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Yesterday — 12 November 2024tech

YouTube is testing music remixes made by AI

By: Emma Roth
12 November 2024 at 22:47
YouTube’s logo with geometric design in the background
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube is testing a new feature that will let creators use AI to “restyle” licensed songs for their shorts. The small group of creators with access can enter a prompt to change up different elements in a song, such as its mood or genre, and the expansion of YouTube’s Dream Track AI feature will generate a reworked 30-second soundtrack.

YouTube:

If you’re a creator in the experiment group, you can select an eligible song > describe how you want to restyle it > then generate a unique 30-second soundtrack to use in your Short.

These restyled soundtracks will have clear attribution to the original song through the Short itself and the Shorts audio pivot page, and will also clearly indicate that the track was restyled with AI

YouTube has...

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Generative disinfo is real — you’re just not the target, warns deepfake tracking nonprofit

12 November 2024 at 22:46

Many feared that the 2024 election would be affected, and perhaps decided, by AI-generated disinformation. While there was some to be found, it was far less than anticipated. But don’t let that fool you: the disinfo threat is real — you’re just not the target. So at least says Oren Etzioni, an AI researcher of […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Eufy’s new floodlight cam will watch over your backyard in HD for $150

12 November 2024 at 22:16
The Eufy Floodlight Camera E30 attached to a wall covered in siding.
Eufy’s new hardwired floodlight camera can record all day long. | Image: Eufy

Eufy’s new Floodlight Camera E30 attaches a 2K camera that can tilt and pan 360 degrees to a pair of 2,000-lumen LED floodlights and throws in local video capture without subscription fees. Although Eufy, the smart home brand of Anker, sells similar products with batteries and solar panels offering more flexibility on where they can be mounted, most homes already have a floodlight. That makes the hardwired E30 an easy replacement that is available now through the company’s website and Amazon for $149.99,

There are alternatives we currently recommend in our floodlight camera buyer’s guide, but for $150, the Eufy E30 offers several premium features without requiring ongoing fees to actually use them.

Being hardwired also means the E30,...

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The Rivian-Volkswagen joint venture deal is now up to $5.8B

12 November 2024 at 22:11

Rivian and Volkswagen Group have finalized a multi-billion-dollar joint venture to develop software, paving the way to let the German auto giant leverage the EV startup’s more technical chops in the coming years. Volkswagen will invest up to $5.8 billion by 2027, about 16% more than when the deal was first announced in June. Volkswagen […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

VW and Rivian officially kick off $5.8 billion joint venture, announce leadership

12 November 2024 at 22:10
Rivian vehicles
Image: Rivian

Volkswagen and Rivian have crossed all their T’s and dotted all their I’s in their new $5.8 billion joint venture, which officially kicks off its work on November 13th, the companies announced today.

Last June, VW said it would invest $5 billion in Rivian as part of a new joint venture that’s focused on developing a new electrical architecture and vehicle software for future models, including subcompact cars, with the first planned for 2027. The investment size has now increased to $5.8 billion.

The new joint venture, dryly named “Rivian and VW Group Technology, LLC,” will be led by Rivian software chief Wassym Bensaid and VW Group chief technology engineer Carsten Helbing. Teams will be based in...

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard has fantastic hair tech thanks to FIFA and Madden

12 November 2024 at 21:55
Screenshot from Dragon Age: The Veilguard showing off the game’s new hair technology.
Image: BioWare

EA has shared a lengthy blog detailing all the technical work that went into rendering hair in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

While it used to be, and in some cases still is, a struggle to find a game with a character creator that included a diverse range of hairstyles, newer games are getting better at providing styles to represent folks on the kinky / curly hair spectrum where a lot of people of color reside. However, the new struggle is getting those hairstyles to look and act natural. I remember looking at all the hairstyles in Horizon Forbidden West and being bemused that the dreadlocks on Varl looked like they were made out of foam, while his beard was simply straight hair without an ounce of kink a Black man like him typically has....

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For the second time this year, NASA’s JPL center cuts its workforce

12 November 2024 at 21:55

Barely nine months after the last cut, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will again reduce its workforce. On Wednesday, the lab will lay 325 employees off, representing about 5 percent of the workforce at the California-based laboratory that leads the development of robotic space probes for NASA.

"This is a message I had hoped not to have to write," JPL Director Laurie Leshin said in a memo to staff members on Tuesday morning, local time. "Despite this being incredibly difficult for our community, this number is lower than projected a few months ago thanks in part to the hard work of so many people across JPL."

