Author: Art Ryan

When OpenAI debuted its image-generation feature in ChatGPT last week, social media exploded when users realized that they could make AI-generated images that looked like something out of an animated film from Studio Ghibli. Fans hoped that Studio Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki would take a stand, but the 84-year-old animator has remained silent. In the Ghibli fan subreddit, however, fans are enforcing a long-standing ban against AI art. “I just noticed about a dozen different ‘BAN AI NOW’ posts here seemingly spurred on by an influx of AI Ghibli art on other sites,” a moderator posted to the Ghibli subreddit last week. “We don’t allow AI…

More than two years after Google was caught flat-footed by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company has dramatically picked up the pace. In late March, Google launched an AI reasoning model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, that leads the industry on several benchmarks measuring coding and math capabilities. That launch came just three months after the tech giant debuted another model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, that was state-of-the-art for the time. Google’s director and head of product for Gemini, Tulsee Doshi, told TechCrunch in an interview that the increasing cadence of the company’s model launches is part of a concerted effort to keep up with the rapidly…

OpenAI’s new image-generation feature is on track to be one of the company’s most popular product launches ever. According to Brad Lightcap, who oversees day-to-day operations and global deployment at OpenAI, over 130 million users have generated more than 700 million images since the upgraded image generator launched in ChatGPT on March 25. “[W]e appreciate your patience as we try to serve everyone,” Lightcap wrote in a post on X on Thursday. “[The] team continues to work around the clock.” Lightcap added that India is now the fastest-growing ChatGPT market. OpenAI’s new image generator, which launched for all ChatGPT users earlier this week, went viral for…

The quality of AI-generated voices is good enough for things like creating audiobooks and podcasts, having articles read aloud to you, and basic customer support. But many businesses don’t think AI voice tech is quite reliable enough to deploy. That’s why two MIT grads, Moin Nadeem and Nikhil Murthy (pictured above), founded Phonic, a company offering an end-to-end voice stack to increase synthetic voice reliability while decreasing latency. Nadeem and Murthy met at MIT, and have known each other for more than seven years. When the duo started building Phonic last year, they felt there weren’t many companies crafting complete voice tech…

Runway, a startup developing a range of generative AI models for media production, including video-generating models, has raised $308 million in a Series D funding round. General Atlantic led the round, which had participation from Fidelity Management & Research Company, Baillie Gifford, Nvidia, SoftBank, and others. The fresh capital will be put toward AI research and hiring, Runway said in a press release, as well to expand its Runway Studios film and animation production arm. To date, Runway has raised $536.5 million, according to Crunchbase. “Today marks an important milestone as Runway announces a significant next step towards our goal of creating…

Two leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, just announced major initiatives in higher education. It’s the constant one-upping we’ve all become familiar with: this week, Anthropic dropped their announcement at 8 AM Wednesday, while OpenAI followed with nearly identical news at 8 AM Thursday. For Anthropic, this week’s announcement was its first major academic push. It launched Claude for Education, a university-focused version of its chatbot. The company also announced partnerships with Northeastern University, London School of Economics (LSE), and Champlain College, along with with Internet2, which builds university tech infrastructure, and Instructure (maker of Canvas) to increase “equitable access…

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about AI, art, and the controversial collision between the two — a debate that, to be honest, is an absolute mess. If you’ve been on the internet this past week, you undoubtedly know that controversy was just kicked up a notch by the Studio Ghibli memes — pictures cribbing the style of the legendary Japanese film studio. These images, powered by OpenAI’s new image generator, are everywhere; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even been posting some examples to his personal X account. And they’ve widened an already pretty stark rift between AI boosters and critics. Brian…

Researchers at the University of California San Diego and other institutions are working on a way to make a type of artificial intelligence (AI) called diffusion models—a type of AI that can generate new content such as images and videos by training on large datasets—more efficient and widely applicable. Currently, diffusion models work by making small, incremental changes to input data, allowing the model to learn complex patterns and relationships—a process that can be slow and limited in application. So Yian Ma, an assistant professor at UC San Diego’s Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), part of the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences,…

The global artificial intelligence market is projected to reach $4.8 trillion—roughly the size of Germany’s economy—by 2033, the UN said Thursday, warning nearly half of jobs worldwide could be affected. While AI is transforming economies and creating vast opportunities, the technology also risks deepening existing inequalities, the UN trade and development agency UNCTAD warned in a report. In particular, the report cautioned that “AI could impact 40% of jobs worldwide, offering productivity gains but also raising concerns about automation and job displacement.” While previous waves of technology mainly impacted blue-collar jobs, UNCTAD highlighted that knowledge-intensive sectors would be left most exposed by…

In February 2024, Reddit struck a $60 million deal with Google to let the search giant use data on the platform to train its artificial intelligence models. Notably absent from the discussions were Reddit users, whose data were being sold. The deal reflected the reality of the modern internet: Big tech companies own virtually all our online data and get to decide what to do with that data. Unsurprisingly, many platforms monetize their data, and the fastest-growing way to accomplish that today is to sell it to AI companies, who are themselves massive tech companies using the data to train…

