At its annual State of Unreal event, Epic Games demonstrated the formidable capabilities of its creator tools, showcasing open-world updates in Unreal Engine 5.6 and moving the MetaHuman photo-real 3D character generator out of early access and into general availability — its character and animation output now able to be used in competing game engines Unity and Godot and in software packages including Maya, Houdini and Blender. Game studio CD Projekt Red, creator of the popular “The Witcher” series, joined Epic in demonstrating how Unreal 5.6 lets teams build large-scale open worlds that run smoothly on current-generation phones and PCs. Read more

Microsoft’s Bing mobile search app for Android and iOS is adding a free Bing Video Creator feature powered by OpenAI’s Sora. Text-to-video model Sora was previously available only by subscription through ChatGPT Plus for $20 per month or the $200 monthly ChatGPT Pro. The integration will enable creation of five-second vertical video clips on mobile, with horizontal capability coming soon. Although a major investor in OpenAI, Microsoft has made headway with its own signature AI offerings, including Bing Image Creator and the Copilot AI assistant. The Bing Mobile app is available worldwide via the App Store for iOS and the Play Store for Android. Read more

ByteDance-owned TikTok is officially launching its TikTok for Artists music insights tool two months after reports surfaced that the service was testing the resource in select countries. Billed as an “all-in-one” analytics platform, the company says TikTok for Artists provides detailed data about the performance of an artist’s music and posts on TikTok, as well as insights into how the community is engaging with the performer’s content. In addition to providing actionable marketing support, the tool is designed to help artists boost fan engagement and inform content creation. TikTok is also launching a new Pre-Release tool designed to help artists promote upcoming material. Read more

Hollywood heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg has thrown his support behind an AI advertising startup called Creatify, leading its Series A round with $1.5 million via WndrCo. Katzenberg is also taking a board seat at the two-year-old firm, which claims more than 1.5 million global users and 10,000 teams using its tech to create social media-centric video ads, leveraging AI avatars and real-time testing. Marketing teams can use its tools to “spin up high-quality video creative in minutes (not weeks),” the company claims, mentioning a client that uses Creatify to generate 1,000-plus ads per month. Read more

Google has quietly released the AI Edge Gallery app, which lets users download models and run them locally without Internet connectivity. Available for Android and eventually on iOS, the experimental app is hosted on GitHub where it can be downloaded for free. Users can find compatible models capable of running on-device, like Google’s Gemma 3n, and run them offline to do things like generate images, get answers to questions, and write and edit code using the processor of supported smartphones. While locally running models aren’t as powerful as their cloud counterparts, they offer more privacy and can sometimes be faster. Read more