Meta Platforms has reportedly been investing billions of dollars each quarter in developing the metaverse, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as the future of the company. Although sales of VR headsets and AR glasses dropped nearly 40 percent in the U.S. (according to research firm Circana), Meta continues to tout the intersection between AI and the metaverse. “The progress we made in 2023 means generative AI is making its way into the heart of the world’s most popular apps, mixed reality is now at the core of a mass market headset, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will let AI see the world from our perspective for the first time,” explained Andrew Bosworth, CTO and head of Meta’s Reality Labs. Continue reading Meta Platforms Continues Its Pursuit of AI and the Metaverse

Google is rolling out Gemini to developers, enticing them with tools including AI Studio, an easy-to-navigate Web-based platform that will serve as a portal to the multi-tiered Gemini ecosystem, beginning with Gemini Pro, with Gemini Ultra to come next year. The service aims to allow developers to quickly create prompts and Gemini-powered chatbots, providing access to API keys to integrate them into apps. They’ll also be able to access code, should projects require a full featured IDE. The site is essentially a revamped version of what was formerly Google’s MakerSuite. Continue reading Google Debuts Turnkey Gemini AI Studio for Developing Apps

Epic Games has prevailed against Google in U.S. District Court, scoring a victory in the 2020 lawsuit filed against the search giant over antitrust behavior related to its Google Play store. Epic claims that Google leverages control over the Android mobile operating system to require content creators who want a presence on an estimated 71 percent of the world’s smartphones to sell through the Play Store. The verdict “proves Google’s app store practices are illegal and they abuse their monopoly to extract exorbitant fees, stifle competition and reduce innovation,” Epic wrote of the win. Google disagrees with the ruling and says it plans to appeal. Continue reading Court Rules in Favor of Epic Games in Google Antitrust Case

Stability AI, developer of Stable Diffusion (one of the leading visual content generators, alongside Midjourney and DALL-E), has introduced SDXL Turbo — a new AI model that demonstrates more of the latent possibilities of the common diffusion generation approach: images that update in real time as the user’s prompt updates. This feature was always a possibility even with previous diffusion models given text and images are comprehended differently across linear time, but increased efficiency of generation algorithms and the steady accretion of GPUs and TPUs in a developer’s data center makes the experience more magical. Continue reading Stability AI Intros Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model

Amazon is debuting its Titan Image Generator in preview for AWS Bedrock customers. The new Titan generative AI model can create new images from a text prompt or existing image, and automatically adds watermarking to protect intellectual property. The move into generative imaging puts Amazon in competition with a growing field that includes large firms like Adobe and Google. Unlike those companies and others, the e-retail giant is at present focusing exclusively on enterprise customers. Amazon Bedrock is a managed service giving developers access to a range of foundation models from companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic, and Amazon itself. Continue reading Amazon Previews Titan Image Generator for Bedrock Clients

The United States, Britain and 16 other countries have signed a 20-page agreement on working together to keep artificial intelligence safe from bad actors, mandating collaborative efforts for creating AI systems that are “secure by design.” The 18 countries said they will aim to ensure companies that design and utilize AI develop and deploy it in a way that protects their customers and the public from abuse. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) jointly released the Guidelines for Secure AI System Development. Continue reading U.S., Britain and 16 Nations Aim to Make AI Secure by Design

Stability AI has opened research preview on its first foundation model for generative video, Stable Video Diffusion, offering text-to-video and image-to-video. Based on the company’s Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, the new open-source model generates video by animating existing still frames, including “multi-view synthesis.” While the company plans to enhance and extend the model’s capabilities, it currently comes in two versions: SVD, which transforms stills into 576×1024 videos of 14 frames, and SVD-XT that generates up to 24 frames — each at between three and 30 frames per second. Continue reading Stability Introduces GenAI Video Model: Stable Video Diffusion

Unity has officially released its Muse AI platform for general use in early access. Muse is a suite of AI-powered tools that streamline game development. The Muse package includes Muse Chat to source answers and generate code, Muse Sprite for 2D sprites generation, and Muse Texture, providing 2D and 3D ready textures. Originally announced in July, Muse is now offered at a $30 per month subscription. Also announced at the firm’s annual Unite conference was the next major software update, Unity 6, for 2024, and the deployment of Unity Cloud to connect development tools across projects and pipelines. Continue reading Unity Opens Beta for Muse AI, Sets General Release for 2024

