In a two-screen movie theater modeled after a 1920s-era cinema on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hundreds of viewers gathered last week to watch short films made in a style that’s very much of the 2020s.

The occasion was tech startup Runway’s second annual AI Film Festival, for which the company invited submissions that feature AI techniques, whether in generating visuals or editing. This year, Runway CEO and co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela said organizers received around 3,000 entries—10 times the number put forth for the inaugural event—as a sign of how much interest in this technology has exploded over the past year.

That boom also changed the backdrop of this year’s festival; Runway now has more competition in courting Hollywood with its AI production tools from the likes of OpenAI. Two historic labor strikes have spotlighted frictions around the technology and its use in the entertainment and media industries. And video-generation tech itself has matured from crude distortions to uncanny quasi-realism.

Events like the AI Film Festival can help to cut through some of the noise and open up direct dialogues around the technology between filmmakers, according to Valenzuela. The company’s more creative-centric background—its three co-founders met in art school—also differentiates it from some of the new entrants in the space, he said.

“We’ve always been in [the video AI] business—it’s very natural for us to just do this,” Valenzuela told Tech Brew. “We don’t have to pretend we like it. We don’t have to pretend we want to help artists. We started this company being artists ourselves. And most of [those] who work in our company have artistic backgrounds.”

Keep reading here.—PK

Heard of Zero Trust? IT pros everywhere are nodding—and quite possibly sighing. Zero Trust requires that security and IT teams verify every identity, secure every sign-in, and ensure the health of every device. That’s…a lot.

The problem? Traditional IAM tools aren’t equipped to do it. The ways we approach access management must evolve to effectively secure today’s hybrid/remote world. 1Password’s webinar with IT Brew on June 5 will explore these pressing topics and discuss how extended access management can help.

Register for the webinar.

Even though they’re still fairly new, AI-powered large language model chatbots have taken on many roles: customer service rep, traffic-ticket negotiator, maybe even wedding vow author. But there’s one big job AI isn’t ready for: five-star general.

Jacquelyn Schneider, a fellow at the Hoover Institution public policy think tank, runs war games that simulate conflict scenarios, and she’s been documenting the results as AI plays alongside human participants. In a policy brief released this month, she and several co-authors observed that three of OpenAI’s ChatGPT versions as well as models by Anthropic and Meta all “show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns that lead to greater conflict and, in some cases, the use of nuclear weapons.”

The researchers found that these unpredictable behaviors can vary widely depending on the bot and its version. For example, earlier versions of ChatGPT “are more likely to think of winning in a really kind of absolutist way,” Schneider told Tech Brew.

Keep reading here.—KG

Much ink has been spilled on the promises and failures of AI’s highest-profile automotive application: self-driving cars.

But the much-hyped technology could reshape another aspect of the automotive experience: buying a car.

Executives at Cox Automotive, speaking at a Detroit event last week, expressed optimism about the ways they believe AI could make a notoriously time-consuming and difficult process easier on both buyers and sellers.

Take a look: Already, Manheim, the Cox-owned wholesale vehicle auction, is deploying AI to collect images and identify damage on vehicles.

Manheim has 23 fixed imaging tunnels installed at 13 auction sites, with plans to double the equipment by year’s end, Brad Burns, Manheim’s AVP of vehicle information, told Tech Brew. Vehicles drive through the tunnel and, in seconds, the equipment captures 2,500 images, including of the vehicle’s undercarriage.

AI selects the 12 best images. The rest are run through a machine-learning model that can detect damage, speeding up the process of conducting an inspection and generating a vehicle condition report, Burns explained.

“Right now, for the most part, the entire process is manual,” Burns said. “As we’re starting to deploy this technology, certain aspects of it will be presented to [inspectors] just to validate…Subjectivity is a big challenge when it comes to describing the condition of the vehicle because everyone has a different set of eyes.”

Keep reading here.—JG

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