Netflix’s new gaming boss is a former Epic Games exec

Netflix has hired Alain Tascan as its new president of games. Before joining Netflix, Tascan was executive vice president for Epic Games and oversaw first-party development for some of the company’s (and gaming’s) most successful titles, like Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys.

Since launching its games project in 2021, Netflix has acquired notable indie studios Night School, Boss Fight, Next Games and Spry Fox and has brought many great indie games to mobile — seriously, search the app store, if only for Into The Breach. Netflix recently said it has 80-plus games currently in development. A multiplayer Squid Game project will be part of that, coinciding with the hit show’s next season, later this year.

— Mat Smith

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The large language model arms race continues.

Meta’s newest large language model (LLM), called Llama 3.1 405B, is the first openly available model to compete with rivals in general knowledge, math and translating. It was apparently trained on more than 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, currently the fastest available chips, which cost roughly $25,000 each, and can beat rivals on over 150 benchmarks, Meta claimed.

Unlike OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic, which hold their AI models proprietary close, Meta’s AI models are open source, meaning anyone can modify and use them for free, without sharing personal data with Meta.

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The publisher confirmed its layoffs.

Humble Games laid off all 36 of its staff. Former employees posted about the layoffs on social media. But a PR rep for Humble Games confirmed to Engadget the company would not be shutting its doors after the restructuring. He added the studio would continue to support and publish both ongoing and upcoming projects. Humble Games is owned by media conglomerate Ziff Davis, which counts IGN, Eurogamer and GamesIndustry.biz in its gaming portfolio.

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Including a 954-piece Battle Bus kit.

That should keep someone busy for an afternoon or ten.

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