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This recap will take you through the events which unfolded in FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE, the first game in the FFVII remake project, in just over 3 minutes.

Square Enix and Fathom Events, in collaboration with Sony Pictures, announced on Tuesday that they will screen the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete film in over 650 U.S. theaters for a limited time on February 21-22. The English dub will screen on February 21, and the Japanese version with English subtitles will screen on February 22.

Right before the screening, there will be exclusive videos, including a history of Final Fantasy VII, gameplay from the upcoming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth game, and new interviews with game and film director Tetsuya Nomura, Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi, and producer Yoshinori Kitase.

Square Enix is screening the film again in theaters in Japan from January 19-February 1.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete is a director's cut of Square Enix's computer-animated feature that recounts the story following the original Final Fantasy VII role-playing game. The complete version features 26 minutes of additional footage.

Join Cloud and his friends on a journey across the planet in search of Sephiroth, experiencing the captivating story and thrilling combat, in FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH.

Final Fantasy XIV wrapped up the final leg of its Fan Festival tour in Tokyo over the weekend. As with the other Fan Festival events, players were treated to a wealth of new information on Dawntrail, the next expansion in the critically acclaimed MMORPG series — in addition to graphical updates, a new playable race, and information on the expansion’s new area (and you can check out the full keynote address here). We also got a first look at the second job class being added to the game: Pictomancer.

Terminal Trove showcases the best of the terminal, Discover a collection of CLI, TUI, and more developer tools at Terminal Trove.

イニシエノウタ/デボル · SQUARE ENIX MUSIC · 岡部 啓一 · MONACA

NieR Gestalt & NieR Replicant Original Soundtrack

Released on: 2010-04-21

On Monday, Mistral AI announced a new AI language model called Mixtral 8x7B, a "mixture of experts" (MoE) model with open weights that reportedly truly matches OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in performance—an achievement that has been claimed by others in the past but is being taken seriously by AI heavyweights such as OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy and Jim Fan. That means we're closer to having a ChatGPT-3.5-level AI assistant that can run freely and locally on our devices, given the right implementation.

Mistral, based in Paris and founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, has seen a rapid rise in the AI space recently. It has been quickly raising venture capital to become a sort of French anti-OpenAI, championing smaller models with eye-catching performance. Most notably, Mistral's models run locally with open weights that can be downloaded and used with fewer restrictions than closed AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. (In this context "weights" are the computer files that represent a trained neural network.)

Mixtral 8x7B can process a 32K token context window and works in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English. It works much like ChatGPT in that it can assist with compositional tasks, analyze data, troubleshoot software, and write programs. Mistral claims that it outperforms Meta's much larger LLaMA 2 70B (70 billion parameter) large language model and that it matches or exceeds OpenAI's GPT-3.5 on certain benchmarks, as seen in the chart below.
A chart of Mixtral 8x7B performance vs. LLaMA 2 70B and GPT-3.5, provided by Mistral.

The speed at which open-weights AI models have caught up with OpenAI's top offering a year ago has taken many by surprise. Pietro Schirano, the founder of EverArt, wrote on X, "Just incredible. I am running Mistral 8x7B instruct at 27 tokens per second, completely locally thanks to @LMStudioAI. A model that scores better than GPT-3.5, locally. Imagine where we will be 1 year from now."

LexicaArt founder Sharif Shameem tweeted, "The Mixtral MoE model genuinely feels like an inflection point — a true GPT-3.5 level model that can run at 30 tokens/sec on an M1. Imagine all the products now possible when inference is 100% free and your data stays on your device." To which Andrej Karpathy replied, "Agree. It feels like the capability / reasoning power has made major strides, lagging behind is more the UI/UX of the whole thing, maybe some tool use finetuning, maybe some RAG databases, etc."

Mixture of experts

So what does mixture of experts mean? As this excellent Hugging Face guide explains, it refers to a machine-learning model architecture where a gate network routes input data to different specialized neural network components, known as "experts," for processing. The advantage of this is that it enables more efficient and scalable model training and inference, as only a subset of experts are activated for each input, reducing the computational load compared to monolithic models with equivalent parameter counts.

