CyberTechMag

Jesusegun Alagbe / Rest of World : Filmmakers, critics, and users detail why Prime Video failed in Africa; Amazon laid off staff and scaled back operations on the continent in January 2024   —  Filmmakers, critics, and users blame the platform's struggle in Africa on poor user experience, a lack of local content, and mediocre publicity. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/N0lEUzC via IFTTT

The Information : Source: HeyGen, which uses AI to generate avatars and voices for videos, is raising $60M at a $440M pre-investment valuation, amid concerns about its China ties   —  HeyGen, a three-year-old startup that uses artificial intelligence to generate avatars and voices for videos … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/5R2BxrI via IFTTT

Chris Stokel-Walker / Fast Company : Q&A with ex-CEO of CrowdTangle Brandon Silverman about the founding principle of the research tool, Meta's decision to close it in an election year, and more   —  Meta announced this month that in August it will be closing CrowdTangle, the platform monitoring tool the company bought in 2016. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/VtOfiTx via IFTTT

Researchers from Apple are probing whether it’s possible to use artificial intelligence to detect when a user is speaking to a device like an iPhone, thereby eliminating the technical need for a trigger phrase like “Siri,” according to a paper published on Friday. In a study, which was uploaded to Arxiv and has not been peer-reviewed, researchers trained a large language model using both speech captured by smartphones as well as acoustic data from background noise to look for patterns that could indicate when they want help from the device. The model was built in part with a version of OpenAI’s GPT-2, “since it is relatively lightweight and can potentially run on devices such as smartphones,” the researchers wrote. The paper describes over 129 hours of data and additional text data used to train the model, but did not specify the source of the recordings that went into the training set. Six of the seven authors list their affiliation as Apple, and three of them work on the c...

Newcomer : As regulators constantly and unreasonably block acquisitions, Microsoft is pioneering the non-acquisition acquisition with its OpenAI and Inflection deals   —  Plus, Redpoint makes the case for the venture slowdown ending … Reddit's Y Combinator Origins at the Forefront of its Public Debut from Techmeme https://ift.tt/2iFluOd via IFTTT

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land : Google is testing AI overviews in the main Google Search results with some users, even if they do not opt in to the Search Generative Experience labs feature   —  Some users who do not opt in to the Google Search labs SGE feature may see AI overview answers in the search results.  —  Chat with SearchBot from Techmeme https://ift.tt/SlPXvBK via IFTTT

Jason Snell / Six Colors : A look at DOJ's case against Apple, which has some strong points but also includes some silly arguments like Apple affecting “the flow of speech” via Apple TV+   —  The U.S. Department of Justice, 15 states, and the District of Columbia sued Apple on Thursday. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/h6CT71I via IFTTT