Paula Parisi

YouTube's Playables, a no-download app for light games, is testing a multiplayer feature for select titles. The Playables multiplayer lets users play games in real time with others on the platform. The test kicks off with two games available on both desktop and mobile, “Ludo Club” and “Magic Tiles 3.” YouTube launched Playables to all users in May with more than 75 titles and announced this week that it plans to introduce more features and content in the future. Gaming is a “sizable” viewing market for YouTube, according to Statista, which says its most-subscribed game channels each average about 47 million monthly subscribers.

Google has unveiled Android XR, an operating system for computers and smart glasses powered by Google's Gemini AI large language model. Samsung confirmed that it will release an extended reality headset that runs on Android XR sometime in 2025. Samsung worked closely with Google and Gemini throughout 2023, leading up to the Galaxy S24 series of smartphones that debuted at CES 2024 last January. Google announced the release of the Android XR SDK Developer Preview kit so new apps can be built and existing ones ported over to the new platform to support Samsung's new headset and other devices.

Meta's FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team has unveiled recent work in areas ranging from transparency and safety to agents, and architectures for machine learning. The projects include Meta Motivo, a foundation model for controlling the behavior of virtual embodied agents, and Video Seal, an open-source model for video watermarking. All were developed in the unit's pursuit of advanced machine intelligence, helping “models to learn new information more effectively and scale beyond current limits.” Meta announced it is sharing the new FAIR research, code, models and datasets so the research community can build upon its work.

Amazon is testing a new way to provide viewers with content recommendations with AI Topics, now in limited beta release for Prime Video. AI Topics eschews traditional recommendation algorithms in favor of AI that “discovers” Prime Video content based on a combination of viewing history and personal interests. Users can request “mind-bending sci-fi” or “fantasy quests,” then navigate seamlessly through topics curated for them that appear on the Prime Video home page. Once a topic is selected, movies, series and linear channels will populate alongside additional related topics.

Elon Musk's xAI has been rolling out an updated Grok-2 model that is now available free to all users of the X social platform. Prior to last week, the “unfiltered” chatbot — which debuted in November 2023 — was available only by paid subscription. Now Grok is coming to X's masses, but those on the free tier can only ask the chatbot 10 questions in two hours, while Premium and Premium+ users will “get higher usage limits and will be the first to access any new capabilities.” There is also now a Grok button featured on X that aims to encourage exploration.

Twelve Labs has raised $30 million in funding for its efforts to train video-analyzing models. The San Francisco-based company has received strategic investments from notable enterprise infrastructure providers Databricks and SK Telecom as well as Snowflake Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. Twelve Labs targets customers using video across a variety of fields including media and entertainment, professional sports leagues, content creators and business users. The funding coincides with the release of Twelve Labs' new video foundation model, Marengo 2.7, which applies a multi-vector approach to video understanding.

Pika Labs has updated its generative video model, Pika 2.0 adding more user control and customizability, the company says. Improvements include better “text alignment,” making it easier to have the AI follow through with intricate prompts. Enhanced motion rendering is said to deliver more “naturalistic movement” and better physics, including greater believability in transformations that tend toward the surreal, which has typically been a challenge for genAI tools. The biggest change may be “Scene Ingredients,” which lets users add their own images when building Pika-generated videos.

Meta has added new features to Ray-Ban Metas in time for the holidays via a firmware update that make the smart glasses “the gift that keeps on giving,” per Meta marketing. “Live AI” adds computer vision, letting Meta AI see and record what you see “and converse with you more naturally than ever before.” Along with Live AI, Live Translation is available for Meta Early Access members. Translation of Spanish, French or Italian will pipe through as English (or vice versa) in real time as audio in the glasses' open-ear speakers. In addition, Shazam support is added for users interested in easily identifying songs.

Attempting to stay ahead of OpenAI in the generative video race, Google announced Veo 2, which it says can output 4K clips of two-minutes-plus at 4096 x 2160 pixels. Competitor Sora can generate video of up to 20 seconds at 1080p. However, TechCrunch says Veo 2's supremacy is “theoretical” since it is currently available only through Google Labs' experimental VideoFX platform, which is limited to videos of up to 8-seconds at 720p. VideoFX is also waitlisted, but Google says it will expand access this week (with no comment on expanding the cap).

Blackmagic Design is live with URSA Cine Immersive pre-orders. If it meets its late Q1 2025 ship date the $29,995 the camera will be the first on the market optimized for the Apple Immersive Video (AIV) format compatible with the Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality headset. Currently, there isn't much content that takes advantage of the Vision Pro's immersive features. The Cine Immersive captures 3D footage in resolution of 8160 x 7200 per eye at 90 fps. The package includes a fixed-distance lens and 8TB of onboard network storage. Also in Q1, DaVinci Resolve Studio will be updated to support AIV editing.