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17 stories in the last 30d

Cocomelon's Studio Tells Its Artists to Start Experimenting With AI

Moonbug Entertainment, studio behind Cocomelon and Blippi, issued generative AI guidelines requiring human authorship and legal review of all AI use.

Moonbug Entertainment, producer of Cocomelon, Little Baby Bum, Blippi, and Mia's Magic Playground, shared its 'Studio AI Bible' and generative AI policy with 404 Media. The guidelines permit AI for ideation, storyboarding, and utility tasks but require substantial human creative input on core elements, legal approval of every tool, and a 'provenance and isolation' filing system to preserve copyright. A spokesperson said generative AI is not currently used in aired episodes. Moonbug content has hundreds of millions of YouTube subscribers, with Cocomelon spinoffs on Netflix, a Universal movie in development, and a Disney+ move planned next year.

404 Media · 20d agoAI industry

Building AI to accelerate science and improve lives

Google highlights AI-for-science advances: AlphaGenome Atlas mapping 9 billion genetic variants, WeatherNext 3 weather model, and global health AI tools.

Google detailed AI advances across science and health, including AlphaGenome Atlas, which mapped all 9 billion possible single-letter genetic changes in the human genome and was made openly available. WeatherNext 3 delivers 50% more accurate precipitation forecasts a day or more ahead and is already in products. AlphaFold is used by 4 million researchers in 190 countries, TB chest X-ray screening has processed 25,000+ scans across six nations, and the diabetic retinopathy model has supported 1.15 million screenings. Google also released its AI & Economy ATLAS global usage insights.

Google · AI · 1d agoAI industry

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup from a former Spotify leader for making music apps

Former Spotify innovation head raises $5.5M pre-seed for A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup building playful music-creation apps with selective generative AI features.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, founded by former Spotify head of innovation Máuhan M Zonoozy, raised a $5.5M pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital and others. The startup ships small music-play apps including Speed Surfer, Usersound, Stacks, Drops, Sampler, and the iOS mixer app bop, plus a new prompt-based sound creation feature. Zonoozy says the company deliberately avoids infusing AI into every product, arguing human taste and participation become more valuable as AI-generated content grows abundant.

TechCrunch · AI · 2d agoAI industry 2 sources

Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

Anthropic merges Claude Cowork and chat into one Claude, adding Docs, Slides, and Design to conversations.

Anthropic announced that Claude Cowork and Claude chat are merging into a single Claude experience, rolling out to Pro and Max plans on web, desktop, and mobile over the coming weeks. New Claude Docs, Claude Slides, and Claude Design features, in beta on paid plans, let users co-create and edit documents, presentations, and designs directly in conversations and download them as PowerPoint or PDF. Team and Free plans will follow, and Enterprise admins will get at least 30 days notice before any changes.

Hacker News · securityupdated · 19h agofirst · 21h agoAI industry 5 sourcesHN 31↑ · 18 comments

New insights from Google’s AI & Economy ATLAS

Google launches an interactive AI & Economy ATLAS experience; new research shows nearly half of surveyed scientists use AI daily.

Google introduced new interactive, open-access data visualizations for its AI & Economy ATLAS project tracking global AI adoption patterns. Research from Google, Google DeepMind, and MIT FutureTech analyzed 2,600 specialized AI models and surveyed over 600 U.S. and U.K. scientists, finding nearly half use AI daily and report saving almost seven hours per week. The study also found validation bottlenecks and a growing backlog of untested hypotheses limiting research productivity gains.

Google · AI · 2d agoAI industry

The Gemini app is now available for Windows

Google launched the Gemini app for Windows 10 and 11 globally, adding Alt+Space access, the Gemini Spark agent, and in-app image and video generation.

Google released a native Gemini desktop app for Windows, available globally on Windows 10 and 11. The app opens with an Alt+Space shortcut, delegates multi-step tasks to the Gemini Spark agent, and pulls information from Gmail and Google Drive for tasks like drafting project summaries. It also supports image generation with Nano Banana and video direction with Gemini Omni 1, with more native desktop capabilities promised over time.