Consumers who want to submit a complaint to an agency such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau face a task that, for some, can be daunting: they must fill out a form that requires them to explain the issue, clearly and convincingly, in their own words. Those who are not native English speakers or simply don’t regularly communicate in writing may lack the skills needed to convincingly make their cases.‌ New research from Jiwoong Shin of Yale SOM reveals that the recent wave of consumer Large Language Models like ChatGPT may offer an unexpected solution to this problem. Shin and his…

Editor’s note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copilots. The series also highlights the NVIDIA software and hardware powering advanced AI agents, which form the foundation of AI query engines that gather insights and perform tasks to transform everyday experiences and reshape industries. Online shopping puts a world of choices at people’s fingertips, making it convenient for them to purchase and receive orders — all from the comfort of their homes. But too many choices can turn experiences from exciting to exhausting, leaving…

Real-time AI is unlocking new possibilities in media and entertainment, improving viewer engagement and advancing intelligent content creation. At NAB Show, a premier conference for media and entertainment running April 5-9 in Las Vegas, NVIDIA will showcase how emerging AI tools and the technologies underpinning them help streamline workflows for streamers, content creators, sports leagues and broadcasters. Attendees can experience the power of the NVIDIA Blackwell platform, which serves as the foundation of NVIDIA Media2 — a collection of NVIDIA technologies including NVIDIA NIM microservices and NVIDIA AI Blueprints for live video analysis, accelerated computing platforms and generative AI software. Attendees can also see NVIDIA Holoscan for Media — an advanced…

The Nintendo Switch 2, unveiled April 2, takes performance to the next level, powered by a custom NVIDIA processor featuring an NVIDIA GPU with dedicated RT Cores and Tensor Cores for stunning visuals and AI-driven enhancements. With 1,000 engineer-years of effort across every element — from system and chip design to a custom GPU, application programming interfaces (APIs) and world-class development tools — the Nintendo Switch 2 brings major upgrades. The new console enables up to 4K gaming in TV mode and up to 120 frames per second at 1080p in handheld mode. Nintendo Switch 2 also supports high dynamic…

More than 1 million people are contributing their data to Vana’s decentralized network, which started as an MIT class project. In February 2024, Reddit struck a $60 million deal with Google to let the search giant use data on the platform to train its artificial intelligence models. Notably absent from the discussions were Reddit users, whose data were being sold. The deal reflected the reality of the modern internet: Big tech companies own virtually all our online data and get to decide what to do with that data. Unsurprisingly, many platforms monetize their data, and the fastest-growing way to accomplish…

In the race to deploy enterprise AI, one obstacle consistently blocks the path: hallucinations. These fabricated responses from AI systems have caused everything from legal sanctions for attorneys to companies being forced to honor fictitious policies. Organizations have tried different approaches to solving the hallucination challenge, including fine-tuning with better data, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and guardrails. Open-source development firm Oumi is now offering a new approach, albeit with a somewhat ‘cheesy’ name. The company’s name is an acronym for Open Universal Machine Intelligence (Oumi). It is led by ex-Apple and Google engineers on a mission to build an unconditionally open-source AI platform. On April 2, the company released…

The Founders Fund-backed San Francisco startup Cognition AI (also known as Cognition Labs) made a name for itself out of nowhere in early 2024 with the release of Devin, its AI-powered software engineer that could work alongside human developers and carry out tasks autonomously through natural language instructions given to them by a human dev through a prompt window or even separate third-party communication app Slack. But the AI dev landscape has advanced rapidly since then, with many other companies offering similar functionality and autonomous or semi-autonomous coding agents, including GitHub Copilot, AWS Developer Q, Codeium’s Windsurf, and Cursor. Cognition itself has since its inception leveraged…

Just as Meta Platform (META) is doubling down on its artificial intelligence ventures, it is suffering what could be a massive blow. During its Q1 earnings report, the social media giant clearly focused on increasing AI spending in 2025 with higher capital expenditure plans. However, the person responsible for spearheading Meta’s AI expansion has announced an abrupt exit from the company. Joelle Pineau, who has been Vice President of AI Research at Meta since 2023, recently announced in a LinkedIn post that May 30 will be her last day. Her decision comes at a time when Meta is facing many challenges as it seeks…

Travel planning has traditionally been fragmented and time-consuming, forcing users to juggle multiple platforms for inspiration, itinerary creation, and bookings. Traditional platforms also lack engaging content, making destination discovery difficult. Unravel addresses these challenges by offering one integrated app that combines immersive travel videos with seamless itinerary planning and booking, streamlining the entire process. Today, this AI-powered video commerce platform has secured $7M in Series A funding. Nauta Capital, one of Europe’s leading B2B software investors, led the round, joined by Active Partners, Slingshot Ventures (whose largest LP is Kees Koolen, former CEO and Chairman of Booking.com), and Olivier Bisserier (former CFO, Booking.com). Additional investors…

MLCommons announced new results for its MLPerf Inference v5.0 benchmark suite, which delivers machine learning (ML) system performance benchmarking. The rorganization said the esults highlight that the AI community is focusing on generative AI, and that the combination of recent hardware and software advances optimized for generative AI have led to performance improvements over the past year. To view the results, visit the Datacenter and Edge pages. The MLPerf Inference benchmark suite, which encompasses datacenter and edge systems, is designed to measure how quickly systems can run AI and ML models across a variety of workloads. The open-source and peer-reviewed benchmark suite creates a…