Propelled by increasing demand for artificial intelligence services, Microsoft cloud solutions, which includes the Azure platform, was the star of the quarter, bringing in $38.9 billion for 22 percent growth year-over-year. Revenue was $65.6 billion, up 16 percent, while profit increased by 11 percent, to $24.7 billion. While Microsoft financials don’t break out AI — now embedded across numerous products — Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella says AI “is on track to surpass an annual revenue run rate of $10 billion” by December 31, “making it the fastest business in our history to reach this milestone.” Continue reading AI Surges: Microsoft Quarterly Revenue Climbs to $65.6 Billion

Marking its first news deal in years, Meta Platforms entered into an agreement with Reuters to use its content to answer user questions posed to its Meta AI chatbot. The arrangement comes as Meta has been minimizing news content on its services in response to publisher demands for revenue sharing and regulatory criticism over misinformation. Terms of the partnership were not disclosed, nor were details provided as to whether Meta plans to use Reuters content for model training. Meta AI is available across its Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Messenger services. Continue reading Meta, Reuters Sign Multi-Year AI Content Licensing Agreement

Nvidia has debuted a new AI model, Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct, that it claims is outperforming competitors GPT-4o from OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The impressive showing has prompted speculation of an AI shakeup and a significant shift in Nividia’s AI strategy, which has thus far been focused primarily on chipmaking. The model was quietly released on Hugging Face, and Nvidia says as of October 1 it ranked first on three top automatic alignment benchmarks, “edging out strong frontier models” and vaulting Nvidia to the forefront of the LLM field in areas like comprehension, context and generation. Continue reading Nvidia’s Impressive AI Model Could Compete with Top Brands

A new LLM framework evaluates how well generative AI models are meeting the challenge of compliance with the legal parameters of the European Union’s AI Act. The free and open-source software is the product of a collaboration between ETH Zurich; Bulgaria’s Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT); and Swiss startup LatticeFlow AI. It is being billed as “the first evaluation framework of the EU AI Act for Generative AI models.” Already, it has found that some of the top AI foundation models are falling short of European regulatory goals in areas including cybersecurity resilience and discriminatory output. Continue reading ‘EU AI Act Checker’ Holds Big AI Accountable for Compliance

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

Meta is rolling out new generative AI advertising tools for video creation on Facebook and Instagram. The expansion to the Advantage+ creative ad suite will become widely available to advertisers in early 2025. The announcement, made at Advertising Week in New York last week, was positioned as a way for marketers to improve campaign performance on Meta’s social platforms. The new tools will allow brands to convert static images into video ads. The company also announced a new full screen video tab for Facebook that feeds short-form Reels with long-form and live-stream content. Continue reading Meta Announces New GenAI Video Tools at Advertising Week

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

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+

Meta Platforms has unveiled Movie Gen, a new family of AI models that generates video and audio content. Coming to Instagram next year, Movie Gen also allows a high degree of editing and effects customization using text prompts. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated its abilities last week in an example shared on his Instagram account, where he sends a leg press machine at the gym through transformations as a steam punk machine and one made of molten gold. The models have been trained on a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets. Continue reading Meta’s Movie Gen Model is a Powerful Content Creation Tool

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

AI startup Liquid, founded by alums of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has released its first models. Called Liquid Foundation Models, or LFMs, the multimodal family approaches “intelligence” differently than the pre-trained transformer models that dominate the field. Instead, the LFMs take a path of “first principles,” which MIT describes as “the same way engineers build engines, cars, and airplanes,” explaining that the models are large neural networks with computational units “steeped in theories of dynamic systems, signal processing and numeric linear algebra.” Continue reading MIT Spinoff Liquid Eschews GPTs for Its Fluid Approach to AI

The European Commission has released a list of more than 100 companies that have become signatories to the EU’s AI Pact. While Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are among them, Apple and Meta are not. The voluntary AI Pact is aimed at eliciting policies on AI deployment during the period before the legally binding AI Act takes full effect. The EU AI Pact focuses on transparency in three core areas: internal AI governance, high-risk AI systems mapping and promoting AI literacy and awareness among staff to support ethical development. It is aimed at “relevant stakeholders,” across industry, civil society and academia. Continue reading Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI Join the EU’s AI Pact

Meta’s Llama 3.2 release includes two new multimodal LLMs, one with 11 billion parameters and one with 90 billion — considered small- and medium-sized — and two lightweight, text-only models (1B and 3B) that fit onto edge and mobile devices. Included are pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions. In addition to text, the multimodal models can interpret images, supporting apps that require visual understanding. Meta says the models are free and open source. Alongside them, the company is releasing “the first official Llama Stack distributions,” enabling “turnkey deployment” with integrated safety. Continue reading Meta Unveils New Open-Source Multimodal Model Llama 3.2

Meta has secured rights to the voices of actors Judi Dench, Kristen Bell, John Cena and others for its Meta AI chatbot, a ChatGPT-like digital assistant that is part of the plan for conversational AI as part of the multimodal Llama 3.2. Also revealed at Meta Connect this week was Orion, “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen,” queued up to become Meta’s “first consumer full holographic AR glasses,” though they won’t be available anytime soon. A low-priced Quest 3 mixed reality headset, the $299 Quest 3S, will be arriving in time for the holidays, however. Continue reading Meta Reveals Orion Concept Glasses, Celeb Voices, Quest 3S

Microsoft has released a suite of “Trustworthy AI” features that address concerns about AI security and reliability. The four new capabilities include Correction, a content detection upgrade in Microsoft Azure that “helps fix hallucination issues in real time before users see them.” Embedded Content Safety allows customers to embed Azure AI Content Safety on devices where cloud connectivity is intermittent or unavailable, while two new filters flag AI output of protected material. Additionally, a transparency safeguard providing the company’s AI assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot, with specific “web search query citations” is coming soon. Continue reading New Microsoft Safety Tools Fix AI Flubs, Detect Proprietary IP