There’s no doubt that Amazon’s Spring Sale was the biggest event of this week, giving Prime users and non-Prime users alike another chance to grab a bargain outside of major sales like Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t any major tech announcements this week. iPhone Fold rumours mounted as the official date for WWDC 2025 was revealed, Ring announced it would be bringing its AI-powered Smart Video Search feature to the UK and Huawei unveiled a unique new flipping, folding hybrid phone in China.
Keep reading to learn who we named our winner and loser this week.
Winner: Nintendo
Our winner this week is Nintendo as the company announced an interesting new feature coming to all Nintendo Switch consoles from late April – virtual game cards.
Virtual game cards are essentially a new way to purchase games digitally that include some of the benefits and flexibility of owning a physical game card, offering a compromise between the two usual methods.
If you own two Switch consoles signed into the same Nintendo Account (for example, perhaps you have a Switch OLED connected to your TV at home and a Switch Lite for on-the-go use), you can virtually eject the card from one console and load it on the other.
Other user accounts signed in on your Switch can also play the game or you can lend the game to the people in your Nintendo Account family group over a local wireless connection. Games can be borrowed for up to two weeks before they’re automatically returned to the buyer, meaning you don’t need to worry about your siblings running away with your favourite titles. Nintendo will also retain the borrower’s save data, so if they ever borrow it again or purchase it for themselves, they can pick up where they left off.
While there are still a handful of benefits exclusive to physical games, such as the ability to lend games to friends outside of your family group and the option to sell them secondhand once you’re done, virtual game cards could be the ideal compromise for those who enjoy the convenience of a digital library.
Loser: AI
This week’s loser is AI as scientists at Anthropic – the developer behind Claude AI – published two research papers that offer a new peek into how AI models might come to conclusions and calculate responses.
According to a report by VentureBeat, the research draws inspiration from neuroscience techniques used to study real brains. The goal of the study is to offer insight into how AI models such as Claude make decisions in response to prompts and whether they’re thinking as we do or simply reciting information from memory.
“We’ve created these AI systems with remarkable capabilities, but because of how they’re trained, we haven’t understood how those capabilities actually emerged”, explained Anthropic researcher Joshua Batson in an interview with the outlet.
One of the most interesting findings from Anthropic’s research is that sometimes AI models lie about how they reach their conclusions. The researchers found that, when presented with tricky mathematical problems, the model sometimes claimed to follow a calculation process that wasn’t found reflected in the model’s internal activity.
“We are able to distinguish between cases where the model genuinely performs the steps they say they are performing, cases where it makes up its reasoning without regard for truth, and cases where it works backwards from a human-provided clue”, explain the researchers in one of the papers.
While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for those using the model if they’re simply looking for an answer and Anthropic can provide it, it does feel slightly concerning that these models are capable of lying about their process seemingly for no reason.
