Santa Monica-based Snapchat announced a new Monetization Program for content creators this week that will feature expanded revenue opportunities and evolving rewards. Beginning February 1, creators that have at least 50,000 followers and post at least 25 times each month to Saved Stories or Spotlight videos will have the option to place ads in videos that are longer than one minute. Eligible creators would also need to meet one of the following criteria in the most recent month: 10 million Snap views, one million Spotlight views, or 12,000 hours of total view time. According to Snap, Spotlight video viewership is up 25 percent year-over-year. Continue reading Snapchat to Empower Creators with Video Monetization Plan

Last week, a federal appeals court upheld a law that would force the sale of popular social platform TikTok in order for it to remain operational in the United States. Beijing-based parent company ByteDance is vowing to fight on with a petition for a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law, passed in April, invokes existing federal code that prohibits access to sensitive material by adversarial foreign nations of which China (along with Russia, Iran and North Korea) is one. Barring further court action, ByteDance will have to sell TikTok by January 19 or face bans at app stores. Continue reading TikTok Aims to Resist Divestment, Remain Operational in U.S.

Alibaba Cloud has released the latest entry in its growing Qwen family of large language models. The new Qwen with Questions (QwQ) is an open-source competitor to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model. As with competing large reasoning models (LRMs), QwQ can correct its own mistakes, relying on extra compute cycles during inference to assess its responses, making it well suited for reasoning tasks like math and coding. Described as an “experimental research model,” this preview version of QwQ has 32-billion-parameters and a 32,000-token context, leading to speculation that a more powerful iteration is in the offing. Continue reading Qwen with Questions: Alibaba Previews New Reasoning Model

Ernie, the foundation model for Baidu’s generative AI, has been updated with iRAG technology to mitigate visual hallucinations and a no-code tool called Miaoda that creates apps using natural language. The company behind China’s largest search engine says Ernie now handles 1.5 billion daily user queries, up from 50 million circa its March 2023 launch (a 30x increase). Baidu also debuted Ernie-powered smart glasses from its Xiaodu Technology hardware unit. The Xiaodu AI Glasses features built-in voice activation and cameras for taking photos and video. The news was shared at this week’s Baidu World 2024 in Shanghai. Continue reading Baidu’s Ernie AI Gets Improved Text-to-Image and App Builder

The government of Canada has ordered social video app TikTok to shut down its business operations in the country, following a national security review under the Investment Canada Act. and potential risks posed by TikTok and parent ByteDance. “The government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content,” explains François-Philippe Champagne, minister of innovation, science and industry. “The decision to use a social media application or platform is a personal choice.” Canada previously banned the TikTok app from official government devices, while the U.S. passed a law that could also ban the app. Continue reading Canada Orders TikTok to Shut Down Its Business Operations

President Biden issued the first-ever National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence, outlining how the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and various national security groups should use artificial intelligence technology to advance national interests and deter threats, touching on everything from nuclear weapons to the supply chain. “The NSM is designed to galvanize federal government adoption of AI to advance the national security mission, including by ensuring that such adoption reflects democratic values and protects human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and privacy,” the White House announced in a statement. Continue reading The White House Defines Government Objectives Involving AI

Samsung is releasing a Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition that will initially debut in South Korea on October 25 at a price of roughly $2,000. This thinner, lighter new Z Fold sports larger displays and a superior 200MP camera system, an AI-friendly 16GB of RAM and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, though by the time it debuts in the U.S. it may have the newer Snapdragon 8 Elite, which Qualcomm says will start showing up in products by the end of this year. Samsung is positioning the exclusive limited run as “a thank-you” to local customers. There are rumors of a possible China release forthcoming. Continue reading Samsung’s New Galaxy Z Fold Releasing Only in South Korea

Hailuo, the free text-to-video generator released last month by the Alibaba-backed company MiniMax, has delivered its promised image-to-video feature. Founded by AI researcher Yan Junjie, the Shanghai-based MiniMax also has backing from Tencent. The model earned high marks for what has been called “ultra realistic” video, and MiniMax says the new image-to-video feature will improve output across the board as a result of “text-and-image joint instruction following,” which means Hailuo now “seamlessly integrates both text and image command inputs, enhancing your visuals while precisely adhering to your prompts.” Continue reading MiniMax’s Hailuo AI Rolls Out New Image-to-Video Capability

