Disney buys $1.5B stake in Epic Games.

Galileo AI comes out of stealth with their highly-anticipated text-to-interface product. Love the value proposition — but was surprised they chose to keep to the chat interface for edits, which reminded me of DesignerGPT on the Open AI store. I did appreciate the nifty export to Figma button, however.

For a dose of inspiration, check out 10 short films made by AI filmmakers for Runway’s Short Film Festival Gen48.

For those who celebrate, Happy Lunar New Year! Here’s to a great Year of the Dragon! 🐉

🔥 Latest news

• Meta pushes to label all AI images on Instagram and Facebook in crackdown on deceptive content: Meta is working to detect and label AI-generated images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads as the company pushes to call out “people and organizations that actively want to deceive people”. Photorealistic images created using Meta’s AI imaging tool are already labeled as AI, but the company’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced in a blog post that the company would work to begin labeling AI-generated images developed on rival services.

• Hugging Face launches open source AI assistant maker to rival OpenAI’s custom GPTs: Hugging Face announced the launch of third-party, customizable Hugging Chat Assistants. The new, free product offering allows users of Hugging Chat, the startup’s open source alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to easily create their own customized AI chatbots with specific capabilities, similar both in functionality and intention to OpenAI’s custom GPT Builder.

• Disney buys a $1.5B stake in Epic Games. The partnership, according to Disney, will enable the creation of a new expansive, open, persistent, and social universe that will "interoperate" with Fortnite and let fans "play, watch, shop, and engage" with their favorite characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, and more.

• Microsoft in deal with Semafor to create news stories with aid of AI chatbot: Microsoft is working with media startup Semafor to use its artificial intelligence chatbot to help develop news stories—part of a journalistic outreach that comes as the tech giant faces a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from the New York Times. As part of the agreement, Microsoft is paying an undisclosed sum of money to Semafor to sponsor a breaking news feed called “Signals.” Signals will offer a feed of breaking news and analysis on big stories, with about a dozen posts a day.

• Universal Group pulls song catalog from TikTok: Universal Music Group (UMG), the label representing artists such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, says that it’ll pull its music from TikTok after failing to reach a deal with the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, over royalties. UMG won’t seek to renew its current arrangement with TikTok, and plans to cease licensing content to both TikTok and its music-focused service, TikTok Music.

• Bluesky is now open for anyone to join: After almost a year as an invite-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the more promising micro-blogging platforms that could provide an alternative to Elon Musk’s X. Before opening to the public, the platform had about 3 million sign-ups. Bluesky looks and functions like Twitter at the outset, but the platform stands out because of what lies under the hood. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky’s code is completely open source, which gives people outside of the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT Protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform.

🔧 Cool Tools and Experiments

• Roblox releases real-time AI chat translator with 16 languages, including English, French, Japanese, Thai, Polish, and Vietnamese

• Google unveiled MusicFX, an upgrade to its music-generating tool MusicLM, that can create ditties up to 70 seconds in length and music loops

• DeepMind introduces GenEM: A technique that uses LLMs to create expressive behaviors for robots

• Synthesia launches LLM-powered assistant to turn any text file or link into AI video

• Apple releases ‘MGIE’, an AI model for instruction-based image editing 

• Google announces MobileDiffusion: An AI model that generates images on mobile devices in under one second

💰 Latest Startup Fundings

• Eggscape Entertainment raises $4.25M for social gaming on mixed reality headsets

• StatusPro raises $20M in funding from Google Ventures to build an XR sports gaming empire

• Roro raises $1.6M for 3D digital dollhouse game

• Synthetaic raises $15M for its advanced AI image classification and detection platform 

• London-based AI-text-to-video platform Colossyan secures $22M in a funding round led by Lakestar