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.
Every now and then, global governments humbly suggest that Big Tech companies might adjust their actions ever so slightly to avoid existential harm if it’s not too much trouble. A group of eighteen countries including the U.S. and Britain took one of those tentative steps this week by offering non-binding recommendations for building AI systems that are “secure by design”. It’s not clear whether the Tech Overlords took notice.
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.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.