philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Top A.I. Researchers Leave OpenAI, Google and Meta for New Start-Up

... “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.” ...

But Mr. Fedus said such companies were not on a path to true scientific discovery. “Silicon Valley is intellectually lazy” when describing the future of large language models, he said. He and Dr. Cubuk are harking back to a time when the tech industry’s leading research operations, including Bell Labs and IBM Research, saw the physical sciences as a vital part of their mission. ...

Periodic Labs, which has secured over $300 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm a16z and others, has started its work at a research lab in San Francisco. But it plans to build its own lab in Menlo Park, Calif., where robots — physical robots — will run scientific experiments on an enormous scale.

The company’s researchers will organize and guide these experiments. As they do, A.I. systems will analyze both the experimentation and the results. The hope is that these systems will learn to drive similar experiments on their own. ...

“It will not make the discovery on the first try, but it will iterate,” Dr. Cubuk said, meaning it will repeat the process over and over again. “After lots of iteration, we hope to get there faster.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/technology/ai-meta-google-openai-periodic.html

California bill regulating top AI companies signed into law

... The law is likely to have worldwide ramifications, as 32 of the world’s top 50 AI companies are based in California. In a signing message to the state Senate, Newsom wrote that California’s “status as a global leader in technology allows us a unique opportunity to provide a blueprint for well-balanced AI policies beyond our borders–especially in the absence of a comprehensive federal AI policy framework.”

The law requires leading AI companies to publish public documents detailing how they are following best practices to create safe AI systems. It creates a pathway for companies to report severe AI-related incidents to California’s Office of Emergency Services while strengthening protections for whistleblowers who raise concerns about health and safety risks. 

The law is backed by civil penalties for noncompliance, to be enforced by the state attorney general’s office. ...

In a statement Monday afternoon, Anthropic co-founder and head of policy Jack Clark said: "Governor Newsom’s signature on SB 53 establishes meaningful transparency requirements for frontier AI companies without imposing prescriptive technical mandates." 

"While federal standards remain essential to avoid a patchwork of state regulations, California has created a strong framework that balances public safety with continued innovation," he said. ...

Addressing the U.N. one day after Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “We are now living through the most destructive arms race in human history because this time, it includes artificial intelligence.”

See the full story here: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-law-california-ca-companies-regulation-newsom-rcna234562

Nvidia Audio2Face AI Avatar-Generator Is Now Open Source

... It works by analyzing acoustic features to create a stream of animation data that is then mapped onto a character’s facial poses. The data translates to “accurate lip-sync and emotional expressions,” says Nvidia, noting the imagery can be rendered offline for pre-scripted content or streamed in real time for dynamic characters with accurate lip-sync and emotional expressions. ...

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/nvidia-audio2face-ai-avatar-generator-is-now-open-source/

AI ‘actress’ may soon sign with agency as studios increasingly turn to artificial intelligence

At the Zurich Summit this weekend, actor and technologist Eline Van der Velden revealed that her new AI talent studio, Xicoia, is already in discussions with agents about signing its first creation — a hyperreal AI actress named Tilly Norwood. ...

If successful, Norwood would be among the first AI-generated performers to secure professional representation, traditionally reserved for human actors. ...

Van der Velden described a shift in industry attitudes over the course of the year. “We were in a lot of boardrooms around February time, and everyone was like, ‘No, this is nothing.’ Then, by May, people were like, ‘We need to do something with you guys,’” she said. ...

See the full story here: https://www.livemint.com/news/trends/who-is-tilly-norwood-ai-actress-may-soon-sign-with-agency-as-studios-increasingly-turn-to-artificial-intelligence-11759078698684.html

What happens when an AI-generated artist gets a record deal? A copyright mess

The only human-made element behind Xania Monet’s act appear to be the lyrics. ...

Jones is a Mississippi-based lyricist behind the R&B artist “Xania Monet” whose most popular song on Spotify racked up over 1 million listens, and whose Reels regularly top 100,000 views on Instagram – despite her likeness, vocals, and music being AI-generated.

Multiple copyright experts speaking with The Verge have been quite clear: the law is not at all settled but generally one cannot copyright AI-generated works by themselves without human intervention, but you may be able to secure copyright where there are human-made expressive elements, which in this case are the lyrics. So, what exactly is Hallwood Media buying? What can they license? What does this mean for the future of music as a sellable product? The more questions we asked, the more it became evident that we’re facing a cultural shift in the wake of the flood of AI-generated content. The law is just trying to keep up. ...

A lack of copyright protection does not stop anyone from selling their art or music, Kevin Madigan, SVP of Policy and Government Affairs at the Copyright Alliance told The Verge. They just might not have any way to enforce a copyright claim if someone rips the music and uses it in a commercial, for example. ...

