AI News

ByteDance says that it’s rushing to add safeguards to block Seedance 2.0 from generating iconic characters and deepfaking celebrities, after substantial Hollywood backlash after launching the latest version of its AI video tool. The changes come after Disney and Paramount Skydance sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance urging the Chinese company to promptly end the allegedly vast and blatant infringement. Studios claimed the infringement was widescale

Google DeepMind has been tinkering with Lyria for a while now, offering limited access in developer-oriented products like Vertex AI. Lyria 3 is more capable than previous versions, and it’s also quicker to use. Just select the new “Create music” option in the Gemini app or web UI to get started. You can describe what you want and even upload an image to help the robot get the right vibe. And in a few seconds, you get music (or something like it). In case

Credit: Google Credit: Google Google also calls out the model’s improvement in ARC-AGI-2, which features novel logic problems that can’t be directly trained into an AI. Gemini 3 was a bit behind on this evaluation, reaching a mere 31.1 percent versus scores in the 50s and 60s for competing models. Gemini 3.1 Pro more than doubles Google’s score, reaching a lofty 77.1 percent. Google has often gloated when it releases new models that they’ve already hit the

It seems that tech giants eyeing rural zones for data center development have underestimated how attached American farmers have grown to their lands in the decades they’ve been nurturing them. Across the country, several farmers have firmly rejected eye-popping offers—sometimes in the tens of millions. These offers dwarf the value of their properties, but farmers have refused to put a price on the lands that they love most. In a report on Monday, The Guard

Elon Musk appears to be grasping at straws in a lawsuit accusing OpenAI of poaching eight xAI employees in an allegedly unlawful bid to access xAI trade secrets connected to its data centers and chatbot, Grok. In a Tuesday order granting OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita F. Lin said that xAI failed to provide evidence of any misconduct from OpenAI. Instead, xAI seemed fixated on a range of alleged conduct of former employees. But in assess

Nano Banana 2 is more accurately known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Image—the previous Nano Banana models were based on the 3.0 branch. According to Google, the new release can deliver results similar to Nano Banana Pro but with the speed of the non-pro Flash variant. Google promises the new image generator will have more advanced world knowledge pulled from the Internet by the Gemini 3.1 LLM. This apparently gives it the necessary information to render objects wit

There are some important caveats with the Workspace tool. While this new GitHub project is from Google, it’s “not an officially supported Google product.” So you’re on your own if you choose to use it. The company notes that functionality may change dramatically as Google Workspace CLI continues to evolve, and that could break workflows you’ve created in the meantime. For people interested in tinkering with AI automations and don’t mind the inherent risks,

Google didn’t waste time integrating Gemini into its popular Workspace apps, but those AI features are now getting an overhaul. The company says its new Gemini features for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides will save you from the tyranny of the blank page by doing the hard work for you. Gemini will be able to create and refine drafts, stylize slides, and gather context from across your Google account. At this rate, you’ll soon never have to use that squishy

A comeback for Nokia’s weakest businessTo read the launch only as a product story is to miss why it matters to Nokia. Radio has been chief executive Justin Hotard’s hardest problem since he took over in 2025. At Nokia’s November capital markets day, he told investors the mobile business had not delivered acceptable returns, and he folded it into a new Mobile Infrastructure segment alongside further cost cuts. The NVIDIA partnership, announced in October 20

Why the Kimi K3 open-weight model is a memory problemTwo different things determine what it costs to run a large model. One is how much calculation the machine does to produce each word. The other is how much of the model has to be held ready and instantly reachable the entire time it is working. The first is compute. The second is memory. Chip export controls have squeezed China hard at first, and Moonshot’s design reads as a sustained attempt to spend le