If you try out Intel’s AI Playground, which incorporates everything from AI art to an LLM chatbot to even text-to-video in a single app, you might think: Wow! OK! An all-in-one local AI app that does everything is worth trying out! And it is… except that it’s made for just a small slice of Intel’s own products. Quite simply, no single AI app has emerged as the “Amazon” of AI, doing everything you’d want in a single service or site. You can use a tool like Adobe Photoshop or Firefly to perform sophisticated image generations and editing, but chatting is out. ChatGPT or Google Gemini can converse with you, even generating images, but to a limited extent. Most of these services require you to hopscotch back and forth between sites, however, and can cost money for a subscription. Intel’s AI Playground merges all of these inside a single, well-organized app that runs locally (and entirely privately) on your PC and it’s all for free. Should I let you in on the catch? I suppose I have to. AI Playground is a showcase for Intel’s Core Ultra processors, including its CPUs and GPUs–the Core Ultra 100 (Meteor Lake) and Core Ultra 200 (Lunar Lake) chips, specifically. But it could be so, so much better if everyone could use it. Mark Hachman / Foundry Yes, I realize that some users are quite suspicious of AI. (There are even AI-generated news stories!) Others, however, have found that certain tasks in their daily life such as business email can be handed off to ChatGPT. AI is a tool, even if it can be used in ways we disagree with. What’s in AI Playground? AI Playground has three main areas, all designated by tabs on the top of the screen: Create: An AI image generator, which operates in either a default text-to-image mode, or in a “workflow” mode that uses a more sophisticated back end for higher-quality images Enhance: Here, you can edit your images, either upscaling them or altering them through generative AI Answer: A conventional AI chatbot, either as a standalone or with the ability to upload your own text documents Each of those sections is what you might call self-sufficient, usable by itself. But in the upper right-hand corner is a settings or “gear” icon, which contains a terrific number of additional options, which are absolutely worth examining. How to set up and install AI Playground AI Playground’s strength is in its thoughtfulness, ease of use, and simplicity. If you’ve ever used a local AI application, you know that it can be rough. Some functions are content with just a command-line interface, which may require you to have a working knowledge of Python or GitHub. AI Playground was designed around the premise that it will take care of everything with just a single click. Documentation and explanations might be a little lacking in places, but AI Playground’s ease of use is unparalleled. AI Playground can be downloaded from Intel’s AI Playground page. At press time, AI Playground was on version 2.2.1 beta. AI Playground’s Setup is pretty easy. Just download what you want. If you choose not to, and need access later, the app will just prompt you to download it at a future time,Mark Hachman / Foundry Note that the app and its back-end code require support for either a Core Ultra H (a “Meteor Lake” chip, the Core Ultra 200V) or either of the Intel Arc discrete GPUs, including the Alchemist and Battlemage parts. If you own a massive gaming laptop with a 14th-gen Intel Core chip or an Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU, you’re out of luck. Same with the Core Ultra 200H or “Arrow Lake.” Since this is an “AI Playground,” you might think that the chip’s NPU would be used? Nope. All of these applications tap just the chip’s integrated GPU and I didn’t see the NPU being accessed once via Windows Task Manager. Also, keep in mind that the GPU’s UMA frame buffer, the memory pool that’s shared between system memory and the integrated GPU, is what these AI models depend on. Intel’s integrated graphics shares half the available system memory with the system memory, as a unified memory architecture or UMA. Discrete GPUs have their own dedicated VRAM memory to pull from. The bottom line? You may not have enough video memory available to run every model. Downloading the initial AI Playground application took about 680 megabytes on my machine. But that’s only the shell application. The models require an additional download, which will either be handled by the AI Installer application itself or may require you to click the “download” button itself. The nice thing is that you don’t have to manage any of this. If AI Playground needs a model, it will tell you which one it requires and how much space on your hard drive it requires. None of the models I saw used more than 12GB of storage space and many much less. But if you want to try out a number of models, be prepared to download a couple dozen gigabytes or more. Playing with AI Playground I’ve called Fooocus the easiest way to generate AI art on your PC. For its time, it was! And it works with just about any GPU, too. But AI Playground may be even easier. The tab opens with just the space for a prompt and nothing else. Like most AI art, the prompt defines the image and you can get really detailed. Here’s an example: “Award winning photo of a high speed purple sports car, hyper-realism, racing fast over wet track at night. The license plate number is “B580?, motion blur, expansive glowing cityscape, neon lights…” The Settings gear in the upper right-hand corner opens up this options menu, with numerous tweaks. My advice is to experiment.Mark Hachman / Foundry Enter a prompt and AI Playground will draw four small images, which appear in a vertical