Author: kissdev

[ad_1] If your target market has 22 official languages and its people speak in over 19,000 dialects, does it make sense to offer a text-only AI chatbot that can function best in a couple languages? That’s the question Indian AI startup Sarvam has been working to solve, and on Tuesday it launched a series of offerings, including a voice-enabled AI bot that supports more than 10 Indian languages, betting that people in the country would prefer to talk to an AI model in their own language rather than chat with it over text. The startup is also launching a small…

According to the latest statistics, 81% of Elderly Japanese Seek Virtual Companionship

[ad_1] A class action lawsuit filed by artists who allege that Stability, Runway and DeviantArt illegally trained their AIs on copyrighted works can move forward, but only in part, the presiding judge decided on Monday. In a mixed ruling, several of the plaintiffs’ claims were dismissed while others survived, meaning the suit could end up at trial. That’s bad news for the AI makers: Even if they win, it’s a costly, drawn-out process where a lot of dirty laundry will be put on display. And they aren’t the only companies fighting off copyright claims — not by a long shot.…

[ad_1] There’s a fascinating look by John Herrman over at NYMag today at one of the big proposed uses of AI: summarizing content. We all need things summarized, right? Everybody’s too busy and overloaded with information. At least that’s what every tech company doing AI seems to be settling on. The problem is the summaries that AI produces aren’t always very useful. Beyond the obvious joke applications, like an AI summary of the Mt. Everest climb on the digital hiking guide AllTrails that was so gamified it was later taken down, Herrman points out that Gmail’s email summaries often leave…

[ad_1] When I interviewed writers and actors at the picket lines of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year, there was a mix of sentiment around AI, which, while largely negative, encompassed anxiety, uncertainty, equivocation, and anger.The crowd in Burbank was the most uniformly and passionately anti-AI I’ve ever witnessed. Asked for his thoughts on how AI was impacting his industry, one animator said, “AI can fuck right off.” I asked the storyboard artists Lindsey Castro and Brittany McCarthy for their thoughts on AI, and both simply booed.A year after the WGA strikes, AI was not, to the animation workers…

[ad_1] Balderton Capital — one of the older, larger, European VCs noted for investing in Revolt and Wayve — has raised a fresh $1.3 billion in total, spread across two funds. Its Early Stage Fund IX will get $615 million, and its Growth Fund II will get $685 million. The news was greeted with cautious optimism by the VCs TechCrunch spoke with.  It’s also a further indication that European VC is picking up after a lackluster couple of years following the ZIRP and post-COVID-driven bull-run of 2021 and2022.  Indeed, the London-based Balderton pointed to research that said European VC funds have outperformed…

[ad_1] Meta and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced on Monday the expansion of their multi-year music licensing agreement, which enables users to share songs from UMG’s music library across Meta’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Horizon, Threads, and WhatsApp) without violating copyright.  What’s most notable about the new agreement is that it states that the two companies are addressing “unauthorized AI-generated content.” This refers to songs being scraped by AI systems, often without the consent of the original creators. Artists and songwriters are increasingly grappling with AI fakes and their work being used by AI companies to train their models. “We look…

[ad_1] Amazon loses money on Echo smart speakers. It’s been an open secret for the duration of Alexa’s existence. It’s the product of the kind of loss leader strategy only a company of Amazon’s size can get away with for a decade. Selling hardware at a loss can be an effective strategy, of course. Think about printers and razors, which get corporate feet into the door and make up for the loss with ink cartridges and blades, respectively. From the perspective of saturation, Amazon’s strategy can be viewed as a success. Early this year, founder Jeff Bezos claimed that Alexa…