Apple Doesn’t Want You to Worry About the New Apple Watch's Listening Features

Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 add opt-in audio intelligence features that process microphone audio on-device via a new Secure Exclave.

The Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 ship with four opt-in audio intelligence features: Sound Recognition, Shazam music identification, Siri Recap conversation summaries, and Live Rewind 15-second transcription. Audio is held and processed in an isolated Secure Exclave buffer on the new S11 chips, with on-device speech recognition on iPhone producing a distilled transcript that foundation models in Private Cloud Compute then summarize. Apple says no raw audio is stored or accessible to the operating system, apps, the user, or Apple, and untransferred audio is automatically deleted.

WIRED · Security · 7d agoAI industry1

NVIDIA Brings Real-Time AI to Broadcast, Sports and Global Streaming at IBC

NVIDIA expanded its AI for Media suite at IBC 2026, adding NIM microservices for synthetic video detection, body pose, frame generation, upscaling and HDR.

At IBC 2026 in Amsterdam, NVIDIA announced a major expansion of NVIDIA AI for Media, a collection of GPU-accelerated SDKs, NIM microservices and blueprints for broadcast and streaming workflows. The Synthetic Video Detector (SVD) NIM microservice reaches 99.3% accuracy on text-to-video and 97.7% on image-to-video content, while Video Frame Generation boosts frame rates 2x-4x and Video Super Resolution adds 10-bit support; TrueHDR converts SDR to HDR at up to roughly 2,000 nits. Partners including Dalet, TwelveLabs, Wowza, Vizrt and Ross Video are integrating the new services into verification, compliance and live-production workflows.

NVIDIA Blog · 7d agoAI industry

Recreating a 70-year love story frame by frame

Google DeepMind and filmmakers used generative image restoration and performance capture to recreate a couple's unrecorded past in the documentary 'Love, Rendered'.

Google DeepMind partnered with Primordial Soup, Darren Aronofsky's creative venture, on 'Love, Rendered,' a documentary short directed by Academy Award-nominated Liz Garbus. The film follows Burt and Ethelle Shatz, married over 70 years, as AI recreates their unrecorded first meeting amid Burt's cognitive decline. The team restored black-and-white photos with generative models and mapped the couple's present-day mannerisms onto younger likenesses using performance capture models. Google also highlights photo restoration and colorization capabilities in the Gemini app.

Google · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Adobe is trying to make its AI generators idiot-proof in Premiere

Adobe adds in-timeline generative media to Premiere, letting editors generate video and audio clips using Firefly, Veo, Runway, Luma, and Kling models.

Adobe's new Generative Media tool lets Premiere editors highlight empty gaps in the timeline and generate context-aware, editable video, sound effects, music, and soundscapes without leaving the project. Editors can choose among underlying models including Adobe Firefly, Google Veo, Runway, Luma, and Kling. Beta AI audio tools can separate overlapping speakers and duck music under speech, and an AI Assistant is coming to After Effects for plain-language project commands.

The Verge · AI · 9d agoAI industry

Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU: desktop-class mobile gameplay with AI-native graphics

Arm unveiled Mali G2-Ultra NX, its first AI-native mobile GPU with in-shader neural acceleration, third-gen ray tracing, and up to 24% higher benchmark performance.

Arm announced the Mali G2-Ultra NX, the first AI-native Mali GPU, integrating neural accelerators directly into shader cores alongside a new execution engine and third-generation hardware ray tracing. It introduces Neural Super Sampling (NSS), Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU), and Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD); the Neural Dawn demo with Sumo Digital showed up to 4x performance efficiency and 70% lower external memory traffic versus native rendering. Arm claims up to 24% higher benchmark performance, 13% lower DRAM traffic on ray tracing benchmarks, and up to 120 FPS with NFRU. Over 14 billion Mali GPUs have shipped to date.