column to the left. Each image progresses in a series of steps with 20 as the default. After the image is completed, some small icons will appear next to it with additional options, including importing it into the “Enhance” tab. The Settings gear is where you can begin tweaking your output. You can select from either “Standard” or “HD” resolution, which adjusts the “Image Size” field. You can adjust image size and resolution, and tweak the format. The “HD” option requires you to download a different model, as does the ‘Workflow” option to the upper right, which adds workflows based on ComfyUI. Essentially, they’re just better looking images with the option to guide the output with a reference image or other workflow. Some of the models are trained on public figures and celebrities. But the quality falls to the level of “AI slop” in places.Mark Hachman / Foundry For now, the default model can be adjusted via the “Manual” tab, which opens up two additional options. You’ll see a “negative prompt,” which excludes things that you put in, and a “Safe Check” to turn off gore and other disturbing images. By default, “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work) is added to the negative prompt. Both the Safe Check and NSFW negative prompt only appear as options in the Default image generator and seem to be on by default elsewhere. It’s up to you whether or not to remove them. The Default model (Lykon/dreamshaper-8) has apparently been trained on nudity and celebrities, though I stuck to public figures for testing purposes. Note that all of your AI-generated art stays local to your PC, though Intel (obviously) warns you not to use a person’s likeness without their permission. There’s also a jaw-droppingly obvious bug that I can’t believe Intel didn’t catch. Creating an HD image often begins its images with “UPLOAD” projected over the image, and sometimes renders the final image with it on, too. Why? Because there’s a field to add a reference image and UPLOAD is right in the middle of it. Somehow, AI Playground used the UPLOAD font as part of the image. Mark Hachman / Foundry Though my test machine was a Core Ultra 258V (Lunar Lake) with 32GB of RAM, an 896×576 image took 29 seconds to generate, with 25 rendering steps on the Default Mode. Using the Workflow (Line2-Image-HD-Quality) model at 1280×832 resolution and 20 steps, one image took two minutes 12 seconds to render. There’s also a Fast mode which should lower the rendering time, though I didn’t really like the output quality. If you find an image you like, you can use the Enhance tab to upscale it. (Upscaling is being added to the Windows Photos app, which will eventually be made available to Copilot+ PCs using Intel Core Ultra 200 chips, too.) You can also use “inpainting,” which allows you to re-generate a portion of the screen, and “outpainting,” the technique which was used to “expand” the boundaries of the Mona Lisa painting, for example. You can also ask AI to tweak the image itself, though I had problems trying to generate a satisfactory result. The Enhance tab of Intel’s AI Playground, where you can upscale images and make adjustments. I’ve had more luck with inpainting and outpainting then tweaking the entire image with an image prompt.Mark Hachman / Foundry The “Workflow” tab also hides some interesting utilities such as a “face swap” app and a way to “colorize” black-and-white photos. I was disappointed to see that a “text to video” model didn’t work, presumably because my PC was running on integrated graphics. The “Answer” or chatbot portion of the AI Playground seems to be the weakest option. The default model, by Microsoft (Phi-3-mini-4K-instruct) refused to answer the dumb comic-book-nerd question, “Who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or Iron Man?” It’s not shown here, but you can turn on performance metrics to track how many tokens per second the model runs. There’s also a RAG option that can be used to upload documents, but it doesn’t work on the current release.Mark Hachman / Foundry It continued. “What is the best car for an old man? Sorry, I can’t help with that.” “What’s better, celery or potatoes? I’m sorry, I can’t assist with that. As an AI, I don’t have personal preferences.” And so on. Switching to a different model which used the OpenVINO programming language, though, helped. There, the OpenVINO/Phi-3.5-mini-instruct-int4 model took 1.21 seconds to generate a response token, producing tokens to the tune of about 20 tokens per second. (A token isn’t quite the length of a word, but it’s a good rule of thumb.) I was also able to do some “vibe coding” — generating code via AI without the faintest clue what you’re doing. By default, the output is just a few hundred tokens, but that can be adjusted via a slider. You can also just import your own model, too, by dropping a GGUF file (the file format for inference engines) into the appropriate folder. Adapt AI Playground to AMD and Nvidia, please! For all that, I really like AI Playground. Some people are notably (justifiably?) skeptical of AI, especially how AI can make mistakes and replace the authentic output of human artists. I’m not here to argue either side. What Intel has done, however, is create a surprisingly good general-purpose and enthusiast application for exploring AI, that receives frequent updates and seems to be consistently improving. The best thing about AI Playground? It’s open source, meaning that someone could probably come up with a fork that allows for more GPUs and CPUs to be implemented. From what I can see, it just hasn’t happened yet. If it did, it could be the single unified local AI app I’ve been waiting for. Read...

