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French artificial intelligence startup Mistral AI launched a new content moderation API on Thursday, marking its latest move to compete with OpenAI and other AI leaders while addressing growing concerns about AI safety and content filtering.
The new moderation service, powered by a fine-tuned version of Mistral’s Ministral 8B model, is designed to detect potentially harmful content across nine different categories, including sexual content, hate speech, violence, dangerous activities, and personally identifiable information. The API offers both raw text and conversational content analysis capabilities.
“Safety plays a key role in making AI useful,” Mistral’s team said in announcing the release. “At Mistral AI, we believe that system level guardrails are critical to protecting downstream deployments.”
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Mistral AI’s new moderation API analyzes text across nine categories of potentially harmful content, returning risk scores for each category. (Credit: Mistral AI)
Multilingual moderation capabilities position Mistral to challenge OpenAI’s dominance
The launch comes at a crucial time for the AI industry, as companies face mounting pressure to implement stronger safeguards around their technology. Just last month, Mistral joined other major AI companies in signing the UK AI Safety Summit accord, pledging to develop AI responsibly.
The moderation API is already being used in Mistral’s own Le Chat platform and supports 11 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. This multilingual capability gives Mistral an edge over some competitors whose moderation tools primarily focus on English content.
“Over the past few months, we’ve seen growing enthusiasm across the industry and research community for new LLM-based moderation systems, which can help make moderation more scalable and robust across applications,” the company stated.
Performance metrics showing accuracy rates across Mistral AI’s nine moderation categories, demonstrating the model’s effectiveness in detecting different types of potentially harmful content. (Credit: Mistral AI)
Enterprise partnerships show Mistral’s growing influence in corporate AI
The release follows Mistral’s recent string of high-profile partnerships, including deals with Microsoft Azure, Qualcomm, and SAP, positioning the young company as an increasingly important player in the enterprise AI market. Last month, SAP announced it would host Mistral’s models, including Mistral Large 2, on its infrastructure to provide customers with secure AI solutions that comply with European regulations.
What makes Mistral’s approach particularly noteworthy is its dual focus on edge computing and comprehensive safety features. While companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have focused primarily on cloud-based solutions, Mistral’s strategy of enabling both on-device AI and content moderation addresses growing concerns about data privacy, latency, and compliance. This could prove especially attractive to European companies subject to strict data protection regulations.
The company’s technical approach also shows sophistication beyond its years. By training its moderation model to understand conversational context rather than just analyzing isolated text, Mistral has created a system that can potentially catch subtle forms of harmful content that might slip through more basic filters.
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The moderation API is available immediately through Mistral’s cloud platform, with pricing based on usage. The company says it will continue to improve the system’s accuracy and expand its capabilities based on customer feedback and evolving safety requirements.
Mistral’s move shows how quickly the AI landscape is changing. Just a year ago, the Paris-based startup didn’t exist. Now it’s helping shape how enterprises think about AI safety. In a field dominated by American tech giants, Mistral’s European perspective on privacy and security might prove to be its greatest advantage.
VB Daily
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Krafton and PUBG Studios unveiled Project ARC today. It’s a spinoff of the popular game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, but trades in the third-person battle royale gameplay for that of a 5v5 top-down shooter.
Currently intended as a multiplayer-only title, Project ARC is trying to stand out by implementing realistic shooting mechanics into a top-down shooter. Things like target height, hit zones, destructible environments, and gun recoil matter in Project ARC when they typically don’t in top-down shooters. Players choose a character, each of which uses a unique weapon from PUBG and has a gadget like a Med Kit or Grenade Launcher. Right now, the only confirmed game modes are Team Deathmatch and Demolition, which has the same rules as the primary mode of games like Valorant or Spectre Divide, but swaps the bomb for a Decrypter hacking device.
Krafton
Unlike The Callisto Protocol, which started as a PUBG spinoff, but developed into its own universe, Project ARC is a direct PUBG spinoff set in the same world as the battle royale. That connection will mainly be seen through weapons and gadgets like the Blue Zone Grenade and Folded Shield. When it comes to expanding PUBG as an IP, developers said in comments provided to Digital Trends that “PUBG Studios is currently working on several new projects, including Project ARC. As a small team, the ARC Team will continue to pursue swift and bold experimentation.” A team of less than 15 people is working on Project ARC.
Project ARC will be released into early access on PC in 2025. The developers will consider a console release after they add controller support, but don’t plan to bring the game to mobile. The developers are still deciding whether Project ARC will be a free-to-play or premium title.
Google has confirmed the general availability of Google Vids. The AI-powered platform allows users to quickly create videos with features such as automated storyboards, voiceovers, and media suggestions.
Google confirms general availability of Google Vids for paying Workspace users
Google has integrated Google Vids into its Workspace suite of apps. The AI-powered video creation tool was previously available only to Gemini for Google Workspace customers. Moving forward, several more Workspace subscription plans will include access to Google Vids.
According to the search giant, Google Vids is an AI-powered video creation app for work. The company assures it will help teams in customer service, learning and development, project ops, and marketing, “tell more engaging stories at work through video”.
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Specifically speaking, select editions of Google Workspace, including Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise tiers, and Education Plus, as well as Gemini add-on customers will have access to Google Vids.
How to use Google Vids?
Google Vids essentially combines multiple powers of Gemini to quickly create videos that businesses can use. With the “Help me create” feature, Gemini can generate an initial storyboard from a text prompt and a Google Drive document.
Users can quickly and effortlessly add animations, transitions, photo effects, and royalty-free stock content. If that’s not impressive enough, the platform offers AI-powered voiceovers with a selection of preset voices. Users can also record voiceover in their voices. Google Vids has a read-along teleprompter and Gemini AI rolling feature.
