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One of the biggest bugbears Gray Zone Warfare players faced in the first couple of days of play was that once you had chosen your faction at the beginning of a game when you first set up your character, there was no way to change it, which had the knock-on effect of not being able to team up with your friends if they had chosen a different faction.
Can you change factions in Gray Zone Warfare?
Thankfully a new patch has just been pushed (2nd May) that fixes this oversight and we can now switch allegiances as much as any top-line politician can.
It’s not quite all plain sailing, you need to wipe your character and sign up with a new faction and will lose all your items and progress, but it is a start. I guess deserters have to pay some price.
Here we are going to look at the three different factions in-game and try and make head or tail of which you should choose to sign up with.
Gray Zone Warfare Factions
Each faction in GZW has a tasty back story to help you decide which one suits your own ideals.
Lamang Recovery Initiative
‘Founded and funded by a tech billionaire, LRI publicizes itself as a strictly philanthropic exercise to search for pockets of survivors in and around Ground Zero after even the UN abandoned the island. The armed section of the organization is composed of small, highly professional security details that accompany rescue and clean-up teams to protect them from some of the other, far less altruistic factions operating in the area.’
Mithras Security Systems
‘Mithras bills itself as a PMC run by soldiers for soldiers, and it doesn’t ask too many questions about an operator’s motivations or history. The only real bar to Mithras membership is a lack of field experience in military competence. It prides itself on only accepting the best and pays accordingly. The organization is inspired by the Roman Legion system, where the spoils of war were shared among the troops. From the highest-ranking officer to the lowest-ranking foot soldier according to their status within the unit and performance in the field.’
Crimson Shield International
‘This Private Military Company rose to infamy during the early stages of the Syrian civil war. While they boast an impressive 95 percent success rate, some of their methods can be seen as somewhat questionable, often resulting in collateral damage. That said, no one can deny their effectiveness and cold-blooded approach to any job that needs to be done. This gung-ho nature attracts not just ex-military personnel but anyone with a lust for adventure and action. However, thanks to their strict elimination process, only the truly exceptional soldiers ever make it as far to be deployed on an actual combat mission.’

Best faction to choose
If you are playing with friends the only choice really is to choose the one they are in, otherwise you won’t be playing with them.
Each faction comes with its own lore and not much else, so see which one sounds the most like you would be and jump in. There are no faction-specific bonuses at this stage of Early Access.
They do all start off at different corners of the map however and this could influence you, but they all get the same gear and benefits as each other so, unless you like a particular topographic region, any will do.
Other Gray Zone Warfare pages you might like

Gray Zone Warfare vs Escape from Tarkov
How to complete the Radio Silence task
How to complete the Rat’s Nest task

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Another task in Gray Zone Warfare that might be causing you problems, alongside the Radio Silence task, is Rat’s Nest. The game is filled with these tasks and a lot of the issues is finding the location of the objectives in the first place. Let us make that a little easier for you.
Rat’s Nest is a two-part quest that you obtain from Handshake that will see you having to locate two different positions at either end of Nam Thaven.
Right, let’s infiltrate and get to business
How to complete Rat’s Nest
To start with we need the map locations of the Northwest Hideout and the East Hideout as these are where we need to raid.
Rat’s Nest hideout coordinates

Northwest: Map 169, 120
East:  Map 172,118

If you look on your map you will see these squares are, annoyingly at opposite ends of the town. That’s game designers for you, never making anything simple.
The hideouts both feature red graffiti on the exterior so you can easily recognize them when you get there. Both are heavily protected so getting in and out is not going to be a silent affair.
In the Northwest hideout, once cleared you need to head upstairs and get the Convict’s Notepad which you will find on the table.
The East hideout also needs clearing before you can head upstairs and pick up the Thug’s smartphone which is lying around on the desk.
Hand over the intel
Now you have both pieces of intel in your possession you need to backtrack to the Base Camp and find Handshake. Pass the intel to him by accessing the menu, selecting Handshake from the Vendors section, and selecting Hand Over.
Job done. Mission complete.
Other Gray Zone Warfare pages you might like

Gray Zone Warfare vs Escape from Tarkov
How to complete the Radio Silence task

The post Gray Zone Warfare: How to complete the Rat’s Nest task appeared first on ReadWrite.