Since Snap released its Lens Studio tool in 2017, creators have become “the fuel of Snap AR,” the company says by way of announcing Lens Studio 5.0 Beta, representing a major overhaul of the editor. The development tool now includes a ChatGPT API, improved version control, and more support for teams. The company also launched a Lens Performance Toolkit to help optimize reach and engagement. Performance optimization has resulted in load times that are 18x faster, Snap says, noting “a project that used to take 25 seconds to open now only takes seconds — resetting the bar for productivity.” Continue reading Snap Adds ChatGPT and Other New Tools to AR Lens Editor

Startup Flip AI has built a custom LLM to run its observability platform. Observability is the act of monitoring corporate IT systems, ferreting out issues or identifying potential problems before they occur. It’s a 24/7 process, and can slow down sites or apps, sometimes causing crashes. Not to be confused with the PDF reader app, Flip AI has trained an LLM specifically to monitor new and emerging challenges. Concurrently, Flip AI has announced $6.5 million in seed funding led by Factory with participation from Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and GTM Capital. Continue reading Startup Flip AI Creates Custom LLM to Address Observability

Now anyone can make their own GPT chatbot, for fun or productivity — no coding skills necessary — and soon will be able to list it on a marketplace called the GPT Store. This was among the news announcements to come out of OpenAI’s first developer conference — OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco — where a new, lower-priced model called GPT-4 Turbo with 128K context, was unveiled, along with a new Assistants API, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision and the DALL-E 3 API. Now in preview, GPT-4 Turbo “is more capable and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023,” according to OpenAI. Continue reading OpenAI Intros GPT-4 Turbo, Creator Chatbots at Dev Confab

Microsoft’s Xbox wants to help game developers harness the power of generative AI. The company has entered into a multi-year partnership with Inworld AI to build automation tools for creating game dialogue and narrative tools at scale. Inworld has expertise in working with generative AI models for character development while Microsoft will contribute cloud solutions including Azure OpenAI Service and the technical insights of Microsoft Research on the future of play. The Xbox division will oversee the initiative as part of its ongoing effort to bring responsible creator tools to its developers. Continue reading Microsoft’s Xbox Partners with Inworld AI on Game Dev Tools

Microsoft has launched Radius, a language-agnostic collaboration app for creating and running cloud-native applications. Radius sprang from the Microsoft Azure Incubations team, whose projects include the development app Dapr, event-driven autoscaling solution KEDA, and the Copacetic security tool. Dapr and KEDA are among the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects. Microsoft submitted Copacetic to CNCF and plans to submit Radius, which standardizes deployment and automates resource provisioning through features like Recipes and Connections. Continue reading Microsoft’s Radius App is Open Source and Cloud Agnostic

At yesterday’s Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco, South Korea’s number one smartphone exporter unveiled new additions to its Galaxy ecosystem: the Galaxy S23 FE model phones, the Galaxy Tab S9 FE and S9 FE+, and Galaxy Buds FE. These latest additions to the flagship Galaxy line are designed to provide a pro-level camera as well as smooth mobile gaming performance. Complete with AI editing tools for easy-share content, the Galaxy S23 FE is also customizable, with Pro Mode controls that allow manual selection for shutter speed, aperture and ISO for those who choose. Continue reading Samsung Showcases the Latest Additions to Its Galaxy Lines

Marching toward its goal of eliminating third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by the close of December 2024, Google has generally released its APIs for Privacy Sandbox, its privacy-oriented solution to cross-site consumer tracking cookies. The new system has begun shipping with the latest version of Chrome. The Privacy Sandbox tracks topics of interest based on browsing patterns and lets advertisers use that data to serve relevant ads. While clicking “got it” to close your first Sandbox pop-up activates the new system by default, it can be turned off by visiting the privacy settings. Continue reading Google Is Replacing Cookies with Privacy Sandbox in Chrome