philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Social media now main source of news in US, research suggests

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More than half (54%) of people get news from networks like Facebook, X and YouTube - overtaking TV (50%) and news sites and apps (48%), according to the Reuters Institute.

"The rise of social media and personality-based news is not unique to the United States, but changes seem to be happening faster – and with more impact – than in other countries," a report found.

Podcaster Joe Rogan was the most widely-seen personality, with almost a quarter (22%) of the population saying they had come across news or commentary from him in the previous week. ...

It said populist politicians around the world are "increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, 'personalities', and 'influencers' who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse". ...

• The use of AI chatbots to get the news is on the rise, and is twice as popular among under-25s than the population as a whole.
• But most people think AI will make news less transparent, accurate and trustworthy.
• All generations still prize trusted brands with a track record for accuracy, even if they don't use them as often as they once did

See the full story here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93lzyxkklpo

Its time for sovereign AI

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been crisscrossing the continent making a compelling case for “sovereign AI,” which has been defined as localized AI models that reflect each country's unique language, culture, and values. ...

Behind the policy speeches and funding pledges is a very clear business case: Nvidia wants to ensure that when Europe builds its own AI capabilities, it does so using Nvidia GPUs. It’s also a direct response to Europe’s growing discomfort with being dependent on a small number of U.S. tech giants.

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See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2025/06/its-time-for-sovereign-ai/

Apple’s Liquid Glass design is paving the way for AR glasses

... Liquid Glass is named with the idea that each window on a phone is like a pane of glass, see-through and somewhat reflective. It gives the screen a sleeker look, though in its developer beta, Apple hasn’t quite wored out the kinks of playing with opacity. ...

If that’s the case, then Apple will need to master the style of these somewhat transparent design elements. If you’re wearing AR glasses and get some form of notification, you’d probably rather see that as something that blends into your surroundings, and not some giant colorful box that suddenly obscures your vision while you’re walking around. ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/13/apples-liquid-glass-design-is-paving-the-way-for-ar-glasses/

How Disney’s AI lawsuit could shift the future of entertainment

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“It’s sort of a ‘finally’ moment,” said Chad Hummel, principal at the Los Angeles office of the law firm McKool Smith. Previously, entertainment giants had stayed on the sidelines even as researchers documented how AI tools could be used to generate apparently infringing content. Now they’ve entered the fray in a big way.

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See the full story here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/11/disney-universal-sue-midjourney-ai-copyright/

Meta Is Creating a New A.I. Lab to Pursue ‘Superintelligence’

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Meta is preparing to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence,” a hypothetical A.I. system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology race, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s plans.

Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, 28, the founder and chief executive of the A.I. start-up Scale AI, to join the new lab, the people said, and has been in talks to invest billions of dollars in his company as part of a deal that would also bring other Scale AI employees to the company. Meta has offered seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading A.I. companies such as OpenAI and Google, with some agreeing to join, according to the people. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/technology/meta-new-ai-lab-superintelligence.html

ChatGPT: Scale AI is a company that provides data-centric infrastructure to accelerate the development of AI applications. They focus on creating high-quality data for machine learning models, offering services like data annotation, synthetic data generation, and model validation. Their platform helps organizations build and deploy AI models efficiently, with a focus on both speed and accuracy. 

Is it live or is it AI? A ‘pop-up’ radio station takes over LA’s airwaves

• A new type of radio station bubbled up in Los Angeles this week, with songs, bands and even the DJ generated by artificial intelligence
• The Fizz, as it’s called, is broadcasting on 106.3 FM for the month of June as part of an elaborate relaunch campaign for the ‘80s soda brand, Slice
• Driving through mid city, where the signal is strongest, people who tune in either by choice or by accident will hear soda-themed songs with titles like “Pop the Top,” “Fizzical Attraction” and “Lipstick Stain on my Slice” as part of a “pop 40 countdown"
• Billed as LA’s home for pop hits that didn’t exist until now, the station airs jingles, back announcements from a DJ named Bev and back stories for nonexistent bands — all of it created with Google’s AI programs

See the full story here: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triad/entertainment/2025/06/06/fizz-fm-ai-radio-slice-soda

Tech prophet Mary Meeker just dropped a massive report on AI trends – here’s your TL;DR

... Meeker's data shows AI is being adopted faster than the early internet. ChatGPT, the report's standout example, reached 100 million users in just two months, far eclipsing the growth rates of TikTok, Instagram, or Netflix. By April 2025, ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users and was handling over 365 billion searches annually. These numbers make ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer technology product in history, achieving in two years what took Google more than a decade. ...

ChatGPT hit the world stage all at once, growing in most global regions simultaneously." ...

In 2025 alone, China released three large-scale open-source AI models, and DeepSeek,  a Chinese large language model (LLM), rapidly captured 21% of the global user share. ...

Everyone is engaged. It's a period for lots of wealth creation and wealth destruction." ...

China now operates more industrial robots than the US and the rest of the world combined, signaling an aggressive push toward automation and AI-driven productivity. ...

