Competing chipmakers Intel and AMD are joining forces on an advisory group for x86 computing. Invented by Intel and launched in 1978, the x86 architecture remains one of the most widely used platforms in the world, but has already been displaced by ARM in mobile, and is now fending off a challenge from that architecture in the AI space. Also participating in the x86 advisory are Broadcom, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat, joined by tech luminaries Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, and Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. Continue reading Rivals Intel and AMD Team Up to Launch x86 Advisory Group

Just in time for the holiday season, Google Shopping is launching an AI-powered personalized feed that recommends items customers might like. The redesign is coming to desktop and mobile devices in the U.S. in the coming weeks. Suggested items are based on search and YouTube histories as well as AI inference. Shoppers will get “an AI-generated brief with top things to consider” in finding the right item, plus a curated feed of products. For now, the brief will be labeled “experimental,” and Google is encouraging feedback for the times AI doesn’t get it 100 percent right. Continue reading Google Shopping Redesigned with Gemini Feed, Infinite Scroll

Adobe has launched a public beta of its Generate Video app, part of the Firefly Video model, which users can try for free on a dedicated website. Login is required, and there is still a waitlist for unfettered access, but the Web app facilitates up to five seconds of video generation using text and image prompts. It can turn 2D pictures into 3D animation and is also capable of producing video with dynamic text.  The company has also added an AI feature called “Extend Video” to Premiere Pro to lengthen existing footage by two seconds. The news has the media lauding Adobe for beating OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo to market. Continue reading Adobe Promos AI in Premiere Pro, ‘Generate Video’ and More

OpenAI has added publishing powerhouse Hearst to its formidable list of media partners. The force behind outlets including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, Car & Driver, Popular Mechanics, San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle will allow more than 20 magazine brands and over 40 newspapers to provide “a vast array of lifestyle content” as well as local news and niche insights to ChatGPT’s professed 200 million weekly users as well as, presumably, on the prototype SearchGPT that launched in July (with a planned ChatGPT integration). Continue reading Hearst Agrees to Content Deal with OpenAI to Fuel ChatGPT

Adobe is introducing a free, web-based Content Authenticity app that lets creators “sign” their work with the aim of protecting rights and controlling attribution against unwanted AI attention. It allows creators to assign “do not train” tags to images, video or audio. Batch designation is another convenience those with voluminous output will appreciate as a time saver. Users can select the Generative AI Training and Usage Preference options in the Adobe Content Authenticity app to set preferences, whether or not the work was created using Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Continue reading Free Adobe Content Authenticity Web App Shields Against AI

Although TikTok has been carrying ads since 2018, it hasn’t really caught on as an advertising vehicle. Now the company is trying to change that by launching Smart+, an AI-powered ad buying tool that is the ByteDance company’s version of Google Performance Max, Meta Advantage+ or Pinterest Performance+. The idea is that by automating campaign management, marketers may be inclined to spend more. Smart+, which launched last week, automates everything from creative development to bidding, targeting and measurement, making ad buying easier on the short-form video app. Continue reading TikTok Intros AI-Driven Ad Campaign Automation with Smart+

Having demonstrated how advertisements in its AI Overviews would work back in May at its Google Marketing Live event, the search giant is now adding the feature for U.S. mobile users and plans to include Google Lens shopping ads “above and alongside visual search results by the end of the year.” “The ways people ask questions today have expanded beyond the search box,” notes Google, explaining the move as a response to that evolution, as artificial intelligence technology has helped consumers use their voice and cameras “to explore the world around them.” Continue reading Google Serving Ads in AI Overviews and Lens Search Results

Beginning October 15, YouTube Shorts will extend its maximum length to 3 minutes. The move competitively positions the Google unit against TikTok, which allows for videos of up to 10 minutes when recording, or an hour when uploading. Regular YouTube accommodates videos of up to 12 hours for verified accounts and 15 minutes for unverified accounts, whether live or uploaded. But in terms of marketing focus, the current attention is on short-form video. YouTube is also updating the Shorts player, adding templates, and introducing a Shorts trends page for mobile. Continue reading YouTube Updates Shorts Player, Extends Length to 3 Minutes

