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2023 marked the all-time high for North American concert ticket sales, owing to the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. 2024 was strong, too. And that’s one reason why concert promoters like AEG Presents and Live Nation are looking to tap into parts of the country long underserved by major touring bands.

Think mid-sized American cities.

Well, there’s a company in Colorado trying to meet that demand and their product is the venue itself.

For a long time in Colorado, to see a big epic concert you had to go to Denver. Maybe to Red Rocks, an outdoor amphitheater surrounded by sandstone cliffs. But last summer, the state’s second-biggest city, Colorado Springs, got its own venue.

Homegrown band OneRepublic was the first to play at the Ford Amphitheater. The outdoor concert space has room for 8,000 and it’s a boutique concept. Concert goers can sit around gas fire pits while big names play, and the sun sets behind the Rocky Mountains.

The Colorado Springs company behind the amphitheater — called VENU — wants to bring basically this exact high-end event space to dozens of mid-sized cities.

“Since there haven’t been new amphitheaters built in quite some time in general, let alone in these areas, the company is being very, very tactical in terms of selecting where to create something new,” said Dean Budnick, who writes about the live music industry for magazines like Billboard and Variety.

VENU’s pitch to cities is that these outdoor amphitheaters can bring millions of dollars in economic activity. The company often gets tax breaks or other incentives. Budnick said it’s a smart model. Big promoters like Notes Live and AEG Presents are building new concert spaces too, but they can’t build everywhere.

“Venues are expensive to build,” Budnick said. “While it might be optimal to own the venue, if one had the resources, there’s a lot of value in just operating the venue.”

That’s the case here. AEG Presents brings in the bands that play the Ford Amphitheater. Colorado Springs was VENU’s first project, but the company has five more under construction in places like Oklahoma and Texas.

But plopping a concert venue in a place that’s not used to concert sound can cause problems.

“My family and I were enjoying our last night of summer with the kids outside, before they started school on Monday,” resident Cheree Hutchison told the Colorado Springs City Council in August. She lives close to the new venue.

“We had to cut our evening short as the band was screaming profanities that were blaring at us at over 70 decibels,” she said.

She’s one of hundreds of neighbors who have protested VENU’s amphitheater. Some residents say they can hear song lyrics loud and clear in their living rooms from miles away. Budnick said this is pretty common with new event spaces, that it can take some time to calibrate the sound levels at an outdoor amphitheater.

Even though the venue’s decibel levels might be legal, he said the sound “still could be just absolutely striking to the folks who live around the venue and never anticipated that and that can become a flashpoint.”

VENU is trying to be a good neighbor. In Colorado Springs, the company plans to spend $3 million dollars on sound mitigation measures like additional walls and speaker system changes. The issue makes headlines in Colorado Springs on the regular, but VENU CEO J.W. Roth said lots of other cities are not so concerned about neighborhood noise.

“They want my business there and they want us there,” Roth said. “So, many of them have gone completely out of their way to make it easier for me, not more difficult.”

He pointed out that two new hotels have sprung up next to the Ford Amphitheater and five new restaurants. He’s hoping residents eventually get used to the sound of the concerts and appreciate the business they bring. 

Borderlands 4 is coming this fall. Developer Gearbox revealed that the latest entry in the Borderlands series is launching on September 23, 2025 at Sony's latest State of Play event, and the game will receive a standalone State of Play this spring where you can get an in-depth look at it in action.

Like past Borderlands games, Borderlands 4 has shooting and looting, though with much looser and faster-paced movement. You'll be able to double jump, dodge and grapple your way through the game, and play as four new vault hunters looking to make their fortune.

Borderlands 4 was originally announced during Gamescom in 2024, and Gearbox showed off a first glimpse of gameplay during the Game Awards. Other than those tweaks to traversal, it looks like more Borderlands. Considering its been about six years since Borderlands 3 was released in 2019, that might not be a bad thing, but hopefully Gearbox still has something up its sleeve to justify another dip into the post-apocalyptic shooter well.

Borderlands 4 is launching on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on September 23, 2025.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/borderlands-4-is-launching-on-september-23-225358207.html?src=rss

Oil company BP said it’s planning to announce a “fundamental reset” of its business strategy later this month. The company had a rough 2024 — its profits dropped by more than a third.

So what’s that “reset” likely to look like?

If recent moves — and analyst intel — are any indication, the company will be moving away from renewables and doubling down on oil and gas. 

It’s not just BP. Other oil companies, including Shell and the Norwegian company Equinor, are doing the same.

