Google will pay to carry stories from Canadian news outlets under an agreement announced yesterday. Details are sparse but the process for compliance with government’s C-18 law has been simplified to meet some Google objections. Meta, the only other firm required to make payments under the law, has not changed its decision to block reliable news.
India-based Rephrase.ai, which uses generative AI to create videos from a text prompt, has been acquired by an unnamed Big Tech firm that is almost surely Adobe. Rephrase says it has over 50,000 users. The new capabilities will presumably be integrated into Adobe’s existing design tools.
The threat that large language models will reach human levels of performance on common tasks is overblown, according to research co-authored by Meta’s top AI scientist Yann LeCunn. A new benchmark of real-world problems found that humans succeeded at 92% while ChatGPT-4 with plug-ins solved only 15%. A cynic would note that Meta has a strong interest in reducing pressure for AI regulation, and that other experts have argued the debate over human-like performance is a distraction from concrete problems that AI poses today.
Amperity has launched Lakehouse CDP, which delivers CDP functions within “lakehouse” data stores including Snowflake and Databricks. Amperity tools for data modeling, data quality, identity resolution, generative AI, segmentation, and performance measurement will send all results to a company’s own lakehouse rather than a separate Amperity-managed database. Modules can be used independently but the real benefit here is that Amperity is one of the few “composable” CDP vendors who offer a complete set of pre-integrated CDP functions.