Google has formally announced the launch of its AI Futures Fund to identify and invest in artificial intelligence startups. Participating startups will get early access to Google DeepMind’s latest models — Gemini, Imagen and Veo, “hands-on support from Google researchers” and Google Cloud credits. The AI Futures Fund has been ramping up these past several months, working with startups including Fal, Replit and Synthesia, among others. In identifying up-and-coming AI startups, Google is competing against Amazon and Microsoft who have aggressively pursued nascent firms, most notably Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Continue reading Google Launches AI Futures Fund to Finance, Foster Startups

Online graphic design platform Freepik, has unveiled F Lite, a text-to-image generator that the company says was trained only on licensed content, making it safe for commercial use. The 10 billion-parameter F Lite — currently available in two openly-licensed versions — was developed in partnership with Fal.ai, a San Francisco-based AI startup that uses a proprietary inference engine and APIs to enable fast training, inference, and scaling of image, video, audio, and multimodal AI models. Freepik Head of AI Iván de Prado describes F Lite as “a significant milestone in open, responsible AI.” Continue reading Freepik Introduces a Responsibly Trained AI Image Generator