Architecting memory and storage in the AI era

Analysis argues AI inference shifts data-center bottlenecks to memory and storage, urging balanced compute, memory, storage, and network architecture over raw compute.

MIT Technology Review, citing Tirias Research principal analyst Jim McGregor, argues that AI inference and agentic workloads make data movement the key constraint, elevating memory and storage from background hardware to strategic assets. The piece says RAG and real-time inference require continuous data retrieval and caching that legacy infrastructure cannot support. It frames infrastructure planning as a business decision balancing performance, efficiency, cost, and scalability in healthcare, finance, and customer-facing AI.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 12d agoAI industry

Instagram’s AI detection is a mess (again)

Instagram is mislabeling ordinary edited photos as AI Content while some AI imagery goes unlabeled, repeating a 2024 detection failure.

The Verge documents weeks of erroneous AI Content labels on Instagram, including images edited only with Canva's Background Remover or an iPhone Photos app, while some generative images escape tagging. Canva said some of its assistive AI tools were being tagged as generative and claims the issue is fixed, though users still report tagging. Meta scans IPTC and C2PA metadata and uses signals like Google's SynthID, but remains vague about detection criteria; one tester found only Meta AI-created or edited images reliably triggered labels, and an image-poisoned photo was tagged. A similar mislabeling wave hit Instagram in 2024.

The Verge · AI · 13d agoAI industry

Proactive cyber defense for governments and enterprises

Google launches the Fairwind Program giving governments and enterprises access to Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber and CodeMender for autonomous vulnerability finding and patching.

Google DeepMind announced the Fairwind Program, a limited-access offering giving Google Cloud customers, government agencies, and cybersecurity partners access to Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber and the CodeMender harness to autonomously find, verify, and fix vulnerabilities. Initial access prioritizes governments, critical infrastructure operators in healthcare, telecom, energy, and finance, and core technology platforms, with over 650 partners participating. Google also raised its total global cybersecurity funding commitment above $100 million, including $36 million for 35 US cyber clinics.

Google DeepMind · 14d agoAI industry

Facilitating AI integration with simplicity at scale

Jabil's SAP IT director says simplifying integration across 100+ sites in 30+ countries with SAP Integration Suite created the data backbone for AI.

In an MIT Technology Review Business Lab podcast produced in partnership with SAP, Jabil SAP IT director Harish Manohar described consolidating fragmented tools across more than 100 sites in over 30 countries using SAP Integration Suite. The manufacturer, with 140,000-plus employees and more than 400 top-brand customers, says a standardized data backbone enables real-time supply chain visibility and is a prerequisite for scaling predictive, AI-driven planning and forecasting. The company frames simplification-first modernization as a competitive advantage tied to measurable business value and operational resilience.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 14d agoAI industry1

The latest AI news we announced in August 2026

Google's August 2026 AI recap includes launches of Gemini 3.7 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, and the Pixel 11 series, plus 1 billion Gemini users.

Google's monthly recap covers the Gemini 3.7 Flash workhorse model for coding and agents, released three weeks after 3.6 Flash at half its per-million-token cost, and the Gemini app surpassing 1 billion monthly users. The Pixel 11 series launched with the Tensor G6 chip running Gemini Nano, alongside Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for real-time speech-to-text and Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash for studio-quality video generation. Other announcements include a free year of Google AI for college students, Gemma's 1 billion downloads, and AI weather forecasts for aviation contrail reduction.

Google · AI · 15d agoAI industry

Try Google Pics: Easy image creation and editing in Google Workspace

Google rolls out Pics, a Nano Banana-based image creation and editing tool, to Workspace subscribers with integrations in Docs, Slides, and Drive.

Google Pics, built on the Nano Banana image generation model, is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers. Features include object segmentation, in-image text editing and translation, collaboration, and multiple generations per prompt. Integrations launched in Docs and Slides, with Drive support planned in the coming weeks.

Google · AI · 15d agoAI industry