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.
Full image variations based on creative assets or text prompts, plus text overlay and image expansion, are among the new GenAI features offered by Meta. Also offered, text generation to create variations on ad headlines. The features are available in Ads Manager through Advantage+ creative.