Adobe has launched a public beta of its Generate Video app, part of the Firefly Video model, which users can try for free on a dedicated website. Login is required, and there is still a waitlist for unfettered access, but the Web app facilitates up to five seconds of video generation using text and image prompts. It can turn 2D pictures into 3D animation and is also capable of producing video with dynamic text.  The company has also added an AI feature called “Extend Video” to Premiere Pro to lengthen existing footage by two seconds. The news has the media lauding Adobe for beating OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo to market. Read more

OpenAI has announced Swarm, an experimental framework that coordinates networks of AI agents, and true to its name the news has kicked over a hornet’s nest of contentious debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence and the future of enterprise automation. OpenAI emphasizes that Swarm is not an official product and says though it has shared the code publicly it has no intention of maintaining it. “Think of it more like a cookbook,” OpenAI engineer Shyamal Anadkat said in a social media post, calling it “code for building simple agents.” Read more

Acting in advance of a California law that goes into effect on January 1, cloud gaming platform Steam has begun posting a notice that its customers are purchasing a license, not a product. The language that appears in the Steam shopping cart now includes the advisory that “purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam.” Signed into law last month, California’s AB 2426 is categorized a consumer protection law against false advertising for digital goods. Specifically, it requires online sellers provide a “conspicuous” advisory that licenses are limited in duration and can be revoked. Read more

Apple TV+ will be available as a $9.99 monthly add-on with Amazon Prime Video in the U.S., allowing users to use the service in one app with a single bill, the companies announced. The deal has the mutual upside of adding the cachet of award-winning Apple originals like “The Morning Show” and “Ted Lasso” to Amazon Prime, while getting Apple TV+ in front of Prime’s more than 100 million U.S. households. Apple doesn’t release specific subscriber numbers for Apple TV+, which has reportedly accrued about 25 million paid global subscribers since its 2019 launch. Read more

Meta is rolling out new generative AI advertising tools for video creation on Facebook and Instagram. The expansion to the Advantage+ creative ad suite will become widely available to advertisers in early 2025. The announcement, made at Advertising Week in New York last week, was positioned as a way for marketers to improve campaign performance on Meta’s social platforms. The new tools will allow brands to convert static images into video ads. The company also announced a new full screen video tab for Facebook that feeds short-form Reels with long-form and live-stream content. Read more