philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Square Enix to wind down its Web3 venture Symbiogenesis in July

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The project was launched when the non-fungible token (NFT) market’s fatigue reached its peak in 2023, failing to meet the low expectations of players in the sector. The project began as a game where players could purchase NFT-based characters and travel across a mystery multi-chapter fantasy. The growing fatigue in the market was another factor, with the usual players burnt out from other projects.

While the project promised excitement with its 10,000 NFT characters and promise of utility, the underwhelming reception it received was a surprise, especially considering the fact that it came from a renowned publisher like Square Enix.

Square Enix to shutter Symbiogenesis in July

According to reports, Symbiogenesis did not offer users any financial incentives for playing, nor did it offer much in terms of gameplay. The project was supposed to follow legendary projects like Axie Infinity or Off The Grid but refused to adopt their mechanism. Aside from allowing players to sell and buy characters and items in the games, it offered little return on investment. Players mentioned at the time that even at their peak, most of these items sold for a couple of thousand dollars. ...

See the full story here: https://www.mitrade.com/insights/news/live-news/article-3-713288-20250322

The Maya Angelou Immersive Experience

... Professor Travis Cloyd of FIU’s D.R.E.A.M.S. program is proud of the university’s role in this educational AI experience. “By integrating AI, augmented reality, and spatial experiences, we are creating a new standard for location-based entertainment, one that enhances learning, retention, empathy and connection for the next generation. Immersive experiences aren’t just seen—they’re felt. By blending digital and physical worlds, we create deeper connections to stories that matter.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.shootonline.com/spw/the-maya-angelou-immersive-experience/

OpenAI takes its pitch to Hollywood creatives after launching controversial video tool

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This week, the ChatGPT maker screened 11 short films made with Sora on the big screen at Brain Dead Studios, a movie theater on Fairfax Avenue. The event, called Sora Selects, aimed to showcase filmmakers using Sora while also marketing the technology. The company’s first such event was held in New York in January, followed by L.A. The next stop is Tokyo. 

The movies shown on Wednesday featured various themes and AI-generated environments, including medieval times, dreams and sunsets — with scenes showing AI-produced humans, animals and landscapes. ...

Sahai said at peak traffic, there are 10 Sora videos generated every second. The four top cities using Sora are all abroad — Seoul, Paris, Tokyo and Madrid, OpenAI said. New York ranks fifth. ...

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-03-21/openai-hollywood-filmmakers-sora

Bob Iger Says AI May Be “Most Powerful Technology That Our Company Has Ever Seen”

... “Given the speed that it is developing, we’re taking precautions to make sure of three things: One, that our IP is being protected. That’s incredibly important,” Iger said. “Second, that our creators are being respected, and last, that our customers are being considered and valued, particularly as this technology emerges rapidly.” ...

Iger noted throughout the meeting that Disney has always embraced new technologies, and featured some of Disney Imagineering’s tech, like the BDX droids, in a prerecorded segment. AI will likely be technology that plays a role in the company’s future, in pursuit of those creative endeavors. ...

See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/bob-iger-disney-ai-use-comments-1236169173/

(Shelly Palmer) Anthropic Claude

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Anthropic has finally given Claude what it's been missing: the ability to search the web. This may seem like a minor feature update, but it's not—it's huge.

If you're a paid Claude 3.7 Sonnet user, go to your profile settings and toggle on "web search." It's that simple. When Claude uses web search, it provides inline citations, allowing users to verify sources and dig deeper if needed. This brings Claude to feature parity with competitors like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Mistral's Le Chat. ...

Amazing New Technology Can ‘Bend’ Sounds Into Your Ears Only

... We use two ultrasound beams at different frequencies that are completely silent on their own. But when they intersect in space, nonlinear effects cause them to generate a new sound wave at an audible frequency that would be heard only in that specific region. ...

Crucially, we designed ultrasonic beams that can bend on their own. Normally, sound waves travel in straight lines unless something blocks or reflects them. However, by using acoustic metasurfaces – specialized materials that manipulate sound waves – we can shape ultrasound beams to bend as they travel.

Similar to how an optical lens bends light, acoustic metasurfaces change the shape of the path of sound waves. By precisely controlling the phase of the ultrasound waves, we create curved sound paths that can navigate around obstacles and meet at a specific target location.

The key phenomenon at play is what's called difference frequency generation. When two ultrasonic beams of slightly different frequencies, such as 40 kHz and 39.5 kHz, overlap, they create a new sound wave at the difference between their frequencies – in this case 0.5 kHz, or 500 Hz, which is well within the human hearing range.

Sound can be heard only where the beams cross. Outside of that intersection, the ultrasound waves remain silent. ...

This isn't something that's going to be on the shelf in the immediate future. For instance, challenges remain for our technology. Nonlinear distortion can affect sound quality. And power efficiency is another issue  ...

