The era of Google’s dominance in search and advertising hasn’t been one in which the news sector has thrived. In fact, it has coincided with a calamitous collapse in revenues and a dramatic contraction of the industry overall. What they’re worth to us has been, overall, less than zero. The news industry has gone backwards. Yet news businesses still can’t conceive of managing without them.
Source: Perhaps Google is really worth nothing to the news industry
Runway, a startup best known for its suite of generative AI media tools, has raised $308 million in a new funding round. “Today marks an important milestone as Runway announces a significant next step towards our goal of creating a new media ecosystem with world simulators,” the company wrote in the press release. “[Our recent] advancements aren’t merely incremental improvements; they form the foundation for an entirely new approach to media.
Source: Runway, best known for its video-generating AI models, raises $308M | TechCrunch
While privacy, security, and technical challenges limit access to valuable private data, the biggest hurdle is commercial. There is no established system for companies to securely share proprietary data. Without a structured system for data sharing, vast amounts of valuable information will stay locked away, stifling AI-driven advancements and slowing innovation across industries.
OpenAI has been accused by many parties of training its AI on copyrighted content sans permission. Now a new paper by an AI watchdog organization makes the serious accusation that the company increasingly relied on non-public books it didn’t license to train more sophisticated AI models. The new paper, out of the AI Disclosures Project, draws the conclusion that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model on paywalled books from O’Reilly Media.
Source: Researchers suggest OpenAI trained AI models on paywalled O’Reilly books | TechCrunch
NaNoWriMo, the non-profit organization that grew out of the annual tradition National Novel Writing Month, had a solid 25-year run encouraging writers to speedrun the novel writing process, but it has come to an end. On Monday, the organization announced that it would cease operations due to ongoing financial issues, as well as some very public drama that has played out in recent years.
Source: Longtime Writing Community NaNoWriMo Shuts Down After AI Drama
Kunlun claims that Mureka O1 outperforms competing models like Suno V4 across multiple metrics, with strong results in mixing quality, vocal textures, and background instrumentation. The company says its AI models’ ability to carry out subjective assessments places them “among the top-tier” in the category.
Agentic AI and quantum computing are crashing into the music industry faster than anyone is ready for. The pace of change is breathtaking: what used to take years is now happening in weeks. These technologies also bring massive potential – but also present some pretty alarming challenges.
Source: The AI tipping point is happening – and here’s how it will affect the music industry
A cybersecurity company that combats AI deepfakes called GetReal Security has closed a $17.5 million Series A funding round. GetReal says it “specializes in the detection and mitigation of malicious generative AI threats” including deepfakes and impersonation attacks. Its technology is used by “multinational corporations, financial institutions, media organizations, government agencies, and social media companies”.
Source: GetReal Security raises $17.5m to combat AI deepfakes
Today’s refined GPT-4o model makes it easier for consumers, and businesses, to create more life-like images and paragraphs of comprehensible text—and even company logos and slide decks, OpenAI said. Behind the improvement to GPT-4o is a group of “human trainers” who labeled training data for the model—pointing out where typos, errant hands and faces had been made in AI-generated images.
Source: OpenAI Claims Breakthrough in Image Creation for ChatGPT
The fundamental problem of licenses undermining libraries and scholarly research remains, even as technology and business models shift. Today, some publishers are attempting to implement new contractual bans on artificial intelligence by sending impromptu addendums to their customers and, in some cases, claiming that they’re unable to waive these bans because they intend to create their own AI tool.
Source: AI Is Reigniting Decades-Old Questions Over Digital Rights, but Fair Use Prevails | TechPolicy.Press