In layperson's terms, a MoE is like having a team of specialized workers (the "experts") in a factory, where a smart system (the "gate network") decides which worker is best suited to handle each specific task. This setup makes the whole process more efficient and faster, as each task is done by an expert in that area, and not every worker needs to be involved in every task, unlike in a traditional factory where every worker might have to do a bit of everything.

OpenAI has been rumored to use a MoE system with GPT-4, accounting for some of its performance. In the case of Mixtral 8x7B, the name implies that the model is a mixture of eight 7 billion-parameter neural networks, but as Karpathy pointed out in a tweet, the name is slightly misleading because, "it is not all 7B params that are being 8x'd, only the FeedForward blocks in the Transformer are 8x'd, everything else stays the same. Hence also why total number of params is not 56B but only 46.7B."

Mixtral is not the first "open" mixture of experts model, but it is notable for its relatively small size in parameter count and performance. It's out now, available on Hugging Face and BitTorrent under the Apache 2.0 license. People have been running it locally using an app called LM Studio. Also, Mistral began offering beta access to an API for three levels of Mistral models on Monday.

New information about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has just surfaced, teasing a subplot for the returning Team Avalanche member Biggs. The second installment of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is set to launch on February 29, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will pick up where the first entry left off with Cloud and company leaving Midgar in search of answers about the Ancients and their connection to the former SOLIDER Sephiroth who now threatens the planet.

Just like Final Fantasy 7 Remake before it, Rebirth will cover a fraction of the original Final Fantasy 7’s beloved storyline, reportedly going all the way up to the party’s fateful journey to the Forgotten Capital at the end of the original game’s second disk. While a recent ESRB rating for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth suggests that it will faithfully follow one of the old Final Fantasy 7’s most iconic and shocking plotlines, Creative Director Tetsuya Nomura has stated that Rebirth could see certain story beats play out in a different order - and that the destinies of particular characters could be changed outright.

Such is the case for Biggs, a supporting character in the Final Fantasy 7 universe and a loyal member of Barret Wallace’s Avalanche resistance team. According to a new post on the official Final Fantasy 7 Twitter account, Biggs will return in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth to seek revenge against the corrupt Shinra Corporation for the deaths of his teammates. In Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Biggs participated in a mission to defend the plate above the Sector 7 slums from Shinra - a battle that originally claimed his life in the old Final Fantasy 7.

However, due to Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s altered timeline, Biggs is shown to be alive and well following the ill-fated attack on the Sector 7 plate and is last seen recuperating at the Leaf House orphanage in Midgar’s Sector 5 slums during Remake’s final moments. His Team Avalanche squadmates Wedge and Jesse were also among the casualties of the Sector 7 battle in the original Final Fantasy 7, but their fates in the Remake continuity are left much more ambiguous and Avalanche itself is now a global organization.

This might change in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, as Biggs is described as the last remaining member of his unit. This means that his friends could have met a tragic end at the hands of Shinra between games, assuming they didn’t die in the Sector 7 attack after all. Only time will tell how Biggs’s newfound quest for vengeance will play out in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, as well as how it will connect with the continuing journey of Cloud and his friends.

Listen to the official theme song of FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH, “No Promises to Keep”, for the first time in this brand new trailer.
The song is composed by the incomparable Nobuo Uematsu and performed by Loren Allred, the renowned, platinum-selling artist who captivated the world with her single “Never Enough” from The Greatest Showman.

FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH launches February 29, 2024.

Theme Song “No Promises to Keep”

"Music: Nobuo Uematsu
Vocals: Loren Allred
Lyrics: Kazushige Nojima
Lyrics Translation: Ben Sabin, Matt Furda
Arrangement & Synthesizer Programming: Tsutomu Narita"

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth will bring a new twist to its difficulty options when the second chapter of the Final Fantasy 7 remake project arrives next year. Square Enix revealed Friday that in addition to easy and normal difficulty settings, Rebirth will offer a new “dynamic” difficulty that adapts to match players’ skill.