Netflix has selected Dallas, Texas and Pennsylvania’s King of Prussia as the first two cities for its massive location-based entertainment venues, set to open in 2025. Specifying “they’re not exactly theme parks,” the Netflix House destinations will feature shopping, eateries and “regularly updated” experiential activities that tie-in with major franchises like “Bridgerton,” “Stranger Things” and “Squid Game.” Netflix CMO Marian Lee says the company has already launched more than 50 experiences in 25 cities, with Netflix House representing “the next generation” venue for the streaming giant. Read more

Runway ML has introduced a new foundation model, Gen-3 Alpha, which the company says can generate high-quality, realistic scenes of up to 10 seconds long from text prompts, still images or a video sample. Offering a variety of camera movements, Gen-3 Alpha will initially roll out to Runway’s paid subscribers, but the company plans to add a free version in the future. Runway says Gen-3 Alpha is the first of a new series of models trained on the company’s new large-scale multimodal infrastructure, which offers improvements “in fidelity, consistency, and motion over Gen-2,” released last year. Read more

Google DeepMind has unveiled new research on AI tech it calls V2A (“video-to-audio”) that can generate soundtracks for videos. The initiative complements the wave of AI video generators from companies ranging from biggies like OpenAI and Alibaba to startups such as Luma and Runway, all of which require a separate app to add sound. V2A technology “makes synchronized audiovisual generation possible” by combining video pixels with natural language text prompts “to generate rich soundscapes for the on-screen action,” DeepMind writes, explaining that it can “create shots with a dramatic score, realistic sound effects or dialogue.” Read more

United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has renewed his push for Congress to enact social media warning label advising of potential mental health damage to adolescents. Murthy also called on tech companies to be more transparent with internal data on the impact of their products on American youth, requesting independent safety audits and restrictions on features that may be addictive, including autoplay, push notifications and infinite scroll, which he suggests “prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use.” His federal campaign joins a groundswell of local laws restricting minors’ access to social media. Read more

Nvidia is expanding its substantive influence in the AI sphere with Nemotron-4 340B, a family of open models designed to generate synthetic LLM training data for commercial applications across numerous fields. Through what Nvidia is calling a “uniquely permissive” free open model license, Nemotron-4 340B provides a scalable way for developers to build LLMs. Synthetic data is artificially generated data designed to mimic the characteristics and structure of data found in the real world. The offering is being called “groundbreaking” and an important step toward the democratization of artificial intelligence. Read more