On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use 🙂 and 🙁 as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as “the inventor…or at least one of the inventors” of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.

The whole episode started three days earlier when computer scientist Neil Swartz posed a physics problem to colleagues on Carnegie Mellon’s “bboard,” which was an early online message board. The discussion thread had been exploring what happens to objects in a free-falling elevator, and Swartz presented a specific scenario involving a lit candle and a drop of mercury.

That evening, computer scientist Howard Gayle responded with a facetious message titled “WARNING!” He claimed that an elevator had been “contaminated with mercury” and suffered “some slight fire damage” due to a physics experiment. Despite clarifying posts noting the warning was a joke, some people took it seriously.

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Some Xreal smart glasses have been discounted as part of a Black Friday promotion. This includes the recently-released Xreal One Pro glasses. The smart specs are down to $600, which is $50 off. The sale applies to both sizes.

These glasses are the real deal. We praised them in our official review, saying they offer similar functionality to the Apple Vision Pro, but at a much friendlier price point. Wearing these glasses allows access to a massive 222-inch virtual display that can be used for just about anything. The glasses connect to laptops, gaming consoles and smartphones, among other gadgets.

The 1080p Micro-OLED screens are surprisingly bright and sharp, which makes this device great for both work and consuming content. The frames even darken to give the illusion of wearing sunglasses.

The glasses are light and comfortable, especially when compared to the Vision Pro. However, the comfort does come at a price. These oversized glasses are not as immersive as Apple’s product, because they don’t completely block out light and cover the entire face. They offer a 57-degree field of view. This is squarely an augmented reality product and not a virtual reality product.

The company has also discounted its Xreal One AR glasses to $400, which is a discount of around $100. These offer smaller virtual screens than the Pro, with a 50-degree field of view.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/get-50-off-the-xreal-one-pro-smart-glasses-for-black-friday-113032108.html?src=rss

Amazon is hosting a Black Friday sale that covers many of its ereaders. This includes the Kindle Colorsoft, which has been discounted to $170. This thing usually costs $250, so this is one heck of a deal and a record low price. 

The model came out earlier this year and we gave it a glowing review, calling it “the missing link in Amazon’s ereader lineup.” It’s the first Kindle ereader in color, which makes this thing one of the best ways to read comic books and graphic novels. The pinch-to-zoom feature lets you get closer to details, to make each panel really pop.

This is also a high-end ereader, color or not. We found the load times to be exceptionally fast and the same goes for turning pages. There’s an auto-adjusting front light, which comes in handy. There are also no lock screen ads by default and a single charge lasts eight full weeks of regular use.

The major downside here is the price. It’s tough to truly recommend any ereader at $250, or the original launch price of $280. It’s a lot easier to recommend at $170.

Amazon is also selling similar products at a discount, some of which made our list of the best ereaders. The base Kindle is down to $80, which is another record low. The Paperwhite is on sale for $125, yet another record low price.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/black-friday-kindle-deals-include-the-colorsoft-for-a-new-record-low-price-110037178.html?src=rss

For anyone looking to get a great deal on a streaming device, Roku’s Black Friday deals are here. The Roku Streaming Stick Plus, which just happens to be one of our favorite streaming devices, is 50 percent off, on sale for just $20. The regular Streaming Stick and Streaming Stick 4K are also on sale for 47 percent and 50 percent off, coming in at $16 and $25 respectively.

Roku makes some of the best streaming devices you can get, and any of the ones on sale would be great picks to upgrade an old TV you already have. The Streaming Stick Plus is our favorite of the bunch since it supports 4K HDR content and gives you access to a bunch of free content thanks to Roku’s streaming OS. We also appreciate its accurate universal search and the fact that it draws power from your TV, so it doesn’t need to be plugged into a wall outlet to get power.

