philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Newest Alamo Drafthouse Is a World-First Godzilla Cinematic Experience

Alamo Drafthouse is working on a multi-year alliance with Toho that will bring with it new merch and — special Godzilla programming - and it’s kicking off today with the opening of a new Drafthouse theater in California that will become the world’s first fully Godzilla-themed cinema.

io9 can exclusively reveal the first details about Drafthouse and Toho’s new partnership, which formally kicks off with today’s opening of the Alamo Drafthouse Valley Fair, at Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara, California.  The new theater, one of two new Drafthouses opening in Silicon Valley this summer, features a a two-story window projection of Godzilla at the front of the theater, welcoming customers into a theater decked out with Godzilla theming.  ...

See the full story here: https://gizmodo.com/alamo-drafthouse-godzilla-theater-toho-partnership-2000618998

Yep, There’s an Agent for That

... Today, we’ve reached peak app fatigue. The average smartphone user has 80+ apps installed but regularly uses only 9. We don’t want another app; we want intelligence that works across all our apps.

OpenAI launched Operator, an AI agent that books restaurant reservations through OpenTable and assembles orders on Instacart and DoorDash by using your browser: pointing, clicking, typing, and navigating websites autonomously. Operator achieves an 87% success rate on live website navigation tasks but only works through web browsers, not mobile. ...

Development tools now include Agent Mode for complex multi-step tasks and Journeys that test apps using natural language, with Gemini performing actions autonomously across multiple app states. Key improvements include:

Notification Intelligence: Automatic notification grouping and Notification Cooldown that gradually lowers alert volume when you get bursts from the same app.

Enhanced Photo Integration: New photo picker APIs enable searching across cloud providers and apps, letting agents access your photos contextually.

System-Level Accessibility: Improved accessibility APIs enable agents to observe and interact with other applications, creating foundation for automation across apps.

Your phone can become the intelligent coordinator you’ve always wanted instead of isolated apps. ...

The age of “there’s an app for that” is ending. The age of “there’s an agent for that” is beginning...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/06/yep-theres-an-agent-for-that/?mc_cid=1d4d2112ce&mc_eid=3ce5196977

The Global A.I. Divide

... Cassava, a tech company founded by a Zimbabwean billionaire, Strive Masiyiwa, is scheduled to open one of Africa’s most advanced data centers this summer. The plans, three years in the making, culminated in an October meeting in California between Cassava executives and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, to buy hundreds of his company’s chips. Google is also one of Cassava’s investors.

The data center is part of a $500 million effort to build five such facilities across Africa. Even so, Cassava expects it to address only 10 percent to 20 percent of the region’s demand for A.I. At least 3,000 start-ups have expressed interest in using the computing systems.

“I don’t think Africa can afford to outsource this A.I. sovereignty to others,” said Hardy Pemhiwa, Cassava’s chief executive. “We absolutely have to focus on and ensure that we don’t get left behind.”

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/23/technology/ai-computing-global-divide.html

Inside Disney’s Campaign to Protect Darth Vader From AI

...

Midjourney was a ripe target. Founded in 2022, its model allows people to generate an image using a text prompt. It was clear to Walt Disney Co. that the model had been trained on characters such as Darth Vader and Deadpool, and the company sent Midjourney several notices asking the startup to take down material it believed infringed upon its copyrights. Those notices were ignored, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this month. Midjourney declined to comment on the suit.

Disney’s top lawyer Horacio Gutierrez took the lead on this legal fight, but he asked his peers in Hollywood to join. Some, like Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., were distracted with their own corporate dramas. Others, like Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., have different priorities. Yet Comcast Corp., the owner of NBCUniversal, agreed to participate.

...

Media companies continue to be litigious. Major newspapers (the New York Times), record labels (all three majors) and Hollywood studios have sued AI companies. But those engaged in litigation also say they want to work with these new companies. Publishers, including the Atlantic and Vox Media, have licensed their work to OpenAI while record labels have struck partnerships with YouTube.

Hollywood studios already use AI technology in many phases of their business. The Wonder Project used AI to cut the cost of shooting its hit Amazon show House of David while Lionsgate struck a deal with AI startup Runway to build a model trained on some of Lions Gate’s IP. ...

“The goal is you’re making higher quality content for lower prices,” Lionsgate Vice Chairman Michael Burns said at Runway’s AI Film Festival in Santa Monica earlier this month. ...

The Trump administration fired the head of the copyright officenot long after she issued a report contending that some usage of copyrighted materials to train models was legal while others were not. ...

