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Rockstar developers in the UK are seeking official union recognition from the GTA 6 studio's bosses, who were accused of union busting in 2025 after firing 31 workers involved in union activity. If Rockstar devs are successful in their bid, they'll join Zero Parades creator ZA/UM in history as one of the first formally acknowledged games industry unions in the UK.

Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) Union president Alex Marshall is confident Rockstar can afford such a milestone. The organizer says in a June 30 press release, "GTA 6 has reportedly already generated more than $3 billion in preorder sales. Rockstar bosses can easily afford to sit around the table with the people whose hard work created these games, and give them a meaningful voice in their workplace."

Rockstar itself has not revealed GTA 6 pre-order revenue, and that $3 billion estimate seems to stem, at least in part, from University of Virginia assistant professor of business Anthony Palomba saying recently that Rockstar parent company "Take-Two shares rose almost 3% in early trading when preorders opened, and some analysts modeled as much as $1 billion in revenue in the first hour alone." Take-Two hasn't commented on this analysis, though the publisher is clearly expecting GTA 6 to be its golden calf – it predicts, in a recent financial report , that the game will contribute to "$8 to $8.2 billion" in sales for fiscal year 2027.

What Rockstar devs are asking for in return, says Rockstar North production co-ordinator Shanti Easton-Steel, is for executives to acknowledge "our key objectives of pay transparency, fairer crunch practices and better flexible working arrangements."

"This is a landmark moment for the Rockstar Game Workers Union, and hopefully for the industry as a whole," Easton-Steel says. "It's thanks to the hard work of so many of our members – both those currently with us and those who were fired last October – that we are now in a strong enough position to pursue formal recognition."

Rockstar and the IWGB's legal dispute over those 31 fired union members is ongoing, with the final trial set to run from September 10 to October 15, according to the workers' union.

Fired GTA 6 developer accusing Rockstar Games of union busting says playing the blockbuster will "probably just bring back too much."

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Two lumps of potato discovered in a roughly 500-year-old Inca storage room in Peru are a rare find: freeze-dried potatoes predating the Spanish invasion, a new study finds.

These freeze-dried potatoes, known as chuño, were once a backbone of the Inca Empire 's food supply and a product so fragile that they almost never turn up at archaeological sites.

The new discovery, made along Peru's arid south coast, is only the second time chuño has been recovered from an Inca site, researchers reported in the new study. It is concrete evidence that the empire directed one of its most important food sources hundreds of miles from the Andes, down to the Pacific Ocean.

Chuño is made by repeatedly exposing potatoes to nighttime frost and daytime sun until nearly all their moisture has evaporated , leaving a lightweight, long-lasting vegetable that can be stored for decades. This technique works only at high elevations where hard frost occurs regularly, so chuño had to be produced in the mountains and then transported using llama caravans, often hundreds of kilometers, to feed people living elsewhere in the empire.

The Inca used the same drying method to preserve meat, he said, producing a product called "charki" — the source of the English word "jerky," study principal investigator Lidio Valdez , an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, told Live Science in an email.

In the new study, published May 1 in the Journal of Field Archaeology , Valdez and study co-author Katrina Bettcher , an independent archaeologist, reported that the chuño was found alongside an Inca pottery fragment and a broken spindle whorl , a tool used to spin fibers, such as raw wool, into yarn or thread.

The discovery happened during the 2024 field season at Tambo Viejo, an Inca provincial center in the Acarí Valley, where an archaeological team had worked for several years. Inside a small storage room, the team uncovered a clay pot sunk into the dirt floor, its top half long gone. As researchers scooped soil out of the broken pot, they reached its bottom.

"Almost at the base of the vessel, the two samples of freeze-dried potatoes were found," Valdez said. "They showed me without knowing what they were, and right away I said: chuño!"

Llamas were used across the Inca empire to transport food and other items. (Image credit: Photo by L.M. Valdez) Potatoes are roughly 80% water, and they typically rot within a week at lower, warmer elevations — making them a poor food choice for long-distance storage. Valdez said freeze-drying was likely discovered long before the Inca rose to power in the 15th century, perhaps when potatoes that were accidentally exposed to frost at a high elevation became dried out and people realized the result was still edible.

