Gracenote, the Nielsen content solutions division, has launched Gracenote Watch Prompts, an AI-powered dataset that equips global video platforms and services with programming facts intended to help influence consumer viewing behavior. Designed to be paired with user preference and consumption data, the new Watch Prompts aim at delivering personalized film and TV promotion, resulting in increased tune-in. According to Nielsen, 74 percent of U.S. consumers last year either didn’t know or only had a vague idea as to what they wanted to watch when starting a streaming session, “meaning a large majority are making on-the-fly viewing decisions.” Continue reading Gracenote Watch Prompts Aim to Help Streaming TV Viewers

Robotics startup Figure AI — with investors including OpenAI, Nvidia and Microsoft — has released its next-gen humanoid, Figure 02. Its predecessor made a splash earlier this year with a demo that captured it conversing with an interlocutor as it organized household items and prepared a snack. Compared to the Figure 01 prototype, with exposed wiring and limited range of motion, Figure 02 is more polished. The latest iteration boasts skeletal improvements for heavier lifting as well as enhanced visual reasoning to assist with machine learning. The result is characterized as “a major leap” in AI-powered robotics, a category in which players include Tesla and 1X Technologies. Continue reading Humanoid Robot Figure 02 Touts Better Strength, Reasoning

The U.S. Commerce Department has issued a large package of material designed to help AI developers and those using the systems with an approach to identifying and mitigating risks stemming from generative AI and foundation models. Prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the AI Safety Institute, the guidance includes the initial public draft of its guidelines on “Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models.” Dual-use refers to models that can be used for good or ill. The release also includes an open-source software test called Dioptra. Apple is the latest to join the government’s voluntary commitments to responsible AI innovation. Continue reading Apple Joins the Safe AI Initiative as NIST Amps Up Outreach

Amazon Web Services made availability announcements for services including its enterprise AI assistant Q, which now becomes available on its entry-level SageMaker tier, and introduced some new products at the AWS Summit at New York City’s Javits Center this week. Notably, the App Studio development assistant has launched in public preview. Amazon is also highlighting new features to improve AI accuracy, including a guardrail that detects “hallucinations.” Overall, the event — one in a series of daylong summits held in key cities across the nation — emphasized the comprehensiveness of the company’s generative AI stack. Continue reading AWS Expands Q Availability, Adds Guardrails for Bedrock AI

Amazon announced the public preview launch of its GenAI-powered App Studio service. The platform — which is geared toward professionals who lack extensive software development skills — builds full-featured, enterprise-level apps using natural language prompts. Users simply describe what they would like the app to accomplish and the data sources available to it and App Studio will produce in minutes what the company claims, “could have taken a professional developer days to build from scratch.” The announcement was made during this week’s AWS Summit in New York City. Continue reading AWS Releases GenAI-Powered App Studio in Public Preview

Federal regulators have taken the unprecedented step of banning the NGL messaging platform from providing service to users under 18. The action is part of a legal settlement between NGL Labs, the Federal Trade Commission and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. NGL, whose niche is “anonymous” communication and features the tagline “Ask me anything,” has also agreed to pay $5 million in fines. An FTC investigation found that in addition to fraudulent business claims about divulging the identities of message senders for a fee, NGL also falsely claimed it used artificial intelligence to filter out cyberbullying and harmful messages. Continue reading Popular Messaging App Banned from Servicing Young Users

Deepfake videos are becoming increasingly problematic, not only in spreading disinformation on social media but also in enterprise attacks. Now researchers at Drexel University College of Engineering say they have developed an advanced algorithm with a 98 percent accuracy rate in detecting deepfake videos. Called the MISLnet algorithm, for the school’s Multimedia and Information Security Lab where it was invented, the platform uses machine learning to recognize and extract the “digital fingerprints” of video generators including Stable Video Diffusion, VideoCrafter and CogVideo. Continue reading Drexel Claims Its AI Has 98 Percent Rate Detecting Deepfakes

