1)
WP Engine files a lawsuit against Automatic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mulleweng
The ongoing public spat between WP Engine and WordPress has now entered legal terrain, after WP Engine sued WordPress and its cofounder Matt Mulleweng. WP Engine has accused them of extortion and abuse of power. The lawsuit comes nearly two weeks of tension with both companies calling out each other publicly for their alleged malicious actions. The spat was triggered after Mulleweng labelled WP Engine of a “cancer” to the WordPress community,” accusing it of unfairly profiting from WordPress ecosystem and trademark violation. This was followed with WordPress banning WP Engine from using its features, which has been temporarily revoked following the backlash from customers.
2)
OpenAI raises $6 Bn in a fresh round, in a largest VC deal ever
Chatgpt’s parent company OpenAI raised $6 Bn in a fresh funding round at a valuation of nearly $150 Bn. What makes the latest round so special is the fact that it is the largest VC deal ever in the history. Investors apparently got excited about the fact that OpenAI has agreed to convert itself from a charitable non-profit organization into a profit organization, in-turn potentially promising handsome returns for the investors. In order to make it more profitable, OpenAI is reportedly planning to steadily increase the subscription price of all its paid plans. The new funding round was led by Thrive Capital while other investors included Nvidia, SoftBank, Fidelity Management and Microsoft.
3)
Nvidia launches new open-source AI model, designed to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Chipmaker Nvidia, which is known for making powerful AI chips, is seeking to alter the landscape of LLMs by launching a new open-source AI model NVLM 1.0. NVLM 1.0 is available in various sizes with NVLM-D-72B being the biggest model with 72 billion parameters. Nvidia claims that NVLM models excel in both language and vision tasks, showing equally impressive capabilities in text only scenario as well. The model is publicly available on the Hugging Face. The company is also planning to launch training codes of the model.
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Pika launches Pika 1.5, allowing it to add special effects to your videos
Video AI generating platform Pika, which has remained quite for several months, popped up into action on Monday by launching Pika 1.5. Pika 1.5 has brought with it set of special effects that can transform your ordinary videos into extraordinary videos. You can add wide-range of effects like explode, melt, inflate and cake-ify. Pika 1.5 supports both image-to-videos and text-to-video text flows. Currently, users can generate high-quality five second clips with lifelike movements. Will the launch of Pika 1.5 help the company to regain its feet in a highly competitive market remains to be seen, with competitors like Runway and Stability AI launching several cutting-edge models during past few months.
