Adobe

Adobe Also Joining the Race: Developing Generative Video Technology

Adobe's $20 Billion Figma Deal Faces Eu Probe
Offered as an answer of sorts to OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Imagen 2 and models from the growing number of startups in the nascent generative AI video space, Adobe’s model — a part of the company’s expanding Firefly family of generative AI products — will make its way into Premiere Pro, Adobe’s flagship video editing suite, sometime later this year, Adobe says. Like many generative AI video tools today, Adobe’s model creates footage from scratch (either a prompt or reference images) — and it powers three new features in Premiere Pro: object addition, object removal and generative extend. The lack of release time frame on the video model doesn’t instill a lot of confidence that it’ll avoid the same fate. And that, I’d say, captures the overall tone of Adobe’s generative video presser. Adobe’s clearly trying to signal with these announcements that it’s thinking about generative video, if only in the preliminary sense.

Can India Tackle Election Misinformation? Analyzing Labels and the AI Safety Coalition within its Borders

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India, grappling with election misinfo, weighs up labels and its own AI safety coalition An Adobe-backed association wants to help organizations in the country with an AI standardIndia, long in the tooth when it comes to co-opting tech to persuade the public, has become a global hotspot when it comes to how AI is being used, and abused, in political discourse, and specifically the democratic process. Tech companies, who built the tools in the first place, are making trips to the country to push solutions. Using its open standard, the C2PA has developed a digital nutrition label for content called Content Credentials. It also automatically attaches to AI content generated by Adobe’s AI model Firefly. “That’s a little ‘CR’… it’s two western letters like most Adobe tools, but this indicates there’s more context to be shown,” he said.

Incorporating Affinity: Enhancing Canva’s Competitive Edge Against Adobe’s Creative Suite

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Canva has typically targeted the beginner for their products, but company co-Founder Cliff Obrecht sees the acquisition opening the door to more advanced users. “Canva needed products with more complex capabilities to go up against Adobe,” Wang told TechCrunch. In a blog post on the Affinity website, CEO Ashley Hewson tried to allay customer fears about the change. “In Canva, we’ve found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. With Affinity, Canva gains 3 million users worldwide along with 90 employees who will be joining the company.

“Developers Can Now Access Over 20 Cutting-Edge APIs from Adobe’s Firefly Services”

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Adobe today announced Firefly Services, a set of over 20 new generative and creative APIs, tools and services. Firefly Services makes some of the company’s AI-powered features from its Creative Cloud tools like Photoshop available to enterprise developers to speed up content creation in their custom workflows — or create entirely new solutions. In addition, the company also today launched Custom Models, which allows businesses to fine tune Firefly models based on their assets. Custom Models is already built into Adobe’s new GenStudio. In addition to these AI features, Firefly Services also exposes tools for editing text layers, tagging content and applying presets from Lightroom, for example.

“Transforming Brands: GenStudio by Adobe Introduces Safe and Innovative AI for Marketers”

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Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand. At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands create content and measure its performance, with generative AI — and the promise of brand safety — at its center. Adobe wants GenStudio, which it first previewed last September, to be an end-to-end solution to help marketers tailor their content to different channels and audience segments. That, of course, is where generative AI comes in, since it can speed up content creation dramatically. The tools also continuously checks that anything a user creates in GenStudio is within a brand’s guidelines.

“Streamline Your Mobile Social Content Creation with Adobe”

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Adobe is making it easier for users to create and publish social content on mobile, as the company announced today that it’s launching the latest version of the Adobe Express app in beta. With this update, Adobe is bringing its Firefly AI models directly into the app, allowing users to quickly create and edit social content using generative AI tools. The Adobe Express app lets you preview and publish content to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Since Apple restricts the number of beta users in apps, iOS users need to sign up to get access to the beta app. Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Adobe and TikTok announced that TikTok’s AI-powered Creative Assistant is now available directly within Adobe Express.

“Surprisingly, Figma Still Shines Without Adobe”

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Even without Adobe, things don’t look too bad for Figma CB Insights estimates that Figma is still worth between $8.3 billion and $9 billionA failed acquisition often spells doom for the target company. But despite its $20 billion takeover by Adobe not going through, there are reasons to think that Figma will be just fine. That the online design company will get a $1 billion termination fee from Adobe will help soften the blow. So, “no, startups, you’re not getting a breakup fee unless it’s a sizable enough deal where there is antitrust risk,” VC Ed Sim wrote on X. But in the Adobe-Figma deal, where both companies knew that this risk was front and center, even a $1 billion fee seems only fair compared to the uncertainty ahead.

Adobe Faces Major Challenge as Figma’s $20B Deal Falls Through

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Adobe and Figma ended their $20 billion acquisition dream this morning after regulators signaled it would continue to be rough going. Figma still gets a $1 billion consolation prize as part of the deal, and as the leader in collaborative design, should land on its feet just fine. Adobe put on a brave face in their public statement, but it has to be deeply disappointed with this outcome. Figma, for its part, has not stood still since the deal was announced, proceeding and planning as the independent company it is. If he is right, that’s precisely why Adobe wanted to buy the company because it saw that too.

European Regulatory Obstacles Result in Abandonment of Adobe and Figma’s $20B Merger Deal

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Adobe’s $20 billion mega-bid to buy rival Figma is now officially dead, after the companies said today that regulatory pushback in Europe had caused them to put an end to the acquisition plans. First announced in September last year, the deal was always going to attract regulatory scrutiny due to the size of the transaction and the fact that it took one of Adobe’s major rivals out of the picture. Irrespective of that outcome, the two companies were already facing significant headwinds in Europe. As a result of all this, Adobe will now have to pay Figma a termination fee of $1 billion, which was contractually payable in the event of the transaction failing to attain regulatory clearance — or if it failed to close within 18 months of the acquisition’s announcement last September. That 18-month stipulation hadn’t yet been reached, and no regulatory body had actually announced their final findings — but Adobe and Figma clearly saw no way through this, and with the DoJ also weighing up regulatory action, in the end it just made more sense to pull the plug on the deal entirely.