This Week in Review: Humane scraps its AI Pin and sells to HP, and Hightouch raises $80 million for AI-driven marketing. Google’s Gemini gets new meeting automation, South Korea bans DeepSeek over TikTok data concerns, Meta announces ‘LlamaCon’ for open-source AI, and more.
The New York Times Lets Journalists Use AI Tools
This week, The New York Times said it would be giving its editorial staff the green light to use AI tools to suggest edits or potential interview questions, SEO-friendly headlines, and for coding.
The publication is letting staff use an internal AI solution called Echo in addition to purchased tools like Amazon AI tools, GitHub Copilot, Google Vertex AI, NotebookLM, NYT’s ChatExplorer and OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API.
The paper reassured staff that any AI-intervened content would be vetted by journalists.
“Any use of generative A.I. in the newsroom must begin with factual information vetted by our journalists and, as with everything else we produce, must be reviewed by editors,” the Times said.
Humane Shuts Down AI Pin and Sells to HP
Humane announced it’s scrapping its AI Pin product and selling most of its assets to HP for $116 million.
The Silicon Valley startup is discontinuing its pins immediately, and told customers their devices will no longer connect to Humane’s server and will stop working at 12 noon February 28, according to TechCrunch.
Humane made waves when it released an AI Pin in April 2024 after raising $230 million in funding. Around this time, Humane had sought to be bought for nearly $1 billion, according to Bloomberg. However, the pins – marketed as a smart phone replacement – didn’t do well amongst reviewers and the startup struggled to keep sales outpacing returns, The Verge reported.
HP will reportedly acquire Humane’s technology, engineers and product managers.
Hightouch Raises $80 million in Series C Funding
Marketing platform Hightouch announced it received $80 million in Series C funding, giving the firm a $1.2 billion valuation.
The round was led by Sapphire Ventures, NVC, Amplify Ventures, ICONIQ Growth and Bain Capital.
Hightouch’s original product ‘Composable CDP’, enabled users to plug consumer data into existing databases.
But the San Francisco company said the latest funding will revolve more around a new ‘AI decisioning’ product that uses agentic AI to send out and analyse personalised marketing.
Gemini’s Note-taking Automatically Creates Actions
Google announced a new Gemini feature on Google Meet that will see the AI tool automatically create actions off the back of meetings.
The new update will also assign due dates, attach necessary employees to relevant tasks and outline a transcript of calls, identifying speakers.
Google Meet’s notetaking feature was originally rolled out in August 2024.
South Korea Bans DeepSeek After TikTok Data Sharing Concerns
South Korea removed DeepSeek from domestic app stores claiming the Chinese startup shared user data with TikTok parent company ByteDance.
South Korean officials have confirmed that DeepSeek has been “communicating” with ByteDance, Yonhap News Agency said.
DeepSeek sent shockwaves through US tech markets when it launched its R1 chatbot. Audiences were shocked at the app’s advanced capabilities, despite the tech costing much less than US rivals and strict US-to-China tech export restrictions.
The news comes as TikTok’s fate in the US hangs in the balance. Whether TikTok should be banned for national security concerns is currently under review in the States.
Meta Announces New ‘LlamaCon’ Conference
Meta announced it will be holding a new conference for updates on ‘open source AI developments’ to help developers create apps.
The conference will be called ‘LlamaCon’ after the firm’s open-source AI Llama and will take place on April 29th
Meta said the conference will include the newest Meta Horizon updates and will “peel back the curtain on tomorrow’s tech.”
Two OpenAI Co-founders Starts Own AI Rivals
Former co-founder and chief tech officer at OpenAI, Mira Murati, announced she is starting her own AI company called Thinking Machines Lab.
Murati was among OpenAI’s executives that left in 2023 when Sam Altman was famously sacked and then reinstated five days later.
At the time, it was reported that senior leadership were unhappy with the philosophy and commercial direction the company was taking.
OpenAI made waves in November 2022 when it released ChatGPT.
Thinking Machines Lab said it plans to make AI tools designed to “people’s unique needs and goals”.
At the same time, another OpenAI co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, said he’s raising $1 billion for his own AI startup Safe Superintelligence. This would bring the new company’s valuation to roughly $30 billion.
Sutskever worked as a researcher and was key to the development of OpenAI’s tech, but left the company in May 2024. He also played a key role in Altman’s ousting in 2023.
Alibaba Unveils AI to Create Human-like Animations
Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced a new tool, Animate Anyone 2, an AI model that can produce life-like animations from images or videos.
The new animation tech was developed by Tongyi Lab, and allows animations to retain their original ‘environment’ from images and videos.
The company said its tech trained on 100,000 videos, and is for entertainment and advertising studios.
This announcement is the second model of Animate Anyone, the first released in December 2023.
Runway Announces Third Edition of AI Film Festival
AI video firm Runway announced the third installment of its AI Film Festival, taking place in LA on June 5.
Runway says the film festival was created to celebrate short films made with AI technology, and to ignite conversations around the growing use of AI in film production.
The use of AI in film production is a contentious issue. Oscar nominees The Brutalist and Emilia Perez both came under scrutiny after film makers revealed the use of AI in the editing process. There continues to be an ongoing debate about how AI should be used in film production.
This subject was at the heart of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strikes, which saw Hollywood studios come to a standstill and writers demand more regulations around the use of AI in creative industries.
Gartner Study Reveals That 27 percent of CMOs Don’t Want to Use AI
A new Gartner study revealed that 27 percent of CMOs are reluctant to adopt AI in their teams. This group has no or limited adoption of AI, the report outlines. Of this group, 6 percent said they’re not using Gen AI at all.
For those CMOs with AI integrated already, 47 percent said they are seeing the tech have benefits.
In terms of how AI is being used, the report revealed marketers were utilising AI for such things as campaign evaluation, reporting, creative development, and strategy development.
Gartner surveyed 418 marketing leads between July and September last year, before DeepSeek was a influencing factor.