Because chuño can be made only above roughly 11,800 feet (3,600 meters), the samples at Tambo Viejo must have traveled down from the highlands, most likely via a llama caravan along the Inca road network, Valdez said.

"Chuño being a light product probably also made its transportation easier," he added.

The two freeze-dried potatoes survived thanks to the Acarí Valley's extremely dry conditions, which help preserve organic remains that would otherwise decay — the same conditions that have previously yielded naturally mummified guinea pigs ( Cavia porcellus ) in Valdez’s previous work at the site.

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Beyond its archaeological importance, the ancient preservation method has lessons for today. "We still have so much to learn from the people of the past," Valdez said. "Food security is a main concern, even in our times; yet we waste food, perhaps more than at any time in human history."

Relatively few Inca sites along Peru's coast have been systematically excavated, and Valdez expects more evidence of chuño — and the long supply lines that carried it — to surface as archaeologists keep digging.

Do you know where pumpkins and blueberries come from? Find out with our fruits and vegetables quiz!

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Bitcoin Magazine

Crypto Firms Lead $517 Million Corporate Surge Into 2026 Midterms

Cryptocurrency companies have become the single largest corporate political spenders in the United States, pouring $189 million into the 2026 midterm elections — more than they spent during the entire 2024 election cycle — according to a new report from the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

The crypto sector accounts for 37% of the $517 million that corporations have reported spending on the 2026 midterms so far, a figure that already surpasses the previous record of $461 million set during the full 2024 cycle.

Months remain before Election Day.

The report, authored by Public Citizen researcher Rick Claypool and published June 30, draws on Federal Election Commission data and finds that corporations have now spent nearly one third of the $1.58 billion in total corporate election spending since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision — all in a single election cycle.

Corporate super PACs pioneered by crypto

At the center of the spending surge is a category the report calls “corporate supremacist super PACs” — political committees structured not around party affiliation, but around advancing the interests of specific industries. The strategy, pioneered by the crypto sector in 2024, is now being replicated across multiple industries.

The primary crypto-aligned vehicle, Fairshake, has received $82.6 million in corporate contributions this cycle — 60% of its $135 million total. Coinbase contributed $33 million to Fairshake, and Ripple Labs added $48.5 million. Josh Vlasto, a co-leader of the super PAC and a former chief of staff for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, said the group is building “an aggressive, targeted strategy” to support pro-crypto candidates across the country.

Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm that ranked among Fairshake’s top backers in 2024, has shifted focus for the 2026 cycle.

The firm contributed $50 million to Leading the Future, a super PAC oriented around AI policy. Leading the Future has raised $75.1 million in total, with corporate contributions making up 67% of that figure. Combined with direct donations from co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the firm’s political footprint reaches $115.5 million.

A third sector-specific super PAC, Win for America, has received $43 million from online betting companies FanDuel and DraftKings, which contributed $19.5 million each. Win for America’s corporate contributions represent 100% of its reported funding.

MAGA Inc. also a major beneficiary

Beyond sector-specific super PACs, corporations have directed significant sums to MAGA Inc., the super PAC originally created to support Trump-endorsed candidates. MAGA Inc. has received $120.6 million in corporate contributions this cycle — 35% of its $342 million total raised.

Crypto.com parent Foris Dax contributed $35 million to MAGA Inc., making it the top corporate donor to the committee. Other crypto contributors include Gemini Trust Company ($4.4 million), Blockchain.com ($5 million), and Ondo Finance ($2.1 million).

Tools for Humanity Corporation — which runs OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s biometric identity startup — contributed $5 million to MAGA Inc. days before Trump’s inauguration. Altman has since stated publicly that he “would love to see money out of politics.”

OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife Anna gave $25 million to MAGA Inc. and $25 million to Leading the Future, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Brockman and OpenAI’s global affairs chief Chris Lehane were involved in initiating the latter super PAC.

Undisclosed spending is likely higher

The $517 million figure does not capture all corporate political activity. Meta Platforms is spending an additional $65 million through non-federal super PACs to counter state-level AI regulation, and Anthropic has pledged $20 million to a group backing AI safety-oriented candidates — funds not yet reflected in FEC disclosures.

