The popcorn bucket wars just became literal with Cinemark’s latest entry for Gladiator II. The theater chain’s new entry is not only shaped like the Roman colosseum, it plays a cutesy augmented reality gladiator battle when you point your smartphone at QR code on the bottom (AR-ENA, get it?). The butter on the popcorn is Cinemark’s tagline, claiming “you can eat war.”

In fact, all of the ad copy is brilliantly cheesy: “Every kernel of strength, every ounce of honor, is for the glory of Rome. As you preside over this gladiator arena, you can… eat war. Finish the popcorn and unleash the battle within. You will be entertained.” Being intoned in the Honest Trailer style takes it up an extra notch.

It’s the latest popcorn bucket movie merch, following high-profile entries from Dune and Deadpool. We’ve also seen entries for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and others that didn’t quite capture the same zeitgeist.

Sure, you might need to wipe off some popcorn grease to read the Cinemark bucket’s QR code, and the AR animation of two fighting gladiators is reminiscent of a PlayStation 2 render. Still, neither the Dune nor Wolverine buckets boast any interactive features, so the Gladiator II bucket has them beat there — and it’s a smart way to rope in the tech press.

Cinemark’s vessel is also plausibly shaped like a popcorn bucket with its colosseum form. The same can’t be said for Dune‘s sandworm-shaped bucket or Deadpool’s Wolverine head bucket (Dune director Denis Villeneuve called the latter “horrific” and he’s right). If you’re looking to expand your collection, the Gladiator II popcorn bucket will arrive “soon” and the movie itself hits theaters on November 22.

A pair of researchers at OpenAI has published a paper describing a new type of model — specifically, a new type of continuous-time consistency model (sCM) — that increases the speed at which multimedia including images, video, and audio can be generated by AI by 50 times compared to traditional diffusion models, generating images in nearly a 10th of a second compared to more than 5 seconds for regular diffusion.

With the introduction of sCM, OpenAI has managed to achieve comparable sample quality with only two sampling steps, offering a solution that accelerates the generative process without compromising on quality.

Described in the pre-peer reviewed paper published on arXiv.org and blog post released today, authored by Cheng Lu and Yang Song, the innovation enables these models to generate high-quality samples in just two steps—significantly faster than previous diffusion-based models that require hundreds of steps.

Song was also a leading author on a 2023 paper from OpenAI researchers including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever that coined the idea of “consistency models,” as having “points on the same trajectory map to the same initial point.”

While diffusion models have delivered outstanding results in producing realistic images, 3D models, audio, and video, their inefficiency in sampling—often requiring dozens to hundreds of sequential steps—has made them less suitable for real-time applications.

Theoretically, the technology could provide the basis for a near-realtime AI image generation model from OpenAI. As fellow VentureBeat reporter Sean Michael Kerner mused in our internal Slack channels, “can DALL-E 4 be far behind?”

Faster sampling while retaining high quality

In traditional diffusion models, a large number of denoising steps are needed to create a sample, which contributes to their slow speed.

In contrast, sCM converts noise into high-quality samples directly within one or two steps, cutting down on the computational cost and time.

OpenAI’s largest sCM model, which boasts 1.5 billion parameters, can generate a sample in just 0.11 seconds on a single A100 GPU.

This results in a 50x speed-up in wall-clock time compared to diffusion models, making real-time generative AI applications much more feasible.

Reaching diffusion-model quality with far less computational resources

The team behind sCM trained a continuous-time consistency model on ImageNet 512×512, scaling up to 1.5 billion parameters.

Even at this scale, the model maintains a sample quality that rivals the best diffusion models, achieving a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) score of 1.88 on ImageNet 512×512.

This brings the sample quality within 10% of diffusion models, which require significantly more computational effort to achieve similar results.

Benchmarks reveal strong performance

OpenAI’s new approach has undergone extensive benchmarking against other state-of-the-art generative models.

By measuring both the sample quality using FID scores and the effective sampling compute, the research demonstrates that sCM provides top-tier results with significantly less computational overhead.

While previous fast-sampling methods have struggled with reduced sample quality or complex training setups, sCM manages to overcome these challenges, offering both speed and high fidelity.

The success of sCM is also attributed to its ability to scale proportionally with the teacher diffusion model from which it distills knowledge.

As both the sCM and the teacher diffusion model grow in size, the gap in sample quality narrows further, and increasing the number of sampling steps in sCM reduces the quality difference even more.

Applications and future uses

The fast sampling and scalability of sCM models open new possibilities for real-time generative AI across multiple domains.

From image generation to audio and video synthesis, sCM provides a practical solution for applications that demand rapid, high-quality output.

Additionally, OpenAI’s research hints at the potential for further system optimization that could accelerate performance even more, tailoring these models to the specific needs of various industries.

Lithuania’s Vinted has secured a new valuation of €5 billion (around $5.4 billion at current exchange rates), after the second-hand fashion marketplace closed a secondary share sale worth €340 million ($367 million).

The transaction was led by private equity giant TPG, with other new participants including Baillie Gifford, FJ Labs, Hedosophia, Invus Opportunities, Manhattan Venture Partners, and Moore Strategic Ventures. It’s unclear how much Vinted’s existing investors cashed out, but the company says that all its existing institutional investors — which include Accel, EQT, Insight Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners — have retained at least some stake.

