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.
Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg ultimately blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the failure of his short-form video app, but maybe it was just too soon.
In the first quarter of 2024, 66 short drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox pulled in record revenue of $146 million in global consumer spending.
In March 2024 alone, consumers spent $65 million on short drama apps, a 10,500% increase from the $619,000 spent in March 2023.
In Q1 2024, short drama apps were installed nearly 37 million times, up 992% from 3.4 million in Q1 2023.
Short drama apps claimed a 6.7% share of the total across all three categories combined, up from 0.15% a year ago.
TikTok is working towards launching a new app called TikTok Notes that will allow users to post images in an apparent bid to rival Instagram, a service best known for its static-photo sharing feature.
Instagram, of course, has expanded into video and stories itself, taking pieces of other services and incorporating them into its own product.
As is nearly every social service you can imagine.
If it works for one social media service, expect the rest to follow in some manner at some point — probably sooner rather than later.
Expanding a feature set can bolster engaged time, and therefore how much revenue a social media service can earn.
Most notably, the company is rolling out a Spotify integration that will allow podcasters on Substack to sync and distribute all of their free and paid episodes to Spotify’s streaming service.
Plus, the integration will allow Substack podcasters’ existing subscribers to listen to paid episodes on Spotify.
Podcasters on Substack can set up a Spotify integration by going into their podcast settings, opening the Spotify dropdown, and then clicking the “Sync to Spotify” option to create a new feed with all current and future episodes.
Paid episodes are labeled with a padlock, and listeners need to link their Substack account to Spotify to listen to paid episodes directly on the streaming service.
Substack plans to make this data accessible via a creator’s Substack podcast stats page in the future.
If the decisions made by corporate boards of directors can indicate where a company wants to be focusing, Amazon’s board just made an interesting move.
The company announced on Thursday that Andrew Ng, known for building AI at large tech companies, is joining its board of directors.
And given the AI whiplash that every big tech company is currently dealing with, it feels timely that McGrath is stepping away from the board now.
To stay at the forefront of the tech industry, Amazon will be looking for better thought leadership on the next steps in its artificial intelligence strategy.
It’s worth remembering that Amazon has been a leading player in AI for a long time.
Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google’s most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google’s enterprise-focused AI development platform.
Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google’s Gemini family of generative AI models.
Gemini 1.5 was incredibly able to find the specific perfect 50 dunk and details from just its long context video understanding!
Gemini 1.5 Pro doesn’t process a million tokens at the snap of a finger.
Google previously said that latency is an area of focus, though, and that it’s working to “optimize” Gemini 1.5 Pro as time goes on.
On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids.
At Google Cloud Next, we’re unveiling Google Vids, a brand new, AI-powered video creation app for work,” Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said, introducing the tool.
Examples of the kinds of videos people are creating with Google Vids include product pitches, training content or celebratory team videos.
Like most generative AI tooling, Google Vids starts with a prompt.
Along the way colleagues can comment or make changes, just as with any Google Workspace tool.
Uber Eats is launching a TikTok-like short-form video feed to boost discovery and help restaurants showcase their dishes.
With this launch, Uber Eats now joins numerous other popular apps that have launched their own short-form video feeds following TikTok’s rise in popularity, including Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and Netflix to name a few.
The new Uber Eats short-form videos are visible in carousels placed across the app, including the homescreen.
Verma also shared that in order to further support merchants, the company has revamped its Uber Eats Manager software and added personalized growth recommendations.
Uber Eats announced today that it now has more than one million merchants around the world on its platform, across 11,000 cities in six continents.
Meta has announced changes to its rules on AI-generated content and manipulated media following criticism from its Oversight Board.
So, for AI-generated or otherwise manipulated media on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the playbook appears to be: more labels, fewer takedowns.
“Our ‘Made with AI’ labels on AI-generated video, audio and images will be based on our detection of industry-shared signals of AI images or people self-disclosing that they’re uploading AI-generated content,” said Bickert, noting the company already applies ‘Imagined with AI’ labels to photorealistic images created using its own Meta AI feature.
Meta’s blog post highlights a network of nearly 100 independent fact-checkers which it says it’s engaged with to help identify risks related to manipulated content.
These external entities will continue to review false and misleading AI-generated content, per Meta.
Hoping to stall a ban, TikTok says it generated $14.7B for US small businesses last yearAs U.S. lawmakers weigh a possible TikTok ban, the ByteDance-owned short-form video app released an economic impact report on Thursday.
In it, the company touts the platform generated $14.7 billion for small- to mid-size businesses (SMBs) last year, and a further $24.2 billion in total economic activity, supported through small business’s use of TikTok.
In addition, it says that over 7 million U.S. businesses rely on TikTok and that 224,000 jobs were supported by small business activity on the platform in 2023.
In March, a bill that could ban TikTok passed in the House of Representatives.
The Trump administration had previously sought to ban TikTok, calling it a national security risk, but Trump now opposes a ban, saying that Meta would benefit.
