Paula Parisi

In the wake of the recent Vision Pro launch, mostly positive reviews, and (reportedly) selling out of its modest 200,000 unit initial production run, Apple seems to have reignited its appetite for innovation. The company is said to be considering the release of a foldable iPhone after quietly developing the technology since 2018. A sticking point for the design-oriented firm may be the “ubiquitous foldable Read More

In his annual letter about the state of YouTube, CEO Neal Mohan shared that YouTube TV has passed 8 million subscribers in seven years. Mohan also revealed that YouTube viewers watch a daily average of 1 billion hours of the 19-year-old streaming video platform on a TV screen. With more than 3 million channels in the YouTube Partner Program, the platform has in the past three years paid over $70 billion to creators, artists and media companies. Now, as YouTube integrates AI, Mohan envisions developing “entirely new ways of empowering creative expression, managing rights, and driving revenue.”

News site Semafor has teamed with Microsoft to create a new breaking news product called Signals it says is a template for “the newsroom of the future.” Using AI tools from Microsoft and OpenAI to assist its journalists, the multi-source Signals will offer “perspectives and insights on the biggest stories in the world as they develop,” Semafor says. Microsoft simultaneously announced deals with the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and the Online News Association. “

The global augmented reality market is expected to reach $289 billion by 2030, according to a recent study by Research and Markets, and advertisers have taken notice. While the majority of revenue is generated by software, then hardware, the augmented reality advertising market is projected to generate $1.2 billion in revenue in the U.S. in 2024, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. To help foster growth in that nascent sector, the IAB has teamed with the Media Ratings Council to create consistent definitions and measurement guidelines for ads within AR campaigns.

The Biden administration has awarded another $42 million to advance development of the 5G Open RAN standard (O-RAN) that has become known as the “Huawei killer.” Administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the form of a grant, the funding will be used to establish a Dallas testing center and companion satellite facility in the Washington DC area for evaluation and R&D in Read More

Nvidia is investing $30 billion in a new business unit focused on custom chips for high-performance computing. The company already controls about 80 percent of the advanced chip market but wants to avoid losing ground as alternatives spring up. Alphabet, AWS, Intel and AMD market high-end processors to third-parties, and Meta is expected to begin deploying its own Artemis AI chips this year. Nvidia has had discussions with Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI about helping them create bespoke chips and is also talking to automakers, cloud service providers (CSPs) and telecom companies, according to reports.

Web-based transcription service Otter.ai is expanding its toolkit with Meeting GenAI, aimed at corporate customers who want to increase meeting productivity while decreasing effort. Multi-meeting capabilities have been added using Otter AI Chat, which can respond to queries like “What did I miss in the meetings from the past two weeks?” Conversation Summary View summarizes meetings in real-time along with automatically identified action items that are assigned owners, deadlines and tracking. Otter is positioning itself as a David versus the Goliaths of AI meeting assists: Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion and Google's Gemini for Workspace.

Google has rebranded its Bard chatbot as Gemini, and is launching a Gemini mobile app along with a subscription offering for Gemini Advanced that will be included as part of the new $19.95 monthly Google One AI Premium plan. As with Bard, Google will continue to make a free version of the Gemini chatbot available. Gemini Advanced is powered by Gemini Ultra, the most sophisticated of the three Gemini AI models Google unveiled in December. “Gemini Advanced not only allows you to have longer, more detailed conversations, it also better understands the context from your previous prompts,” Google explains.

Project Music GenAI Control, an experimental work from Adobe Research, is setting out to change how people create and edit custom audio and music. The prototype tool lets creators generate music from text prompts, “and then have fine-grained control to edit that audio for their precise needs,” according to Adobe. Designed to help create music for broadcasts, podcasts or other “audio that's just the right mood, tone, and length,” it can generate music from text prompts like “powerful rock,” “happy dance” or “sad jazz,” says Adobe Research Senior Research Scientist Nicholas Bryan, a creator of the technology.

Meta's next generation AI silicon is a 5nm chip designed to power the models that provide recommendations to those who use its social network platforms. The new MTIA inference accelerator is part of a “broader full-stack development program for custom, domain-specific silicon that addresses our unique workloads and systems,” Meta says. The next-gen MTIA more than doubles the compute and memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the 7nm MTIA v1 chip introduced in May 2023, resulting in 3x the performance, according to Meta, which says the new silicon is already live in 16 data centers.