Some of the nation’s biggest streaming services have banded together to form a trade group, the Streaming Innovation Alliance, that will lobby at federal and state levels for policies that support their goals. Early members include Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, The Walt Disney Company, TelevisaUnivision, ViX, BET+ and the MPA. Signing on as advisors are Washington D.C. veterans Fred Upton, who headed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Mignon Clyburn, once acting chair of the FCC. The creation of the trade group comes as new online regulations loom. Continue reading Streaming Giants Form Trade Group as New Regulations Loom

Spotify is using AI to drive podcast language translation in what sounds like the podcaster’s own voice, which has obvious implications for film and television dubbing. Working with podcast notables including Dax Shepard, Monica Padman and Bill Simmons, Spotify used AI to mimic their voices in Spanish, French and German for several episodes. The proprietary Spotify technology uses OpenAI’s new text-to-speech voice-generation technology as well as its open-source Whisper speech recognition system, which transcribes spoken words into text. The result, Spotify says, is “more authentic” and “more personal and natural” than traditional dubbing. Continue reading Spotify Uses AI to Copy Host Voices for Podcast Translations

Meta Platforms will offer its “Horizon Worlds” virtual reality experience to the world at large, making it available in 2D via mobile and browsers on the Web, starting with early access. Initially, a “small number of people” will be able to  tap into the FPS game “Super Rumble” via the Meta Quest app on Android, with iOS availability over the next few weeks and “more experiences to come.” Early access can also be requested by those who prefer to use computer browsers at horizon.meta.com. “The metaverse should be available to everyone — no matter what device they’re on,” Meta suggests. Continue reading Meta’s ‘Horizon Worlds’ Offers Metaverse on Mobile, the Web

California lawmakers have put data brokers on notice. A bill known as the Delete Act would allow consumers to require all such information peddlers to delete their personal information with a single request. The bill defines “data brokers” as any number of businesses that collect and sell people’s personal information, including residential address, marital status and purchases. Both houses last week passed the proposed legislation — Senate Bill 362 — and it now heads to Governor Newsom’s desk. If he signs it, the new law will go into effect in January 2026. Continue reading California Plans to Protect Consumer Privacy with Delete Act

Stability AI is launching Stable Audio, a music generation AI tool that uses latent diffusion to deliver what the company says is high-quality 44.1 kHz music for commercial use. Stable Audio uses a web-based interface to generate music from text prompts and duration. Because its latent diffusion model architecture has been conditioned on text metadata as well as audio file duration and start time, it defeats a problem common to diffusion for generative audio — producing cohesive musical segments as opposed to arbitrary sections of a song that start or end in the middle of a phrase. Continue reading Stability AI Develops ‘Stable Audio’ Generative Text-to-Music

The first U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum was a lively event, with xAI’s Elon Musk calling for a federal department of artificial intelligence while Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg emphasized a need for transparency and Google’s Sundar Pichai stressed AI’s potential to improve the human condition with regard to things like health and energy. The three-hour meeting was organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) who said the crash course would address both how AI “enriches our world and opens the door to new prosperity” and how society can “minimize the very real risks.” Continue reading Tech Titans Convene in Washington for First AI Insight Forum

Google is establishing a $20 million fund to promote responsible AI through its charitable arm, Google.org. The investment will provide grants to academics and think tanks as part of the company’s new Digital Futures Project, announced on the eve of today’s private meeting between Congress and AI-focused tech giants. “AI has the potential to make our lives easier and address some of society’s most complex challenges — like preventing disease, making cities work better and predicting natural disasters. But it also raises questions about fairness, bias, misinformation, security and the future of work,” Google said. Continue reading Google Digital Futures Project Pumps $20M into Responsible AI

Roblox is adding an expressive, avatar-based video chat called Roblox Connect to its virtual world in an effort to keep its young user base engaged as it grows up while also potentially expanding its audience. “We’re essentially packaging a Hollywood-style motion capture studio into something that runs on a mobile phone or laptop — without the need for equipment or motion-tracking dots,” Roblox explains, pointing out that the device’s on-board camera is all that’s needed to capture facial motion and convey it in real time. Also, Roblox is is coming to PS4 and PS5 next month, while the company will allow game creators to sell 3D virtual goods. Continue reading Roblox Adds Facial-Tracking Vid Chat, Expands to PlayStation