See the full story here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-22/inside-disney-s-campaign-to-protect-darth-vader-from-ai

Seizing the agentic AI advantage

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• A new AI architecture paradigm—the agentic AI mesh—is needed to govern the rapidly evolving organizational AI landscape and enable teams to blend custom-built and off-the-shelf agents while managing mounting technical debt and new classes of risk. But the bigger challenge won’t be technical. It will be human: earning trust, driving adoption, and establishing the right governance to manage agent autonomy and prevent uncontrolled sprawl.
• To scale impact in the agentic era, organizations must reset their AI transformation approaches from scattered initiatives to strategic programs; from use cases to business processes; from siloed AI teams to cross-functional transformation squads; and from experimentation to industrialized, scalable delivery.
• Organizations will also need to set up the foundation to effectively operate in the agentic era. They will need to upskill the workforce, adapt the technology infrastructure, accelerate data productization, and deploy agent-specific governance mechanisms. The moment has come to bring the gen AI experimentation chapter to a close—a pivot only the CEO can make.

...

See the full story here: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/seizing-the-agentic-ai-advantage

Eyeglasses With Built-In Hearing Aids: This Just Makes Sense

PhilNote: After ~8 years it is nice to see this tech possibly going mainstream.

... You can also toggle between picking up sounds from the direction you’re facing or sounds from all around your head. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/hearing-aid-eyeglasses-nuance-audio-bdd4c330

How UFC is employing AI

... That’s where UFC Insights Engine - a generative AI platform developed collaboratively by UFC and IBM using Watsonx technology—comes in. The platform captures live fight data and translates it into clear analytics, statistical insights, and narratives. This allows fans to better understand rivalries, interpret judging decisions, and gauge who has the upper hand. AI-generated insights are displayed during live broadcasts, on social media, and at event venues, making fights easy to follow,...

The process of adopting AI is different, requiring considerable planning and support across the organization. Without such a disciplined approach, companies run the risk of employees becoming frustrated, stressed, or even resentful of the new technology. ...

Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles is reportedly introducing a new free-flow facial authentication system called Go-Ahead Entry—a non-IBM technology—that allows fans to enter the venue without presenting a physical ticket. By registering in advance and submitting a selfie, fans can use a dedicated entry lane for faster, contactless access. ...

See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91346610/how-ufc-is-employing-ai-to-elevate-the-fan-experience-and-give-its-own-workers-a-leg-up-on-the-competition

What Gets Measured, AI Will Automate

Summary: In the age of AI, what gets measured gets automated. As models grow more powerful, any task that can be turned into data—from spreadsheet analysis to therapy sessions—is increasingly within reach of automation. The underlying playbook is clear: define the task, feed it data, attach rewards, and apply compute. As AI slashes the cost of measurement, even minor activities become economically viable to automate, expanding the reach of AI into nearly every industry. What remains defensible are tasks defined by ambiguity, creativity, or uncertainty—places where outcomes can’t be easily quantified or where human judgment still prevails. For leaders, the challenge is to manage both the measurable and the unmeasurable, investing not just in automation, but in the intangibles—taste, trust, vision, and adaptability—that AI can’t yet replicate.

Read the full article here: https://hbr.org/2025/06/what-gets-measured-ai-will-automate

Midjourney Set to Release its First Video Model

... This is not a photorealistic model. Founder David Holz says the goal is aesthetic control, not realism. Think art direction over live action. ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/06/midjourney-set-to-release-its-first-video-model/

MIT Looks at How AI Agents Can Learn to Reason Like Humans

PhilNote: this work appears to view human intervention as a flaw, rather than as an AI/human partnership.

“These findings underscore a fundamental reality: Most GenAI tools remain tethered to humans. The reason: Most enterprise functions are complex, interdependent and context-rich—conditions that challenge today’s GenAI capabilities,” the report added.New research at MIT suggests that could be the case. A report Tuesday (June 17) from the university’s Sloan School of Management covers some of MIT’s studies involving agentic artificial intelligence (AI), including an exploration into how these digital entities can be trained to reason and collaborate more like humans. ...

The research found that AI’s strict adherence to rules could be relaxed when exposing models to human reasoning, letting them be more flexible in making exceptions in scenarios like hiring and customer service. ...

In the meantime, generative AI (GenAI) still “requires human operators for prompting and assessing the outcomes of most tasks,” as PYMNTS wrote in the recent report, “AI at the Crossroads: Agentic Ambitions Meet Operational Realities.”

See the full story here: https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/mit-looks-at-how-ai-agents-can-learn-to-reason-like-humans/