Microsoft has launched a new AI-powered feature for its Edge Browser. Copilot Vision is now in preview for a limited number of U.S. Copilot Pro subscribers by opt-in through Copilot Labs. With user permission, Copilot Vision “sees” what is onscreen and can respond to questions about text and images, explains the company. Calling Copilot Vision “the first AI experience of its kind,” Microsoft suggests the experience is “almost like having a second set of eyes as you browse,” adding that when users turn on Copilot Vision it will “instantly scan, analyze, and offer insights based on what it sees.” Continue reading Microsoft Previews AI-Powered Copilot Vision for Edge Browser

Google DeepMind’s new Genie 2 is a large foundation world model that generates interactive 3D worlds that are being likened to video games. “Games play a key role in the world of artificial intelligence research,” says Google DeepMind, noting “their engaging nature, challenges and measurable progress make them ideal environments to safely test and advance AI capabilities.” Based on a simple prompt image, Genie 2 is capable of producing “an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments” — suitable for training and evaluating embodied agents — that can be played by a human or AI agent using keyboard and mouse inputs. Continue reading DeepMind Genie 2 Creates Worlds That Emulate Video Games

YouTube’s Global Culture & Trends Report for 2024 is out, providing a snapshot of the year’s trending topics, top songs and leading creators from across the globe. The Paris Olympic Games appeared on 10 of 12 countries’ trending topics lists, “emphatically illustrating that non-digital-native franchises can thrive in a digital culture,” YouTube says. “Deadpool & Wolverine” is another such example. Also hot in 2024, “digital franchises” — independent creator content driven to success by online communities. Examples include Roblox’s viral “Dress to Impress” fashion game and the animated series “The Amazing Digital Circus.” Continue reading YouTube Releases Global Trends, Personalized Music Recaps

Taylor Swift ranked first among the world’s musical artists on the annual Spotify Wrapped chart that ranks the year’s top songs, albums, podcasts and audiobooks. Her more than 26.6 billion global streams earned her the preeminent title of Spotify’s Global Top Artist for the second consecutive year. The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Drake and Billie Eilish rounded out the top performers, at numbers 2 through 5, respectively. Women dominated the global Top 10 for albums, led by Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology” followed by Eilish’s “Hit Me Soft and Hard.” Swift claimed a total of three slots among the Most-Streamed Albums Globally. Continue reading Spotify Wrapped: Swift Leads a Banner Year for Female Artists

After years of focusing on AI infrastructure, Amazon is plunging into the frontier model business with the Nova series. The new family of generative AI models includes the text-to-text model Amazon Nova Micro and Amazon Nova Lite for fast, mobile-friendly apps, and at the upper echelon the multimodal Amazon Nova Pro and Amazon Nova Premier for processing text, images and video. Amazon, which is heavy into production via Amazon Studios and MGM, is also launched two specialty models focused on “studio quality” output — Amazon Nova Canvas for images and Amazon Nova Reel for video. Continue reading Amazon Dives into Generative AI with Nova Foundation Models

Amazon Web Services is building a supercomputer in collaboration with Anthropic, the AI startup in which the e-commerce giant has an $8 billion minority stake. Hundreds of thousands of AWS’s flagship Trainium chips will be amassed in an “Ultracluster” that when it is completed in 2025 will be one of the largest supercomputers in the world for model training, Amazon says. The company announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual servers as well as Trn2 UltraServers designed to train and deploy AI models and teased next-generation Trainium3 chips. Continue reading AWS Building Trainium-Powered Supercomputer with Anthropic

Walmart has closed its $2.3 billion all-cash acquisition of smart television maker Vizio. The deal increases the retail giant’s media clout, signaling an expansion of its video-based advertising efforts and interest in content-based marketing. “The acquisition of Vizio and its SmartCast operating system allows Walmart to serve its customers in new ways to enhance their shopping journeys,” Walmart said in concluding the deal, initiated in February. Walmart’s media efforts to date have focused around Walmart Connect, which works with brands to position ads across Walmart.com and in the company’s U.S. stores. Continue reading Walmart Closes $2.3 Billion Acquisition of Vizio, SmartCast OS