The standard Streaming Stick is a good alternative to Amazon’s most basic Fire TV Stick, and if you already prefer Roku’s streaming OS, it’s arguably the better choice. The Streaming Stick 4K adds Dolby Vision into the mix, if that’s a must-have for you. Also, if you’re looking for a more powerful set-top streaming box, the Roku Ultra is 30 percent off, marked down to $70 from $100.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-roku-streaming-stick-plus-drops-to-only-20-for-black-friday-103023110.html?src=rss

Our pick for the best robot vacuum (or at least one of its many variants) is on sale. Amazon’s Black Friday deals include the Shark AI Ultra robot vacuum. This model has a list price of $599, but you can snag one for $250. That’s 58 percent off — and a record low.

One of this model’s standout features is its bagless design. Like many robovacs, it has an auto-empty station. But here, you can remove part of the base, dump its contents in the garbage, and lock it back in place. The base holds up to 60 days of dirt and debris, and you’ll never need to order bag refills.

The Shark AI Ultra has strong suction and decent obstacle avoidance (via LiDAR). The robovac cleans in a matrix grid. It auto-maps your home and supports Google Assistant and Alexa for voice control.

The vacuum has a runtime of about 120 minutes. (If it needs to stop and charge, it will auto-resume afterward.) Also note that this is a vacuum-only model: no mopping here.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/this-is-the-shark-robot-vacuum-to-get-for-black-friday-100013969.html?src=rss

Canadian librarian Ian Linkletter has ended a five-year legal battle with ed-tech firm Proctorio after being sued for sharing public YouTube help videos that exposed how the company’s remote-proctoring AI works. Ars Technica reports: … Together, the videos, the help center screenshot, and another screenshot showing course material describing how Proctorio works were enough for Proctorio to take Linkletter to court. The ed tech company promptly filed a lawsuit and obtained a temporary injunction by spuriously claiming that Linkletter shared private YouTube videos containing confidential information. Because the YouTube videos — which were public but “unlisted” when Linkletter shared them — had been removed, Linkletter did not have to delete the seven tweets that initially caught Proctorio’s attention, but the injunction required that he remove two tweets, including the screenshots.

In the five years since, the legal fight dragged on, with no end in sight until last week, as Canadian courts tangled with copyright allegations that tested a recently passed law intended to shield Canadian rights to free expression, the Protection of Public Participation Act. To fund his defense, Linkletter said in a blog announcing the settlement that he invested his life savings “ten times over.” Additionally, about 900 GoFundMe supporters and thousands of members of the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff at UBC contributed tens of thousands more. For the last year of the battle, a law firm, Norton Rose Fulbright, agreed to represent him on a pro bono basis, which Linkletter said âoewas a huge relief to me, as it meant I could defend myself all the way if Proctorio chose to proceed with the litigation.”

The terms of the settlement remain confidential, but both Linkletter and Proctorio confirmed that no money was exchanged. For Proctorio, the settlement made permanent the injunction that restricted Linkletter from posting the company’s help center or instructional materials. But it doesn’t stop Linkletter from remaining the company’s biggest critic, as “there are no other restrictions on my freedom of expression,” Linkletter’s blog noted. “I’ve won my life back!” Linkletter wrote, while reassuring his supporters that he’s “fine” with how things ended. “It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why Proctorio is a nightmare for students,” Linkletter wrote. “I can say everything that matters about Proctorio using public information.”

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The Amazon Smart Plug is on sale for just $13 as part of a Black Friday promotion. This is a discount of $12 and represents a record low price. If you’ve been waiting to stock up on some smart plugs, now might be the time.

To that end, this product made our list of the best smart plugs. It’s the perfect accessory for those who rely on Alexa to control aspects of the smart home. These plugs are really easy to set up via the Alexa app. You don’t have to pop in a Wi-Fi password or anything. It’s basically plug-and-play.

Once connected, you’ll be able to use any device with Alexa to control whatever it’s plugged into. For instance, you can group multiple plugs together as lights and then just say “Alexa, turn all the lights off” and it’ll do just that. They are compatible with just about any household device with a physical on/off switch, including lamps and coffee makers.

