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📣 In the news

👉 AI 'Porcelain Filter' Trend Goes Viral Among Chinese Netizens

📰 The News: A new AI photo filter called the 'porcelain filter' has become a viral sensation among Chinese social media users. The filter, available through the Remini app, transforms ordinary selfies into porcelain-like figures with traditional Chinese clothing, pale complexions, and delicate makeup. The trend has amassed over 81,000 views on Xiaohongshu, with some users offering the service for a fee. The Remini app surpassed Douyin (TikTok) in iOS downloads during the first week of May.

🔍 Why it's important: The 'porcelain filter' trend reflects the growing interest among Chinese Gen Zers in reconnecting with their cultural heritage through contemporary design and technology. It aligns with the broader 'guochao' movement, which celebrates traditional Chinese motifs and aesthetics. The trend also speaks to the rapid adoption of AI-powered applications in China, fueled by government investment and consumer appetite for personalized online experiences. Brands can leverage this trend to tap into the guochao movement and appeal to young consumers' desire for cultural pride and self-expression through digital means.

👉 Today Unveils Dreamia, an AI-Powered Character and Storytelling Engine

📰 The News: Lisbon-based Today has unveiled Dreamia, an AI-powered character engine designed to shape storytelling in real-time for their upcoming cozy social simulation game where players cultivate virtual island communities.

🔍 Key Features: Dreamia uses AI to create intelligent, responsive non-player characters (NPCs) with lifelike behavior, profound discussions, emotional awareness, and the ability to adapt to player actions. These NPCs perceive environmental changes, offer contextual responses, and sustain memory for a continuous narrative experience unique to each player.

🧠 The Technology: Today's team fine-tunes open-source language models to enhance Dreamia's capabilities, utilizing a hybrid model of local and cloud-based systems for efficient performance and high-quality text/voice generation.

💰 Funding and Plans: After raising $5 million, Today plans to introduce a visual front-end later in 2024 for players and developers to create characters using Dreamia, with the game's alpha launch scheduled for early 2025.

👉 Canva Unveils Major Redesign, Targets Office Suite Market with Enterprise Offering

📰 The News: Canva has announced a comprehensive redesign of its platform, along with the introduction of Canva Enterprise, a specialized tier aimed at larger organizations. The redesign includes a revamped homepage and editing experience, making tools more accessible. Canva Enterprise provides enhanced collaboration, brand management, and security features for professional teams and workspaces.

🔍 Why it's important: Canva is positioning itself as a unified solution for design, AI, and workflow tools, aiming to replace the fragmented ecosystem of specialized applications used by businesses. By expanding its offerings beyond digital design, Canva is targeting the office suite market, challenging established players like Adobe's Creative Cloud, Figma, and Google Workspace. The company aims to reduce "app sprawl" and organizational complexity by consolidating various creative and productivity tools into a single platform. This move aligns with Canva's goal of democratizing design and now extending its reach to streamline workflows for enterprises.

👉 WPP Integrates Anthropic's Powerful Claude AI Models into its Marketing Platform

📰 The News: WPP, one of the world's largest advertising and marketing companies, has announced the integration of Anthropic's advanced Claude AI models, including Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, into its intelligent marketing operating system WPP Open. This integration, facilitated by Amazon Bedrock, will provide WPP's 114,000 marketers with cutting-edge AI capabilities to enhance their work and deliver innovative solutions to clients.

🔍 Why it's important: The integration of Claude AI models into WPP Open brings several advantages to WPP and its clients:

1. Augmented human expertise: WPP marketers can leverage Claude's advanced language understanding and generation capabilities to augment their expertise, scale capabilities, and improve efficiency across various tasks like ideation, content creation, copywriting, and design.

2. Improved performance and accuracy: The Claude 3 model family, including Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, offers extremely high levels of accuracy, performance, and speed, enabling better understanding of brand identity and high-quality marketing content generation.

3. Enhanced security and responsibility: By accessing Claude 3 through Amazon Bedrock, WPP can build generative AI applications with robust security, privacy, and responsible AI practices.

This move aligns with WPP's broader strategy to embrace emerging technologies and leverage AI to drive innovation in its work with clients. It also reflects the company's ongoing investment in AI, data, and technology, as well as its plans to capitalize on its leadership in the space by collaborating with companies like AWS and Anthropic.