April 25, 1990: Steve Jobs shuts down Pixar’s hardware division (yes, it used to have one!), ending production of the pricey Pixar Image Computer immediately. Jobs sells the company’s hardware unit to Fremont, California-based imaging company Vicom Systems for a paltry $2 million. Steve Jobs at Pixar Pixar was Jobs’ “rebound” company after his acrimonious … Read more
In a devastating blog post, image-uploading site Abload announced that it would be permanently shutting down its website by June 30, 2024. Abload, which has been around as a free service since 2006, stopped accepting new uploads back in December 2023. According to the blog post, the team had spent four months trying to keep … Read more
Adobe Firefly is already a hit with Photoshop users of all stripes but this next iteration could make the generative image tool that does not rely on publicly-scrapped images indispensable. This week, at its Adobe Max in London, the company announced an update to its Photoshop Firefly generative AI utility that deepens the integration and … Read more
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. A Braarudosphaera bigelowii cell magnified 1,000-fold.Credit: Tyler Coale A new organelle that can turn atmospheric nitrogen into biologically useful molecules has been discovered in a marine alga. It’s the first time nitrogen fixation has been recorded … Read more
Billed as a commercially safe AI image generator, iStock released its AI photo platform back in January 2024 – and during a live demo of the latest update, we spoke to Chief Product Officer Grant Farhall and Bill Bon, Director of Editing, about creative efficiencies, business-first AI, and what makes a good AI text-to-image prompt. … Read more
Intel has unleashed a new version of its XeSS upscaling tech that rivals Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR for speeding up frame rates in PC games. Intel XeSS 1.3 is fresh on the scene, although note that it’s still in preview testing right now, with Team Blue claiming some decent performance boosts compared to XeSS … Read more
Last updated: March 26th, 2024 at 09:12 UTC+01:00 WhatsApp compresses all the images and videos unless you share them as documents. And many people get annoyed by the drop in quality of images and videos shared through WhatsApp. Last year, the app introduced the ability to share HD (actually 4K resolution) quality media, but you … Read more
AMD has announced its next-gen upscaling box of tricks to make frame rates smoother with PC games at GDC 2024. This is FSR 3.1, and it sounds like a big step forward – and not just for the quality of the upscaling tech, since there’s a surprise in tow for Nvidia (and Intel Arc) GPU … Read more
Illustration by Ada Zielińska In 2022, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri, a graduate student in artificial intelligence (AI) at Stanford University in California, found something alarming in image-generating AI programs. When she prompted a popular tool for ‘a photo of an American man and his house’, it generated an image of a pale-skinned person in front of … Read more
Midjourney, the Generative AI platform that you can currently use on Discord just introduced the concept of reusable characters and I am blown away. It’s a simple idea: Instead of using prompts to create countless generative image variations, you create and reuse a central character to illustrate all your themes, live out your wildest fantasies, … Read more