The cuts this week follow a reduction of 530 employees in February of this year due to various factors, including a pause in funding for the Mars Sample Return mission. The NASA laboratory has now cut about one-eighth of its workforce this year.

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© NASA/JPL-Caltech

TikTok is integrating with influencer shopping app LTK, videos show

12 November 2024 at 21:52

An integration with LTK, an app that lets consumers shop from creator and influencers’ recommendations, is rolling out on TikTok, according to videos by select creators viewed by TechCrunch. The collaboration could boost fashion creators’ ability to earn affiliate commissions via LTK, while also making it easier for consumers to locate the clothes and accessories […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Trump expected to try to stop looming TikTok ban

12 November 2024 at 21:52

President-elect Donald Trump will try to prevent TikTok from getting banned in the United States, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday. During his campaign, Trump promised voters that he would save the popular social media app if elected. Former Trump adviser and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told the Post that the president-elect “appreciates the breadth and […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

What if AI doesn’t just keep getting better forever?

12 November 2024 at 21:34

For years now, many AI industry watchers have looked at the quickly growing capabilities of new AI models and mused about exponential performance increases continuing well into the future. Recently, though, some of that AI "scaling law" optimism has been replaced by fears that we may already be hitting a plateau in the capabilities of large language models trained with standard methods.

A weekend report from The Information effectively summarized how these fears are manifesting amid a number of insiders at OpenAI. Unnamed OpenAI researchers told The Information that Orion, the company's codename for its next full-fledged model release, is showing a smaller performance jump than the one seen between GPT-3 and GPT-4 in recent years. On certain tasks, in fact, the upcoming model "isn't reliably better than its predecessor," according to unnamed OpenAI researchers cited in the piece.

On Monday, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who left the company earlier this year, added to the concerns that LLMs were hitting a plateau in what can be gained from traditional pre-training. Sutskever told Reuters that "the 2010s were the age of scaling," where throwing additional computing resources and training data at the same basic training methods could lead to impressive improvements in subsequent models.

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CAR T-Cell Therapy Recruits Brain’s Defenses Against Glioblastoma

12 November 2024 at 21:31
This shows brain scans.Researchers have developed an innovative CAR T-cell therapy to combat glioblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in adults. This approach not only attacks tumor cells directly but also reprograms the tumor's microenvironment, enabling immune cells to fight the cancer rather than protect it.

Anysphere acquires Supermaven to beef up Cursor

12 November 2024 at 21:11

Anysphere, the company behind AI-powered code editor Cursor, has acquired AI coding assistant Supermaven for an undisclosed sum. Anysphere CEO Michael Truell announced the deal in a post on Cursor’s blog. Supermaven, he said, will enable Anysphere to launch a new version of its Tab AI model that’s “fast, context-aware, and highly intelligent,” especially at sequences […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Glial Cells May Influence Depression and Schizophrenia

12 November 2024 at 21:01
This shows glial cells.New research highlights neuroglia (or glia cells) as critical players in mental health, potentially influencing conditions like depression and schizophrenia. Glia cells, long considered "support cells" in the brain, have now been shown to communicate through unique calcium signaling, impacting neuronal function and stress responses. Studies suggest that compromised astrocyte function, a glial cell type, may relate to depressive symptoms and schizophrenia.

Meta verlaagt prijzen advertentievrije abonnementen in de EU met 40 procent

12 November 2024 at 20:58
Meta gaat de prijzen van zijn advertentievrije abonnementen voor Facebook en Instagram met 40 procent verlagen. De prijsverlaging geldt ook voor de abonnementen die al lopen. Ook krijgen gratis gebruikers binnenkort de optie om minder gerichte reclame te zien.

Record labels unhappy with court win, say ISP should pay more for user piracy

12 November 2024 at 20:36

The big three record labels notched another court victory against a broadband provider last month, but the music publishing firms aren't happy that an appeals court only awarded per-album damages instead of damages for each song.

Universal, Warner, and Sony are seeking an en banc rehearing of the copyright infringement case, claiming that Internet service provider Grande Communications should have to pay per-song damages over its failure to terminate the accounts of Internet users accused of piracy. The decision to make Grande pay for each album instead of each song "threatens copyright owners' ability to obtain fair damages," said the record labels' petition filed last week.

The case is in the conservative-leaning US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. A three-judge panel unanimously ruled last month that Grande, a subsidiary of Astound Broadband, violated the law by failing to terminate subscribers accused of being repeat infringers. Subscribers were flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads monitored by Rightscorp, a copyright-enforcement company used by the music labels.

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