In the case of an AI-assisted work, only the human-made elements can be registered for copyright protection, and as of today, over a thousand works have been partially copyrighted this way. ...

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/785792/ai-generated-music-record-deal-copyright

One year of agentic AI: Six lessons from the people doing the work

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It’s not about the agent; it’s about the workflow

Achieving business value with agentic AI requires changing workflows. ...

Agents aren’t always the answer

AI agents can do a lot, but they shouldn’t necessarily be used for everything. Too often, leaders don’t look closely enough at the work that needs to be done or ask whether an agent would be the best choice to perform that work. ...

The important thing to remember is not to get trapped in a binary “agent/no agent” mindset. Some agents can do specific tasks well, others can help people do their work better, and in many cases, different technologies altogether might be more appropriate. ...

Stop ‘AI slop’: Invest in evaluations and build trust with users 

... Any efficiency gains achieved through automation can easily be offset by a loss in trust or a decline in quality. ...

Make it easy to track and verify every step

... So when there’s a mistake—and there will always be mistakes as companies scale agents—it’s hard to figure out precisely what went wrong.

Agent performance should be verified at each step of the workflow. Building monitoring and evaluation into the workflow can enable teams to catch mistakes early, refine the logic, and continually improve performance, even after the agents are deployed. ...

The best use case is the reuse case

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Deciding how much to invest in building reusable agents (versus an agent that executes one specific task) is analogous to the classic IT architecture problem where companies need to build fast but not lock in choices that constrain future capabilities. How to strike that balance often requires a lot of judgment and analysis. ...

Humans remain essential, but their roles and numbers will change

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People will need to oversee model accuracy, ensure compliance, use judgment, and handle edge cases, for example. And as we discussed earlier, agents will not always be the best answer, so people working with other tools such as machine learning models will be needed. ...

Another big lesson from our experience is that companies should be deliberate in redesigning work so that people and agents can collaborate well together. Without that focus, even the most advanced agentic programs risk silent failures, compounding errors, and user rejection. ...

See the full story here: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/one-year-of-agentic-ai-six-lessons-from-the-people-doing-the-work

Consistency Is Key: Lessons on Generative AI via ‘The Bends’

In less than three years, generative AI has evolved from an experimental toy to a regular presence in studio pitches, previs workflows, and even the festival circuit. Yet one challenge has stymied the full adoption of generative AI in long-form storytelling: establishing and maintaining control over outputs. This challenge also fuels many of the anxieties surrounding the use of artificial intelligence in media production. How can artists maintain their creative voice when a machine is doing all the artistic work, and often doing so with inconsistent results? The Entertainment Technology Center at USC set out to tackle these and related challenges with a new film project, “The Bends.” ...

See the full article here: https://www.etcentric.org/consistency-is-key-lessons-on-generative-ai-via-the-bends/

Train Your Teams or Drown in Workslop

Chinese censor uses AI to alter gender of gay character in Dave Franco and Alison Brie’s Together; viewers slam move

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In what is being seen as a new frontier in censorship, the Chinese version of Hollywood stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie's thriller Together has altered the gender of a gay character, turning a same-sex relationship into a heterosexual one. ...

Four people who saw the film in China — where it began pre-release screening on September 12 — told Bloomberg News that the version they watched showed a heterosexual couple in the minute-long scene. They said nothing seemed unusual at the time, and they only learned about the edits later through social media. ...

See the full story here: https://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/hollywood/chinese-censor-uses-ai-to-alter-gender-of-gay-character-in-dave-franco-and-alison-bries-together-viewers-slam-move-101758610163360.html

‘Europa’: ETC Teams Up with AWS on Cloud-First Production

Sci-fi short “Europa,” written and directed by Jacqueline Elyse Rosenthal, is the Entertainment Technology Center’s latest project to test the expanding possibilities of virtual production and remote collaboration. To call “Europa” a cloud-first production is to rethink filmmaking from the ground up. This wasn’t just a distributed team working online — it was an ecosystem where every workflow, from previs to final VFX, operated entirely in the cloud. It wasn’t a workaround; it was the foundation. And powering that foundation — every tool, every task, every decision — was AWS. ...

Each of these applications was independent in capability but interconnected through AWS. The cloud didn’t just host files but made them usable, searchable, and actionable across the globe. Collaboration became code. Infrastructure became intelligence. And the architecture itself became a creative enabler. ...

As we move to a cloud-based workflow, the archive becomes the source of truth — not a final resting place but a live, queryable system of record. ...

See the full story here: https://www.etcentric.org/europa-a-cloud-first-production-from-etcusc-and-aws/