Google is making many of its most powerful cloud computing tools available commercially for the first time, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian shared at the company’s Cloud Next ’23 conference in San Francisco. In a bid to catch up with top AI rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, the Google Distributed Cloud will open for general business including at the edge with Vertex AI and PaLM 2. Google Cloud will serve up AI from Anthropic, in which it is an investor, as well as from Meta Platforms. In addition, an AI-infused Gmail productivity suite is on the way. Continue reading Google Takes on the Competition with Cloud and AI Services

Hugging Face has collected $235 million in an investment round that includes contributions from Amazon, IBM, Google, Nvidia, Salesforce, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm. The New York-based startup creates and distributes open-source tools for artificial intelligence development, carving an AI-centric niche similar to the more general programming approach taken by the Microsoft-owned GitHub. The incoming cash infusion — earmarked for talent recruitment — gives Hugging Face a lofty $4.5 billion valuation that experts say indicates momentum for open source in what has to date been a highly competitive AI sector. Continue reading Big Tech Firms Propel Hugging Face to $4.5 Billion Valuation

The Flamera, a prototype augmented reality headset from Meta Platforms, won the coveted Best in Show award at Siggraph 2023 earlier this month, drawing attention for its buggy “fly eyes” appearance as well as lens design that takes an unconventional approach to solving AR’s “passthrough” challenge. Since AR glasses are meant to work IRL, developers typically use external cameras to let the real world pass through. Meta abandons existing solutions for a novel approach it calls “lightfield passthrough” that pairs image sensors with apertures to control the incoming light. Continue reading Meta Flamera Prototype Takes on AR Passthrough Challenge

Nvidia announced Q2 revenue of $13.51 billion, a 101 percent year-over-year increase that sets a new company record. The data center division — which accounts for the majority of AI chip sales — also established a new benchmark: $10.32 billion in Q2, a 171 percent leap over the prior fiscal Q2. Nvidia projects that revenue for the current quarter will hit $16 billion — about $3.5 billion above analysts’ expectations. Nvidia chips power OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT and other generative AI and cloud computing apps from companies including Amazon, Google, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and VMWare. Continue reading Demand for AI Chips Drives Nvidia to Revenue Record in Q2

Meta Platforms is releasing SeamlessM4T, the world’s “first all-in-one multilingual multimodal AI translation and transcription model,” according to the company. SeamlessM4T can perform speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and text-to-text translations for up to 100 languages, depending on the task. “Our single model provides on-demand translations that enable people who speak different languages to communicate more effectively,” Meta claims, adding that SeamlessM4T “implicitly recognizes the source languages without the need for a separate language identification model.” Continue reading Meta’s Multimodal AI Model Translates Nearly 100 Languages

Newsrooms can potentially benefit greatly from AI language models, but at this early stage they’ve begun laying down boundaries to ensure that rather than having their data coopted to build artificial intelligence by third parties they’ll survive long enough to create models of their own, or license proprietary IP. As industries await regulations from the federal government, The New York Times has proactively updated its terms of service to prohibit data-scraping of its content for machine learning. The move follows a Google policy refresh that expressly states it uses search data to train AI. Continue reading The New York Times Looks to Protect IP Content in Era of AI

Meta Platforms is releasing AudioCraft, a generative AI framework that creates “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from text prompts. AudioCraft consists of three models: MusicGen, AudioGen and EnCodec, all of which Meta announced it is open-sourcing. Released in June, MusicGen was trained on Meta-owned and licensed music, and generates music from text prompts, while AudioGen, which was trained on public domain samples, generates sound effects (like honking horns and barking dogs) from text prompts. The EnCodec decoder allows “higher quality music generation with fewer artifacts,” according to Meta. Continue reading Meta’s AudioCraft Turns Words into Music with Generative AI