In particular, Meeker states, "Professions centered on intaking large bodies of structured, historical data and outputting rules-based decisions and judgment, fall squarely in the core competency of generative AI. ...

"In an extreme, entirely agentic future, humans maintain a role in the system, pivoting towards oversight, guidance, and training. Imagine facilities filled with humans teaching robots intricate movements or offices full of workers providing reinforcement learning human feedback (RLHF) to optimize algorithms. This is not conjecture. Companies like  Physical Intelligence and Scale AI, respectively, are building powerful businesses based on this view of the world." ...

But what will people do when they've trained AI all they know? Meeker is unsure, and it's a question no one can answer. ...

... she does point out that developments in AI accompany advances in robotics and drones to automate manual work. ...

She says, for now, "China … is leading the open-source race, with three large-scale models released in 2025: DeepSeek-R1, Alibaba Qwen-32B, and Baidu Ernie 4.5." While proprietary models power Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, Meeker says, "Open-source technology is fueling sovereign AI initiatives, local language models, and community-led innovation."  ...

As Meeker says, "We're watching two philosophies unfold in parallel -- freedom vs. control, speed vs. safety, openness vs. optimization -- each shaping not just how AI works, but who gets to wield it." ...

The pace of adoption, the intensity of global competition, and the shift toward AI-native business models signal a new era for technology and society. ...

See the full story here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-prophet-mary-meeker-just-dropped-a-massive-report-on-ai-trends-heres-your-tldr/

“NATO for News”: Is a Joint Effort by Media Companies the Way to Go in the Age of AI?

... Jones argued that media companies could “collaborate on our own technology” to ensure control and opportunities rather than deep-pocketed technology giants taking advantage of media firms’ content. Corp echoed that, sharing: “We want to protect our brands while working together.” ...

Slade brought a comparison to an international defense alliance into play at that stage. “Someone described it as a kind of NATO for news,” he said. “At the moment, we’re all spending an enormous amount of money, each incremental to last year’s budget, in just trying to hold stuff back. So there’s a good argument for a lot more collaboration around all aspects.” ...

“What I’m most interested in now is a way for us to prove that if AI companies work with us, we can help train their models faster, more efficiently, more accurately. And that’s worth something, and that should be the catalyst.” ...

The panelists on Tuesday also agreed that a proposed opt-out rule in the U.K. approach to AI, allowing AI companies to use copyrighted works unless the holder actively opts out, is not the right approach. ...

See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/nato-for-news-ai-media-conference-london-1236233521/

Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. The world isn’t ready.

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Misinformation experts have been warning for years that we will eventually reach a point where it's impossible for the average person to tell the difference between an AI video and the real thing. With Veo 3, we have officially stepped out of the uncanny valley and into a new era, one where AI videos are a fact of life. ...

Crucially, in addition to video, Veo 3 also produces audio and dialogue. It doesn't just offer photorealism, but fully realized soundscapes and conversations to go along with videos. It can also maintain consistent characters in different video clips, and users can fine-tune camera angles, framing, and movements in entirely new ways. On social media, many users are dumbfounded by the results. ...

Watch short film "Influenders" here: https://youtu.be/zmlbAbWQCVY

"Yes, we used Google Veo 3 exclusively for this video, but to make a piece like this really come to life we needed to do further sound design, clever editing and some upscaling at the end," Dor said in an email to Mashable. "The full piece took around 2 days to complete." Dor added, "Veo 3 is a massive step forward, it’s easily the most advanced tool available publicly right now. We're especially impressed by its dialogue and prompt adherence capabilities." ...

In promoting Veo 3, Google is eager to stress its partnerships with artists and filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky. And it's clear that Veo 3 could drastically reduce the cost of creating animation and special effects. But for content farms and bad actors producing fake news and manipulative outrage bait, Veo 3 is equally powerful. ...

"The SynthID watermark is embedded in all content generated by Google’s AI tools, and our SynthID detector rolled out to early testers last week. We plan to expand access more broadly soon, and as an additional step to help people, we’re adding a visible watermark to Veo videos." ...

TV news anchors speaking into the camera have also been a recurring theme in Veo 3 videos so far, which has worrying implications for the information ecosystem online. ...

See the full story here: https://mashable.com/article/google-veo-3-ai-video

Mary Meeker AI rpt – It’s not your imagination: AI is speeding up the pace of change

... Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page slideshow report -  which used the word “unprecedented” on 51 of those pages  ...

“The pace and scope of change related to the artificial intelligence technology evolution is indeed unprecedented, as supported by the data,” she writes in the report, called “Trends — Artificial Intelligence.” ...

ChatGPT reaching 800 million users in 17 months: unprecedented. The number of companies andthe rate at which so many others are hitting high annual recurring revenue rates: also unprecedented. ...

The one area where AI hasn’t outpaced every other tech revolution is in financial returns. ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/30/its-not-your-imagination-ai-is-speeding-up-the-pace-of-change/

See the slide show here; https://www.bondcap.com/reports/tai