“AI won’t exist as an app, or a button… it’ll be an entirely new environment built on top of a web browser.” That is the pitch from The Browser Company, the New York-based firm behind the Arc browser that is now developing an AI-first web interface called Dia, expected to debut early next year. Dia aims to leverage AI tools to simplify common Internet tasks. The repertoire is now a familiar one, with things like writing assists and inspirational prompts becoming AI givens in a competitive field where Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini are already established. The Browser Company is trying to distinguish Dia with a simple, user-friendly interface. Continue reading The Browser Company is Building Dia, an AI-First Web Browser

Artificial voice startup Hume AI has had a busy Q4, introducing Voice Control, a no-code artificial speech interface that gives users control over 10 voice dimensions ranging from “assertiveness” to “buoyancy” and “nasality.” The company also debuted an interface that “creates emotionally intelligent voice interactions” with Anthropic’s foundation model Claude that has prompted one observer to ponder the possibility that keyboards will become a thing of the past when it comes to controlling computers. Both advances expand on Hume’s work with its own foundation model, Empathic Voice Interface 2 (EVI 2), which adds emotional timbre to AI voices. Continue reading Hume AI Introduces Voice Control and Claude Interoperability

Alibaba Cloud has released the latest entry in its growing Qwen family of large language models. The new Qwen with Questions (QwQ) is an open-source competitor to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model. As with competing large reasoning models (LRMs), QwQ can correct its own mistakes, relying on extra compute cycles during inference to assess its responses, making it well suited for reasoning tasks like math and coding. Described as an “experimental research model,” this preview version of QwQ has 32-billion-parameters and a 32,000-token context, leading to speculation that a more powerful iteration is in the offing. Continue reading Qwen with Questions: Alibaba Previews New Reasoning Model

Amazon Web Services has opened AWS Data Transfer Terminals in Los Angeles and New York. These secure physical locations allow customers to bring their storage devices for fast uploads to the AWS Cloud. The enterprise service can significantly reduce data ingestion time for use cases including uploads of “large datasets from fleets of vehicles collecting data in metro areas for training machine learning models” as well as “digital audio and video files from content creators for media processing workloads” and local government organizations compiling geographical and other smart city data. Continue reading AWS Opens Physical Locations for Fast, Secure Data Uploads

German media company Bertelsmann has partnered with AI startup ElevenLabs on an effort to drive tech innovation and workflow across Bertelsmann production, marketing and distribution. Bertelsmann operations span roughly 50 countries with businesses including the publisher Penguin Random House, record label BMG and the RTL Group television unit. The objective is for ElevenLabs tools in voice and audio generation to help Bertelsmann expand productivity and reach. In August, New York-based ElevenLabs opened a European headquarters in London, expanding its international footprint for text-to-speech and other audio apps. Continue reading Bertelsmann and ElevenLabs Team Up to Foster AI Production

Couchbase, the publicly traded data platform for developers, has launched Capella AI Services with the aim of simplifying the process of developing and deploying agentic AI apps for enterprise clients. Capella AI joins the company’s flagship Couchbase Capella cloud data platform. AI offerings include model hosting, automated vectorization, unstructured data preprocessing and AI agent catalog services. Couchbase’s goal is to “allow organizations to prototype, build, test and deploy AI agents” while giving developers control over data across the development lifecycle, including secure data mitigation for large language models running outside the organization. Continue reading Couchbase Capella AI Helps Deploy Agents, Models, Services

Anticipating what one outlet calls “the likely imminent release of OpenAI’s Sora,” generative AI video competitors are compelled to step up their game. Luma AI has released a major upgrade to its Dream Machine, speeding its already quick video generation and enabling a chat function for natural language prompts, so you can talk to it as with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In addition to the new interface, Dream Machine is going mobile and adding a new foundation image model, Luma AI Photon, which “has been purpose built to advance the power and capabilities of Dream Machine,” according to the company. Continue reading Luma AI Upgrades Its Video Generator and Adds Image Model

Lightricks has released an AI model called LTX Video (LTXV) it says generates five seconds of 768 x 512 resolution video (121 frames) in just four seconds, outputting in less time than it takes to watch. The model can run on consumer-grade hardware and is open source, positioning Lightricks as a mass market challenger to firms like Adobe, OpenAI, Google and their proprietary systems. “It’s time for an open-sourced video model that the global academic and developer community can build on and help shape the future of AI video,” Lightricks co-founder and CEO Zeev Farbman said. Continue reading Lightricks LTX Video Model Impresses with Speed and Motion