It’s proving to be a bumper year for secondary market transactions, particularly in Europe, as scale-ups seek to unlock liquidity for their employees and VCs in a decidedly tepid IPO market. In the past few months alone, we’ve seen neobanks Revolut and Monzo pursue secondary market routes, attaining lofty valuations off the back of strong user growth and profitability.

In the U.S., meanwhile, fintech giant Stripe followed a similar path to unlock liquidity, reaching a private valuation of $65 billion back in February as it continues to delay a long-rumored IPO. This figure later jumped to $70 billion as Sequoia sought a larger stake from existing investors.

Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga (pictured above) noted that the sale “rewards our employees for their dedication in making Vinted a success.” The company was valued at €3.5 billion ($3.8 billion) pre-money for its previous €250 million Series F fundraise back in 2021. Since then, it has gone from strength to strength, reporting record revenue growth of 61% in 2023 compared to the previous year and reaching profitability for the first time.

At the same time, Vinted has expanded geographically and is also extending beyond its core fashion roots into the electronics realm — a growth trajectory that prompted marketplace stalwart eBay to respond by removing seller fees in key European markets.

Three industry groups are suing to prevent the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from enforcing its new “Click to Cancel” rule that requires companies to make it easy to cancel subscriptions, according to Reuters. And yes, it’s exactly who you’d expect.

Click to cancel expands the Negative Option Rule to forbid businesses from making customers cancel services using a method that differs from how they signed up. So, if you sign up online, you must be allowed to cancel online, rather than needing to call a support line, write a letter, or show up in person. Most aspects of the rule, assuming it isn’t blocked, will go into effect 180 days from its entry into the Federal Register.

That’s “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion,” the Internet and Television Association, Electronic Security Association, and Interactive Advertising Bureau allege in their complaint filed with the US Fifth Circuit Appeals Court today. The groups — many of whose member companies profit from subscriptions that are easy to start and harder to stop — argue that the FTC is trying to “regulate consumer contracts for all companies in all industries and across all sectors of the economy.”

Indeed, the rule applies to any automatically renewing subscription, whether it’s a gym membership or Amazon Prime, including free trials or those plans that ship you easy-to-cook dinners. The horror!

Arrowhead Game Studios has confirmed that Helldivers 2 will receive a PS5 Pro upgrade in the future.

That’s according to Arrowhead community manager ‘Twinbeard’ who revealed on the Helldivers 2 Discord channel that the popular third-person online shooter will eventually get some form of PS5 Pro upgrade at a later date, but stopped short of sharing what those enhancements will be (via PSU).

Former Australian cricketer Steve Waugh says that he is learning a lot about space technology and is very excited about it. He was a surprise at the Bengaluru Space Expo (BSX) 2024 that began today. “I am surprised myself to be at the space expo. Space is exciting and new for me and I am learning a lot about space as I go along. I am very happy to be involved in this joint venture between Austraila and India. I have been coming to India for the last forty years with charity, with cricket, with business and this is another opportunity to collaborate with India. I am excited to be involved in it and Australia and India can do great things together in space technology,” said Waugh who is also the brand ambassador of Space Machines Company an Australian India in space servicing firm. 

The Space Machines Company has forged strategic partnerships with two Indian companies Ananth Technologies and Digantara. These partnerships are expected to play a significant role in the upcoming Space MAITRI (Mission for Australia-India’Technology, Research and Innovation) mission and the launch of Space Machines Company’s second Optimus satellite. Scheduled for 2026, the satellite will be deployed abroad NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV).  

It will be the largest Australian-made spacecraft in orbit. The Space Machines Company’s second Optimus spacecraft, a 450 kg Orbital Servicing Vehicle will be launched on NSIL’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle and is part of the first dedicated launch agreement between Australia and India. 

The mission will focus on debris management and sustainability and will significantly advance Australia’s domestic space industry, by combining Australian spacecraft capabilities with India’s launch expertise. 

“We will work closely with Ananth Technologies and Digantara throughout the space MAITRI project lifecycle, leveraging each company’s advanced engineering, logisitc, and situation space awareness capabilities to fulfil the joint Australian-Indian mission of building a more sustainable space future,” said Rajat Kulshrestha, CEO and Co-founder of Space Machines Company. 

Under the partnership, Ananth Technologies will provide Assembly Integration and Testing (AIT) and comprehensive engineering and logistics support throughout the Space MAITRI program. This will include the safe transportation and handling of all spacecraft components in India, extensive testing and launch site spacecraft fueling. This collaboration with Ananth Technologies between the two companies will ensure that Space Machines Company’s second Optimus spacecraft is successfully integrated into the SSLV and ready for launch. 

On the other hand, the collaboration with Digantara will enable the Optimus spacecraft to track and engage short range resident space objects a vital capability when executing close approach maneuvers during in orbit operations. 

Interestingly the Australian government has invested $ 8.5 million in the Space MAITRI mission in April 2024 through the Australian Space Agency’s $18 million International Space Investment India Projects program. “This mission and the collaborations that underpin it emphasise the role that space can play in enhancing cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region for mutual benefit. This mission leverages our nation’s respective capabilities and advantages to make space activities more sustainable-something the global space community is focussed on to protect and maintain the assets in orbit that are central to a functioning modern society,” remarked Enrico Palermo, head of the Australian Space Agency. 

Space Machines Company is an Australian company that delivers on orbit servicing and protection of critical space infrastructure through its Orbital Servicing Network. This company supports mobility, inspection, deorbiting, repair, life extension and protection capbaility to satellite customers when and where they need it.