Here’s a little something to liven up the week in gamerland: Xbox is hosting a third-party games showcase on Thursday, October 17 at 1PM ET. A 4K, 60 fps stream will be available on YouTube in English with live subtitles in 16 other languages (Xbox will add subtitles for more languages after the fact). The Xbox channel will have versions of the show with audio description and American Sign Language (ASL). A British Sign Language version will be available on the Xbox On channel. You’ll also be able to watch the stream in English and ASL on Twitch, as well as on, uh, LinkedIn.

The Partner Preview stream will run for around 25 minutes and it will include more than a dozen trailers from Xbox’s partners. You’ll get a look at the next Alan Wake 2 expansion (The Lake House), Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii gameplay and some bosses in a Soulslike called Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. Xbox is also promising some new game reveals along with release date announcements. As you’d expect, many of these titles will be coming to Game Pass in one form or another.

Xbox is ending the year with a reasonably packed slate of first-party games, with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle yet to come. Still, it’s always nice to see platform holders shine the spotlight on games from third-party publishers and developers.

Whether you’re an Android or iOS person, most people have heard of PicsArt. The platform launched more than a decade ago and has become one of the go-to services for all things image and video editing, with more than 150 million monthly active users. 

However, it hasn’t been an easy journey for the company. Despite being an early mover in the smartphone-based editing domain, the company has seen significant competition from players like Canva and Adobe who have been playing a cat-and-mouse game for quite some time—building their own similar products. When I spoke with Artavazd Mehrabyan, the CTO of the company, at the recent WCIT conference in Armenia, he was pretty vocal about the challenges, saying it is tough to be or at least stay different for long in this market.

“A lot of things that PicsArt had before were copied into the competitors. PicsArt was the first all-in-one editing service on mobile. There was no other player before 2011. We started with this approach and it was copied, among many other things,” Mehrabyan said. He pointed out that the same is happening with AI, where competitors, including mainstream photo services, are offering very similar capabilities.

For example, PicsArt offers object generation, allowing users to use advanced AI to create required photo elements. The same capability has also been incorporated into other products in the category, creating an overlap of sorts.

However, instead of pushing to stand out by adding more tools to its existing batch of over two dozen AI capabilities, the company is looking to make a mark on users by improving the quality of what it is delivering. Specifically, Mehrabyan said, the focus is on how they are productizing and tailoring the features to help customers get to their goal – whether they want to remove a specific object from a vacation image or generate visually appealing advertisements, complete with images and copy.

Training high-quality creative AI

In the early stage, when AI was not a thing, Mehrabyan said most of PicsArt’s technology research and effort went towards making mobile-based editing seamless. 

“It was very hard to get all these editing functionality working on the device offline. Then, the next challenge was to scale our ecosystem and infrastructure to support a surging user base. This took us to hybrid infrastructure. We started with multi-cloud and a data center, which, till now, continues to be the best solution as it’s more cost-efficient, highly performant and very flexible,” Mehrabyan explained.

With this tech stack in place, the company launched its first AI feature in 2016, running a bunch of small models offline on user devices. This gradually transformed into a large-scale AI effort, with the company transforming into an AI-first organization and leveraging its infra and backend services to serve larger models and APIs for more enhanced capabilities like background removal/replacement. More recently, with the generative AI wave taking shape, PicsArt started training its own creative AI models from scratch.

In the creative domain, it is very easy to lose a user. A small error here or there (leading to low-quality results) and there’s a good chance the person won’t come back again. To prevent this, PicsArt is extremely focused on the data side of things. It is selectively using data from its own network – marked by users as public and free to edit – for training the AI models.

“We have a special ‘free to edit’ license. If you are posting publicly and tagging your image – from stock photo across any category to a sticker or background – as free to edit, it allows another user of the service to reuse or work on top of it. So, in essence, the user is contributing this image to the community and PicsArt itself,” Mehrabyan said.

