D-ID has launched two new types of AI-powered avatars: Premium+ and Express. The company’s video-to-video avatar tools aim to provide personal look-alikes that can sub for their creators in uses ranging from instructional videos to business presentations, offloading on-camera duties in areas including sales, marketing and customer support. “Premium+ Avatars can generate hyper-realistic digital humans that are indistinguishable from real people and will serve as the foundation for fully interactive digital agents revolutionizing how brands communicate,” while Express Avatars can rapidly generate serviceable avatars “from just one minute of source footage.” Read more

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up what it thinks is a better way to teach robots general purpose skills. Derived from LLM techniques, the method provides robot intelligence access to an enormous amount of data at once, rather than exposing it to individual programs for specific tasks. Faster and more cost efficient, the approach has been referred to as a “brute force” approach to problem-solving, and machine learners have taken to it in lieu of individualized, task-specific “imitation learning.” Early tests show it outperforming traditional training by more than 20 percent under simulation and real-world conditions. Read more

Amazon reported major revenue and profit increases during its third quarter, beating Wall Street’s forecasts, based largely on the company’s e-commerce sales and increasing demand for its cloud services. Capital expenditure, which reached a record amount following Amazon’s recent investments in artificial intelligence, will maintain its momentum as the company plans $75 billion capex on developing generative AI services over 2024-2025. “The faster we grow demand, the faster we have to invest capital in data centers, network gear and hardware,” explained CEO Andy Jassy. “We invest in all that upfront in advance of when we can monetize it.” Read more

Revenue reached an all-time high for Apple’s most recent quarter as iPhone sales experienced an uptick due in part to consumer excitement for the arrival of Apple Intelligence, the company’s heavily advertised set of AI tools. Total sales reached $94.9 billion for the quarter, up 6 percent year-over-year and exceeding the $94.5 billion that financial analysts had predicted. The company’s iPhone business reported sales of $46.2 billion, following disappointing consecutive quarters in the first half of the year. The AI boom resulted in strong quarters for other Big Tech leaders including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft. Read more

The AI search wars are officially on, with Google giving Gemini access to its online answer engine just hours before OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search. Google is primarily targeting developers with its new feature, “Grounding with Google Search,” though the Alphabet company used the occasion to also tout its new search return template, AI Overviews. Launched last week, ChatGPT Search offers responses in real time using a conversational format. Initially, it is available only to ChatGPT Plus and Teams subscribers as well as those on the SearchGPT waitlist as part of ChatGPT’s existing interface. Read more