Amazon has earmarked $230 million to invest in generative AI startups worldwide, providing funding in the form of “AWS credits, mentorship, and education to further their use of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.” The initiative will cast a global net, focusing on early-stage companies. About $80 million of that allocation will fund the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, which provides up to $1 million in credits “to each of the top 80 early-stage startups that are using generative AI to solve complex challenges.” Applications for the AWS Accelerator are open through July 19. Read more

Yahoo announced it is bringing new AI features to its news and mail platforms. Its reimagined news app leverages tech acquired when it purchased news aggregator Artifact this spring. Greater personalization and a more intuitive UI are among the upgrades, which include feed customization, summaries of articles and top stories and improved sharing tools. Yahoo says all of this will allow users to make its news aggregator feed a more individualized experience that improves with use. Artifact creators Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, who co-founded Instagram, announced plans in January to shutter the AI-powered news app. Read more

Voodoo, the French app publisher behind mobile games like “Helix Jump” and “Crowd City” has purchased social network BeReal for $537 million. Paris-based BeReal was launched in 2020, focusing on “authentic interactions,” but didn’t gain widespread popularity until 2022 when it captured the imagination of Gen Z. According to Voodoo, the platform now has more than 40 million active users, largely concentrated in the U.S., Japan and France. The new owner says it will invest in BeReal and plans to “accelerate its growth” using Voodoo’s “expertise and technologies,” adding that the acquisition “accelerates its diversification into consumer apps.” Read more

Northern California startup Luma AI has released Dream Machine, a model that generates realistic videos from text prompts and images. Built on a scalable and multimodal transformer architecture and “trained directly on videos,” Dream Machine can create “action-packed scenes” that are physically accurate and consistent, says Luma, which has a free version of the model in public beta. Dream Machine is what Luma calls the first step toward “a universal imagination engine,” while others are calling it “powerful” and “slammed with traffic.” Though Luma has shared scant details, each posted sequence looks to be about 5 seconds long. Read more

China’s Kuaishou Technology has a video generator called Kling AI in public beta that is getting great word-of-mouth, with comments from “incredibly realistic” to “Sora killer,” a reference to OpenAI’s still in closed beta video generator. Kuaishou claims that using only text prompts, Kling can generate “AI videos that closely mimic the real world’s complex motion patterns and physical characteristics,” in sequences as long as two minutes at 30 fps and 1080p, while supporting various aspect ratios. Kuaishou is China’s second most popular short-form video app, after ByteDance’s Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Read more