Just five years ago, oil companies were announcing big investments in renewable energy projects and setting climate goals.

“Oil and gas companies are trying to make money, and they have been following the political wind,” said Severin Borenstein at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

He said a few years ago those political winds “were pretty clearly blowing towards having more emphasis on renewables, and potentially restrictions on oil drilling. That’s changed.”

In Washington, the Trump administration is now encouraging more oil and gas drilling and rolling back clean energy incentives. Christopher Knittel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that’s changed the calculus.

“These companies are publicly traded companies that have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder wealth, and the profitability of oil and natural gas is increasing,” said Knittel.

And not just because of shifting political winds.

“Natural gas prices in Europe are still high since the Russia invasion of Ukraine,” said Knittel.

Oil prices have stayed pretty high, too, he said. So these companies can make good money doing what they’re good at.

“Getting oil and natural gas out of the ground. That’s what they’ve done for the last century. Whenever you pivot to an alternative product, there’s a learning curve. You may lose some of your comparative advantage that you enjoyed with the old product,” said Knittel.

That’s why Hugh Daigle at the University of Texas at Austin said policy and public investment matter.

“When you look at the history of any kind of emerging technology that has gotten a lot of initial government support early on, it takes a long time for it eventually to become profitable,” said Daigle.

And until it does, for-profit companies don’t have much incentive to invest on their own. 

The cost of shelter has been a persistent source of inflation in this economy. In Wednesday’s consumer price index report, shelter accounted for nearly a third of price gains from December to January.

Yes, that sounds bad. But rent inflation has actually been coming down lately.

The Labor Department’s definition of shelter costs includes rents. But it also includes what it calls lodging away from home.

“Just think of that as basically hotels when you go on vacation,” said Chen Zhao, head of economic research at real estate company Redfin.

She said those lodging costs went up in January. But rents have not been increasing so quickly, according to the Labor Department and Redfin’s own data.

“What you’ll see is that for the last 2, 2½ years, rents have been really flat. And in some parts of the country, rents have even been falling,” said Zhao.

A lot of newly built apartments are finally coming online, said Bill Adams, chief economist at Comerica Bank. This is happening the most in the Sun Belt, “where there’s lots of undeveloped land and where homebuilding is cheaper and faster to do.”

But in other parts of the country, the pipeline of new apartments is still pretty constrained, especially in the Northeast and coastal West.

“We’re likely to see faster rent increases in markets that are adding less supply, where construction is more expensive,” said Adams.

The numbers of apartment construction projects and building permits have been trending lower.

Chen Zhao at Redfin said some contractors don’t want to keep building apartments if rents are stagnant. “They’re also facing very high financing costs because interest rates continue to be high,” said Zhao.

All of that means the supply of new apartments could start to dwindle, said Ben Ayers, senior economist at Nationwide.

“You know, a year from now, two years from now, we might be back in a similar situation, where we’re talking about constrained housing supply, because we’re just not building enough to keep up with the amount of demand in the market,” said Ayers.

That means housing costs could put even more pressure on inflation.

Blizzard is making some major changes to Overwatch 2 for its Season 15 update, including adding all new gameplay in the form of a perks system and the return of loot box rewards, on top of the new heroes and skins.

Overwatch 2 has been through several changes since it left early access in 2023, many of which brought the game from the revamped structure that made it a sequel to something that works more like a free-to-play version of the original Overwatch. Perks are legitimately new, though. Now during a match you'll be given two opportunities to pick a perk for your hero. One minor perk after leveling up for the first time, which adds smaller upgrades like a passive ability or a cooldown reduction, and one major perk that can alter the play style of your hero. For example, Torbjorn can pick from turrets that stick to ceilings and walls (a frankly diabolical upgrade) or an even more powerful "Level 3 turret."

Blizzard Entertainment

As a reward for your hard work in-game, Blizzard is also adding to Overwatch 2's battle pass system by reintroducing loot boxes as another way to get cosmetics. You can earn loot boxes by completely weekly and event rewards, and you'll get one Legendary Loot Box for having the Free Battle Pass or two Legendary Loot Boxes for having the Premium Battle Pass, as well. Beyond publishing drop rates for boxes, Blizzard is guaranteeing that "a Rare or better item will drop in every single box, with an Epic item within five consecutive boxes and a Legendary item within twenty consecutive boxes."

