Hasta La Gadget!

Lotus’ entry into the performance electric SUV space may have been a surprise, but the Eletre certainly isn’t giving up the speed that the brand is known for.

In an excerpt from their new book, The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits’ Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime, writers Renee Dudley and Daniel Gold take readers inside the complex and mysterious world of the hacker underground. The book reveals the ins and outs of the modern ransomware…

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Nothing only just released its first phone months ago, but that isn’t stopping the company from establishing a physical retail presence. The company is opening its first Nothing Store on 4 Peter Street in London’s fashion-oriented Soho neighborhood sometime “before Christmas” this year. The company is promising a “boutique” rather than the usual tech shop experience, and touts design flourishes inspired by classic chains like Italy’s Olivetti.

The store will offer all of Nothing’s currently small lineup, including the Phone 1, Ear 1 and upcoming Ear Stick. To no one’s surprise, there will be incentives to line up for opening day — you can get free merch and buy one of 100 limited edition Ear Sticks.

The store is a gamble for a two-year-old startup competing against heavyweights in audio and mobile, some of which (such as Apple and Samsung) have much larger retail presences. While Nothing’s store won’t be big, it’s also sitting in one of the posher parts of London. Where the average retail rent in the city is about £64 per square foot, Soho’s is estimated at just under £150. That’s a lot to spend when it’s unclear how customers will respond.

This strategy is familiar, mind you. Apple has long focused on opening stores in high-traffic (and sometimes iconic) locations to catch the eyes of shoppers who wouldn’t otherwise browse technology, and other companies have used similar approaches. Nothing Stores could theoretically make the brand more recognizable, not to mention reinforce its style-oriented image.

Two massive, catastrophic problems are set to become one in the near future: Climate change is likely to worsen the issue of space debris, according to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last month.

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Shutterstock is eager to embrace AI-generated art. As The Vergereports, the photo provider has widened its deal with OpenAI to begin selling stock images built using the DALL-E 2 AI generator. The approach will offer “direct access” to DALL-E through the Shutterstock website, and compensate creators whose pictures played a role in developing the technology through a new Contributor Fund. The company also plans to pay royalties to artists when the AI uses their work.

OpenAI licensed Shutterstock pictures and data to train DALL-E’s text-to-image generation models in 2021. The expanded deal represents one of the first practical uses of the tech through OpenAI’s programming kit.

The DALL-E integration will be available sometime in the “coming months.” Crucially, Shutterstock will also ban AI-generated art that wasn’t produced through OpenAI’s platform. That will protect the companies’ business models, of course, but it will also ensure that Shutterstock can identify the content used and pay the producers accordingly. Payments will arrive every six months and include revenue from both training data and image royalties.

This is the first major compensation-based deal of its kind, and could help settle questions of whether or not AI-generated art is borrowed or stolen. Other companies have been more cautious. Shutterstock rival Getty Images has completely banned AI-made images over copyright concerns, and is even using filters to stop that content from getting through. Google, meanwhile, is keeping its Imagen tool private until (and unless) it can find a “responsible” way to make the system available to the public.

There are lingering issues. It’s not clear just how Shutterstock will pay creators. Artists will likely earn less from these AI-licensing payments than if customers pay for the original images DALL-E uses to create its amalgamations. While this deal is a step toward harmony between AI and the creative world, it’s not the definitive solution.