Microsoft’s OpenAI investment may have been prompted by concerns over Google’s artificial intelligence progress, according to a new report. The tech giant invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 because it was reportedly “very worried” that Google was speeding ahead in the global AI race.
The emails,obtained by Business Insider, show Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, allegedly telling CEO Satya Nadella and Bill Gates that Google’s AI-powered “auto-complete in Gmail” was “getting scarily good.”
He added that Microsoft was “multiple years behind the competition in terms of [machine learning] scale.”
The emails, titled “Thoughts on OpenAI,” were released to the public on Tuesday (April 30) as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google. A significant portion of Scott’s email was censored.
What did the Microsoft emails say?
In his email dated June 12th, 2019, addressed to Nadella and Gates, Scott states, “We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale.” He explains that it took Microsoft engineers six months to replicate and train Google’s BERT language model, attributing the delay to inadequate infrastructure, as “our infrastructure wasn’t up to the task.”
“In the time that it took us to hack together the capability to train a 340M parameter model, they had a year to figure out how to get it into production and to move on to larger scale, more interesting models,” he stated. This head start was visibly impacting Microsoft’s competitive position. “We are already seeing the results of that work in our competitive analysis of their products,” Scott added, highlighting a significant improvement in Google’s products.
He pointed out, “One of the Q&A competitive metrics that we watch just jumped by 10 percentage points on Google Search because of BERT-like models.” Google’s enhancements also were particularly effective in practical applications, as seen with Gmail’s auto-complete feature, which he described as “scarily good,” especially on mobile devices.
Scott admits he initially underestimated the AI efforts at OpenAI and Google DeepMind, which were competing to demonstrate the “most impressive game-playing stunt”—an apparent nod to Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero demonstrations. However, his attitude shifted as the focus turned to natural language processing models. “As I dug in to try to understand where all of the capability gaps were between Google and us for model training, I got very, very worried,” he wrote.
In response, Nadella highlighted the importance of the email, stating, “Why I want us to do this,” and brought Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer, Amy Hood, into the conversation by adding her to the email chain.
ReadWrite has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
Featured image: Canva / Brian Smale and Microsoft
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Google’s “Core” team was subject to at least 200 layoffs late in April, with reorganization and restructuring that has moved some of those roles to India and Mexico.
According to information on Google’s website, the Core team is responsible for the technical foundation of Google’s flagship products, as well as users’ online safety. They also maintain Google’s global IT infrastructure and create internal tooling for other Google staff.
An email and other internal documents seen by CNBC show that at least 50 of the laid-off positions were engineering roles based in the company’s California offices and that many Core teams will rehire for roles in Mexico and India.
This comes just a month after a previous round of layoffs where hundreds of Google staff lost their jobs in a cost-cutting exercise.
What did the email say?
An email that Vice President of Google Developer Ecosystem Asim Husain sent to his team last week stated: “We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities.”
Husain also said in a town hall that this was the biggest batch of redundancies expected to hit the Core team this year.
The comments from Husain about building a global workforce ring true with previous statements made by high-ups in the tech giant.
In mid-April, CFO Ruth Porat stated intentions to restructure, moving positions to Bangalore and Mexico City, with layoffs as part of that. In March, the senior vice president of Search Prabhakar Raghavan said that Google had plans to build teams in more key markets including India and Brazil.
The layoffs and restructuring seem set to continue despite a successful first quarter for Google’s parent company Alphabet, which reported a 13% spike in holdings, plus its first-ever dividend.
Featured image: generated with Ideogram
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In a huge update this week (May 1) Snapchat announced several new upcoming features including one long requested by users – editable Snaps.
According to Snapchat’s press release, users of the communication app send more than five billion (yes, BILLION) Snaps per day. It’s inevitable that some of these will have a typo in them, or that users will wish they’d phrased something just slightly differently. Up until now, that was tough to you – once it was out in the world, a Snap was as unchangeable as a Tweet was in 2021.
One of the key features of the new batch of updates is editable Snaps. For up to five minutes after sending, and before anyone replies, you have a limited window to edit your Snaps. There’s no set date when this feature will launch but it will be coming soon to paid Snapchat+ subscribers first.
How to edit chats on Snapchat
You can only edit Snaps if both of these things are true:

it has been less than five minutes since you sent it – after that, messages will become uneditable
the message has not been replied to yet – as soon as someone responds, the message becomes uneditable

If both these criteria are met, it’s super simple to edit chat messages on Snapchat.

select the message you want to edit
amongst the usual copy/forward/save options, you’ll now find “Edit Chat”
when you choose the edit option, you’ll be able to make changes to the selected Chat

What else is coming to Snapchat?

New emoji reactions – reactions will no longer be limited to Bitmojis – react with whatever emoji best suits the occasion
My AI reminders – despite a shaky start, Snapchat is continuing to improve My AI, this time with reminders. Simply DM the AI chatbot with a request (such as “please remind me at 2 pm tomorrow to pick up milk”) and it will set up a countdown and let you know when your requested time arises.
Map reactions – if you’ve opted into Snap Map location sharing, you can now wave and send hearts directly to your nearby friends on the map.
Bitmoji AI fashion – use a short description prompt to generate unique patterns for your Bitmoji’s clothes.
AI Lenses – choose a lens (currently, there’s only a 90s lens, but it appears that more are incoming) and let AI transform you into a period piece.

Featured image: Snapchat
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