The license has been in place from the early days of the service and has given PicsArt a massive stock of user-generated content for training AI. However, as the CTO pointed out, not all of that is of high quality and ready to use right away. The data has to pass through multiple layers of cleansing and processing, from manual and AI-driven, to be transformed into a safe training-ready dataset.

“At the end of this, we have quite a big dataset that is proprietary to PicsArt. We don’t need to have additional data,” he said.

However, having a large volume of high-quality data in hand was just one part of the puzzle. 

The real challenge for PicsArt, as Mehrabyan described, was to build the “data flywheel.” A self-reinforcing cycle covering not only data accessibility but also aspects like how to annotate data, how to use it and eventually how to leverage it as part of a continuous learning process to improve over time. 

Establishing a feedback loop to achieve this was a long and complex process, he said.

“We built our own annotation technology. We internally developed all related infrastructure and ecosystem technologies, including those for identifying and classifying images, tagging them and adding different types of labels to them,” Mehrabyan said. “Then, we created a team to help refine the pipeline and give feedback over time. It’s mostly been very automatic, AI-driven with human feedback in between so that we can have continuous improvement.”

Feedback loop leads to contextual intelligence

While the human-driven feedback loop has been a critical part in improving PicsArt’s products – enhancing the quality of the outputs they generate – it is also taking the company towards what Mehrabyan calls “contextual intelligence” or the ability of the platform to understand user needs and deliver exactly what they want. 

This function is particularly important for the platform’s growing base of business-focused users who are looking to get work done right on their smartphones. Whether that’s generating graphics or a full-fledged ad for a social media campaign. The platform is still mostly used by individuals looking to edit personal content, but the company says its research shows many want to take it to work, especially for marketing use cases.

“Contextual intelligence not only tracks your history or what you were doing to help you to be more productive in your journey but also predicts your next intent. It’s both reactive and proactive,” he explained. 

This way, each time an individual uses the platform to create something for their work, they won’t have to define brand language and tonality. The product would already have context in place and use that to generate the required content. Mehrabyan said the company also plans to release a brand kit capability that would allow users to tweak this context to their needs and further improve the quality of generations. 

Creative AI agents on the way

Eventually, Mehrabyan says contextual intelligence will lead PicsArt to an agent-based ecosystem. This is where users will have a copilot of sorts – with all relevant knowledge about their work and design preferences – to help them with their tasks.

“This copilot would understand your intent and historical context to provide interactive support and guide you to be even more productive. We see this use case as integrated within the whole PicsArt ecosystem, from the user’s perspective,” he said.

Beyond this, he also expects AI agents will help PicsArt users execute some tasks in bulk. For instance, if a user has to apply the same design or logic of design to several resources, they could use an agent to automate the workflow on their behalf. 

This way, the company hopes to be a key driver in the creative industry, sitting ahead of its competitors and allowing users to grow their creativity and eventually businesses, without too much effort. 

Mehrabyan noted that AI will bring about a major change but users – from businesses to designers and marketers – must try to understand how it affects them and take advantage of the changes to do more than currently possible.

“From the current point of view, it will affect negatively. But if you take perspective from a different side, like from the future, you will see that those people will leverage AI to learn a lot more. They will no longer be narrow specialists. They’ll cover broader areas deeper and faster with the help of AI,” he noted.

According to Future Markets Insights, the global AI image editor market is projected to grow from $80.3 million in 2024 to $217.9 million by 2034, with a CAGR of 10.5%. Meanwhile, AI-driven generation, which has become a core part of most image editing tools/services, including PicsArt, is estimated to grow 38% from $8.7 billion in 2024 to $60.8 billion in 2030.

TechCrunch has lost one of its beloved former colleagues. Steve O’Hear, who wrote for TechCrunch for more than a decade out of his hometown of London, has passed away after a short illness. He was 49.

It’s hard to put into words the remarkable talent that Steve was. Born with muscular dystrophy, he spent his life in a wheelchair and had significant health, mobility and accessibility issues, but he was easily one of the most productive journalists any of us have ever worked with. 