Blizzard Entertainment

Coming a bit later in Season 16, Overwatch 2 will get an entirely new "Stadium" game mode that draws clear inspiration from competing shooters Counter-Strike 2 and Valorant. In a Stadium match you'll be placed on a team of five fighting to earn currency across seven possible rounds. In-between rounds you can spend that currency to unlock upgrades and customize your abilities as you play. Stadium will also let you pick between the traditional first-person mode or a new third-person mode, which should make it easier to aim some of the wilder abilities you can unlock during a match.

The cherry on top to all these changes are new quality of life features Blizzard plans to add this year, like the ability to ban specific heroes from a match, and vote on maps you want to play. Of course, there are also two new heroes in the works: Freja, "a former search and rescue operative turned bounty hunter" with an explosive crossbow who will be playable in a free trial weekend during Season 15 before joining the game in Season 16, and a hero currently being called "Aqua" who will land in Season 18 and can control water.

Season 15 launches on February 18, while features like hero bans and map voting are coming later this year, in that order, according to Blizzard.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/overwatch-2s-next-update-overhauls-the-game-with-perks-and-loot-boxes-212409206.html?src=rss

OpenAI's upcoming GPT-5 release will integrate its o3 reasoning model and be available to free users, CEO Sam Altman revealed in a roadmap he shared on X. He said the company is also working to simplify how users interact with ChatGPT. 

"We want AI to 'just work' for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten," Altman wrote. "We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence." 

In its current iteration, forcing ChatGPT to use a specific model, such as o3-mini, involves either tapping the "Reason" button in the prompt bar or one of the options present in the model picker, which appears after the chatbot answers a question. If you pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, that dropdown menu can get pretty long, with multiple models and intelligence settings to choose from.  

OPENAI ROADMAP UPDATE FOR GPT-4.5 and GPT-5:

We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings.

We want AI to “just work” for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.

We hate…

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 12, 2025

As for the company's roadmap, Altman says GPT-4.5 will be OpenAI's "last non-chain-thought model," meaning everything that comes after will feature the capability to solve problems by breaking them down into a series of intermediate steps. Following the release of GPT 4.5, OpenAI's primary goal is "to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks."

Looking ahead to GPT-5, Altman says OpenAI will release the model "as a system that integrates a lot of our technology," including o3 and its recently released Deep Research feature. In a change of plans, OpenAI won't release o3 as a standalone model. Previously, Altman had said the new system would arrive "shortly after" o3-mini, which OpenAI made available for public use at the end of last month. 

Once GPT-5 arrives, OpenAI plans to offer free users unlimited access to the model, "subject to abuse thresholds," at "the standard intelligence setting." Plus users will get to run GPT-5 "at a higher level of intelligence," while Pro users will get to run the model at "an even higher level of intelligence." 

Altman did not provide an exact timeline for either GPT-4.5 or GPT-5, other than to say they could arrive within weeks or months.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-will-offer-free-chatgpt-users-unlimited-access-to-gpt-5-211935734.html?src=rss

Wall Street is a maze that is often too easy to get lost in. Even just learning the acronyms alone can be a monumental feat. The dictionary on financial content site Investopedia boasts more than 13,000 definitions for different financial words or phrases.

To jump the educational hurdle, many Americans rely on financial planners to advise their investing. But they cost money, and hiring a financial planner can be a costly measure for potential investors.

Instead, many Americans are turning to a free source of information: social media. Every day investors are putting their trust in financial influencers to choose where to put their money.

Isabella Kwai, a reporter for the New York Times, recently wrote about these “fin-fluencers” and the advice they give. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Kwai about who they are and why their viewers should think critically before listening.

Kai Ryssdal: Just generally speaking, who are these financial influencers out there?

Isabella Kwai: So financial influencers can be really anyone who is online and sharing information about investing or personal finance, or it could be something from a celebrity who has a big profile and is partnering or working with, you know, financial services or products. And I think that is something that is really interesting about financial influences, or “fin-fluencers.”

Ryssdal: I’m sorry. “fin-fluencers”? Is that we are calling them?

Kwai: Yeah, it’s very sleek. People have really combined these words, but financial influencers, or “fin-fluencers,” they really can be anybody. And I think that is part of the concerns around them.

Ryssdal: Let’s talk more about that, because we’ll get to the possible upsides. But, “on the internet, they don’t know you’re a dog”, right? That’s the famous Far Side cartoon. So, it could be anybody is the point, right?