Nvidia has unveiled the NVLM 1.0 family of multimodal LLMs, a powerful open-source AI that the company says performs comparably to proprietary systems from OpenAI and Google. Led by NVLM-D-72B, with 72 billion parameters, Nvidia’s new entry in the AI race achieved what the company describes as “state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models.” Nvidia has made the model weights publicly available and says it will also be releasing the training code, a break from the closed approach of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Continue reading Nvidia Releases Open-Source Frontier-Class Multimodal LLMs

Accenture is forming an internal Nvidia Business Group staffed with 30,000 global employees trained to help clients “reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption with AI agents,” the consulting firm announced. Accenture will also use its AI Refinery platform to help companies customize AI models and agents using the full Nvidia AI stack including AI Foundry, AI Enterprise and Omniverse. “With generative AI demand driving $3 billion in Accenture bookings in its recently closed fiscal year, the new group will help clients lay the foundation for agentic AI functionality,” Accenture said. Continue reading Accenture Has Plans for Scaling Enterprise AI with Nvidia Unit

Reuters and CNN are among the global news services that will be charging those who want access to their digital content beyond a free quota. Reuters plans to add $1 per week pricing in the U.S., Canada and parts of Europe in the weeks ahead, while CNN is beginning to ask visitors for $4 a month or $30 per year. Vox Media’s popular tech publication The Verge is also said to be considering subscription fees. The outlets are pursuing digital monetization strategies as ad-supported models are increasingly challenging for those who aren’t Google, Meta or Amazon. Continue reading CNN, Reuters Roll Out Consumer Subscriptions and Paywalls

Snap Inc. is leveraging its relationship with Google Cloud to use Gemini for powering generative AI experiences within Snapchat’s My AI chatbot. The multimodal capabilities of Gemini on Vertex AI will greatly increase the My AI chatbot’s ability to understand and operate across different types of information such as text, audio, image, video and code. Snapchatters can use My AI to take advantage of Google Lens-like features, including asking the chatbot “to translate a photo of a street sign while traveling abroad, or take a video of different snack offerings to ask which one is the healthiest option.” Continue reading Snapchat: My AI Goes Multimodal with Google Cloud, Gemini

TikTok is updating its Live subscription offering, renaming the monetization offering simply “Subscription,” opening it up to eligible non-Live creators in regions including the U.S., Japan, Brazil, France, the UK and Germany. Like the third-party subscription platform Patreon, TikTok’s Subscription allows fans to pay creators for exclusive content and other perks. In participating regions, creators can offer fans monthly subscriptions at three price tiers, each with its own parameters and perks. TikTok launched Live subscriptions in 2022 and announced in March that it would be revamping the feature to allow more users to monetize. Continue reading New TikTok Live Subscriptions Help More Creators Monetize

The Allen Institute for AI (also known as Ai2, founded by Paul Allen and led by Ali Farhadi) has launched Molmo, a family of four open-source multimodal models. While advanced models “can perceive the world and communicate with us, Molmo goes beyond that to enable one to act in their worlds, unlocking a whole new generation of capabilities, everything from sophisticated web agents to robotics,” according to Ai2. On some third-party benchmark tests, Molmo’s 72 billion parameter model outperforms other open AI offerings and “performs favorably” against proprietary rivals like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 1.5 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Ai2 says. Continue reading Allen Institute Announces Vision-Optimized Molmo AI Models

Google has updated its AI assistant, NotebookLM, allowing the AI note-taking and research tool to find summaries of audio files and YouTube videos. First released at the Google I/O developer conference in 2023, NotebookLM even creates sharable AI-generated audio discussions and podcasts. It allows users to upload file formats including PDFs, Google Docs, Google Slides and websites. The items, including text, can be stored in shareable “notebooks,” organizing material in a central location, and users can ask Google’s Gemini AI questions about the notebook material. Initially embraced by students and educators, it has become equally popular among business users. Continue reading Google Unveils New Updates to Its AI-Powered NotebookLM