bubbles

Hitman hitmakers Io Interactive have just screened some extensive footage of their James Bond adaptation, 007: First Light, during Sony’s latest State of Play livestream. As you might expect, it looks and sounds a lot like Hitman, but the whole “James Bond” thing is a definite pace-changer. Catch the whole video below, plus a hasty, opinionated summary from me.

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Sony and Io’s Jamesplay blowout spans a couple of First Light missions, the first being a multiple-agent undercover affair during an exclusive chess tournament held in Slovakia, which begins with our hero kicking his heels in a carpark while disguised as a chauffeur. All seams peaceful. But then our hero remembers that he’s Bond, James Bond, and has better things to do than fulfil his allotted role in a painstakingly organised MI6 operation.

The subsequent 20 minutes or so can be divided into five courses. First, a dash of infiltration that readily channels Agent 47, with Bond using environmental distractions to bamboozle security staff and steal their IDs. Always a fan of bouncers who are hopelessly baffled by leaky hosepipes.

Then, there’s a dollop of social stealth, with Bond hustling a bartender for clues about a weirdo bellhop. Then, it’s time for an Xbox 360-ass car chase with a femme fatale in the passenger seat. Next, James must blow up one million red gas tanks while cover-shooting through a crowded airfield to an escaping transport plane. Then, he must do a crafty QTE hack on the plane’s attitude controls, so as to wrongfoot the on-board defenders and ultimately, turn the plane into a meteor shower.

If it were me, I’d still be in that carpark playing Tetris on my Q-phone. But I am not Bond, James Bond. Io’s version of the character is as smug, quippy and basically unbearable as you’d expect from a Bond actor pre-Daniel Craig. I rate him seven Rogers out of Connery so far.

The other Jamesplay excerpt from Sony’s sprawling Bondcast sees the handsome cad infiltrating a gala in Kensington, London. It may be down to the State of Play presentation, but this one feels much more like a Hitman World of Assassination mission, with Bond navigating the crowd, eavesdropping for interaction opportunities, pickpocketing the help, and generally keeping it on the down-low.

Io and Sony polish everything off with an edited section showing off the game’s various supporting systems. Certain actions earn you Instinct, which can be spent to bluff your way out of confrontations, lure guards into takedowns, and slow time for headshots.

You also get gadgets, of course, such as a laser with which to drop chandeliers on those foolish enough to enjoy their crystal glow, and smoke grenades for when you can’t be arsed to hide properly. Lethal force appears to depend on Bond being granted “License to Kill” by his handlers – you can’t just murder somebody with a pair of scissors whenever you fancy, for you are Bond, James Bond, not some barcode-wearing hooligan.

All in all, I think this looks entertaining. It’s either a Hitman game that has gracefully yielded to Bond’s appetite for getaway shoot-outs, or a Bond game that has studied long and well under Agent 47’s tutelage – take your pick. It’s out March 27th 2026.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke to assembled reporters at a dinner in San Francisco late last week on the topic of, you guessed it, AI, the applications of AI, and the vast sums of money moving behind the scenes to fund it. Despite being one of the most vocal advocates of the tech, Altman had some words of caution for investors jumping on the artificial intelligence train.

According to The Verge, Altman said it was “insane” that AI startups consisting of “three people and an idea” are receiving huge amounts of funding off the back of incredibly high company valuations, describing it as “not rational behaviour.”

“Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money. We don’t know who, and a lot of people are going to make a phenomenal amount of money,” said Altman.

“When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth. If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing.” said Altman, referencing the infamous dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. “Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited.”

That being said, Altman stopped short of calling investment in AI overall a bad idea for the economy in general: “My personal belief, although I may turn out to be wrong, is that, on the whole, this would be a huge net win.”

At the same dinner, Altman confirmed that OpenAI would still be spending vast amounts of money (partially provided, presumably, by the likes of Softbank and the Dragoneer Investment Group in OpenAI’s latest $8.3 billion funding round) to keep the company at the top of the AI financial leaderbooks.

“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future,” Altman said. “You should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands.”

Well, it certainly appears to cost a whole lot of moolah just to keep the good ship OpenAI afloat. The company has raised staggering sums of cash over the past decade to develop and run its various AI implementations, the most famous of which being ChatGPT. Reports last year indicated that OpenAI had spent $8.5 billion on LLM training and staffing for its generative AI efforts, while other analysts have predicted it costs $700,000 a day to run ChatGPT alone.

The Information recently projected that OpenAI would be burning through $20 billion in cash flow by 2027, with the company said to be hopeful that investors like Softbank would stump up another $30 to $40 billion to continue funding its operations.

A CG render of Meta’s planned Hyperion data center, superimposed over Manhattan. (Image credit: Meta)

Still, those spending figures don’t appear to be in the trillions yet, although that estimated sum is perhaps of little surprise to those of us that keep an eye on AI data center expansion.

Given that Altman’s rival, Elon Musk, has been booting up and expanding xAI’s Colossus supercomputer with incredible speed, and with the news that Meta is expanding its data center operations at such a rate it’s currently having to house a significant portion of its racks in nearby tents, OpenAI will feel the need to keep up—and to do that it needs to spend (and raise) huge amounts of cash over the next few years.

One would assume that Altman is confident enough in his company’s efforts to place its investors on the “going to make phenomenal sums of money” side of things, but his comments should perhaps serve as a warning to those looking to jump in with both feet without correctly judging the landing. Someone has to lose in the great AI race, I suppose. And as to which companies survive, and which come to a sticky end? That remains very much an open question for now.

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007 First Light’s first proper footage reveals a posh blockbuster with bubbles of Hitman

‘Someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount of money’ says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about unwise AI investment. ‘When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth’