Amazon announced the public preview launch of its GenAI-powered App Studio service. The platform — which is geared toward professionals who lack extensive software development skills — builds full-featured, enterprise-level apps using natural language prompts. Users simply describe what they would like the app to accomplish and the data sources available to it and App Studio will produce in minutes what the company claims, “could have taken a professional developer days to build from scratch.” The announcement was made during this week’s AWS Summit in New York City. Continue reading AWS Releases GenAI-Powered App Studio in Public Preview

DreamFlare has emerged from stealth to launch what is being billed as the first streaming platform for GenAI video. In addition to the consumer-facing subscription platform, the business model includes a sort of AI studio where creators can tap the expertise of professional storytellers to produce AI video using third-party tools like Runway, Sora and Midjourney. The company will feature two types of content: Flips, which are animated narratives with audio that viewers can also examine frame-by-frame, as with comic books, and Spins, described as “short movies” featuring branched narratives that provide interactive plot choices. Continue reading DreamFlare Launches AI Video Studio and Streaming Service

Generative video creation and editing platform Captions has raised $60 million in Series C funding. Founded in 2021 by former Microsoft engineer Gaurav Misra and Goldman Sachs alum Dwight Churchill, the company’s technologies — Lipdub, AI Edit and the 3D avatar app AI Creator — have amassed more than 10 million downloads for mobile, the firm says. The C round brings its total raise to $100 million for a stated market valuation of $500 million. With the new funding, Captions plans to expand its presence in New York City, which is “emerging as the epicenter for AI research,” according to Misra. Continue reading Captions: Generative Video Startup Raises $60 Million in NYC

Federal regulators have taken the unprecedented step of banning the NGL messaging platform from providing service to users under 18. The action is part of a legal settlement between NGL Labs, the Federal Trade Commission and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. NGL, whose niche is “anonymous” communication and features the tagline “Ask me anything,” has also agreed to pay $5 million in fines. An FTC investigation found that in addition to fraudulent business claims about divulging the identities of message senders for a fee, NGL also falsely claimed it used artificial intelligence to filter out cyberbullying and harmful messages. Continue reading Popular Messaging App Banned from Servicing Young Users

Samsung announced eight new devices in Paris this morning during its latest Galaxy Unpacked event. The products — all featuring Galaxy AI — include new Samsung folding smartphones, the Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Flip6; the Galaxy Watch7 smartwatch series in two sizes and a new Galaxy Watch Ultra; the Galaxy Buds3 and Galaxy Buds3 Pro wireless earbuds; and a $400 health-tracking smart ring called Galaxy Ring, marking a new product category for the company. The IP68 and 10 ATM water-resistant Galaxy Ring is a lightweight titanium ring that will be available later this year in nine size options in black, silver and gold finishes. Continue reading Samsung Reveals New Products at Galaxy Unpacked Event

Meta Platforms has introduced an AI model it says can generate 3D images from text prompts in under one minute. The new model, called 3D Gen, is billed as a “state-of-the-art, fast pipeline” for turning text input into high-resolution 3D images quickly. The app also adds textures to AI output or existing images through text prompts, and “supports physically-based rendering (PBR), necessary for 3D asset relighting in real-world applications,” Meta explains, adding that in internal tests, 3D Gen outperforms industry baselines on “prompt fidelity and visual quality” and for speed. Continue reading Meta’s 3D Gen Bridges Gap from AI to Production Workflow

YouTube has released an eraser tool update that makes it easy to remove copyrighted music from videos without disturbing the remaining audio, like dialogue and sound effects. The Erase Song update uses an AI algorithm to detect and remove the offending material, making it more accurate than what had previously been available, as well as easier. Creators whose material has Content ID claims can now excise the objectionable material without having to manually edit and upload a new video, thereby avoiding potential restrictions on where the video is viewable or whether it can be monetized. Continue reading YouTube AI Song Eraser Easily Removes Copyright Material

Cloudflare has a new tool that can block AI from scraping a website’s content for model training. The no-code feature is available even to customers on the free tier. “Declare your ‘AIndependence’” by blocking AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click, the San Francisco-based company urged last week, simultaneously releasing a chart of frequent crawlers by “request volume” on websites using Cloudflare. The ByteDance-owned Bytespider was number one, presumably gathering training data for its large language models “including those that support its ChatGPT rival, Doubao,” Cloudflare says. Amazonbot, ClaudeBot and GPTBot rounded out the top four. Continue reading Cloudflare Blocking Web Bots from Scraping AI Training Data