Dark money organizations, which are not required to disclose their donors, add further uncertainty to the total.

This post Crypto Firms Lead $517 Million Corporate Surge Into 2026 Midterms first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman .

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Grand Theft Auto 6 is currently a top seller on the PlayStation Store

Physical copies are also the best seller of multiple retailers

That's despite the controversy surrounding the game's physical edition, which includes a download code instead of a disc

The physical edition of Grand Theft Auto 6 is currently a top seller at multiple retailers, despite the game's download code controversy.

As spotted in a ResetEra post, multiple regional versions of the PlayStation Store, including the UK, USA, Japan, and more, have the digital version of GTA 6 listed as the number one best seller right now.

Between the Standard and Ultimate Editions, it appears that the more expensive $99.99 / AU$159.95 / £89.99 Ultimate Edition is the top choice as well.

That's just the digital version of the game for PS5 consoles, and it's harder to tell how well Xbox editions are performing.

That said, it looks like physical editions are flying off shelves at multiple retailers, too, with GTA 6 currently holding the number one best-selling spot in the PC & Video Games category at Amazon US and UK, as well as at GameStop.

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That's despite the fact that physical copies don't come with a disc but rather a digital download code in the box , something that has caused a bit of a stir among the fanbase since it was revealed last week.

However, it appears that even amid controversy , players are willing to spend their money on the most anticipated game of all time.

Rockstar hasn't revealed why physical copies won't include a disc, but one reason could be that the studio is trying to minimize the potential for leaks as much as possible ahead of launch.

GTA 6 officially launches on November 19 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, but pre-loading begin on November 12 if you choose to pre-order.

A recent report suggested that retailers could run out of console stock during the holiday season due to high demand and ongoing issues surrounding hardware component availability.

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For most enterprises, a 90-second training video or a product explainer has never been an easy ask. It means a well planned brief, an internal film crew or an outside vendor, a shoot, an edit, and a round of revisions. Change one line of on-screen text due to a legal review and the whole chain runs again. The cost and the long time lines are why so much internal video never gets made.

That equation is what Google is aiming to rewrite with Gemini Omni Flash , the first model in its new "Omni" family, now rolling out to developers and enterprise customers through an API after debuting to consumers at I/O 2026. Google frames the family's ambition as creating anything "from any input," starting with video. But the headline interaction isn't just a sharper text-to-video prompt. It's the ability to edit a finished clip through conversation.

When the model launched in May, VentureBeat's enterprise analysis flagged the catch: with no programmatic interface, Omni was a consumer and prosumer tool, not a production one. This API rollout changes that. It puts conversational editing in front of the marketing and learning-and-development teams that make the most videos in an organization.

The pitch: a five-tool pipeline collapses into a single conversation

Until now, many teams have been assembling AI videos the hard way, bolting together an LLM for a script, a text-to-image model, an image-to-video model, a separate lip-sync tool and a voice generator, each with its own contract, billing and data path.

Omni's enterprise argument is unification: one model that takes text, images and video and returns a finished clip with synced audio.

That simplicity factor is the part decision-makers should weigh first. Collapsing several point tools into one model means fewer vendors and a single place to monitor output and enforce data-handling rules. For an organization that has avoided generative video because stitching the tools together wasn't worth the overhead, the equation shifts.

With conversational editing each instruction builds on the last, so a marketer can relight a product shot, reframe it, or change the wardrobe without regenerating from scratch and losing the parts that already worked. It is the difference between booking a reshoot and sending a note.

Multimodal references and a physics engine for brand assets

Omni accepts far more than a text prompt. Alongside the words describing what you want, you can feed it multiple reference images, and existing video clips, and it carries those specifics into the result. Hand it a photograph of a particular object, ask the model to place that object into a scene, and it reproduces the real thing's coloring and rough shape instead of inventing a generic stand-in. While the match might not be pixel-perfect, it is close enough to be recognizable. That reference-driven control is what makes the feature commercially interesting: a product photo, a brand logo, or a specific location can be dropped in as an ingredient rather than described in a prompt and hoped for.

