Meta Releases Free AI Chatbot, Adobe Adds Sora To Premiere

SUQIAN, CHINA - FEBRUARY 2, 2024 - Illustration Meta plans to increase AI investment in Suqian, ... [+] Jiangsu Province, China, February 2, 2024. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Meta just released its free AI Chatbot, Meta AI with Llama 3, to 3.98 Billion people. That’s half the people in the world. Having played with Meta AI for just an hour this afternoon it immediately occurs to me that Google, OpenAI and X may have to rethink their twenty dollar a month pricing strategy for thier corresponding services.

Meta AI is multimodal, fast, and free.

Meta AI with Llama 3 is integrated with Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and the Facebook Newsfeed. It can also be found at Meta.ai. The AI assistant is based on their open source Llama 3 Large Language Model. It’s multimodal (generates images), and its answers, in light testing, are quite good, with summaries and annotations from Bing and Google. If asked, Meta AI will even turn images into .gifs. And it’s free, if you can Grok that. An enterprise version has also been released for cloud platforms.

Adobe Adds Sora, Firefly AI, to Premiere. The popular editing software is getting an AI boost with powerful new features like in-painting (object removal or addition), and generative extend, which adds more video to the beginning or end of clips. Generative B-Roll from Sora is also coming. Upgrades will gradually begin to roll out next month.

The Helsinki-based company is closing its site this week.

Glue VR Collaboration Platform Shutters. Launched at the height of the pandemic in 2020, Helsinki-based Glue raised $3.4 M for a highly graphic enterprise VR collaboration platform which enabled its users to make presentations, share 3D assets, and watch videos. Glue got some early traction with enterprise customers like KLM Dutch Royal Airlines, which ironically used Glue to reduce corporate travel. Collaborative Enterprise VR is a crowded niche with both free and paid options, including Engage, Spatial.io, Meta’s Horizon Workrooms, and Arthur. Mozilla’s Hubs was just shut down. The year before Microsoft took down AltSpace.

Sony's new 4K Playstation VR2 with upgraded controllers.

Sony recently turned off production of its Playstation 2 VR, indicative of a more widespread industry downturn. Bad news for Apple and Meta: Kids are bored with VR goggles, writes Business Insider. Developer and blogger Tony (Skarred Ghost) Vitillo has advice for colleagues afflicted by the blight, What To Do When You’re Bounced from VR.

BELLEVUE, UNITED STATES - FEBRUARY 26: Portrait of American video game developer Gabe Newell, ... [+] photographed at Valve Corporations offices in Bellevue, Washington, on February 26, 2020. (Photo by Olly Curtis/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Gabe Newell’s Brain-Computer Interface Company, Starfish Neuroscience Out of Stealth. The Valve co-founder has been quietly working on the minimally invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) for years.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - OCTOBER 20: Co-founder & Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands Yat Siu ... [+] speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 on October 20, 2022 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Animoca Brands, the fund behind The Sandbox, Kraken, MetaMask and Ledger, shared a report that says the company has $558 million in digital assets, and $291 million in cash and stablecoins. In unaudited financials released on Wednesday, Animoca noted this "excludes the value of the Company’s approximately 400 minority investments in Web3 companies, for which valuation work is ongoing."

Screenwriter and AI Filmmaker Gregory Mandarano used the new AI music generator Udio to compose this ode to Owen Lars, Tatoonie moisture farmer and Luke Skywalker’s taciturn step-father, who was killed at the beginning of the first Star Wars movie. “I have always aspired to have a place in traditional Hollywood and a career as a screenwriter. Orson Welles once said, 'A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.' This statement has held true for nearly 80 years, but it's now possible for one person to be an army,” wrote Mandarano in an email. Other tools used Midjourney, RunwayML, Davinci Resolve, and Topaz AI.

Prolific producer of short AI films, Abandoned Films, have come out with a series of video memes based on the idea of “1950s Super Panavision 70.” Others include Super Panavision versions of The Hobbit, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Matrix. Tools used were Midjourney, Eleven Labs, Runway, Stable Audio. Script ChatGPT. Edited in Adobe Premiere.

This column, once called “This Week in XR,” is also a podcast hosted by author Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Akash Nigam, CEO of Genies. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.