The trick to creating believable artificial images is to preserve the realism and character consistency across edits, Google says — and the new model has a «particular focus on maintaining a character’s likeness from one image to the next.»
Available in the Gemini app for free, it fares especially better than the competition on image editing and changing the scenery of a photo.
Continue reading “Google unveils «nano banana» as a state-of-the-art image generator”
The general idea, Perplexity says, is that the incentive structure — and the fundamental economy of the web — is getting outdated by AI companions.
Meets «modern demand»
Comet Plus will be the first business model to reflect «modern demands» from internet users, they write, and they include the likes of Time and Fortune as part of their publisher roster.
Continue reading “Perplexity announces new subscription with revenue sharing for publishers”
Elon Musk just announced on x.com that the model has been released as «open source» under a «Grok 2 Community License Agreement.»
The license forbids the use of the material to «train, create or improve» any foundational AI models, but does allow for some commercial use.
Musk also said that Grok 3 — the model currently running on x.com, will be open sourced in about 6 months:
Continue reading “X.ai open sources Grok 2, now available on Hugging Face”
Google owns the whole stack from hardware to software, and are therefore well positioned to measure their energy efficiency, they say.
During the last twelve months, the carbon footprint of a median Gemini query also went down 44 times, the study finds.
The amount of energy expended on a typical prompt is equivalent to watching TV for about than nine seconds, Google claims.
Continue reading “Energy spent on Gemini queries down 33x in a year, Google claims”
Little is known about the actual details of the collaboration, and Meta’s spokesperson, when asked by The Verge, simply defers to Wang’s x.com post:
Continue reading “Meta partners with Midjourney, licensing their «aesthetic technology»”
If you want to share a chat with friends on Grok, you might get more than you bargained for. According to Forbes, the share-button generates a unique URL that is also shared with search engines, and they found more than 370K stored Grok conversations on Google. OpenAI had a similar problem a few weeks back, and disabled the option. No news yet on mitigation from x.ai.
More at Forbes.
Meta AI enacts hiring freeze as part of reorg
The Wall Street Journal reports that it is part of a wider reorganization of the «Superintelligence» unit, and CNBC reports that it is about «creating a solid structure» for the lab. Apparently, investors have been spooked by the massive expenditures on the unit, after spending big this summer to secure talent. Alexandr Wang, head of the Superintelligence Lab, denies the reports.
More at the WSJ and CNBC.
Continue reading “Friday roundup: Grok spills shares, Meta freezes hiring and AI Mode expands”
MacRumors has a handy list of all the functions, in case you are not interested in the phones themselves and want to follow what’s new instead.
Lots and lots of AI
The list includes a personal daily digest of calendar events, topics and recommended playlists, automatic call transcripts, AI writing prompts, and Voice Translate from a host of languages.
Continue reading “Check out this list of all the AI features announced by Google”
Better memory will enable GPT-6 to get to know us better, remember more details around us, and lead to much better personalization.
— People want product features that require us to be able to understand them, he tells MSNBC.
Will remember more about you
The next GPT should therefore remember more of who you are and what you care about, and allow you to create chatbots that «mirror personal tastes,» CNBC writes.
Continue reading “ChatGPT-6 is already in the pipeline, with better personalization, memory”
The new plan offers greater access to GPT models, and expands on the free tier for just a little more cash.
Continue reading “OpenAI launches ChatGPT Go in India, a shortened paid tier for ~$5/month”
Further, 90% report that AI is reducing repetitive tasks in their work, and 94% even see it as driving innovation.
The technology has upended «norms in developers’ daily lives and work processes,» the study finds.
Continue reading “Almost all game developers say AI is reshaping their industry”
— We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future, Anthropic says in their post on the issue.
Continue reading “Anthropic lets their chatbots turn off conversations due to «model welfare»”
So far, the new GPT-5 has handled football banter like champ, managed complex geopolitics and has given advice on food recipes without calling me a Michelin-worthy chef, while delivering compelling, well sourced analysis quickly, in more than one-sentence responses.
Continue reading “OpenAI upgrades GPT-5 personality to be more likable, in less than a week”
Robby Starbuck rose to fame as an influencer campaigning against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the USA. He often sued companies to force them to end such policies, and even sued Meta after their AI wrongly implicated him in the events of January 6.
Now the suit is settled and he has a new job offer; as a Meta advisor to address «ideological and political bias» in their AIs. This is what Trump meant when he went against «woke» AI, and Meta says they have made «tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias» since working with Starbuck.
More at The WSJ, The Verge, Mashable and MSNBC.
Gemini now defaults to remembering previous chats
Google Gemini’s new feature is always on by design, and will remember your older chats without specifically asking. The feature delivers «more personalized responses the more you use it,» Google says. It will remember «key details and preferences you’ve shared, leading to more natural and relevant conversations, as if you’re collaborating with a partner who’s already up to speed.»
It can be turned off by going to Settings, then «Personal context.» There is also an option called «Temporary Chats» that won’t be remembered.
More at Google’s launch post, The Verge and 9to5Google.
After the launch of Opus 4.1 last week, they have been working at a «fast clip,» to compete with Google and OpenAI, The Verge writes.
Continue reading “Anthropic’s busy week; launches memory, longer context and $1 govt plans”
The launch of GPT-5 has been a little bumpy, at best. The first reaction was from users missing GPT-4o, which was quickly returned — but what about the other «legacy models?»
Almost all models returned
They are all coming back, and as per now the model picker lists GPTs 4.1, o3 and o4-mini for paid users. The only one missing from before the GPT-5 launch is GPT-4.5, which Altman says «costs a lot of GPUs.»
Continue reading “OpenAI brings back more legacy models, ponders «personality» for GPT-5”