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Paramount has finalized its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, rebranding the combined entity as Skydance. The merger, which follows a competitive bidding process against Netflix and extensive regulatory review, includes plans to consolidate the Paramount+, HBO Max, and Discovery+ streaming platforms.
Meta has expanded its Muse AI assistant to iPad following its mobile launch, reaching 6.6 million installs. The company is also proposing an open standard to help AI agents navigate website bot-blocking protocols, impacting how automated agents interact with web-based services.
Google Labs has introduced Playground, a browser-based platform that allows users to generate 2D and 3D games using natural-language prompts. The service is currently available in the U.S. and plans to integrate Unity Spark to provide advanced 3D capabilities and professional-level mechanics.
Melius, an AI platform for generating video and creative assets, has raised $25 million in total funding across seed and Series A rounds. The company, founded by former Ramp engineers, recently pivoted from a performance marketing tool to focus on generative AI tools for marketers and agencies.
Cloud infrastructure provider Lambda is raising $4 billion in a private funding round at a $14.5 billion valuation ahead of a planned 2027 IPO. The company's growth is heavily supported by a $35 billion GPU commitment from Anthropic, highlighting the capital-intensive nature of scaling AI infrastructure for streaming and compute providers.
AI chip startup Etched is reportedly reviewing new investment offers at a valuation between $40 billion and $50 billion, only months after raising $700 million. The company is developing proprietary hardware systems specifically designed to optimize inference speed and cost for AI workloads, positioning itself as a competitor to Nvidia.
OpenAI is implementing an invisible text watermarking method called textGrain for ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union to comply with the EU AI Act. The watermark embeds detectable patterns in word choices that remain invisible to human readers and persist through copy-pasting.
TikTok has launched a conversational AI shopping assistant and a one-click checkout feature integrated directly into its For You feed. The new tools, developed in partnership with commerce platforms including Shopify and Salesforce, aim to streamline the in-app purchasing journey for users.
Reflection AI has launched Beam, a 501-billion-parameter open-weight model designed for reasoning and agentic tasks. The startup, which has secured significant compute deals with SpaceX and Nebius, is positioning the model as a cost-effective alternative for enterprises building sovereign AI factories.
ElevenLabs has reached a $22 billion valuation following a $300 million employee tender offer co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price. This secondary sale, which doubles the company's valuation from February, highlights a growing trend of using liquidity events as a tool for employee retention among high-growth AI startups.