Alibaba Cloud last week globally released more than 100 new open-source variants of its large language foundation model, Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community. The company has also revamped its proprietary offering as a full-stack AI-computing infrastructure across cloud products, networking and data center architecture, all aimed at supporting the growing demands of AI computing. Alibaba Cloud’s significant contribution was revealed at the Apsara Conference, the annual flagship event held by the cloud division of China’s e-retail giant, often referred to as the Chinese Amazon. Continue reading Alibaba Cloud Ups Its AI Game with 100 Open-Source Models

Backed by Alibaba and Tencent, Chinese startup MiniMax has launched a new text-to-video model called Hailuo AI that is quickly gaining traction on social media based on its impressive capabilities, with comments ranging from “fantastical” to “hyper-realistic.” The free, web-based tool has already triggered videos that have gone viral, despite the current limitation of only 6-second clips. However, an image-to-video model is reportedly coming soon, in addition to a version 2 that promises longer video duration and improved motion. Unlike the Jimeng AI text-to-video model that was issued by ByteDance last month, the MiniMax technology is available outside of China. Continue reading Hailuo AI: China’s MiniMax Releases Free Text-to-Video App

China’s Huawei has unveiled a trifold smartphone with an OLED panel that has two vertical folds, opening to a 10.2-inch, 16:11 display. The Mate XT — which comes in red and black and offers three storage options ranging in price from $2,809 to $3,371 — is due to arrive in Chinese stores September 20, the same day that Apple’s new iPhone 16 lineup hits retail shelves there. Huawei and Apple are among the top brands currently battling for market share in what is the world’s largest cellphone market. With Huawei under U.S. sanctions, it is unlikely the trifold phone will be released here. Continue reading Huawei Unveils Mate XT Phone with 3 Panels, 10-inch Screen

China’s largest cloud computing company, Alibaba Cloud, has released a new computer vision model, Qwen2-VL, which the company says improves on its predecessor in visual understanding, including video comprehension and text-to-image processing in languages including English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese and others. The company says it can analyze videos of more than 20 minutes in length and is able to respond appropriately to questions about content. Third-party benchmark tests compare Qwen2-VL favorably to leading competitors and the company is releasing two open-source versions with a larger private model to come. Continue reading Alibaba’s Latest Vision Model Has Advanced Video Capability

Huawei Technologies Co. continued to grow revenue for the sixth consecutive quarter, tallying $33.6 billion for the period ending in June, a 33.7 percent increase year-over-year. The privately held company releases limited financial information. The net profit margin at the half-year mark was said to be 13.2 percent, equivalent to $7.7 billion. Bloomberg extrapolated that to profit of about $5 billion for the quarter, which represents an 18.6 percent decline over the same period last year when asset sales boosted results. The overall trend saw Huawei and other Chinese smartphone manufacturers continuing to gain ground against Apple. Continue reading Huawei Flourishes Despite Sanctions as U.S. Trial Approaches

ByteDance has debuted a text-to-video mobile app in its native China that is available on the company’s TikTok equivalent there, Douyin. Called Jimeng AI, there is speculation that it will be coming to North America and Europe soon via TikTok or ByteDance’s CapCut editing tool, possibly beating competing U.S. technologies like OpenAI’s Sora to market. Jimeng (translation: “dream”) uses text prompts to generate short videos. For now, its responsiveness is limited to prompts written in Chinese. In addition to entertainment, the app is described as applicable to education, marketing and other purposes. Continue reading ByteDance Intros Jimeng AI Text-to-Video Generator in China

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, charging they’ve violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by allowing children to create TikTok accounts without parental consent, and collecting their data. The suit also alleges TikTok retained the personal data of minors who joined prior to COPPA going into effect in 2000, even after parents demanded it be deleted, a right under COPPA. This latest move in the ongoing legal battle with ByteDance follows the Chinese company’s own lawsuit against the U.S. government. Continue reading U.S. Raises Stakes in TikTok Legal Battle, Suing Under COPPA