On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free.
But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.
Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect.
With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month.
The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required.
But this year, whether to foster developer goodwill or advance its ecosystem ambitions (or both), Google debuted a number of open-source tools primarily aimed at supporting generative AI projects and infrastructure.
Beyond MaxDiffusion, Google’s launching Jetstream, a new engine to run generative AI models — specifically text-generating models (so not Stable Diffusion).
“We’ve heavily optimized [the models’] performance on TPUs and also partnered closely with Nvidia to optimize performance on large GPU clusters,” Lohmeyer said.
The goal is to reduce the barrier to entry for getting generative AI models onto TPU hardware, according to Google — in particular text-generating models.
And Optimum TPU doesn’t yet support training generative models on TPUs — only running them.
According to the Form S-1, the new AI governance committee includes managers from Rubrik’s engineering, product, legal and information security teams.
Here’s why having AI governance could become the new normal.
“Aside from its strategic role to devise and oversee an AI governance program, from an operational perspective, AI governance committees are a key tool in addressing and minimizing risks,” he said.
The EU AI Act has teeth, and “the penalties for non-compliance with the AI Act are significant,” British-American law firm Norton Rose Fulbright noted.
Establishing AI governance committees likely will be at least one way to try to help on the trust front.
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.
To make all of this easier, Zip today announced Zip Premier, a set of new enterprise capabilities, as well as a new low-code integration platform that allows its users to build their own integrations to tap into services that Zip itself doesn’t support with its existing connectors.
And to make it easier to onboard new customers, Zip is also launching a set of 100 pre-built workflow templates today.
Zip is going up against several other procurement platforms from the likes of Coupa, SAP, Workday and more.
“Traditional procurement solutions don’t meet the complex needs of modern enterprises who face an intricate web of fractured procurement processes across many business teams and systems,” he said.
“Developed alongside our largest enterprise customers, our new capabilities streamline the entire spending process, delivering enterprise grade performance with consumer-grade flexibility so our customers can drive compliance and scale with speed.”
Now, it appears Meta is using its Quest VR store to demonstrate how it thinks devices with app stores should approach online age verification.
Since it’s easy to lie about someone’s age when entering only a birthdate, Meta says it’ll require people who accidentally enter a wrong birthdate to verify with an ID or credit card.
Meta has previously told developers that, starting in March 2024, it will require them to identify their app’s intended age group (preteens, teens or adults).
It also announced the launch of its user age group APIs, which officially launched last month.
Meta first added parental supervision tools to its VR headset in 2022.
So Chen founded NewRetirement, a Mill Valley-based company building software to help people create financial retirement plans.
Today, NewRetirement’s direct-to-consumer products power financial planning for 70,000 users managing close to $100 billion in their own financial plans, according to Chen.
And while 37% of respondents say that they work with a financial adviser, two-thirds of Americans believe that their financial planning needs improvement, according to Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Study 2023.
Now, you might wonder, what makes NewRetirement different from startups like Retirable, which similarly provides an array of retirement planning tools and access to asset managers?
Chen asserts that NewRetirement is one of the few — and perhaps only — financial planning platform that serves consumers as well as advisers and workplaces.
Observe — not to be confused with Observe.AI — builds observability tools for machine-generated data that aims to break down data silos, useful for developers to understand how apps are working, being used, and potentially failing.
The main use case for Observe today is to analyze data to troubleshoot when an application is not working as it should be.
It’s very permissive.” The company today works with third-parties to enhance that work but he doesn’t rule out native applications in these and other areas down the line.
“We see it as a lever to unlock new customers,” he said of the investment thesis of Snowflake Ventures.
[In data,] there is nothing that competes with Observe right now,” Williams added.
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.
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.
