Web-based editing application Canva unveiled a significant makeover this week in Los Angeles at the Canva Create event. Touting “a whole new Canva,” the company shared changes that impact the entire platform, from pricing to tools, templates and user interface. The new editor, designed to make it easier to jump between projects, is “available to the first one million users who discover the secret portal hidden in their Canva homepage, before becoming available to the entire Canva community from August.” The 11-year-old company, which claims 183 million free and paid monthly users, also unveiled an enterprise solution. Continue reading Graphics Productivity Tool Canva Unveils Enterprise Redesign

T-Mobile has agreed to buy most of U.S. Cellular in a deal worth about $4.4 billion that would bring the self-proclaimed “un-carrier” more than 4 million new customers as well as its retail stores and about 30 percent of U.S. Cellular’s wireless spectrum. U.S. Cellular would hang on to 70 percent of its spectrum and towers and lease much of it back to T-Mobile, which was already leasing its infrastructure. T-Mobile says it plans to use the added spectrum to improve its service in rural areas, which constitute the bulk of U.S. Cellular’s footprint. Continue reading T-Mobile Plans to Buy Most of U.S. Cellular in $4.4 Billion Deal

Not to be outdone by Windows Copilot+ PCs, Google is also bringing AI to the Chromebook, which will be infused with Gemini’s generative smarts via companies including Acer, HP and Asus. “New Google AI and gaming features are available on Chromebook Plus,” says the Alphabet company, noting “you can now write like a pro with Help Me Write, supercharge your ideas with Gemini, edit photos in a snap with Magic Editor, and more — all on Chromebook Plus laptops starting at $350.” Google, which partially integrated Gemini with the Chrome browser, teased AI for ChromeOS last fall. Continue reading Acer, Asus, HP First to Offer Chromebook Plus with Google AI

OpenAI has begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model to succeed GPT-4, the technology currently associated with ChatGPT. The new model — which some are already calling GPT-5, although OpenAI hasn’t yet shared its name — is expected to take the company’s compute to the next level as it works toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), intelligence equal to or surpassing human cognitive abilities. The company also announced it has formed a new Safety and Security Committee two weeks after dissolving the old one upon the departure of OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Continue reading OpenAI Is Working on New Frontier Model to Succeed GPT-4

Elon Musk’s xAI has secured $6 billion in Series B funding. While the company says the funds will be “used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development,” some outlets are reporting a significant portion is earmarked to build an AI supercomputer to power the next generation of its foundation model Grok. The company publicly released the open-source Grok-1 as a chatbot on X social in November, and recently debuted Grok-1.5 and 1.5V iterations with long-context capability and image understanding. Continue reading Musk Said to Envision Supercomputer as xAI Raises $6 Billion

Music startup Suno, which leverages ChatGPT tech with the goal of emulating that app’s success in music, has raised $125 million in Series B funding, resulting in a valuation of $500 million. Founded by Harvard physics PhD turned tech entrepreneur Mikey Shulman, the company is being called “a rising star” in the realm of generative AI. Suno lets people generate original songs by using text prompts or lyrics, with the AI supplying the melodies and harmonies for fully-formed compositions. “We started Suno to build a future where anyone can make music,” according to the company. Continue reading AI Startup Suno Raises Funds to ‘Democratize Music Creation’

Maven is a new social network launched by OpenAI and Twitter alums designed to remove the pressure to amass followers and reinfuse a sense of serendipitous exploration, emphasized in its tagline: “Follow interests, not influencers.” Abandoning what it calls the “popularity-contest style” of most platforms, Maven doesn’t include likes, and lets people follow “interests” instead of other accounts. Its founders built Maven’s algorithm by drawing on the principles of open-ended systems. Its goals include increasing the probability of serendipity while addressing users’ curiosity, thus upping the odds of “meeting people with complementary interests.” Continue reading New Social Network Maven Favors Serendipity Over Followers

Nvidia just wrapped a record quarter, with no sign of interest cooling for the GPUs that have become essential to powering the AI boom. Revenue for the company’s most recent quarter was a record $26 billion, up 262 percent year-over-year. Profit also hit a new high, up nearly sevenfold to $14.88 billion compared to the same period a year earlier. The performance drove the already buoyant stock price above $1,000 a share. Company founder and CEO Jensen Huang proclaimed, “the next industrial revolution has begun,” with Nvidia playing a pivotal role in transforming data centers into “AI factories.” Continue reading Nvidia Reports Record Revenue, Profits as AI Demand Surges