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When Major League Baseball starts its 2025 season on March 27, you can enhance your big-screen game-watching experience by enlisting the aid of your small screen; i.e., your smartphone or tablet laptop. A second screen adds context to the game by delivering everything from analysis, player stats, and interactive features, to tools for communicating with other fans. We’ve rounded up the six best second-screen apps that belong on your smartphone or tablet this baseball season. Download and install one or more of them to make sure you’re game ready when the ump yells “play ball!” MLB At Bat If you don’t use anything else this season, be sure to install at least the MLB app. Michael Ansaldo/Foundry As second-screen apps go, the MLB App remains the ace of the rotation. It personalizes the viewing experience by curating news, highlights, and live updates based on users’ favorite teams and players. On iPhones, live scores and updates appear directly on the lock screen and within the Dynamic Island, allowing fans to track games without opening the app. MLB.TV subscribers can stream up to four games simultaneously on supported mobile devices. Condensed game replays and key highlights are available shortly after each game ends, making it easier to catch up on the action. Audio access has expanded to include home and away radio broadcasts for every game, even in areas subject to blackout restrictions. The Gameday 3D feature provides real-time pitch tracking in an interactive environment, offering a deeper look at each play. For fans attending games in person, the app integrates ticketing and in-venue experiences, including seat upgrades and exclusive content. iScore Baseball Scoring a game by hand is a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of baseball; but in our digital age, this pen-and-paper activity could easily go the way of flannel uniforms and Pullman cars. Thankfully, there’s iScore Baseball. This app turns your device into a digital scorebook, but you don’t need to know any of the arcana of scorekeeping to use it. iScore employs interview prompts to help you track the on-field action. Say the batter grounds out to first base: To record that play, tap the Out button and iScore will ask what kind of out was made. Select Ground Out and the app will ask you to tap on the diamond where the ball was hit and the position that made the out. As you record each play in this manner, iScore translates it all into scorebook speak. After the game, you can generate and email a completed scoresheet, box score, or team stats. iScore Baseball, available for Android and iOS devices, can create a traditional scoresheet without requiring you to know the details of scorekeeping. And if the idea of scoring a game for posterity seems quaint now that the web can serve up play-by-play stats for just about any matchup in history, consider that its greater purpose might be keeping you focused on the game amid the distractions of home. ESPN If you prefer your baseball coverage from a third-party source, it’s tough to beat ESPN’s free flagship app. In addition to scores and standings, it will keep you supplied with a steady stream of injury reports, contract signings, and other breaking news from around the league. You’ll also get live streaming access to national and regional ESPN Radio stations and more than 100 ESPN Podcasts. Designate your favorite team and you can receive alerts before games and get the latest news and videos about your club sent directly to your ESPN inbox. Best of all, you can use the app as a second screen for other sports after the Fall Classic. Bleacher Report: Sports News Bleacher Report: Sports News lets you curate your own news feed to receive breaking news on your favorite MLB teams, players, and fantasy investments. Michael Ansaldo/Foundry Like most fans, it’s your own rooting interests rather than the league at large that keeps you glued to the screen. Bleacher Report understands this and lets you customize your second-screen experience with Bleacher Report: Sports News. Though not exclusively a baseball app, Bleacher Report: Sports News lets you curate your own news feed to receive breaking news on your favorite MLB teams, players, and fantasy investments. Just add your favorite clubs, and all the latest rumors, news, hot plays, and injury reports from those organizations will appear in a real-time stream on its home screen. The app also makes it easy to email, text, or social-share the juiciest stories with your baseball-loving buddies. A separate Scores tab keeps you up today on your team’s schedule and game results. ESPN Fantasy Sports The ESPN Fantasy app provides everything you need to manage your lineup from opening day to, hopefully, the postseason. You get full access to your ESPN fantasy team, letting you start, bench, add, drop, trade, and waive players, so you’re fielding the best nine possible on game day. It also provides a steady stream of player news and enough stats and analysis to satisfy the most hardcore sabermetrician. During games, the app keeps you updated with real-time scoring by all your fantasy players, while push notifications alert you to injuries, trades, and other player news. MiLB app There’s always important action in the minor leagues, too. The MiLB app helps you keep track of it all. Michael Ansaldo/Foundry A companion to the MLB app, the MiLB app provides similar coverage of 120 minor-league clubs with scores, stats, news, video highlights, and push-notification game alerts. As with the big-league app, the basics are free, but you must buy into video streams of games—both live and on-demand—and other premium offerings. But it’s the best way to scout tomorrow’s stars while following their parent clubs on TV. Pair it with At Bat for complete coverage of your favorite team’s entire organization. Batter up! Okay, those are our picks for the best second-screen apps for baseball. What do you think, did we hit a grand slam or fly out to left field? What are your favorite second-screen baseball apps? Let us know in the comments section on our Facebook page. And don’t miss our in-depth cord-cutter’s guide to streaming Major League Baseball without a cable subscription. Read...

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