Virtua Fighter may soon be punching its way back into the public eye. Justin Scarpone, Sega’s global head of transmedia, casually dropped the news about a new game in the franchise during an interview with . “We have a suite of titles in development right now that fall into that legacy bucket, which we announced last year at The Game Awards,” he said. “Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Streets of Rage, Shinobi, and we have another Virtua Fighter being developed. And so all that’s very exciting.”

Exciting indeed. Most of those titles were indeed showcased during The Game Awards as part of for Sega, but Scarpone’s mention of Virtua Fighter is a new revelation. The last numbered entry in the series was Virtua Fighter 5 all the way back in 2006. That’s not to say the fighting game franchise has been static since then; there have been riffs and redos such as in 2015 and 2021’s Virtua Fighter Ultimate Showdown. But it has been nearly 20 years since fans have gotten an all new game.

Beyond this offhand confirmation that Sega is working on a follow-up, we know nothing about what the future might hold for a possible Virtua Fighter 6. It seems likely that Akira Yuki and other familiar faces will return, but anything’s possible for the characters and mechanics.

Tech leaders said they are ready to work with the new Trump administration, stating that American leadership in AI and the government’s focus on tech policies must be ensured. 

Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, presented a tech industry-friendly approach and courted personalities like Elon Musk to shore up support from the sector. AI companies, like Musk’s xAI, could greatly benefit from this more tech-focused administration, especially if the Biden administration’s flagship AI executive order is repealed. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman congratulated Trump, adding, “It is critically important that the US maintains its lead in developing AI with democratic values.” Greg Brockman, OpenAI president, echoed the same sentiment, pointing out that he believes it is with technology and AI that the country can “continue to lead the world and protect democratic values.”

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas also took to social media to offer his congratulations. 

“USA is the land of dreams, opportunity and competition. Look forward to working with the new government to improve how people search for information online with AI,” he said. 

Srinivas also touted Perplexity’s election information hub. According to Srinivas, around 10% of Perplexity usage on November 5 revolved around the elections. 

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, said the US is undergoing a “golden age of innovation.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is starting to roll out more AI features on its devices, also promised to work with the administration.

LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, an outspoken supporter of Kamala Harris, expressed the need to “get to the hard work of bridging divisions and ensuring that all Americans can enjoy safe, secure, and prosperous futures.”

Change in policies

The Biden administration has been vocal in seeking to support AI innovation with balancing privacy protections, culminating in the AI executive order in October last year. Since then, the government began looking into the potential dangers of open-weight models and asked companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to submit their unreleased AI models for safety evaluations. 

Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran against Trump instead of President Joe Biden, represented the US in international gatherings on AI safety and regulation. 

Tech companies faced scrutiny during the Biden administration as the government put forward several anti-trust cases. The Department of Justice, after winning its monopoly case against Google, put forward a potential plan to break up the tech giant. 

Game company Epic won against Google, accusing the search giant of monopoly. Epic’s lawsuit against Apple, however, failed. The DOJ filed a separate antitrust case against Apple in March. 

A more tech-friendly administration may mean a less litigious DOJ or Federal Trade Commission and fewer antitrust lawsuits, though Trump previously sued tech companies in his first term. 

President-elect Donald Trump spent plenty of time on the campaign trail railing against key portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, from solar and wind tax credits to electric vehicles and environmental justice initiatives. 

But his return to the presidency doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the landmark legislation. While Trump’s administration is unlikely to be supportive of certain climate tech startups, it will have a harder time ending the broadly popular law.

The Inflation Reduction Act, enacted in 2022, ushered in a range of tax credits and incentives aimed at reducing carbon pollution in the U.S. and attracting climate-friendly industries to the country. On both accounts, it’s been successful. Carbon emissions are down, and investment in climate tech is up.

Startups have broadly benefited from the Inflation Reduction Act. Tax credits have encouraged investors to plow money into nuclear power, hydrogen, and all things EV-related. Nuclear power, which is one of the more expensive sources of electricity in the U.S., receives a production tax credit under the law. Green hydrogen does, too, which could help it achieve cost parity with fossil fuel-derived hydrogen much more quickly. Battery startups have benefited as major manufacturers look to develop domestic supply chains for new factories in the U.S.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Further downstream, startups have sprouted to help homeowners and landlords install heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers. It’s the sort of knock-on effect that broadens the impact beyond the hit to the U.S. treasury.

By many measures, the law has been a success: In the first year alone, more than 270 clean energy projects were announced and private investments in the space topped $130 billion. Companies invested in manufacturing, and consumers spent on everything from EVs to heat pumps, according to the Rhodium Group. Batteries destined for EVs and grid-scale storage have arguably benefited the most: Investors have bet $110 billion on the space to date, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

The biggest hurdle Trump will face is the fact that the Inflation Reduction Act is already on the books. Repealing it will require a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate; many previous climate-related policies under Barack Obama were executive orders, which are easier to reverse, or regulatory changes, which take longer but can be a lighter lift than repealing a law. Trump’s administration might be able to water down some provisions and redirect some funding. But given support from moderate Republicans and the public popularity of certain provisions of the law, it’s unlikely that Trump will be able to eliminate the law entirely.

The Federal Trade Commission has charged Sitejabber, an online review platform, with violating its new fake reviews rules by using point-of-sale reviews to misrepresent what customers think about products. In one of its first enforcement actions under new rules banning companies from making or selling fake reviews, the FTC is ordering the company to stop.

The FTC says Sitejabber “deceptively” punched up businesses’ review counts by incorporating responses to point-of-sale questionnaires asking customers to rate and review their shopping experience, before they’d actually gotten any products or services. It also alleges that by giving its clients tools to publish that feedback on their own sites, Sitejabber enabled them to mislead people to think the ratings and reviews were based on actual experience with what the companies were selling.

The FTC now forbids Sitejabber from “misrepresenting, or assisting anyone else in misrepresenting” that such reviews are based on customer experience with a product or service. The company is also barred from helping other companies misrepresent the reviews that “it collects, moderates, or displays.”

The regulator’s new anti-fake review rules, which went into effect last month, aim to address AI-generated reviews online, including on Amazon and other e-commerce sites. The FTC prohibits a swath of deceptive practices, such as offering incentives to leave feedback or creating a fake review website that seems independent but is actually owned by the very company that makes the products being reviewed. Or at least, it will for the next couple of months, after which the next US President will be sworn in and (probably) replace its leadership — and we’ll see what happens next.

• Nvidia and xAI collaborate on Colossus development
• xAI has markedly cut down ‘flow collisions’ during AI model training
• Spectrum-X has been crucial in training the Grok AI model family

Nvidia has shed light on how xAI’s ‘Colossus’ supercomputer cluster can keep a handle on 100,000 Hopper GPUs – and it’s all down to using the chipmaker’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform.

Spectrum-X, the company revealed, is designed to provide massive performance capabilities to multi-tenant, hyperscale AI factories using its Remote Directory Memory Access (RDMA) network.

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