Currently, the main AI-powered features such as “Help me create” and the read-along teleprompter, are limited to English. However, the application is available in multiple languages, and Google has assured it will expand language support in the near future.
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All Google Vids features are reportedly available to paying Google Workspace customers until December 31, 2025. Google has indicated it may impose limits on some features starting next year. The company should start alerting businesses about the changes later this year.
We’re in a new age of AI now. Google has an AI video maker available on select Workspace editions.
runs on Google’s AI model Gemini to create workplace and marketing videos from Google Drive files and descriptions. You can either start a video from scratch or use to get a first draft going. There’s even a option in which Gemini can suggest scripts to get you started on your video.
You aren’t just limited to what’s in the templates. Google Vids allows you to use your own photos and videos. It also has a virtual recording studio so you can add your own photos and videos, record videos of yourself or just make audio tracks of your voice to accompany your video.
Google announced its new using the Gemini AI model. Google Vids doesn’t make videos from the ground up like Runway’s Gen-2 or that created one hell of a creepy . Google Vids creates a slideshow of sorts using different types of media and compiles them based on the content of the source documents or the suggestion you type into it. As Google Vids is part of Google Workspace, you can collaborate on a video project in real time with other team members.
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Google Vids is coming to Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Essentials, Enterprise Essentials and Enterprise Essentials Plus members.
The action sci-fi world of Mass Effect is next on the docket to join the transmedia world of video game-to-television adaptations. According to a report from Variety, Amazon MGM is moving forward with a TV show based on the 2007 – 2021 game series.
The show will be penned by the writer of F9: The Fast Saga, Daniel Saga, which did not fare particularly well critically but made over $700 million at the box office. Mass Effect developer BioWare’s studio head Mike Gamble, who worked on two of the four mainline Mass Effect titles, will also be serving as an executive producer on the TV show alongside Hollywood’s ubiquitous executive producer Avi Arad.
Though the reporting does not indicate what a Mass Effect adaptation will be based on, it’s easy to assume that it will focus on the more popular original Mass Effect trilogy. Those three games told the stories of Commander Shepard uncovering the threat of the extraterrestrial reapers from deep space. The 2017 Mass Effect Andromeda was a critical and sales disappointment for publisher Electronic Arts, so it is unlikely to be consider creatively ripe for an adaptation.
This news comes on November 7th, which BioWare has enshrined as the yearly N7 Day, making reference to Commander Shepard’s N7 armor in the video games. While the announcement has not officially come from EA or Amazon, it does give fans something to celebrate this N7 Day.
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It is likely this adaptation deal is a direct result of Fallout‘s success, which is one of Amazon Prime’s biggest streaming successes in recent years. That adaptation, which intimately involved Bethesda Game Studios producer Todd Howard in its creation and execution, has been a big boost for the series. Mass Effect, with its space soap opera leanings and unique world, seems likely to be a logical successor to Fallout‘s 17 emmy nominations.
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Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website.
In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to customary closing conditions.
“We believe RepairPal will accelerate our broader services efforts by expanding our offerings in the multi-billion dollar U.S. auto services advertising vertical,” Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
While it might not seem like an obvious marriage, RepairPal fits into Yelp’s ambition to become a major home services funnel.
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In recent years, Yelp has added functionality beyond restaurant and business search tools, like an AI-powered feature that suggests plumbers, repairmen, and other home service providers to users potentially in need of them. Yelp has also introduced programs like Yelp Guaranteed, which offers up to $2,500 of coverage for qualifying projects in case of problems.
Yelp makes money through fees it receives from service providers for certain leads — and through ads. In the company’s most recent fiscal quarter (Q3 2024), advertising revenue from services businesses increased 11% year-over-year to a record $228 million, with revenue growth of around 15% in the home services category alone.
In its shareholder letter, Yelp says that RepairPal generated approximately $30 million in revenue and was roughly break-even on cash and net income.
“We believe there are clear synergies between Yelp and RepairPal,” the letter reads. “RepairPal brings deep knowledge of auto repairs and pricing, which we can leverage to improve our offerings for auto services businesses. They also maintain a robust partner network, including CarMax, USAA, and Endurance Vehicle Services. Meanwhile, Yelp has a large consumer audience and expertise in areas like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and AI, which we believe will provide value to RepairPal going forward.”
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The acquisition is a nice exit for San Francisco-based RepairPal, which managed to raise $21.3 million in funding from Cars.com, Tugboat Ventures, and others in the 17 years since the company’s founding. In its press release, Yelp didn’t say whether founders Aaron Tavistock, David Esser, and David Sturtz will be joining Yelp corporate.
A Yelp spokesperson later confirmed to TechCrunch that all RepairPal employees, including the leadership (but not the founders, who no longer head the company), will be joining Yelp.
Google Photos is making it easier to follow activity in your shared albums with a new “Updates” section. In the new section, you’ll be able to see notifications like updates to a shared album and updates to a conversation within Google Photos, according to a support post from Google.
The Updates section can be found by tapping a bell icon that replaces the Sharing button (the one that looks like two people). Updates are shown chronologically, and you’ll be able to look at activity from “today, yesterday, this week, this month, last month, and beyond,” the Google Photos team says the post. “We want to streamline how you can view recent activity with an interface that makes albums, groups, and conversations more accessible.”
Google notes that if you want to access shared albums, you can do so from the newly-launched Collections section.
The new Updates page is rolling out now on the Android and iOS Google Photos apps. I personally don’t have it, but one of my colleagues does; if it’s not available to you, the Photos team says to check back “over the coming weeks.”
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