See the full story here: https://www.sciencealert.com/amazing-new-technology-can-bend-sounds-into-your-ears-only?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Nvidia says ‘the age of generalist robotics is here’

... During his GTC 2025 keynote today, Huang demonstrated 1X's NEO Gamma humanoid robot performing autonomous tidying jobs using a post-trained policy built on the GR00T N1 model. “The future of humanoids is about adaptability and learning,” says 1X Technologies CEO Bernt Børnich. “NVIDIA’s GR00T N1 model provides a major breakthrough for robot reasoning and skills. With a minimal amount of post-training data, we were able to fully deploy on NEO Gamma — furthering our mission of creating robots that are not tools, but companions that can assist humans in meaningful, immeasurable ways.” ...

System 1, as Nvidia calls it, is described as a “fast-thinking action model” that behaves similarly to human reflexes and intuition. It was trained on data collected through human demonstrations and synthetic data generated by Nvidia’s Omniverse platform.

System 2, which is powered by a vision language model, is a “slow-thinking model” that “reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions.” Those plans are passed along to System 1, which translates them into “precise, continuous robot movements” that include grasping, moving objects with one or two arms, as well as more complex multistep tasks that involve combinations of basic skills. ...

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/news/631743/nvidia-issac-groot-n1-robotics-foundation-model-available

Moonvalley releases a video generator it claims was trained on licensed content

Los Angeles-based startup Moonvalley has launched an AI video-generating model it claims is one of the few trained on openly licensed — not copyrighted — data.

Named “Marey” after cinema trailblazer Étienne-Jules Marey, the model was built in collaboration with Asteria, a newer AI animation studio. Marey was trained on “owned or fully licensed” source data, according to Moonvalley, and offers customization options including fine-grained camera and motion controls. ...

... “Marey enables nuanced control over in-scene movements,” Moonvalley wrote in a press release provided to TechCrunch, “such as controlling the movement of an individual checkers piece, or animating the exact breeze blowing through a person’s hair.” ...

Moonvalley is pitching Marey, which can generate “HD” clips up to 30 seconds in length, as lower risk than competitors, from a legal perspective. ...

Unlike some “unfiltered” video models that readily insert a person’s likeness into clips, Moonvalley is also committing to building guardrails around its creative tooling. Like OpenAI’s Sora, Moonvalley’s models will block certain content, like NSFW phrases, and won’t allow people to prompt them to generate videos of specific people or celebrities. ...

“We’re proving it’s possible to train AI models without brazenly stealing creative work from the creators — the cinematographers, visual artists, creators, and creative producers — whose voices we aim to uplift with our technology,” Moonvalley co-founder and CEO Naeem Talukdar said in a statement. “At Moonvalley, we’re setting a new standard for generative AI to deliver industry-leading AI capabilities while ensuring that the voices and rights of creatives are not lost as this technology and industry evolve.”

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/12/moonvalley-releases-a-video-generator-it-claims-was-trained-on-licensed-content/

February 2025 AI Developments Under the Trump Administration

This is part of an ongoing series of Covington blogs on the AI policies, executive orders, and other actions of the Trump Administration.  The first blog summarized key actions taken in the first weeks of the Trump Administration, including the revocation of President Biden’s 2023 Executive Order 14110 on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI” and the release of President Trump’s Executive Order 14179 on “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” (“AI EO”).  This blog describes actions on AI taken by the Trump Administration in February 2025. ...

See the full story here: https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/03/14/february-2025-ai-developments-under-the-trump-administration/

Why the internet still needs Section 230

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Just look at Bluesky, which has gained millions of users in only a few months as people flee X. Without Section 230, anyone aggrieved by a decision from Bluesky’s nascent moderation team could initiate a devastating lawsuit on any number of claims, smothering it in legal fees even if it won. The next upstart may never launch at all — leaving users with no alternatives to the government-favored Big Tech cartel.

Critics of Section 230 often charge that the internet has fundamentally changed in the past three decades. Yet the bill’s 26 key words were written to address the same challenges we face today: keeping kids safe online, leveling the playing field between entrenched corporate interests and small innovators, and ensuring that individuals — not the government — control what we see online. ...

We captured these elements in the name we attached to our bill: the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act.

Some critics of Section 230 claim it’s granted special rights to internet platforms. Yet at its heart our proposal simply applied four long-standing principles and rights to the internet.

First, a distributor is not a publisher. ...

Second, distribution of content is as protected as the creation of content. ...

Third, distributors have the right to determine what content they will carry or not carry, as well as the conditions in which they carry or promote content, and that those decisions do not make them publishers. 

Fourth, only the actual speaker, writer, or publisher of content is accountable for that content. ...

[Section 230 is] 26 carefully chosen words:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by an information content provider.” ...

We were well aware of the old A. J. Liebling adage, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” We wanted to continue to guarantee that freedom in the new world — where everyone owns a press that they carry in their pocket.

See the full story here: https://www.theverge.com/policy/626326/ron-wyden-section-230-history-it-takes-chutzpah-excerpt