A little over a year since the beta release of its conversational AI search and discovery tool, Cineverse is making cineSearch commercially available to business customers. The Los Angeles startup says its AI-powered framework “solves” the content-hunt quandary for digital networks and streaming services, finding programming across all streaming platforms. Cineverse is making cineSearch available for commercial licensing to OEMs and streaming platforms via the company’s own sales team and through Google Cloud Marketplace. CineSearch was developed using Google’s AI ecosystem — specifically Vertex AI platform and the Gemini 2.0 Pro model. Continue reading CineSearch Is a New AI Discovery Tool for Streaming Content

Meta Platforms has restructured its artificial intelligence operations, creating two separate units — an AI Products team headed by Connor Hayes and the AGI Foundations unit jointly run by Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel. The move comes as Meta is delayed getting its latest foundation model Llama 4 Behemoth to market and has also seen several key AI engineers depart. The idea is that dividing a single large organization into two smaller divisions will speed product development and add flexibility as Meta faces tough competition from top companies such as Google and OpenAI, as well as social companies X and TikTok. Continue reading Meta Restructures AI Ops in Wake of Llama 4 Behemoth Delay

Google is in a filmmaking frame of mind. The search giant introduced Veo 3, the latest version of its generative video model, loading it with cinematic capabilities including a new AI storytelling tool called Flow. At the Google I/O conference the company also debuted an upgraded image generator, Imagen 4, and announced expanded access to the AI music tool Lyria 2. Veo 3 can generate videos with audio — a Google first, adding things like background traffic noises, birds singing, “even dialogue between characters.” It offers improved consistency of characters, scenes and objects, while gaining camera controls, outpainting and object add/remove. Continue reading Google Upgrades GenAI Models, Debuts AI Storyteller ‘Flow’

Among the many tech advancements unveiled at Google Cloud Next include a major generative media upgrade to Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s managed AI development platform. The new Vertex AI Media Studio lets enterprise users generate complete videos from scratch using text prompts. Lyria, Google’s text-to-music model is now available on Vertex in private preview. Both are subject to an “allowlist.” Chirp 3 now creates custom voices with just 10 seconds of audio input, while Imagen 3 has gained improved abilities for reconstructing missing or damaged portions of an image. Continue reading Vertex AI Movie Studio Can Create Videos from Start to Score

Google has released what it calls its most intelligent AI model yet, Gemini 2.5. The first 2.5 model release, an experimental version of Gemini 2.5 Pro, is a next-gen reasoning model that Google says outperformed OpenAI o3-mini and Claude 3.7 Sonnet from Anthropic on common benchmarks “by meaningful margins.” Gemini 2.5 models “are thinking models, capable of reasoning through their thoughts before responding, resulting in enhanced performance and improved accuracy,” according to Google. The new model comes just three months after Google released Gemini 2.0 with reasoning and agentic capabilities. Continue reading Google Debuts Next-Gen Reasoning Models with Gemini 2.5

Google is expanding its AI presence in the UK market, hosting a splashy launch event there for Agentspace. Google in December launched Agentspace, an AI agent hub that makes it easy for enterprises to build, manage and deploy custom agents using Gemini. The gathering was hosted by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and included participation by local customers BT Group and advertising powerhouse WPP. Google invited UK businesses to store cloud data locally using its $1 billion data center, opening there this year. The company also promoted its new Chirp 3 audio generator, which offers HD voice synthesis. Continue reading Google Launches Agentspace in the UK and Promotes Chirp 3

In an expansion of their existing strategic partnership, Salesforce and Google have entered into a seven-year, $2.5 billion deal that will allow Salesforce customers to build Agentforce agents using Gemini and to deploy Salesforce on Google Cloud. The companies plan to more tightly integrate connections between platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud and Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite, as well as Slack and Google Workspace, “empowering AI agents and service representatives with unified data access, streamlined workflows, and advanced AI capabilities, regardless of platform,” the companies said. Continue reading Salesforce Brings Gemini to Agentforce in $2.5B Google Deal

