Generative AI

Spotify’s AI playlist feature rolls out to the U.S. and more markets

Apps /

Spotify has expanded the availability of its AI Playlist tool to the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand after initially launching it for Premium subscribers in the U.K. and Australia.  This feature, currently in beta on Android and iOS devices, allows users to create personalized playlists based on written prompts. For instance, users can enter […]

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Black Forest Labs, the company that powers Grok’s image generation, is raising another $100M on a $1B valuation, say sources

AI /

While OpenAI pursues yet another monster fundraise, it is not stealing all the oxygen in the room: AI startups building promising foundational models can still open doors, and checkbooks. For example, multiple sources tell us that Black Forest Labs — a startup building generative AI image models, which only came out of stealth two months

Black Forest Labs, the company that powers Grok’s image generation, is raising another $100M on a $1B valuation, say sources Read More »

Grok’s image generator, Black Forest Labs, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation, say sources

Fundraising /

While OpenAI pursues yet another monster fundraise, it is not stealing all the oxygen in the room: AI startups building promising foundational models can still open doors, and checkbooks. Multiple sources tell us that Black Forest Labs — a startup that’s building generative AI image models and came out of stealth two months ago with

Grok’s image generator, Black Forest Labs, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation, say sources Read More »

Fal.ai, which hosts media-generating AI models, raises $23M from a16z and others

Fundraising /

Fal.ai, a dev-focused platform for AI-generated audio, video, and images, today revealed that it’s raised $23 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. It’s a two-round deal. $14 million of Fal’s total came from a Series A tranche led by Kindred Ventures.

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LinkedIn scraped user data for training before updating its terms of service

Enterprise /

LinkedIn may have trained AI models on user data without updating its terms. LinkedIn users in the US — but not the EU, EEA, or Switzerland, likely due to those regions’ data privacy rules — have an opt-out toggle in their settings screen disclosing that LinkedIn scrapes personal data to train “content creation AI models.”

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Generative AI startup Runway inks deal with a major Hollywood studio

Media & Entertainment /

Runway, a startup developing AI video tools, including video-generating models, has partnered with Lionsgate — the studio behind the “John Wick” and “Twilight” franchises — to train a custom video model on Lionsgate’s movie catalog. Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns said in a statement that the studio’s “filmmakers, directors and other creative talent” will get

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AWS shuts down DeepComposer, its MIDI keyboard for AI music

Media & Entertainment /

AWS’ weird AI-powered keyboard experiment, DeepComposer, is no more. In a blog post today, the company announced it’s shutting down the five-year-old DeepComposer, a physical MIDI piano and AWS service that let users compose songs with the help of generative AI. “After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end support for AWS DeepComposer,”

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Snap’s new AI feature lets you create Snapchat Lenses by simply describing them

Social /

Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, is expanding its suite of AI tools for creators. At this year’s Snap Partner Summit in Santa Monica, Snap announced a new feature, Easy Lens, that translates plain-English descriptions into Lenses, Snap’s brand of augmented reality (AR) objects, 3D effects, characters, and transformations for photos and videos. Available in Snap’s developer

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