CES’s Eureka Park is a section of exhibits where startups and early-stage products from all over the world solicit feedback and explore opportunities. From this year’s Italian delegates at Eureka Park, our team found EYE2DRIVE, a semiconductor company that develops CMOS chips for digital imaging inspired by the human eye. Their image sensors use AI to mimic the human eye’s ability to adapt its response to changing environmental light conditions. As a result, quality and color of the captured image remains unaffected. While currently focusing on autonomous navigation applications, the tech has potential for media production as well. Continue reading CES: Image Sensors Adapt to Light Changes Like Human Eye

The Eureka Park section at CES 2025 in Las Vegas is an exhibition area dedicated to thousands of startups and early-stage products from across the globe. Our reporting team visited the space organized specifically for Japanese startups and discovered a few that are developing innovative technologies that could potentially be applied to 3D computer graphics modeling, XR, and gaming. Among the standouts were Tokyo-based CalTa that developed the digital twin platform Trancity — and Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo’s exhibit of its ongoing Feel Tech system. Continue reading CES: Japanese Startups Showcase 3D Modeling, XR, Gaming

Microsoft anticipates spending $80 billion to construct AI data centers in fiscal 2025, which ends in June. More than half of that investment will fund U.S. infrastructure, according to company Vice Chair and President Brad Smith. The move aims to keep Microsoft, which owns a stake in OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence, and bolster the nation’s position in the global AI race, which Smith says it currently leads, “thanks to the investment of private capital and innovations by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic startups to well-established enterprises.” Continue reading Microsoft AI Forecast Includes $80B in Data Center Spending

Promise is a new entertainment studio launched around the potential of generative AI. The Los Angeles-based startup is developing a multiyear slate of films, TV shows and media in “new formats.” With funding led by Peter Chernin’s North Road Company and Andreessen Horowitz, Promise vows to set “a new standard for high-quality storytelling enabled by AI.” The firm is also working on new tools to optimize the generative workflow. The first product, MUSE, “integrates the latest GenAI technology throughout the creative process in a streamlined, collaborative, and secure production environment.” Continue reading Promise Is an Entertainment Studio Built Around Generative AI

Particle, the AI-powered news aggregator created by a pair of Twitter alums, has launched after a year in beta. The iOS app summarizes current events in quick hits the startup says do not violate the copyrights of publishers whose news it shares. Instead of simply scraping publishers’ work for proprietary use, the startup seeks to compensate publishers and drive traffic to news sites with prominent links to sources accompanying each AI news summary. Developed by Sara Beykpour and Marcel Molina, Particle has raised more than $11 million in early funding led by Lightspeed. Continue reading Particle Launches AI News App That Summarizes in Quick Hits

Panjaya is a AI startup that aims to disrupt the world of video dubbing with a way to generate “hyperrealistic” recreations of a person’s voice speaking a new language. The system also automatically modifies the imagery to match lip and other physical movements to match the new speech patterns. Called BodyTalk, the technique is the launch point for Panjaya as it emerges from the stealth in which it conducted its R&D the past three years, backed by $9.5 million from venture funds and angel backers. The startup describes BodyTalk as “AI dubbing that looks and feels as natural as the original.” Continue reading BodyTalk Dubs into 29 Languages with Facial Moves to Match

AI startup Liquid, founded by alums of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has released its first models. Called Liquid Foundation Models, or LFMs, the multimodal family approaches “intelligence” differently than the pre-trained transformer models that dominate the field. Instead, the LFMs take a path of “first principles,” which MIT describes as “the same way engineers build engines, cars, and airplanes,” explaining that the models are large neural networks with computational units “steeped in theories of dynamic systems, signal processing and numeric linear algebra.” Continue reading MIT Spinoff Liquid Eschews GPTs for Its Fluid Approach to AI

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

DreamFlare has emerged from stealth to launch what is being billed as the first streaming platform for GenAI video. In addition to the consumer-facing subscription platform, the business model includes a sort of AI studio where creators can tap the expertise of professional storytellers to produce AI video using third-party tools like Runway, Sora and Midjourney. The company will feature two types of content: Flips, which are animated narratives with audio that viewers can also examine frame-by-frame, as with comic books, and Spins, described as “short movies” featuring branched narratives that provide interactive plot choices. Continue reading DreamFlare Launches AI Video Studio and Streaming Service

Bellevue, Washington-based startup Butterflies AI has created a new social platform that makes artificial intelligence more interactive with humans, allowing people to create customized AIs that generate posts, comments and DMs to which their creators and other humans — as well as other Butterfly AIs — can respond. Anyone using the platform, which has launched publicly on iOS and Android after 5 months in beta, can create their own AI, called a “Butterfly.” The venture, created by former Snap engineer Vu Tran, has raised $4.8 million on Tran’s premise that the public lacks an “interesting” consumer AI product. Continue reading Butterflies: AI Interacts with Humans on New Social Platform

Ilya Sutskever — who last month exited his post as chief scientist at OpenAI after a highly publicized power struggle with CEO Sam Altman — has launched a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Sutskever’s partners in the new venture are his former OpenAI colleague Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, who founded the AI startup Cue, which was acquired by Apple where Gross continued in an AI leadership role. “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our​​ time,” the trio posted on the company’s one-page website, stating its goal is to “scale in peace.” Continue reading Sutskever Targets Safe Superintelligence with New Company

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

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’

France has been pursuing Big Tech and Microsoft and Amazon are among the first to express interest. Microsoft has committed $4.3 billion to expand cloud and AI infrastructure there, sharing plans to bring as many as 25,000 advanced GPUs to France by the close of 2025. The software giant will also train one million people for AI and data jobs while supporting 2,500 AI startups over the next three years. Meanwhile, Amazon announced that it would invest up to $1.3 billion to expand its existing footprint of 35 logistics facilities in the country. The deals were announced Monday during the Choose France summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. Continue reading Microsoft, Amazon Commit to Expanding Operations in France

The UK AI Safety Institute announced the availability of its new Inspect platform designed for the evaluation and testing of artificial intelligence tech in order to help develop safe AI models. The Inspect toolset enables testers — including worldwide researchers, government agencies, and startups — to analyze the specific capabilities of such models and establish scores based on various criteria. According to the Institute, the “release comes at a crucial time in AI development, as more powerful models are expected to hit the market over the course of 2024, making the push for safe and responsible AI development more pressing than ever.” Continue reading UK Launches New Open-Source Platform for AI Safety Testing