Steve brought his A-game to this organization every day he worked here and was a huge part of what made (and makes — you can read his 3,210 posts, a veritable magnum opus, here) TechCrunch great. 

Steve was a dogged news hound who broke tons of stories. He also wrote grand features, spoke truth to power, and was, quite simply, an original and unmistakable voice. 

Steve first joined TechCrunch in 2009, hired to help create a footprint for TechCrunch in Europe and conversely give the early tech ecosystem here exposure to the rest of the world. 

Steve was fearless and more than a writer. Well before he came to TechCrunch, in 2004, fascinated with the gravity pull Silicon Valley was clearly exerting as far as Europe, he traveled to California with two friends in search of what made it tick and made a film about it. You can see that film here. 

He was also a huge music lover who reveled in that world, too, building audio hardware and making music himself (as a keyboard player). 

Like a lot of people who end up writing about startups, he also had a strong entrepreneurial streak. He left TechCrunch in late 2011 to co-found a semantic Q&A/search platform called Beepl. Alas, it didn’t toot enough horns. Eventually, Steve followed the great TechCrunch boomerang and came back here.

Steve was a natural at TechCrunch, deftly handling the two sides of what it means to work in a high-performing team. 

He was fiercely independent, competitive and proud of his work, relentlessly pursuing stories, twisting arms, developing leads and spilling the beans — (usually!) with a smile, but taking no prisoners, and without suffering fools. He was also a consummate team player and friend, collaborating and helping others with their work. In our permanently distributed virtual office, Steve was a wonderful person to banter with on Slack about ridiculous things we’d seen.

As tech grew and TechCrunch grew, so did Steve’s profile. He was an excellent on-stage interviewer and he took on some iconic and some tricky, yet ultimately inspiring subjects over the years.

He eventually got the bug to do something different again and took a big veer back into startup land, working for quick commerce player Zapp.

The hard and fast rules of startup life turned him in a different direction eventually, and he once again started his own business, a communications consultancy called O’Hear & Co. As the firm said earlier, their plan is to continue with the vision Steve had. 

It’s a huge loss, and he’s gone too soon. Our hearts, and our deepest sympathies, go out to his former colleagues, his friends, his wife Sara, and his family.

– Mike Butcher and Ingrid Lunden

(Some more words below from the team as they come in. As we like to say here, please refresh for updates.)

Connie Loizos, editor in chief of TechCrunch

I spent seven years working with Steve and while we were rarely in the same place at the same time, he seemed ubiquitous inside of TechCrunch, producing an impressive volume of work about up-and-coming founders in London and Berlin particularly, but also actively engaging in our own internal social channels to flag the news he was covering, share tips for others to chase down, and occasionally, good-humoredly, complain – as we all do in the news business – about our rivals.

He cared about TechCrunch, and TechCrunch cared about him. Among his parting words to all of us, in 2021, were these: “Thanks to everyone for making me feel valued and giving me the freedom to keep on learning and keep on scooping. If I had to give any advice to newcomers (not that you asked for it): TechCrunch is an amazing platform and like no other in this biz – use its special powers to do your best work and it will give you back double.”

Natasha Lomas

I only met Steve — professionally and in person — after I joined TechCrunch in 2012. But I soon realised I had already come across this guy on ‘the socials’, as he might have jokingly riffed back then. His strength of character and love of hustling meant he could play Twitter like a DJ dropping the big tunes at the club. Of course, he expected nothing less than the crowd to go wild. Mic drops were his bread and butter. 

In person his character was no less large, no less magnetic than his social media self. While, professionally, I found — to my delight — I had acquired a colleague who was generous to a fault. Always happy to hear from you and genuinely interested to be a sounding board for story ideas. He also had a mentor’s keenness to help anyone who didn’t have his labyrinthine expertise of the ins & outs of VC funding — which was, in truth, most of the rest of his colleagues. Outside the fold I suspect he didn’t suffer fools gladly. But for a guy of his whip-smart intelligence you’d expect nothing less. Dear Steve, we already miss you so much.  

