of deal. So, you know, does this have influence over what the company does on its own lobbying efforts? Maybe how does how does the content coming out of this? Like if it's not specifically pro open AI, let's say, if it is truly editorial independent, how how does open AI work with it so that it can influence the industry around AI? As Cimo has has alluded to without it seeming like they're putting their their foot on the the pedal towards them. Well, that makes sense. I don't know. Yeah, they do a lot of interviews. So definitely there is some some shaping that way, depending on how much pushback you get on the on the interviews there. But how much will it actually shape the content if your core listeners are already pro AI, you get a little bit of the preaching to the choir effect? Yeah, that's that's a good point. That's a really good point. Big thanks to Tech Z Explorer or Tech Z Explorer in our subreddit for this next story. Google has released Gemma for its latest Gemma family model as a fully open weight and open source LLM under the Apache to license. That means it can be freely modified, used commercially, redistributed with attribution. That's important. Gemma for was designed using the same research as Gemma and I3. It's designed to run locally on quote billions of Android devices, but also supported, you know, laptop GPUs, devices like the Raspberry Pi and even directly in the browser using web GPU. The new model brings advanced multi step reasoning, agentic workflow support, which is really important right now, multimodal abilities in audio and video. And this is key. It ships in a number of different configurations, two billion, four billion, twenty six billion and thirty one billion parameter sizes with support up to two hundred fifty six thousand token context window. All these numbers just to say this is a pretty seemingly a very powerful family suite of models. And the real benefit here is that open license, right? And some people are kind of looking at this and thinking like, oh, so Google's, you know, in some ways kind of playing the Android playbook, but with, you know, these AI models, very powerful, very, very much, you know, designed to run locally and not to have to be online. So you could do a lot with that. And I don't know. I think that's that's pretty cool. Pretty interesting. I know. Yeah. More people I know are willing to try it if it is locally, if they can sandbox it, if they can protect it. So yeah, I think this release is going to bring more people who were hesitant about it to that kind of ecosystem. And I think Google is counting on like, OK, well, like there was your taste. You want to see what we can really do? You want to see? Oh, you like that taste? Yeah. And also, like important to note, the prior Gemma releases were open, but I would say open ish. They were open weight. They were still bound by some pretty comparatively restrictive terms by comparison. So this Gemma for I think what a lot of people are really reacting to is it really does feel like a truly open model. Metas played around with this with Llama, although Meta seems to be step pulling away from the the open AI model thing right now and go in a little bit more closed. This is kind of Google, at least in this sense, going in the opposite directions. Good to see that, especially with such a strong like 31 billion parameters is a very dense model to be running locally. So I'll be curious to see what people do with it. And also thanks to Motang in our subreddit for this Reddit related story. Reddit is permanently deprecating our all and redirecting all links to users' personalized home feeds with its removal. Reddit has been experimenting with its removal since last year, first inside the Reddit app, the Reddit specific app, and then on desktop. In February, Reddit confirmed the decision to remove the feed for all users. Our all has long been the source of a trending view of everything across Reddit with limited filters to keep not safe for work content out for users. Our popular will continue to surface trending content for users, while Reddit continues to decide how global feeds will work, especially for new users. Reddit is also including tighter teen privacy controls this month, meaning under 18 users can't have followers and will have hidden profiles. Yeah, it seems like this is really, you know, part of the big reason here is is tightening down for younger users, making it a little bit more safe, making it a little bit more understandable, maybe veering more even further towards kind of home, not home, but per user customization. What I guess I just don't really understand the difference between our all and our popular, right? Because they're both kind of like I imagine our all wasn't just purely random. It wasn't random, but it was bigger across just a larger larger option of subreddit. It's just pulling from a bigger pool than are popular. But so I wait to check to see if my account was affected by this. But because I am one of those people who still uses old Reddit, like you can access by like old.reddit, I still have it. So that's still works in case you still want it. At least for now. At least for now. But like because, yeah, if I go to just my home feed, I'm sure you'll be shocked, but like you'll find our hockey the Maple Leaf subreddit with that season going great. And the PWH like it's all very hockey focused and leg of focus and Toronto focused. So I do frequently check our all to see what's going on in the world because you will find more politics and our all than our popular, I would say. So I get a little bit more like local takes on world news for various countries, which I found very helpful. Yeah. And it is it is interesting to me now that you say that. And I recognize like when I open the Reddit app on my phone, I'm probably looking at all. I don't know if I'm looking at all or popular by default, but I don't personally subscribe to any political subreddits. Yet my feed always shows it right at the very top. So we're probably talking about the same thing. And, you know, of course, you know, I see something I'm like, oh, you know, and I read it, but I choose not to like follow the subreddit itself. So I wonder if I'll see a change here. But like you mentioned, it's a really good point. If you love your slash all and you don't want it to go anywhere, at least for now, you can go to old reddit.com and you can go back in time. And it's still there. I just use it to avoid some overly customized feeds that mess with like the layout and have flashing banners and stuff. That's the only reason I use it. So yeah, so if you're also trying to duck those things, that's the secret workaround. There it is. So you all out there, do you need a snazzy gift for a co-worker or colleague? And yes, I'm going to say snazzy as long as you all get let me get away with it. We have dozens of ideas at DailyTechNewShow.com slash store, you can pick up a mug, t-shirt or mousepad with our DTNS logo. They are great gifts and more importantly for us, a great way to support the show. And you get something out of it, too, of course. Hey, Sainsbury's, I'm cooking for everyone this Easter, but I don't want to break the bank. Got any tasty offers? Well, with Nectar, there's half price