Back in 2019, Microsoft launched Dapr, a new open-source project that made building event-driven distributed applications easier for developers. Like so many popular open-source projects, Dapr spawned its own ecosystem, especially after Microsoft donated it to the Linux Foundation. And as is also so often the case, some of the creators of Dapr — and the related KEDA project — left to found their own companies, including Diagrid, which is launching its fully managed Dapr service into public beta today.

The new service, Catalyst, functions as an API platform, offering developers an alternative to managing their own Dapr installations.

“It’s all about building distributed microservices applications and the complexity that developers face today,” Diagrid CEO and co-founder Mark Fussell told me. “Today, basically, there’s still a mess of frameworks that people put together, repetitive boilerplate code, reinventing the software pattern, and having to stitch together reliability and security into all of that. We addressed a lot of these challenges with the Dapr open source project.”

Catalyst, he said, now allows developers to leverage Dapr, no matter which language they use and which platform they prefer. Previously, Diagrid’s Conductor project was something enterprises had to manage on their own using Kubernetes. Not every company is interested in doing that.

While Catalyst currently supports the core Dapr APIs, the Diagrid team aims to provide support for all of them by early next year.

One of the most interesting ones Catalyst already supports is Workflows. “Workflows is very, very important to developers because it is used in a lot of ways,” Diagrid co-founder and CTO Yaron Schneider said. “For example, we’re seeing a lot of companies using Dapr Workflows to build generative AI workloads. Thales, the large multinational French company — they built their entire Gen AI infrastructure on top of Dapr and we’re seeing more and more of these novel types of workloads using Workflows.” In a way, this also now turns Dapr into an all-purpose integration service.

Companies that want to switch between Dapr and the new fully-managed Catalyst only have to change the API endpoint (assuming they are only using the currently supported features).

“Catalyst is why we founded Diagrid in the first place,” Fussell said. “It’s the very reason because we saw a vision that this complexity and difficulty for developers to build these microservices and distributed applications was not being solved. All the major clouds are still focusing on infrastructure and that’s what they do. They have a really hard time thinking about the application developer space, and then they sort of leave it as an exercise to the reader, as it were, to stitch it all together.”

Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company would start making users pay to share their passwords this month, and now we know how much it will cost. In a support page spotted by CordBusters, Disney Plus says adding an “extra member” to an ad-supported plan will cost $6.99 monthly, with that price going up to $9.99 for its ad-free plan.

The company says the extra member offering will let you share your subscription with a friend or family member who lives outside your household. This option only applies if you have a standalone subscription to Disney Plus — not the bundle with Hulu, ESPN Plus, and other services — and if you’re billed by Disney directly.

The extra member add-on comes with some limitations, too. That member will be restricted to one profile, and they can only stream and download on one device at a time. Disney also says extra members “cannot have an active Hulu subscription, or an active or canceled Disney+ or ESPN+ subscription.” The Verge reached out to Disney with a request for more information about this but didn’t immediately hear back.

The US Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against payment service giant Visa for its alleged monopoly over the debit card network.

The DOJ says Visa has been engaging in anticompetitve business practice by suppressing competition and innovation, in turn violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.

Filmmaker James Cameron has joined the board of directors of artificial intelligence (AI) firm StabilityAI, 40 years after making a film about its risks.

In 1984’s The Terminator, which Cameron wrote and directed, a rogue AI called Skynet threatens the existence of mankind.

But the creator of the fictional AI has not been hired to help avoid such tech being developed in real life.

Instead, his role will centre around how the technology can be used in special effects, also known as computer-generated images (CGI).

“I’ve spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push the very boundaries of what’s possible, all in the service of telling incredible stories,” he said.

“I was at the forefront of CGI over three decades ago, and I’ve stayed on the cutting edge since.

“Now, the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave.”

Amongst his long list of hit movies, Cameron is known for creating special effects-heavy Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time.

His new place of work, StabilityAI, is best known for making Stable Diffusion – which can generate images based on a user’s text prompt.

It is also branching out into video, with Stable Video Diffusion, which works in the same way.

It is this tech that Cameron seems to have been brought on to help develop.

Proponents of AI video generation say it will enable artists to quickly create complicated digital effects.

But for many creatives – and Cameron’s contemporaries – this use of the technology is considered controversial at best.

Last week, Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro criticised AI-generated video during a talk at the British Film Institute in London, saying it could not generate much beyond “semi-compelling screensavers”.

Michael Bay said last year the tech “will create a whole bunch of lazy people” because “it doesn’t create, it just imitates”.

And Hiyao Miyazaki, who wrote and directed animated classic Spirited Away, previously said he was “disgusted” by an AI-generated video and called it “an insult to life itself”.

Rashik Parmar, head of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, told the BBC the filmmaker’s appointment comes at a time when “many of society’s fears about AI” come from movies.

“We watch Terminator and we form the idea that AI has malicious intentions towards humanity and that it will destroy us in the near future,” he said.

“Cameron has a real opportunity to change the narrative and build a positive view of AI, we’re very happy to work with him on that.”

One of Cameron’s first challenges in his new role will be to shore up StabilityAI’s position in the wider generativeAI landscape, where it faces stiff competition.

OpenAI’s rival video generation tool Sora is the most high-profile name in the space, with Reuters reporting Hollywood executives have discussed with the firm how the film industry could use its tech.

Meanwhile, Hunger Games and John Wick studio Lionsgate made a deal last week with AI firm Runway to create tools based on its massive archive of film and TV.

And in recent weeks the video generation landscape has been shaken by the sudden emergence of MiniMax, created by China-based HailuoAI.

The tool became popular on social media this month thanks to its ability to quickly create high-quality video from just a few lines of text.

In particular, a recent trend has seen people using the tool to make videos about chef Gordon Ramsay, with one such popular post seeing him skydiving while cooking spaghetti.

Ramsay has not responded to a request for comment.

And Cameron is joining the AI industry at a critical time for a different reason – copyright.

The technology works by analysing human-made pictures, including images found online, and artists claim this means their work has been used without permission.

Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque has previously told BBC News Stable Diffusion is trained using “100,000 GB of images” taken from the internet.

Getty Images, which is working on its own AI image generator, is suing StabilityAI over this very thing.