The world’s biggest consultancies are selling companies expensive advice on how to adopt AI without getting burned. Their own reports keep getting burned. PwC is the latest to be caught. Four of its Middle East “thought leadership” reports were a mess,…
BuzzFeed bet on AI to rescue itself. This week it laid off another third of its staff. The bet, it turns out, was never the thing that could save it. The company cut about 180 jobs on Monday, roughly a third of its remaining workforce, the New York Tim…
AI studios are reshaping who owns films, production systems and audience value, giving creators new leverage over Hollywood’s traditional terms.
The most disturbing corporate harassment campaign in recent tech history has a price. eBay and three of its former executives will pay nearly $56m to the couple they set out to destroy for writing a critical newsletter. David and Ina Steiner of Natick,…
Fish Audio, a Palo Alto voice-AI startup, has raised $52m in a round it still calls a seed, first reported by TechCrunch. It arrives at a company with an unusual shape. It gives its best models away, and charges for the wiring around them. The startup …
In China, the AI boom that put actors and models out of work has found a new use for them. It is renting their faces. A growing set of platforms now pays people $15 to $700 to license their likeness for AI-generated content, Rest of World reported. Pro…
Google built one of the world’s largest companies by scraping the entire web without asking permission first. This week a court told Google it cannot stop others from scraping Google. On 20 July, a federal judge dismissed Google’s lawsuit against SerpA…
Ask ChatGPT for a chapter in the voice of Stephen King and it now says no. It offers instead to write something with “the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread,” while staying “its own.” OpenAI has quietly changed how i…
Peacock Premium will be included with YouTube Premium in the US at no extra cost starting in early 2027. The deal, announced on Sunday by NBCUniversal and YouTube, is Peacock’s largest wholesale distribution partnership to date and immediately expands …
Paramount just paused its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Independent creators are scared, but after ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,’ they have more ownership.