Wired

Meta just announced its own media-focused AI model, called Movie Gen, that can be used to generate realistic video and audioclips.

The company shared multiple 10-second clips generated with Movie Gen, including a Moo Deng-esque baby hippo swimming around, to demonstrate its capabilities. While the tool is not yet available for use, this Movie Gen announcement comes shortly after its Meta Connect event, which showcased new and refreshed hardware and the latest version of its large language model, Llama 3.2.

To make the perfect scoop of ice cream, you first need a dairy base—its natural proteins, fat, and sugar provide the rich, distinct mouthfeel. Heavy cream is added, further smoothing the texture. The introduction of sugar isn’t just for sweetness: like scattering salt on snow, it lowers the freezing point, minimizing ice formation. Flavoring can now be brought to the mix, from the quintessential (chocolate chips or vanilla pods) to the more daring (spices, salt, or booze).

Zhang Xiaomeng, who lives in Beijing’s expensive central business district and runs her own design agency, had been putting off downloading Pinduoduo. Despite its popularity, she disliked how it gamified shopping, particularly a feature that prompts users to enlist their friends to click on a link in exchange for a price cut. This year, she finally gave in. “Things there are cheap,” she says.

Pinduoduo shares a parent company with Temu, the blockbuster retail app that has permeated US online shopping in recent years. The success of PDD Holdings, which owns both, has come in spite of economic headwinds and intense competitive pressures in China. But an international crackdown on retail imports could bring it back to earth after a meteoric rise.

It may not have the shine it once did, but Max (previously HBO Max) is still home to some of the best TV shows of the past 25 years, from The Sopranos and The Wire to Game of Thrones and The Leftovers.

Max has gotten into the original content game too, with highly acclaimed series like Hacks, Station Eleven, and The Staircase (the owl did it!). So even if you’ve watched all of the HBO classics, there’s more to devour.

Last month Katlyn, a Massachusetts mother of a 2-year-old daughter, posted a worrying message in a private Facebook group that promotes and sells a dietary supplement that its members believe is a cure for a wide range of ailments, with group members claiming it can help everything from cancer to autism.

“I started my 2 yo daughter on both the drops and the spray on Sunday,” Katlyn wrote. “Monday morning she had a pretty painful looking white head above her top lip which I didn’t think much of until the next day she had another one on the side of her middle finger. She’s never had anything like this before. Could this be a detox symptom? They are painful too she [flinched] when I touched them.”

Just one day after OpenAI announced a $6.6 billion funding round, the company is launching its first major interface evolution for ChatGPT.

In what could be recognition from OpenAI that its transformational chatbot is ready for user experiences beyond a question and answer format, the new beta feature is an editable canvas that opens in a window alongside ChatGPT’s standard chat box.

“The core thing we’re trying to solve is a better way to collaborate with ChatGPT on writing and coding,” says Daniel Levine, a product lead at OpenAI for the canvas feature. Canvas is rolling out in beta to ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers today, and Enterprise and Edu customers will likely get the feature next week. The feature is fully functional on desktops—mobile users can only view the canvas projects for now.

When Google Lens was introduced in 2017, the search feature accomplished a feat that not too long ago would have seemed like the stuff of science fiction: Point your phone’s camera at an object and Google Lens can identify it, show some context, maybe even let you buy it. It was a new way of searching, one that didn’t involve awkwardly typing out descriptions of things you were seeing in front of you.

A short video clip of a Finnish ethical hacker using a USB stick to hack an election voting machine is being hyped by right-wing figures as proof that the US presidential election could be stolen.

But the machine in question has been discontinued, and has not been used in US elections for a decade.

The video clip, which has been shared by key figures who have pushed former president Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, was taken from an episode of the PBD Podcast first broadcast on YouTube last week. The show is hosted by Patrick Bet-David, a conservative commentator known for sharing conspiracy theories to his millions of followers.

Unsettling news emerged from Missouri in late September. Six health care workers in the state developed mild respiratory symptoms after caring for a somewhat high-profile patient—the first person to have caught bird flu despite having no known contact with infected animals. The fear was that the virus could be spreading from person to person.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention emphasize that so far only the original patient has tested positive for bird flu, however; one of the workers has tested negative for the virus, while the others were not tested and have provided blood samples for further analysis.

California is in the middle of a wildfire crisis. Nine of the 10 largest fires in the state’s history have occurred in the past seven years, as have 13 of the 20 most destructive. Just this past month, Southern California has seen three of the most severe fires in recent memory, while it recently took firefighters more than two months to contain the fourth-largest fire in the state’s history. All told, since 2017 wildfires have caused over $30 billion of damage across the state.