on selected sides of salmon and selected beef joints and whole legs of lamb are better than half price. Oh, don't be as happy as my wallet. Sainsbury's, good food for all of us. Eighteen-class Nectar required excludes locals end 7th of April subject to availability, teas and seas apply. All right, we have a bunch of headlines that are good to know. I make you look smarter at the dinner table this weekend. In a move likely, no one will find shocking. Meta is considering cutting funding for its oversight board after 2028, according to Platformer. Yeah, I'm really surprised to see that headline, but here we are. Sam Mobile spotted that Google Cast is now built into Samsung's next fleet of TVs, it's 2026 TVs. It's also rolling out to select older ties and models through a one UI update. So you'll get some Google Cast in your TV. In more Samsung news, Samsung open orders for its 2026 frame pro and OLED TVs with new glare free, Neo Q LED and brighter OLED HDR panels. There are 55 and 48 inch size options, a wall flush float layer design and prices that start at $1,200 up to $6,500. Yeah, definitely related to stories there for Samsung fans. Get yourself some TVs sounds like some good stuff there. Thanks to R.W. Nash in the subreddit for flagging that Microsoft is force upgrade. This is probably important for some of you to know Microsoft is going to force upgrade unmanaged Windows 11, two for H2 home and pro editions to Windows 11 to five H2 ahead of that support window ending on October 13th later this year. Obviously, just keep them updated and secure. But it's a forced update. So, you know, be be aware that's coming. Apple Insider has an interesting look at Apple's only employee still there after 50 years, Chris Espinoza, who joined the company at 14 to code for the Apple to and yeah, you can read about everything he's been involved with and witnessed during his time there. And it's just a fascinating journey. Back in the days when you could get a job at Apple at 14 years old, like that's that's so crazy. Another interesting read since we're talking about interesting reads, go to the deep view and check out a little, not a little, but an article about Anthropics research into how LLM's map patterns to emotions that shape decisions in human like ways within the model and how that can sometimes push them into areas of desperation and unethical behavior as a result. Definitely worth checking out to understand a little bit deeper. A bipartisan House bill called the match act was introduced Thursday that aims to close loopholes in U.S. export controls by severely limiting sale of advanced chip equipment to China and other countries of concern. Researchers have disclosed three new Rohammer GPU exploits that let an unprivileged user on NVIDIA Ampere cards. So the RTX 3060, 6000 corrupt GPU page tables and then escalate to full root control of the host CPU. And that's no bueno. That's no good. You don't want that. And Anthropic acquired AI biotech startup coefficient bio for around four hundred million dollars in a move that will add its biotech workflow team into Anthropics health care division. Interesting. Yep. Anthropics doing more in that health space right now and also doing a lot of leaking data. So I don't know those two realms actually probably should be nowhere near each other health health care and leaking data. Bad combination. We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives today. Mel has some thoughts on why we saw the big jump in Linux users on Steam last month. Yeah, Tom, and I talked about this yesterday. So Mel writes, last month we saw a remarkable increase in reported Windows 10 and simplified Chinese language users on Steam. We've seen this happen before a few times and this increase has vanished by the next month. My personal theory is that every so often a popular title is released on Steam but doesn't make it on Steam China due to censorship. So a lot of mainline Chinese use VPNs to get it from Steam proper. Thus temporarily pumping Steam's global Windows and simplified Chinese stats. If we average two months back, this is from January to March. Windows goes from ninety four point sixty percent to ninety two point three percent minus one point four per month. Linux goes from three point three eight percent to five point three three percent, which is plus zero point nine seven per month. Mac OS goes from two point zero one percent to two point three five percent plus zero point one seven per month, which is not nearly as dramatic as the month to month minus four point two eight windows plus three point one Linux and plus one point one nine Mac, but does still show a gradual trend away from Windows. Yeah, it's an apologies to folks listening because you're like, what are all these numbers? The general kind of gist here if you're if you know, we're we're reading it. We're looking at it. Is that in all of these cases that Windows number drops and the others rise, making at least some sort of, I don't know, some sort of view that it possibly could be related between the two things. Yeah, it's an interesting hypothesis. Yeah, like Steam OS growth, obviously a huge contributor to the Linux side. And yeah, I talked to some game dev friends about this and they're like, yeah, we always notice like that that pump up of the language when we have a simplified Chinese available at launch that yeah, there'll be a good bump from from that language choice that disappears after a month or two once, you know, they finish the game. They don't need the VPN anymore. They don't need it anymore. Yeah, super smart, though. Thank you for writing in, Mel. So what are you thinking about? Do you have some insight on a story or anything past, present, future? We want to hear it. Please share it with us at feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. That's right. Thanks again to Mel for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business. All you got to do is become a patron at patreon.com slash DTNS. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people host producer writer Tom Merritt, host writer Jason Howell, co-host Sarah Lane, co-host Rob Dunwood, co-host Jen Cutter, producer Anthony Lemos, producer Roger Chang, editor Hammond Chamberlain, editor Victor Bognott, contributing producers Kevin Tech, Noel Cow and Brandon Richards, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Dedering, our mods Beatmaster, W. Scottis, one bio cow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a gadget virtuoso and JD Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Looters, art by Len Peralta, a cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Bobby Wagner and our guest this week, Dan Campos. And of course, thanks to all our patrons who make this show possible. The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. Hey, Sainsbury's, I'm cooking for everyone this Easter, but I don't want to break the bank. Got any tasty offers? Well, with Nectar, there's half price on selected sides of salmon and selected beef joints and whole legs of lamb are better than half price. Oh, don't be as happy as my wallet. Sainsbury's, good food for all of us. 18 plus Nectar required excludes locals end 7th of April, subject to availability, teas and seas apply.
