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Tech Competition is Helping Americans. Here's How.
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Thursday • August 1, 2024
Microsoft Adds OpenAI to Its List of Competitors in AI and Search
Software Giant Counts Its Partner Among Rivals Such as Amazon and Google in Annual Report
Microsoft MSFT -2.70%decrease; red down pointing triangle named OpenAI among its significant rivals, acknowledging that its most important partner in artificial intelligence is also increasingly competing for some of the same business.
The software giant, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, added the startup to its list of competitors in its fiscal 2024 report filed this week—the first time Microsoft has designated its partner that way in the annual filing. The maker of ChatGPT joined a shortlist of AI rivals named in the document, including Amazon AMZN -9.42%decrease; red down pointing triangle.com and Google.
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Tuesday • July 30, 2024
Canva adds a new generative AI platform to its growing creative empire
Canva Has Acquired Local Startup Leonardo.ai to Bolster the Design Platform’s Magic Studio AI Tools
Canva has announced plans to acquire Leonardo.ai, an Australian generative AI content and research startup, as part of its goal to build a “world-class suite of visual AI tools.” While financial terms haven’t been disclosed, the deal will see Canva gain access to Leonardo.ai’s lineup of user-customizable text-to-image and text-to-video generators.
In Canva‘s announcement, company cofounder Cameron Adams says Leonardo.ai will “continue to develop its web platform” as a separate product offering, much like the Affinity creative software suite Canva acquired in March. Leonardo.ai’s technology and Phoenix foundation model will also be “rapidly” integrated into Canva’s existing suite of Magic Studio products, such as the Magic Media image and video generator.
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Tuesday • July 30, 2024
Perplexity will put ads in its AI search engine and share revenue with publishers
Its First Partners Include TIME, Fortune, The Texas Tribune and WordPress
When people type a question into Perplexity, the two-year-old search engine scours the internet and uses information from multiple sources, including online publishers, to synthesize an answer using AI. Soon, Perplexity will start sharing revenue with some publishers as part of an advertising platform it plans to launch around the end of September, the company announced on Tuesday.
The initiative, known as the Perplexity Publishers’ Program, comes less than two months after the San Francisco-based startup backed by investors like Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, and valued at $3 billion, came under fire from Forbes, Wired, and Condé Nast for allegedly scraping content without permission and ignoring robots.txt, a type of file that websites use to block page-crawling bots.
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Monday • July 29, 2024
You can now turn still images into AI videos with Runway Gen-3 Alpha
New York City-Based Startup Runway is Plowing Ahead with New Marquee Features
Today, the company announced on its X account and its Discord server that Gen-3 Alpha, the new AI video model it unveiled back in mid June 2024 capable of generating incredibly realistic video in seconds from simple text prompts, now accepts still images as prompts as well.
The user simply has to navigate to Runway’s website, click on the “try Gen 3-Alpha” language and they will be taken to a screen where they can upload imagery and/or continue to enter text prompts to guide new AI video generations that are 5 or 10 seconds in length (the user chooses).
A 10-second generated video requires 100 credits through Runway’s pay-to-play and subscription tiers, while a 5-second generation costs 50 credits.
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Thursday • July 25, 2024
OpenAI Is Launching Search Engine, Taking Direct Aim at Google
Built With Input From Publishers, SearchGPT Will Summarize Real-Time Information on Websites
OpenAI is launching a test version of its long-awaited search engine, which it says will cite sources of information including news from business partners such as The Wall Street Journal parent News Corp NWSA -1.49%decrease; red down pointing triangle and the Atlantic magazine.
The tool, called SearchGPT, will summarize the information found on websites, including news sites, and let users ask follow-up questions, just as they can currently with OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. The sources are linked at the end of each answer in parentheses.
OpenAI also built a sidebar where it said users can see more results and sources with relevant information.
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Tuesday • July 23, 2024
Samsung is pouring research into ‘AI phones’ with ‘radically different’ hardware
What is an AI Phone? That’s a Question We’re Still Waiting For an Answer On
As with everywhere else, AI is taking a big role in the smartphone market. And, apparently, Samsung has plans to make dedicated “AI phones” that are “radically different” from the Galaxy phones we see today.
Speaking to Australian Financial Review (via GSMArena), Samsung’s TM Roh explained that the company is currently spending the “lion’s share” of its research and development (R&D) efforts on creating “AI phones.”
The idea of an “AI phone” has been floating around a lot in the past two years, but most attempts at dedicated AI hardware have been rough, to say the least. Rather, it’s traditional smartphones with added AI features that have proven their worth, such as Samsung’s own Galaxy S24 series.