Another year, another update to Sony’s PlayStation Portal. The latest tweak to the hardware considerably expands the roster of games playable on the device—but the end result only highlights how urgently PlayStation needs to re-enter the gaming handheld market for real.

The evolution of PlayStation Portal has been fascinating to watch, mainly to see Sony practically scrambling to keep up with the gadget’s unexpected popularity. Launched November 2023, Portal was intended as a mere accessory for PlayStation 5. It had no native processing abilities, simply using Sony’s Remote Play technology to stream whatever happened on players’ personal PS5 to the portable’s screen.

Although it could technically be used anywhere with a strong Wi-Fi signal, difficulties connecting to public networks and high speed requirements to even launch a stream meant the Portal was effectively only suitable for in-home use, to free up the main TV or play in another room.

Somehow, it still took off, with Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino saying in 2024 that the Portal had been a “huge success.” The same year, Sony made it easier to connect to public Wi-Fi and added actual cloud gaming support to Portal, with a selection of games on offer to players subscribing to PlayStation Plus Premium. The initial offering included “over 120 PS5 games from the PS Plus Game Catalog,” though the curated library was subject to change. It could have been a big shift in how players approached hardware and software alike, but, in practice, didn’t really deliver.

Even so, another year on and the Portal’s success seems unstoppable. Sony’s Takuro Fushimi recently told TechRadar that “the community’s response has been overwhelming” and that Portal is now the “most widely used device for PS5 Remote Play.” It’s little surprise, then, that Sony keeps trying to hammer it into something that looks, if you squint, like the standalone gaming handheld it was never intended to be, but that players so desperately want.

Clearer Skies?

Enter the newest update to PlayStation Portal. It takes Cloud Streaming out of its beta phase, expanding the streamable library from only those titles included in the PS Plus selection to many games digitally owned by players. Until now, if you didn’t have a game installed locally on your PS5 or it wasn’t included in that cloud catalog, too bad, no Portal play for you. Going forwards, you’ll be able to cloud stream many titles if they’re tied to your PlayStation account through purchase on the PlayStation Store—although you will still need to be subscribed at the PS Plus Premium tier to use the feature, which will set you back $160 for a full year.

The assortment available is already vast—more than 3,000 games at time of writing. On the face of it, this should be a transformative development for not just the Portal, but PlayStation as a gaming ecosystem. It potentially extends availability of titles you own to wherever you want to play them, and could even help alleviate data storage woes. Although the PS5’s internal drives can be expanded, SSDs can be pricey at higher capacities, and players with large digital collections often can’t install everything they own. Being able to stream games tied to your account without eating up drive space could be a great workaround.

The update also aims to improve the broader player experience on Portal. It finally adds the ability to make in-game purchases when cloud streaming (potentially useful if you want to buy some DLC or virtual currency), and allows players to receive game invites to multiplayer sessions when playing a game via the cloud. Previously, these features were only enabled for Remote Play gaming on Portal, since they were effectively being done through the PS5 and mirrored on the Portal’s screen. Accessibility features have also been improved, adding a screen reader tool and adjustable text sizes.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Among the myriad abilities that humans possess, which ones are uniquely human? Language has been a top candidate at least since Aristotle, who wrote that humanity was “the animal that has language.” Even as large language models such as ChatGPT superficially replicate ordinary speech, researchers want to know if there are specific aspects of human language that simply have no parallels in the communication systems of other animals or artificially intelligent devices.

In particular, researchers have been exploring the extent to which language models can reason about language itself. For some in the linguistic community, language models not only don’t have reasoning abilities, they can’t. This view was summed up by Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist, and two coauthors in 2023, when they wrote in The New York Times that “the correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data.” AI models may be adept at using language, these researchers argued, but they’re not capable of analyzing language in a sophisticated way.

That view was challenged in a recent paper by Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley; Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who recently received his doctorate in linguistics at Berkeley; and Ryan Rhodes of Rutgers University. The researchers put a number of large language models, or LLMs, through a gamut of linguistic tests—including, in one case, having the LLM generalize the rules of a made-up language. While most of the LLMs failed to parse linguistic rules in the way that humans are able to, one had impressive abilities that greatly exceeded expectations. It was able to analyze language in much the same way a graduate student in linguistics would—diagramming sentences, resolving multiple ambiguous meanings, and making use of complicated linguistic features such as recursion. This finding, Beguš said, “challenges our understanding of what AI can do.”

This new work is both timely and “very important,” said Tom McCoy, a computational linguist at Yale University who was not involved with the research. “As society becomes more dependent on this technology, it’s increasingly important to understand where it can succeed and where it can fail.” Linguistic analysis, he added, is the ideal test bed for evaluating the degree to which these language models can reason like humans.

Infinite Complexity

One challenge of giving language models a rigorous linguistic test is making sure they don’t already know the answers. These systems are typically trained on huge amounts of written information—not just the bulk of the internet, in dozens if not hundreds of languages, but also things like linguistics textbooks. The models could, in theory, simply memorize and regurgitate the information that they’ve been fed during training.

To avoid this, Beguš and his colleagues created a linguistic test in four parts. Three of the four parts involved asking the model to analyze specially crafted sentences using tree diagrams, which were first introduced in Chomsky’s landmark 1957 book, Syntactic Structures. These diagrams break sentences down into noun phrases and verb phrases and then further subdivide them into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and so forth.

One part of the test focused on recursion—the ability to embed phrases within phrases. “The sky is blue” is a simple English sentence. “Jane said that the sky is blue” embeds the original sentence in a slightly more complex one. Importantly, this process of recursion can go on forever: “Maria wondered if Sam knew that Omar heard that Jane said that the sky is blue” is also a grammatically correct, if awkward, recursive sentence.

Michael Calore: Recording works.

Lauren Goode: Recording. Yeah.

Michael Calore: Yeah. It’s like when people say, let me film that. You’re not actually filming anything. You’re shooting a digital video.

Lauren Goode: So then if you have a video podcast, are you shooting the podcast? What do you say? Do you say taping, then?

Michael Calore: I think you say recording because it just—

Lauren Goode: Recording the pod.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: We’re recording the pod.

Michael Calore: It covers all the bases.

Lauren Goode: We’re capturing it.

Michael Calore: That’s what we’re doing.

Lauren Goode: We’re sublimating it. All right. Well, should we record this pod?

Michael Calore: I would like to, yes.

Lauren Goode: Let’s do it.

Michael Calore: Honestly, I’m still recovering from last week’s Big Interview event. My throat is still feeling a little bit raw, even though it’s been like four or five days.

Lauren Goode: You sound delightful to me.

Michael Calore: Thank you.

Lauren Goode: But that really was an epic event.

Michael Calore: It was.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Michael Calore: You were on stage.

Lauren Goode: I was. I was first up in the morning. Katie, our boss, gave the intro to the conference and then it was me and Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. And not only was it a really interesting conversation, but then I was done for the day. I didn’t have to do any more interviews after that. And I just got to listen and absorb, and there were some other really great talks.

Michael Calore: There were, yes. And we’re going to talk through some of them. We’re also going to listen to your conversation with Lisa Su, and then we’ll talk about it, and we’ll take listeners behind the scenes of The Big Interview.