While these are the perfect smart plugs for Alexa households, they are only for Alexa households. The plugs don’t integrate with any other digital assistant. They are still the best choice for those tied into the ecosystem.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-amazon-smart-plug-drops-to-only-13-for-black-friday-093033211.html?src=rss

Researchers in Germany achieved a major milestone for the future quantum internet by successfully teleporting quantum information between photons generated by two different, physically separated quantum dots — something never accomplished before due to the difficulty of producing indistinguishable photons from remote sources. Phys.org reports: At the University of Stuttgart, the team succeeded in teleporting the polarization state of a photon originating from one quantum dot to another photon from a second quantum dot. One quantum dot generates a single photon, the other an entangled photon pair. Entangled means that the two particles constitute a single quantum entity, even when they are physically separated. One of the two particles travels to the second quantum dot and interferes with its light particle. The two overlap. Because of this superposition, the information of the single photon is transferred to the distant partner of the pair.

Instrumental for the success of the experiment were quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons. These converters were developed by a team led by Prof. Christoph Becher, an expert in quantum optics at Saarland University. […] In the Stuttgart experiment, the quantum dots were separated only by an optical fiber of about 10 m length. “But we are working on achieving considerably greater distances,” says Strobel. In earlier work, the team had shown that the entanglement of the quantum dot photons remains intact even after a 36-kilometer transmission through the city center of Stuttgart. Another aim is to increase the current success rate of teleportation, which currently stands at just over 70%. Fluctuations in the quantum dot still lead to slight differences in the photons. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Not everyone appreciates the artistry of Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings, with some dismissing them as something any child could create. While Pollock’s work is undeniably more sophisticated than that, it turns out that when one looks at splatter paintings made by adults and young children through a fractal lens and compares them to those of Pollock himself, the children’s work does bear a closer resemblance to Pollock’s than those of the adults. This might be due to the artist’s physiology, namely a certain clumsiness with regard to balance, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Physics.

Co-author Richard Taylor, a physicist at the University of Oregon, first found evidence of fractal patterns in Pollock’s seemingly random drip patterns in 2001. As previously reported, his original hypothesis drew considerable controversy, both from art historians and a few fellow physicists. In a 2006 paper published in Nature, Case University physicists Katherine Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur claimed Taylor’s work was “seriously flawed” and “lacked the range of scales needed to be considered fractal.” (To prove the point, Jones-Smith created her own version of a fractal painting using Taylor’s criteria in about five minutes with Photoshop.)

Taylor was particularly criticized for his attempt to use fractal analysis as the basis for an authentication tool to distinguish genuine Pollocks from reproductions or forgeries. He concedes that much of that criticism was valid at the time. But as vindication, he points to a machine learning-based study in 2015 relying on fractal dimension and other factors that achieved a 93 percent accuracy rate distinguishing between genuine Pollocks and non-Pollocks. Taylor built on that work for a 2024 paper reporting 99 percent accuracy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: When Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, unveiled the company’s Superintelligence Lab in June, he named 11 artificial intelligence researchers who were joining his ambitious effort to build a machine more powerful than the human brain. All 11 were immigrants educated in other countries. Seven were born in China, according to a memo viewed by The New York Times. Although many American executives, government officials and pundits have spent months painting China as the enemy of America’s rapid push into A.I., much of the groundbreaking research emerging from the United States is driven by Chinese talent.

Two new studies show that researchers born and educated in China have for years played major roles inside leading U.S. artificial intelligence labs. They also continue to drive important A.I. research in industry and academia, despite the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and growing anti-China sentiment in Silicon Valley. The research, from two organizations, provides a detailed look at how much the American tech industry continues to rely on engineers from China, particularly in A.I. The findings also offer a more nuanced understanding of how researchers in the two countries continue to collaborate, despite increasingly heated language from Washington and Beijing.

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Longtime Slashdot reader ukoda shares a report from the Associated Press: China is replacing its diesel trucks with electric models faster than expected, potentially reshaping global fuel demand and the future of heavy transport. In 2020, nearly all new trucks in China ran on diesel. By the first half of 2025, battery-powered trucks accounted for 22% of new heavy truck sales, up from 9.2% in the same period in 2024, according to Commercial Vehicle World, a Beijing-based trucking data provider. The British research firm BMI forecasts electric trucks will reach nearly 46% of new sales this year and 60% next year.

