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Tidal, AllTrack Team to Provide Songwriter Royalty Snapshots

Tidal — the music streaming service owned by Jack Dorsey’s Block payment processing company — is launching a royalty-tracking toolkit for songwriters. The new feature lets authors organize disparate publisher information in one place. “Songwriters juggle a mix of collection societies, publishing platforms, royalty management services, streaming services, and single-purpose apps to manage their royalties, careers, and catalog,” explains the company, which claims to be the first platform to serve songwriters “throughout the full writing career cycle.” Tidal has partnered with performing rights organization AllTrack to handle the backend. Read more

Sony and Startale Labs Launch Soneium Blockchain for Web3

Last year Sony entered into a joint venture with Singapore-based startup Startale Labs. Now the first fruits of that collaboration have come to light, with the launch of Soneium, an Ethereum layer 2 blockchain, from Startale and Sony Block Solutions Labs. The platform is first being made available to developers, with plans for an eventual public launch, the goal being “to create new services by leveraging the various businesses and IP within the Sony Group so that Soneium becomes an infrastructure that everyone can use on a daily basis,” according to Sony. Read more

OpenAI Pushes GPT-4o Customization with Free Token Offer

OpenAI announced its newest model, GPT-4o, can now be customized. The company said that the ability to fine-tune the multimodal GPT-4o has been “one of the most requested features from developers.” Customization can move the model toward more specific structure and tone of responses or allow it to follow specific instruction sets geared toward individual use cases. Developers can now implement custom datasets, aiming for better performance at a lower cost. The ChatGPT maker is rolling out the welcome mat by offering 1 million training tokens per day “for free for every organization” through September 23. Read more

Dropbox Acquires Productivity and Scheduling App Reclaim.ai

Dropbox has purchased Reclaim.ai, a scheduling tool that uses artificial intelligence to boost productivity, popular with Google Calendar users. The privately held Reclaim announced the deal in a blog post that claims a global user base of over 43,000 companies and more than 320,000 people. Launched in 2019, Reclaim investors include Index Ventures and Calendly contributing to cash raise of more than $9.5 million to date. File-sharing app Drobox has been publicly traded since 2018 and has a current market cap of $7.92 billion. Financial terms of the deal have yet to be disclosed. Read more

OSI Aims for Industry Standard by Defining ‘Open Source AI’

Creating a universal definition of “open source AI” has generated a fair amount of debate and confusion, with many outfits using elastic parameters in order to achieve a fit. Now the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — “the authority that defines Open Source” — has issued what it hopes will become the baseline definition. That definition, which includes the ability to “use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission,” excludes a lot of AI platforms that currently describe themselves as “open,” many freely available only for non-commercial use. OSI’s remaining three parameters involve the ability to inspect the system and modify and share it. Read more

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