A number of news and media publishers are already blocking AI web crawlers from accessing their sites, worried about the impact on traffic when all their work is swept up into AI chatbot experiences. However, a startup called Direqt believes publishers should embrace AI chatbots — just on their own terms. The company, which has now raised its first outside capital of $4.5 million, offers media companies like ESPN, GQ, Wired, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and others, their own customizable chatbot solutions that provide a direct connection to their audience, increased engagement with their own published content, as well as monetization via ads.

The startup was originally founded in 2017 with a focus on chatbot monetization, before turning more recently to AI. In its earlier days, the company had built out the ability to serve promotions and ads inside a chatbot experience, which it licensed to a larger customer in the U.S. In 2021, the team pivoted to start building a chatbot platform for publishers, still slightly ahead of the GPT wave and the rise of ChatGPT.

“Part of that was, candidly, us being a little bit early to the market,” remarked Direqt co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Nick Martin. “Fortunately, things over the last couple of months have really broken the direction we did anticipate all these years,” he said.

Midjourney has solved one of the biggest problems with generative AI art with the option to upscale images to super-high resolutions. Until this week, Midjourney’s output was limited to a default resolution of 1,024 × 1,024 pixels. That was large enough for medium-sized web images, but not high resolution enough to print at anything greater than postcard size.

Now the company has added the option to upscale images by 2x or 4x, meaning the maximum image size is increased to 4,096 × 4,096 in the default square format. In other words, that’s a 4K resolution image.

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Midjourney massively increases the resolution of its AI-generated images, with the option to upscale images to 4K.

NVIDIA wants to turn the Jetson family of devices into powerful edge computing devices capable of running state-of-the-art foundation models. It’s also investing in frameworks that combine the power of robotics with generative AI.

Here are three significant investments from NVIDIA that transform the Jetson family of devices:

The Jetson Generative AI Lab is a collection of tutorials and walkthroughs for running popular generative AI models such as LLama2, Stable Diffusion and Segment Anything Model on Jetson devices. Developers can clone the GitHub repository to download the scripts needed to run the models and the associated applications on devices such as Jetson AGX Orin and Jetson Orini Nano.

A NEW generation of giant shape-shifting robots designed to work on building sites and disaster zones have been unveiled in Japan.

The Transformer-style bots, dubbed the Archax, can grow to nearly three times the height of a man on their four-wheeled legs.

Designed by Tsubame Industries in Tokyo, the machines can also change into different shapes to suit any situation.