Meta Platforms has unveiled its first natively multimodal model, Chameleon, which observers say can make it competitive with frontier model firms. Although Chameleon is not yet released, Meta says internal research indicates it outperforms the company’s own Llama 2 in text-only tasks and “matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models” including Google’s Gemini Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-4V in a mixed-modal generation evaluation “where either the prompt or outputs contain mixed sequences of both images and text.” In addition, Meta calls Chameleon’s image generation “non-trivial,” noting that’s “all in a single model.” Continue reading Meta Advances Multimodal Model Architecture with Chameleon

Barely a month after Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses received a major upgrade, adding Meta AI with Vision in beta in the U.S. and Canada and adding the ability to share what you’re looking at on WhatsApp and Messenger video calls, the company is back with another update. Voice command access to Amazon Music and the wellness app Calm, as well as hands-free posting to Instagram are new features, rolling out “gradually.” Simply say, “Hey Meta, play Amazon Music,” or “Share my last photo to Instagram’” to get results without touching your phone. Continue reading Ray-Ban Meta Now Hands-Free with Amazon, Calm, Instagram

Microsoft is enlarging its family of generative Copilots, introducing new AI assistants in its collaborative Teams and SharePoint platforms. Team Copilot expands Copilot beyond the sphere of personal assistant, empowering it to work on behalf of a team with the goal of improving collaboration and project management. Team Copilot will have agents that provide the ability to orchestrate and automate business processes, as well as extensions and connectors designed to make it easy to tailor and extend Copilot to meet specific business needs. Copilot is also launching in preview for all Azure customers. Continue reading Microsoft Adds Copilot AI Assistants to Teams and SharePoint

Amazon is planning to add generative artificial intelligence to its decade-old voice assistant, Alexa, which will require a monthly fee to offset the cost of the technology, according to reports. Although the new Alexa price plan has not been disclosed, it is not expected to be included in the $139 yearly Amazon Prime plan. The possible move comes as Apple is also undergoing an AI overhaul of its voice assistant, Siri. Once considered precocious by many consumers, Siri and Alexa are now playing catch-up to AI assistants from leaders in the space including Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. Continue reading Amazon to Upgrade Alexa with AI, May Add Subscription Fee

Leading AI firms spanning Europe, Asia, North America and the Middle East have signed a new voluntary commitment to AI safety. The 16 signatory companies — including Amazon, Google DeepMind, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, OpenAI, xAI and China’s Zhipu AI — will publish outlines indicating how they will measure the risks posed by their frontier models. “In the extreme, leading AI tech companies including from China and the UAE have committed to not develop or deploy AI models if the risks cannot be sufficiently mitigated,” according to UK Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan. Continue reading Global Technology Companies Sign Pledge to Foster AI Safety

Microsoft is implementing a series of upgrades to its AI stack, including Azure AI Studio and Copilot Studio, developer platforms for building apps that leverage generative AI. At its Build 2024 conference, the company also announced it is going into preview with its Azure virtual machines (VMs), the first platform to use the powerful Arm-based Cobalt 100 cloud processors developed by Microsoft, which shared that plan at its November Ignite conference. Other Build highlights include the general availability of OpenAI’s new GPT-4o flagship model across the Azure OpenAI Service and the new multimodal Phi-3-vision SLM. Continue reading Microsoft Upgrades Azure AI Stack, Previews Cobalt 100 VMs

Autodesk is going all-in on artificial intelligence with the acquisition of AI startup Wonder Dynamics, maker of the Wonder Studio VFX tool. Autodesk — whose products include Maya, 3ds Max and Flame — worked with Wonder on a Maya plug-in last year and appears to have been impressed. Wonder Studio was purpose-built to be compatible with 3D tools like Maya, largely automating the process of putting 3D characters within live-action scenes. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Autodesk did not detail plans for integrating Wonder Dynamics, but it’s likely the company’s AI expertise will make itself felt across the portfolio. Continue reading Autodesk Buys Wonder Dynamics, AI VFX App Wonder Studio