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Sony’s PS5 Outstrips Predecessor with 10 Mln Units Sold Since Nov. Launch

Inside a GameStop store Sony PS5 gaming consoles are pictured in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, US, November 12, 2020. (Reuters)
Inside a GameStop store Sony PS5 gaming consoles are pictured in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, US, November 12, 2020. (Reuters)
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Sony’s PS5 Outstrips Predecessor with 10 Mln Units Sold Since Nov. Launch

Inside a GameStop store Sony PS5 gaming consoles are pictured in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, US, November 12, 2020. (Reuters)
Inside a GameStop store Sony PS5 gaming consoles are pictured in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, US, November 12, 2020. (Reuters)

Sony Group Corp said on Wednesday its PlayStation 5 (PS5) gaming console has sold more than 10 million units since launching last November, outstripping sales of its predecessor even as the Japanese firm grapples with a global chip shortage.

The PS5, which offers cutting edge graphics and faster loading times than the PS4, is in short supply as the COVID-19 pandemic strains global semiconductor supply chains while demand has risen amid a gaming boom with more people staying indoors.

“We’ve built more PlayStations faster than we ever have before which makes me happy. But on the other hand, we’re some time from being able to meet all the demand that’s out there, which makes me feel bad,” Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan told Reuters via email.

“Our partners are performing really well for us, but the chip shortage is definitely a challenge that we are all navigating,” Ryan said.

Boosted by exclusive games likes Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which has sold more than 6.5 million copies, PS5 sales have outstripped the PS4.

It took Sony around nine months to sell 10 million units of the PS4, which had a staggered launch. More than 100 million units of the console have been sold since November 2013.

Electronics makers warn of deepening semiconductor shortages, with Apple on Tuesday saying the shortfall is affecting iPhone production.

“Sony’s deep expertise in supply chain management for consumer electronics has enabled it to weather the worst impacts of the pandemic even during the launch of a new product,” said Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games research at Ampere Analysis.

Sony sees demand for the PS5 continuing even as vaccinations spur easing of curbs on going out, Ryan said.

A strong games slate will be crucial to maintain momentum amid competition from Microsoft’s rival Xbox device, analysts say.

Another first-party title for Sony, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, has sold more than 1.1 million copies since its release last month. First-party titles refer to games from companies that are owned by the firm making the console.

The group forecasts PS5 hardware sales of at least 14.8 million units in the year through March.

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Technology

Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
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Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File

American AI giant Anthropic aims to boost the European tech ecosystem as it expands on the continent, product chief Mike Krieger told AFP Thursday at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris.

The OpenAI competitor wants to be "the engine behind some of the largest startups of tomorrow... (and) many of them can and should come from Europe", Krieger said.

Tech industry and political leaders have often lamented Europe's failure to capitalize on its research and education strength to build heavyweight local companies -- with many young founders instead leaving to set up shop across the Atlantic.

Krieger's praise for the region's "really strong talent pipeline" chimed with an air of continental tech optimism at Vivatech.

French AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a multibillion-dollar tie-up to bring high-powered computing resources from chip behemoth Nvidia to the region.

The semiconductor firm will "increase the amount of AI computing capacity in Europe by a factor of 10" within two years, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang told an audience at the southern Paris convention center.

Among 100 planned continental hires, Anthropic is building up its technical and research strength in Europe, where it has offices in Dublin and non-EU capital London, Krieger said.

Beyond the startups he hopes to boost, many long-standing European companies "have a really strong appetite for transforming themselves with AI", he added, citing luxury giant LVMH, which had a large footprint at Vivatech.

'Safe by design'

Mistral -- founded only in 2023 and far smaller than American industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic -- is nevertheless "definitely in the conversation" in the industry, Krieger said.

The French firm recently followed in the footsteps of the US companies by releasing a so-called "reasoning" model able to take on more complex tasks.

"I talk to customers all the time that are maybe using (Anthropic's AI) Claude for some of the long-horizon agentic tasks, but then they've also fine-tuned Mistral for one of their data processing tasks, and I think they can co-exist in that way," Krieger said.

So-called "agentic" AI models -- including the most recent versions of Claude -- work as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that are able to do work over longer horizons with less human supervision, including by interacting with tools like web browsers and email.

Capabilities displayed by the latest releases have raised fears among some researchers, such as University of Montreal professor and "AI godfather" Yoshua Bengio, that independently acting AI could soon pose a risk to humanity.

Bengio last week launched a non-profit, LawZero, to develop "safe-by-design" AI -- originally a key founding promise of OpenAI and Anthropic.

'Very specific genius'

"A huge part of why I joined Anthropic was because of how seriously they were taking that question" of AI safety, said Krieger, a Brazilian software engineer who co-founded Instagram, which he left in 2018.

Anthropic is still working on measures designed to restrict their AI models' potential to do harm, he added.

But it has yet to release details of its "level 4" AI safety protections foreseen for still more powerful models, after activating ASL (AI Safety Level) 3 to corral the capabilities of May's Claude Opus 4 release.

Developing ASL 4 is "an active part of the work of the company", Krieger said, without giving a potential release date.

With Claude 4 Opus, "we've deployed the mitigations kind of proactively... safe doesn't have to mean slow, but it does mean having to be thoughtful and proactive ahead of time" to make sure safety protections don't impair performance, he added.

Looking to upcoming releases from Anthropic, Krieger said the company's models were on track to match chief executive Dario Amodei's prediction that Anthropic would offer customers access to a "country of geniuses in a data center" by 2026 or 2027 -- within limits.

Anthropic's latest AI models are "genius-level at some very specific things", he said.

"In the coming year... it will continue to spike in particular aspects of things, and still need a lot of human-in-the-loop coordination," he forecast.