Gemini Canvas & Audio Overview. xAI Acquires Hotshot. StabilityAI's Crazy 3D Camera Motion Tool.

March 18 AI News!
Google's Gemini gets a Canvas and Audio output, xAI acquires the video generation company Hotshot and StabilityAI shows off an amazing camera control concept. Here's today's AI news. Without much fanfare Google's Gemini AI models are suddenly looking like they're going to be offering some of the best AI tools available, and much of it is free.

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It feels like they're rolling out important updates every few days at the moment, and today they announced 'Canvas' and 'Audio Overview'. As you'd expect, Canvas adds an output panel in the chat window and creates artefacts based on your requests. Most typically, this will be for generating and editing code.

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Audio Overview allows you to add a file and have it converted into an engaging podcast style discussion. Both of these tools are available to try in Gemini right now. xAI has acquired the AI video generation company Hotshot. We really haven't heard much out of Hotshot since they first made some waves shortly after their launch in 2024, so it's quite interesting to see them being consumed into the xAI team.

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They must be doing some cool work in the background to have attracted the attention of xAI. Let's see how quickly this materialises into Grok video generation. Finally, StabilityAI has released a preview of a research model called 'Stable Virtual Camera'. This is one of the most intriguing tools that we've seen recently.

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It allows the user to add a single flat image and then generate a 3D video output. Impressive as that is, it's not unique. What is unique about this model is that the user gets to define the exact camera motion required in the output with a camera tool similar to what you might find in a 3D modelling tool.

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This is another mind blowing concept that really shows the immense creative power of AI.