China’s trucking fleet, the world’s second-largest after the U.S., still mainly runs on diesel, but the landscape is shifting. Transport fuel demand is plateauing, according to the International Energy Agency and diesel use in China could decline faster than many expect, said Christopher Doleman, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Electric trucks now outsell LNG models in China, so its demand for fossil fuels could fall, and “in other countries, it might never take off,” he said. […]

The share of electrics in new truck sales, from 8% in 2024 to 28% by August 2025, has more than tripled as prices have fallen. Electric trucks outsold LNG-powered vehicles in China for five consecutive months this year, according to Commercial Vehicle World. While electric trucks are two to three times more expensive than diesel ones and cost roughly 18% more than LNG trucks, their higher energy efficiency and lower costs can save owners an estimated 10% to 26% over the vehicle’s lifetime, according to research by Chinese scientists. “When it comes to heavy trucks, the fleet owners in China are very bottom-line driven,” Doleman said.

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A Tokyo court ruled that Cloudflare is liable for aiding manga piracy after failing to act on infringement notices and continuing to cache and serve content for major piracy sites, awarding about $3.2 million in damages. TorrentFreak says the decision sets a significant precedent in Japan, suggesting CDN providers can face direct liability when they don’t verify customers or respond adequately to large-scale copyright abuse. From the report: After a wait of more than three and a half years, the Tokyo District Court rendered its decision this morning. In a statement provided to TorrentFreak by the publishers, they declare “Victory Against Cloudflare” after the Court determined that Cloudflare is indeed liable for the pirate sites’ activities. In a statement provided to TorrentFreak, the publishers explain that they alerted Cloudflare to the massive scale of the infringement, involving over 4,000 works and 300 million monthly visits, but their requests to stop distribution were ignored.

“We requested that the company take measures such as stopping the distribution of pirated content from servers under its management. However, Cloudflare continued to provide services to the manga piracy sites even after receiving notices from the plaintiffs,” the group says. The publishers add that Cloudflare continued to provide services even after receiving information disclosure orders from U.S. courts, leaving them with “no choice but to file this lawsuit.”

“The judgment recognized that Cloudflare’s failure to take timely and appropriate action despite receiving infringement notices from the plaintiffs, and its negligent continuation of pirated content distribution, constituted aiding and abetting copyright infringement, and that Cloudflare bears liability for damages to the plaintiffs,” they write. “The judgment, in that regard, attached importance to the fact that Cloudflare, without conducting any identity verification procedures, had enabled a massive manga piracy site to operate “under circumstances where strong anonymity was secured,’ as a basis for recognizing the company’s liability.”

The publishers believe that the judgment clarifies the conditions under which a company such as Cloudflare incurs liability for copyright infringement. Failure to carry out identity verification appears at the top of the publishers’ list, followed by a lack of timely and appropriate action in response to infringement notices sent by rightsholders. “We believe this is an important decision given the current situation where piracy site operators often hide their identities and repeatedly conduct large-scale distribution using CDN services from overseas. We hope that this judgment will be a step toward ensuring proper use of CDN services. We will continue our efforts to protect the rights of works, creators, and related parties, while aiming for further expansion of legitimate content,” the publishers conclude. Cloudflare plans to appeal the verdict.

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Adobe is buying Semrush for $1.9 billion in a move to supercharge its AI-driven marketing stack. Reuters reports: Semrush designs and develops AI software that helps companies with search engine optimization, social media and digital advertising. The acquisition, expected to close in the first half of next year, would allow Adobe to help marketers better understand how their brands are viewed by online consumers through searches on websites and generative AI bots such as ChatGPT and Gemini. “The price is steep as Semrush isn’t a massive revenue engine on its own, so Adobe is likely paying for strategic value. The payoff could be high too if Adobe can quickly turn Semrush’s data into monetizable AI products,” said Emarketer analyst Grace Harmon.

“While we are positive on Adobe restarting its M&A engine given the success that it has seen with this motion over the years… this deal likely does little to answer the questions revolving around the company’s creative cloud business,” added William Blair analysts.