Meta’s popular instant messaging service WhatsApp is reportedly beta testing a feature that would allow the already integrated Meta AI chatbot to edit and reply to images. The capability was spotted in the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.24.14.20, with AI powered by Llama 3, the company’s newest large language model released in April. The beta version works via a camera button added to the text box for Meta AI chat in WhatsApp. When pressed, the button triggers a pop-up that indicates Meta AI can analyze and edit photos, though it’s currently unclear to what extent. Continue reading Meta AI Image Analysis and Editing Beta Tested for WhatsApp

San Francisco-based optics company Solos has debuted its latest smart glasses, the Solos AirGo Vision, which offer a camera that takes photos and provides computer vision, and integrates OpenAI’s GPT-4o. The AirGo Vision can provide real-time information using visual input, recognizing people, objects and places, and providing information such as directions or instructions. Both the camera and AI functionality are hands-free, making the AirGo Vision “especially convenient for visual progress and next steps on activities like cooking, home improvement projects, education and studies, and even shopping,” the company explains. Continue reading Solos AirGo Vision Smart Glasses Tout a Camera and GTP-4o

New York-based AI startup Runway has made its latest frontier model — which creates realistic AI videos from text, image or video prompts — generally available to users willing to upgrade to a paid plan starting at $12 per month for each editor. Introduced several weeks go, Gen-3 Alpha reportedly offers significant improvements over Gen-1 and Gen-2 in areas such as speed, motion, fidelity and consistency. Runway explains it worked with a “team of research scientists, engineers and artists” to develop the upgrades but did not specify where it collected its training data. As the AI video field ramps up, current rivals include Stability AI, OpenAI, Pika and Luma Labs. Continue reading Runway Making Gen-3 Alpha AI Video Model Available to All

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company will test a feature to create AI characters through the AI Studio on Instagram that can engage with fans and respond to messages. “Rolling out an early test in the U.S. of our AI Studio so you might start seeing AIs from your favorite creators and interest-based AIs in the coming weeks on Instagram,” he wrote. “These will primarily show up in messaging for now, and will be clearly labeled as AI.” Zuckerberg noted the beta test will help the company improve AI characters and will be made “available to more people soon.” Meta launched AI Studio last year to help businesses build custom chatbots. Continue reading Meta Testing AI Chatbots for Instagram Created by Its Users

Spotify recently introduced a new $10.99 per month Basic streaming plan in the U.S., which includes “the music streaming benefits of your Premium plan without the monthly audiobook listening time.” As part of its move to provide “more choice for U.S. subscribers,” Spotify now offers subscriptions including an $11.99 per month Premium Individual plan, $16.99 Premium Duo option, $19.99 Premium Family (for up to 6 members of one household), and Audiobooks Access for $9.99 per month. Additionally, in an effort to boost video content the company is allowing podcasters, even those not officially hosted by Spotify, to upload video podcasts. Continue reading Spotify Offers Basic Streaming Plan, New Podcaster Feature

Apple has released a public demo of the 4M AI model it developed in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). The technology debuts seven months after the model was first open-sourced, allowing informed observers the opportunity to interact with it and assess its capabilities. Apple says 4M was built by applying masked modeling to a single unified Transformer encoder-decoder “across a wide range of input/output modalities — including text, images, geometric and semantic modalities, as well as neural network feature maps.” Continue reading Apple Launches Public Demo of Its Multimodal 4M AI Model

YouTube is rewarding paid subscribers with early access to test features. Available now to those on the Premium tier are smart downloads and picture-in-picture for YouTube Shorts. Smart downloads populate automatically for convenient offline viewing, while PiP is touted as a convenience for multitaskers. The platform is also rolling out its “Jump Ahead” navigational feature to all Premium subs, starting with Android and coming to iOS “in the next few weeks,” the streamer explains. Powered by “a combination of AI and viewership data,” Jump Ahead lets users double-tap to skip ahead through a video. Continue reading YouTube Premium Offering Smart Downloads, PiP for Shorts