Anthropic has released a new frontier model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, described as the industry’s first “hybrid AI reasoning model.” The new Claude is different in that it can both respond to questions in real time or, alternatively, “think” about a problem for a prolonged period of time — basically as long as a user would like. Users can choose between “near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user” by selecting the appropriate “reasoning” capability for Claude, Anthropic says. Along with the new model, Anthropic is also debuting a command line tool for agentic coding, Claude Code. Continue reading Anthropic Introduces a New Claude Hybrid Reasoning Model

Google has initiated a flurry of AI activity following the recent collection of Chinese AI releases. The Alphabet company has launched an experimental version of a new flagship AI model, Gemini 2.0 Pro. Its premiere coding and complex questions model is now available in Google AI Studio, Vertex AI and the Gemini Advanced app. The company has also made its general-purpose “workhorse” model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, available in general release via the Gemini API in AI Studio and Vertex. This follows last week’s announcement that Gemini 2.0 Flash is powering the Gemini app for desktop and mobile. Continue reading Google Adds Gemini Flash Thinking to Search, Maps and More

Attempting to stay ahead of OpenAI in the generative video race, Google announced Veo 2, which it says can output 4K clips of two-minutes-plus at 4096 x 2160 pixels. Competitor Sora can generate video of up to 20 seconds at 1080p. However, TechCrunch says Veo 2’s supremacy is “theoretical” since it is currently available only through Google Labs’ experimental VideoFX platform, which is limited to videos of up to 8-seconds at 720p. VideoFX is also waitlisted, but Google says it will expand access this week (with no comment on expanding the cap). Continue reading Veo 2 Is Unveiled Weeks After Google Debuted Veo in Preview

Warner Bros. Discovery is putting artificial intelligence to work creating ads that showcase products people see on their favorite TV shows. One of two new ad-based services, Shop with Max, uses machine learning to fuel shoppable content, identifying items within films and TV shows and pairing them with advertiser catalogs. A QR code takes viewers to a second screen where they can learn more about products and even purchase them. Another solution, called Moments, aligns brands with thematic content in 40 identified areas, including cooking, real estate, gaming and science. Continue reading WBD Taps KERV AI to Integrate In-Stream Advertising on Max

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

Google has unveiled three additions to its Gemma 2 family of compact yet powerful open-source AI models, emphasizing safety and transparency. The company’s Gemma 2 2B is a 2.6 billion parameter update to the lightweight 2B parameter Gemma 2, with built-in improvements in safety and performance. Built on Gemma 2, ShieldGemma is a suite of safety content classifier models that “filter the input and outputs of AI models and keep the user safe.” Interoperability model tool Gemma Scope offers what Google calls “unparalleled insight into our models’ inner workings.” Continue reading Latest Gemma 2 Models Emphasize Security and Performance

Google has launched the beta version of its Gemini-powered Google Vids productivity app, which lets users create work-related video presentations that embed documents, slides, audio recordings and even additional videos into a timeline. Incorporated into Workspace Labs, Google’s AI preview space, Google says invited participants can use Vids to “build a narrative with high quality templates” or “get to a first draft faster.” Access to Google’s royalty-free stock content library and Vids recording studio means a project can be completed “without ever leaving Workspace,” according to the company. Continue reading Gemini Powering Google Vids Multimedia Presentation Builder

Anthropic has launched a powerful new AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, that can analyze text and images and generate text. That its release comes a mere three months after Anthropic debuted Claude 3 indicates just how quickly the field is developing. The Google-backed company says Claude 3.5 Sonnet has set “new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval).” Sonnet is Anthropic’s mid-tier model, between Haiku and, on the high-end, Opus. Anthropic says 3.5 Sonnet is twice as fast as 3 Opus, offering “frontier intelligence at 2x the speed.” Continue reading Anthropic’s Claude 3.5: ‘Frontier Intelligence at 2x the Speed’