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If you’re in the market for a laptop, you have no shortage of choices. But unless you need something with exceptionally powerful hardware or are operating on a very tight budget, I’m here to end your search right now: You should buy the M4 MacBook Air, especially while it’s on sale for $749 before Black Friday.

M4 MacBook Air

$749.00
at Best Buy

$999.00
Save $250.00

$749.00
at Best Buy

$999.00
Save $250.00

Apple’s latest MacBook Air is, without a doubt in my mind, the best laptop for most people—at least for people who don’t need to run Windows. This is an entry-level machine, but it doesn’t feel like it: The laptop comes with Apple’s M4 chip, which was until very recently the company’s newest hardware. (That being said, there is no M5 MacBook Air yet, so this is still the best Air on the market.) Apple’s M-series is excellent: In fact, the M1 MacBook Air is still a great machine five years after its release. You kind of can’t go wrong with any M-series MacBook at this time, though the newer the hardware, the better the performance—a perk to this M4 Air.

But M4 is almost an afterthought for me compared to this machine’s 16GB of RAM. For years, Apple only included 8GB of RAM with its base model machines. That was enough for smaller, simpler tasks, but once you started trying to do too much at once, you ran into problems. 8GB of RAM doesn’t go as far as it used to, so the fact that this machine doubles that memory without impacting the price is a major win. That said, this configuration does come with 256GB of storage, which could pose a problem for anyone who stores large files on their computers.

My favorite thing about the M4, however? The price. When Apple released this machine back in March, I was impressed by how much value one could get for $999. In fact, it convinced me to move on from recommending the M2 MacBook Air, even when the latter was on sale. But despite how new it is, the M4 MacBook Air has also seen discounts this year. Now, ahead of Black Friday, the machine is $250 cheaper at Amazon and Best Buy than at Apple. That’s simply a fantastic deal.

Should you buy an older MacBook for less?

Of course, there are other, cheaper MacBooks out there. You can save another $50 and opt for the M2 MacBook Air, which also has 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. And if you don’t need your machine to be brand-new, you can find refurbished M1 MacBook Airs for under $500. Any of these laptops will work great in 2025, but there are drawbacks: The M1 only has 8GB of RAM and it retains Apple’s older MacBook Air design. The M2 MacBook Air looks identical to its M4 counterpart, but it is three years old. By spending the extra $50 on the newer Air, you may eke another two to three years of software updates out of your machine—not to mention the immediate performance gains from the new chip.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This year’s newest iPhones included one momentous change that marked a new phase in the evolution of Apple Silicon: the Apple N1, Apple’s first in-house chip made to handle local wireless connections. The N1 supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and the Thread smart home communication protocol, and it replaces the third-party wireless chips (mostly made by Broadcom) that Apple used in older iPhones. Apple claimed that the N1 would enable more reliable connectivity for local communication features like AirPlay and AirDrop but didn’t say anything about how users could expect it to perform. But Ookla, the folks behind the SpeedTest app and website, have analyzed about five weeks’ worth of users’ testing data to get an idea of how the iPhone 17 lineup stacks up to the iPhone 16, as well as Android phones with Wi-Fi chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others.

While the N1 isn’t at the top of the charts, Ookla says Apple’s Wi-Fi chip “delivered higher download and upload speeds on Wi-Fi compared to the iPhone 16 across every studied percentile and virtually every region.” The median download speed for the iPhone 17 series was 329.56Mbps, compared to 236.46Mbps for the iPhone 16; the upload speed also jumped from 73.68Mbps to 103.26Mbps. Ookla noted that the N1’s best performance seemed to improve scores most of all in the bottom 10th percentile of performance tests, “implying Apple’s custom silicon lifts the floor more than the ceiling.” The iPhone 17 also didn’t top Ookla’s global performance charts — Ookla found that the Pixel 10 Pro series slightly edges out the iPhone 17 in download speed, while a Xiaomi 15T Pro with MediaTek Wi-Fi silicon featured better upload speeds.

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Sling TV offers multiple ways to stream cable channels without having to commit to a month of service, and for Black Friday it’s offering its new $5 Day Passes for a healthy discount. You can get a Sling Orange Day Pass for just $1 through November 30, and get access to 34 channels, including ESPN, ESPN 2 and ESPN 3.