Snap Inc. teased a new on-device AI model capable of real-time filter creation in-app using Snapchat. At last week’s Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California, Snap co-founder and CTO Bobby Murphy explained that the model, which runs on smartphones, can re-render frames on the fly guided by text prompts. Snap’s unnamed prototype model “can instantly bring your imagination to life in AR,” Snap says, explaining “this early prototype makes it possible to type in an idea for a transformation and generate vivid AR experiences in real time.” Continue reading Snapchat Previews Instant AR Filters, GenAI Developer Tools

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. Continue reading Amazon Commits $230M in AWS Credits for GenAI Startups

Apple has entered into a deal with OpenAI to deliver GTP-4o to its devices, which beginning this fall will feature Apple Intelligence, or “AI.” Announced during this week’s WWDC 2024, Apple Intelligence is “deeply integrated into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia,” according to the company. The new AI features will be available to users of the iPhone 15 Pro, or any devices powered by M1 or newer chips “to understand and create language and images, take action across apps, and draw from personal context to simplify and accelerate everyday tasks.” Continue reading WWDC: Apple Intelligence Brings AI to iPhone, iPad and Mac

The trend toward small language models that can efficiently run on a single device instead of requiring cloud connectivity has emerged as a focus for Big Tech companies involved in artificial intelligence. Apple has released the OpenELM family of open-source models as its entry in that field. OpenELM uses “a layer-wise scaling strategy” to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, resulting in what Apple claims is “enhanced accuracy.” The “ELM” stands for “Efficient Language Models,” and one media outlet couches it as “the future of AI on the iPhone.” Continue reading Apple Unveils OpenELM Tech Optimized for Local Applications

Internet advertising revenues hit a record $225 billion in the U.S. in 2023, a 7.3 percent increase, according to a PwC report for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The connected TV and audio categories saw double-digit growth, as did spending on e-commerce platforms, classified “retail media,” which rose 16.3 percent year-over-year, reaching $43.7 billion in 2023 as key players expanded their ad inventory. Video advertising revenue climbed 10.6 percent year-over-year, to $52.1 billion, with 42 percent of that revenue generated from CTV and OTT streaming. Continue reading IAB: U.S. Digital Advertising Hit Record $225 Billion Last Year

Google is moving its most powerful artificial intelligence model, Gemini 1.5 Pro, into public preview for developers and Google Cloud customers. Gemini 1.5 Pro includes what Google claims is a breakthrough in long context understanding, with the ability to run 1 million tokens of information “opening up new possibilities for enterprises to create, discover and build using AI.” Gemini’s multimodal capabilities allow it to process audio, video, text, code and more, which when combined with long context, “enables enterprises to do things that just weren’t possible with AI before,” according to Google. Continue reading Google Offers Public Preview of Gemini Pro for Cloud Clients

Google Vids is a new AI-powered video creation app for Google Workspace. The aim is to integrate a simple AI video editor with the real-time collaboration capabilities of cloud-based text editors Docs, Sheets and Slides, “allowing people everywhere to tap into immersive storytelling at work.” Vids will be released to Workspace Labs in June. Vids will be able to generate an easy-to-edit storyboard and piece together a first draft, with suggestions from stock footage and stills, as well as background music. “It can also help you land your message with the right voiceover,” according to Google. Continue reading AI-Powered Video Generator Available for Google Workspace

Databricks, a San Francisco-based company focused on cloud data and artificial intelligence, has released a generative AI model called DBRX that it says sets new standards for performance and efficiency in the open source category. The mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture contains 132 billion parameters and was pre-trained on 12T tokens of text and code data. Databricks says it provides the open community and enterprises who want to build their own LLMs with capabilities previously limited to closed model APIs. Compared to other open models, Databricks claims it outperforms alternatives including Llama 2-70B and Mixtral on certain benchmarks. Continue reading Databricks DBRX Model Offers High Performance at Low Cost