标签：#news

Google’s first new smart speaker in six years is here and once again leads its competitors—now with paywalled features.

Three AI stories landed this week that all poke at the same nerve: the images, video, and films we actually look at are getting an AI layer — and the line between "real" and "AI-made" keeps thinning. Quick rundown in the short, then my take below: 1. ChatGPT will start showing real, licensed photos — not AI fakes. OpenAI signed a multi-year display deal with Getty Images, so licensed photography shows up inside ChatGPT's search and discovery. It's display-only — the photos aren't used to train models. The twist I can't get over: AI image generation had nearly wiped Getty out (stock down ~55% on the year), and this one deal sent the shares up ~145%. The thing AI almost broke got rescued by AI. 2. ByteDance — yes, TikTok's parent — teased Seedance 2.5: a full 30-second video generated in a single shot, no stitching, up to 50 reference inputs, 4K. Most tools still cap out around 5–10 seconds, so "30s native, one pass" is a real jump in how usable the output is. Public launch is early July. 3. Google DeepMind is partnering with A24 on AI filmmaking — a ~$75M, non-exclusive deal to co-build Veo-powered tools. Notably Google gets no access to A24's film library or data. A prestige studio building with AI in the open makes the whole "AI in Hollywood" debate a lot less hypothetical. As someone building a daily AI-news pipeline on the side, the Getty one is the story I keep chewing on. So much of the "AI vs creators" fight has been framed as scrape-or-die. A display-licensing deal is a third option — pay to show the real thing, instead of generating a confident fake or quietly training on someone's work. I don't know if it scales, but it's the first move in a while that didn't feel zero-sum. The Seedance + A24 pair points the other way though: generation is getting longer, more controllable, and is walking straight into real production. So we get both at once — more verified real media and more convincing synthetic media, in the same week. Curious where other builders land:

Launching with better specs than expected, the no-frills Bezos-backed electric pickup looks set to take on Ford’s Maverick—and be an EV truck you can afford and fix yourself.

We now know the price of Slate Auto's affordable American-made electric truck, almost a year after the company warned it wouldn't hit its initial "under $20,000" target price. The no-frills pickup starts at $24,950 - matching the revised mid-$20,000 price range it promised last year, after the Trump administration announced it was putting an end […]

With its new pickup, Slate Auto is making a simple bet: price matters more than almost anything else. The company announced today that the American-made electric truck will start at $24,950, placing it squarely in the mid-$20,000 price range it had originally promised and making it the least expensive pickup truck and EV available today. […]