The news of Steve’s death is a real shock. He rarely talked about his health. It was just like Steve to play that down – because he was busy turning the volume up on the rest of the world. 

Devin Coldewey 

I worked with Steve on and off for many years, and while we only got to talk in person a handful of times (as it is with many of my colleagues and friends here), I can credit him with igniting my interest in covering accessibility. Of course he covered countless other topics deeply, and I also learned about interview technique from watching him. But he was a well informed, and passionate advocate for accessibility and critic of the tech industry’s historically rather slack approach to this vital issue. He set me right plenty of times over the years and I was sad to lose his expertise when he left TechCrunch; even sadder now that I’ll never get his insight again.

Romain Dillet

Steve was also the epitome of a curious person. When you thought you had him figured out, with his witty personality, he would surprise you with an unexpected move. In the late 2010s, he completely immersed himself in a new passion — music.

After spending a small fortune on synthesizers, sequencers and other music equipment, he went so far as to record an album. You can still listen to Steve’s — or perhaps I should say Otis ‘Max’ Load’s — album on Spotify and Apple Music.

He described these ten songs as his “debut solo/concept album with friends.” This phrase alone perfectly encapsulates Steve’s personality. He didn’t just want to record an album; it had to be a concept album. And it wasn’t just a solo album, it was a solo album… with friends.

Loving music is one thing, but loving music so much that you want to make music with friends and release it to the world is another. Steve had an irresistible urge to share his love of music with others.

And yes, ‘In Between Floors’ was supposed to be his debut album…

Steve was a creative force with so much to share with the world. Many of his headlines and musical arrangements are still available on the internet. That’s the beauty of the web, a medium he cherished because it gave him the superpower to reach such a wide audience. It let him do what he loved. So let’s do the same.

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now nearly 1,000 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my Wordle today, NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles.

SpaceX has shared footage (below) showing a spectacular close-up view of the Starship’s launch and landing on Sunday.

The mission involved the fifth test flight of the Starship, comprising the first-stage Super Heavy booster and upper-stage Starship spacecraft.

The first video shows the 120-meter-tall vehicle roaring skyward from SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas, creating 17 million pounds of thrust at launch as it goes.

Tower view at liftoff of Starship's fifth flight test pic.twitter.com/BAtcod2EVD

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 14, 2024

The next clip shows the extraordinary moment when the 70-meter-tall Super Heavy was secured by the launch tower’s giant mechanical arms as it returned to Earth just a few minutes after deploying the Starship spacecraft to orbit.

The final phase of Super Heavy's landing burn used the three center Raptor engines to precisely steer into catch position pic.twitter.com/BxQbOmT4yk

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 14, 2024

And this rocket’s-eye view shows the vehicle coming to rest on one of the arms.

Onboard view showing a catch fitting on Super Heavy as it contacts a chopstick catch beam pic.twitter.com/r1TVQEdITc

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 14, 2024

It was the first time for the Elon Musk-led spaceflight company to attempt the catch, and many doubted whether SpaceX would pull it off. But in a moment of pure brilliance, everything came together as the booster gently descended before nestling between the waiting arms of the launch tower.

The achievement is a big step forward for SpaceX as it readies the rocket for NASA’s Artemis III mission, which will involve putting the first woman and first person of color on the moon. In the mission, the Super Heavy will deploy the Starship spacecraft, which will make its way to a lunar orbit. There, two astronauts will transfer from NASA’s Orion spacecraft to the Starship, which will then descend to the lunar surface. The mission is currently scheduled for 2026, though the date could slip.

Before then, SpaceX will continue to test the Starship, refining the technology that powers the gigantic vehicle in a bid to get it ready for Artemis III.

The Starship spacecraft could eventually carry up to 100 crew members on a single flight. Elon Musk wants to use the vehicle for the first crewed trip to Mars, which could take place in the 2030s.