Besides ESPN, the Sling Orange Day Pass includes access to TNT and TBS, which makes it a solid option if you’re trying to watch the NBA, NFL or college sports. The pass also includes children’s channels like Disney Channel and Nick Jr., CNN for news and HGTV and Food Network for purer forms of lean back entertainment. Sling TV is Engadget’s pick for the best customizable live streaming service for a reason: You can add on extra premium channels when you buy a pass, and their price will be prorated for whatever length you choose. That way even if a dollar isn’t getting you all the channels you need, you don’t need to pay that much more to get them.

It’s worth noting, while this promotion runs during Thanksgiving in the US, a Sling Orange subscription won’t get you access to the football games scheduled for that Thursday. To watch those, you’ll need at least a Sling Blue subscription, which includes FS1 and NFL Network, but isn’t available as a day-long pass. A Sling Blue subscription currently starts at $46 a month.

Still, for your $1, around $4 off the price Sling TV normally charges, you’re getting a deal. Dozens of popular channels, access to Sling TV’s DVR feature, and the ability to use your subscription from a smartphone, tablet, the web or your TV. Plus, Sling TV’s interface is easy to navigate, which is what you want when you’re likely subscribing with one game or show in mind.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/sling-orange-day-passes-are-only-1-right-now-for-black-friday-231208163.html?src=rss

Many e-bike brands focus their marketing on being a sustainable and environmentally friendly consumer choice. Future Motion has gone the other direction and emphasized how its new product can pop infinite wheelies, which sounds like either loads of fun or a quick way to an injury, depending on your worldview. 

After developing a line of single-wheel skateboards called Onewheel, Future Motion has released a new transportation option with an e-bike dubbed Antic. (Though I am deeply disappointed it isn’t named Twowheel). The 70s-inspired design claims a top speed of 35 miles per hour, a range of 28 to 50 miles, and wide tires intended to handle many types of terrain. It also says that with its Wheelie Assist mode, the bike’s gyroscopes and accelerometers can hold an endless single-wheel ride. The base model Antic has a list price of $2,500 but is currently discounted a few hundred bucks for the launch; longer-range options with more capable tires will run up to $2,900.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/onewheel-teams-antic-e-bike-can-pop-eternal-wheelies-230602296.html?src=rss

There’s been a lot of talk of an AI bubble lately, especially with regards to circular funding involving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic—but Clem Delangue, CEO of machine learning resources hub Hugging Face, has made the case that the bubble is specific to large language models, which is just one application of AI.

“I think we’re in an LLM bubble, and I think the LLM bubble might be bursting next year,” he said at an Axios event this week, as quoted in a TechCrunch article. “But ‘LLM’ is just a subset of AI when it comes to applying AI to biology, chemistry, image, audio, [and] video. I think we’re at the beginning of it, and we’ll see much more in the next few years.”

At Ars, we’ve written at length in recent days about the fears around AI investment. But to Delangue’s point, almost all of those discussions are about companies whose chief product is large language models, or the data centers meant to drive those—specifically, those focused on general-purpose chatbots that are meant to be everything for everybody.

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Because you can never have enough cowbell bass, Philip Kaplan (previously seen reinventing portable music with CD player headphones) went and built a tactical subwoofer. At first I was skeptical, but after watching the video it’s managed to break into the top 10 of my Christmas list. I’m really hoping that much bass so close to my guts will help with digestion. Because I’ve been having digestion issues lately. “You have to stop eating grass.” Turtles do it and they live past 100!

pbahra writes: Saudi Arabia is betting that the future of Hollywood won’t be built in physical stages but in datacenters. In a push to anchor itself in next-generation film production, Riyadh-based Humain has led Luma AI’s latest Series C round, backing the shift towards cloud-based, AI-generated video rather than traditional studio infrastructure.. Humain’s announcement says the new investment will accelerate Luma’s development of world models capable of learning from video, audio and language to generate photorealistic scenes, environments and characters on demand. Supporters argue this could upend film-making by pushing much of Hollywood’s production pipeline into high-performance datacenters rather than physical sets.

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