Two of Google's four highlighted strengths speak directly to enterprise work. The first is a world model, the system's grasp of how physical scenes behave. Add light rain and puddles to an existing shot and it renders reflections of the people and objects in the wet pavement, the sort of physical consistency that separates real footage from obvious AI video.

The second is text and logo insertion. Point it at a scene full of signage and you can have it rewrite those signs in another language, or for a brand of your choosing, and even drop in a company's logo. The results aren't flawless: in testing, sign tracking in complex scenes weren’t always perfect and some text slipped back to the original language between frames. For training videos that need on-screen labels, or ads that need a logo placed in-scene, it is a capability worth a close look, and a reminder that the output still needs a human review before it ships.

The interactions API and where the limits still bite

Under the hood, this runs on Google's new interactions API, a stateful interface built for multi-turn tasks rather than open-ended chat. Each turn carries the previous video and its references forward, which is what lets edits accumulate coherently. Developers can chain generations. They can produce a clip, edit the cat into a puma kitten, restyle a video into 8-bit retro and then into a watercolor look, and store each version to branch from later.

The constraints are real and worth budgeting around. Clips currently cap at 10 seconds, per the model's published model card . To make something longer, you generate chunks and edit them together. Uploaded footage can be edited too, as long as it runs 10 seconds or under and the user holds the rights to it. Google's own model card is candid that holding consistency across edits and rendering accurate text remain open problems.

Guardrails, watermarking and the line Google won't cross

For a CISO, the demos matter less than the provenance work shipping alongside the model. Every Omni clip carries Google's SynthID watermark, Google is extending C2PA Content Credentials across its generative tools, and it has launched an AI Content Detection API that flags AI-generated media, both Google's and other vendors'.

Google has also drawn a deliberate line. The model won't take a still photo of a person plus an audio clip and lip-sync them into speech, an explicit move to limit deepfakes. It will, however, take a recording of someone talking and translate it into another language, a useful path for localizing global training content. For regulated enterprises, those constraints and the baked-in provenance are features rather than friction.

The numbers: cheap, 720p-only, and (preliminarily) ranked first

The pricing landed alongside the API, and it is aggressive. Omni Flash costs $0.10 per second of generated 720p video, which puts a ten-second clip at roughly a dollar. That matches Veo 3.1 Fast at the same resolution, runs double Veo 3.1 Lite, and undercuts standard Veo 3.1 by three-quarters.

Per second (USD)

Gemini Omni Flash

Veo 3.1 Lite

Veo 3.1 Fast

Veo 3.1

720p

$0.10

$0.05

$0.10

$0.40

1080p

n/a

$0.08

$0.12

$0.40

4K

n/a

n/a

$0.30

$0.60

The table also exposes the catch though. Omni Flash only generates 720p. There is no 1080p or 4K option, while the Veo tiers scale up to 4K. For internal training and most social video, 720p is fine. For premium brand work meant for a large screen, it is a real ceiling, and the reason Veo 3.1 still has a job

Clips run 3 to 10 seconds at 720p native, in landscape (16:9) or portrait (9:16). As reference inputs the model accepts up to seven images and up to three video clips of three seconds or less. It does not take audio as an input yet, though it generates audio alongside the video it produces. Output is standard MP4, and every clip ships with SynthID watermarking and C2PA credentials baked in.

On quality, the early signal is strong. In LMArena's Text-to-Video Arena, a leaderboard where people vote on head-to-head outputs from competing models, Omni Flash sat at number one with a score of 1527.

What it means for budgets, and what's still missing

With real pricing in hand, the iteration story gets concrete. Every conversational edit is a fresh generation you pay for, so an edit-heavy session still adds up, roughly a dollar for each ten-second pass at 720p. What the stateful model changes isn't the cost of an edit, it's the number of wasted ones: because context carries across turns, those generations go toward refining a take that mostly works instead of restarting from a blank prompt and hoping the next attempt lands.

Omni isn't alone in this field. Veo 3.1 remains Google's production-grade option when you need higher resolution, and rivals from Bytedance, Alibaba and OpenAI are all chasing the same budgets. What Omni adds is the editing capability itself: the ability to treat a video as a living document instead of a one-shot render.