Kwai: Right. And one of the issues that makes this field quite difficult is it’s so vast. There are people who are giving you information who may not be qualified or certified financial planners, and there is potential there for misinformation to spread. In the most serious examples, you have influencers who have been accused of hyping pump and dump schemes or promoting high risk assets, and it can be really hard for your everyday person or your everyday investor to look at all these different influencers online and work out what is going to be handy information for them and what is potentially dangerous information.

Ryssdal: So let’s get the caveat in here that if you’re going to follow a “fin-fluencer,” I can’t believe I just said that, you have to do some due diligence and find out who they are. But part of the reason they’re so popular is because they’re accessible, right? They probably cater to underserved groups, people who might have been shut out of this sort of wealth industry as it were, right? I mean, there’s lots of things that are appealing.

Kwai: Absolutely, and what some financial influencers are good at is putting it in everyday terms that people can understand. And there are influencers out there who I spoke to as part of the story, who are certified financial planners themselves or certified financial advisors, and they do share information that helps people become more literate when it comes to their finances. But you know whether they are qualified to do that, experts have recommended you really should be thinking about this.

Ryssdal: Yeah, absolutely. Given that social media is, generally speaking, a vast unregulated wasteland. I imagine there aren’t too many regulations protecting people from acting on this bad advice, right? If you act on questionable advice from an influencer, you’re kind of on your own right?

Kwai: Well, not entirely. One thing that is interesting to explore is what’s the responsibility here? And in the U.S., the SEC, for example, has pursued some high profile celebrities for not being honest about whether they were paid to promote an asset or not. But ultimately, one big challenge in this is jurisdiction. People can be following advice from someone in the U.S. while they’re, sitting, like myself, in London. And the question being, would this fall under U.K. jurisdiction? And that makes it difficult for regulators to pursue some people who are perhaps spreading misinformation.

Google will start testing a feature this year that uses machine learning to weed out children trying to access adult content on YouTube. The “machine learning-based age estimation model” will try to predict whether a user is under 18 and, if so, apply appropriate age filter settings to their account. The announcement came amid a flurry of Google child safety announcements as the US Senate considers a bill that would ban pre-teens from social media.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan first mentioned the ML age restriction feature on Tuesday in his letter about the platform’s “bets” for the coming year. “We’ll use machine learning in 2025 to help us estimate a user’s age — distinguishing between younger viewers and adults — to help provide the best and most age-appropriate experiences and protections,” he wrote.

A YouTube spokesperson clarified to Engadget that the model will make its predictions using data like the types of info the person searches for, the categories of videos they watch and the age of their accounts. For example, if someone frequently searches for info about mortgage lending or taxes, that probably points to the person being over 18. Ditto for an account that’s over 20 years old.

If the ML model predicts that someone is underage, YouTube will apply its standard protections to deliver a more age-appropriate experience. Of course, the platform blocks explicit (and otherwise age-restricted) videos from under-18 users. Google’s underage restrictions also include its SafeSearch Filter, which (as its name suggests) blocks explicit content from search results.

YouTube told Engadget it will begin testing the filtration tool by the end of this year. The platform plans to roll it out globally in 2026. Although YouTube’s CEO first announced the feature, Google will test the feature in other areas, too. However, we don’t yet know where else the new ML feature will pop up. Google isn’t alone in trialing such a feature.

Google isn’t alone in trialing such a moderation feature. Last year, Meta said it would use an “adult classifier” tool to identify underage Instagram users posing as adults.

Google

Google also said on Wednesday that School Time, a feature previously only available as a smartwatch app on the Fitbit Ace LTE and Galaxy Watch for Kids, will roll out to Android phones and tablets. Part of Google’s Family Link parental controls app, School Time will let parents determine what phone features and apps their children can use during school hours. Parents can choose which apps remain active (like, say, learning-friendly apps) while allowing messages and calls from certain contacts. The idea is to minimize screen time and help kids focus on their work while still green-lighting emergency contacts.

Along similar lines, the Android Family Link app will let parents approve or deny contacts to add to their children’s devices. (This is another feature making its way over from the Galaxy Watch for Kids.) Parents can then limit calls and texts to only approved contacts. However, that feature isn’t quite here yet: Google says it will roll out “in the coming months.”

Finally, this spring, parents using Google parental control features can add tap-to-pay to their children’s Android phones. (Google said this was coming last year.) Parents will be able to approve a payment card, add or remove further cards and view the child’s transactions. Google says the feature will also work for things like gift cards and concert tickets.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-will-use-machine-learning-to-try-and-tell-if-a-user-is-under-18-204713279.html?src=rss