April 17 2023 - We Don't Deserve Nicolas Cage

👋Good morning friends. It's Monday, and just like that, we're back. Renfield's release has me thinking about this subreddit a lot. Let's get into it.

Warner Bros. Discovery has revealed more details about its upcoming rebranding of HBO Max and Discovery+:

According to JB Perrette, WBD president and CEO of global streaming and games, the HBO Max brand was steering families away from the platform. He argued that because of HBO’s reputation as an adult-first network, “it’s not exactly where parents would most eagerly drop off their kids. And yet Warner Bros. Discovery has some of the best-known kids’ characters, animation, and brands in the industry. Not surprisingly, the category has not met his true potential on HBO Max.”

Max will feature a larger catalog of animation content, which may include some of the animation previously removed from HBO Max. The new platform will receive more than 40 new TV and film titles each month and feature a major influx of Discovery content, including HGTV, Discovery Channel, and Food Network shows. Max will also have a more kid-friendly experience, with simplified navigation tools and personalized accounts

The beauty industry has become an outlier, with the "lipstick index" showing that beauty spending is remaining resilient. Sales of both mass market and prestige beauty products have grown, with Ulta Beauty recording record-breaking revenues in 2022.

Another $27 billion in sales came from the prestige category — brands sold at department and specialty beauty stores — such as Armani, Charlotte Tilbury and Fenty. Sales grew 15 percent year-over-year, with makeup, skin care, fragrance and hair products each growing by double digits.

Ulta Beauty has been one of the leaders in the beauty sector. Total quarterly sales surged more than 18 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022. Fiscal year revenue exceeded $10 billion while annual net income hit more than $1 billion — both company records. That same period, Ulta opened about 48 new stores, according to a company spokeswoman, and foot traffic in early 2023 was up 16.5 percent year-over-year, according to data from analytics firm Placer.ai.

LG has revealed its new logo and animation that turns it into a jaunty, winking emoji-like face in a bid to appeal to a younger audience. The new logo features a flatter version of the LG 'face', dropping the shadow around the symbol and the gradient on the background. The circle surround is gone, with the logo now appearing on a flat background in a color that the brand is calling 'LG Active Red'.

Elon Musk has incorporated a new AI company called X.AI – this comes after rumors of Musk purchasing thousands of GPUs from Nvidia. Musk left the board of OpenAI in 2018 and has become increasingly critical of AI, calling it "one of the biggest risks to the future of civilization". He has been recruiting engineers and researchers from top AI labs, including Igor Babuschkin of DeepMind.

Google is developing an all-new AI search engine powered to take on competitors such as Microsoft's Bing and OpenAI. Google is also upgrading its existing search engine with new AI features, according to internal documents. The new features, under the project name Magi, aim to offer users a more personalized experience than the current search engine, attempting to anticipate users needs. The company is planning to release the new search technology to the public next month and add more features in the fall.

• Who Owns a Song Created by A.I.? The three major debates include: what is owed to the creators of the original material, whether "fair use" applies, and who owns the output of generative AI.
• OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman thinks that we're reaching the end of the era where bigger LLM models are better, and emphasizes on the importance of rapidly increasing model capability instead of focusing on parameter count.
• The Bob Lee story becomes more nuanced – according to court documents Memni knew Lee, and stabbed him after the two had an argument earlier in the evening over whether anything "inappropriate" had happened between him and Momeni's sister.

• Apple has launched a beta version of its rumored multiview feature for sports fans on the Apple TV 4K, allowing users to watch up to four games at once and customize the viewing experience.
• Netflix’s Love is Blind live reunion special was a disaster – after the show failed to start streaming on its scheduled time, leading to technical issues and disappointment from its fans. Netflix announced it will be filmed and made available on the service "as soon as humanly possible" but will no longer be a live broadcast.
• Jack in the Box has teamed up with Weedmaps to promote their Pineapple Express milkshake and a pineapple-infused Red Bull drink on Weedmaps' storefront,  making it the first food brand to make a media buy on the popular site. Weedmap's CMO Randa McMinn notes “To see household brands like Jack in the Box leverage its potential indicates how negative stereotypes around cannabis have evolved...We hope this trailblazing approach charts the way forward for other beloved brands to engage the growing cannabis consumer market effectively.”

• Beat Saber has done over $255 million in sales over it's lifetime. Hidden in a WSJ article, they note the game was played monthly by 1.47 million active devices as of October 2022. While the Quest Store boasts around 500 games, only 14 have grossed over $20 million, as of October 2022.
• Luxury brands such as Hermès and LVMH reported bumper Q1 sales amid economic volatility, but the growing demand is uneven with only a few top brands benefitting from ultra-wealthy consumers. Bank of America analysis shows that last year LVMH, Hermès, and Richemont made up 75% of the luxury industry’s incremental revenue, and analysts predict that future demand will continue to be patchy, making investors cautious about their choices.

• Montana Lawmakers approve statewide ban on TikTok - ByteDance, called the bill an "egregious government overreach," whilst critics argued that it is unconstitutional and violates free speech rights protected under the First Amendment.
• Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the music guessing game it acquired in July 2022. The game was similar to Wordle and allowed users to test their music knowledge by guessing the name of a song after listening to progressively longer snippets. Spotify stated that they made the decision to shut it down to focus on other features for music discovery

• OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, has confirmed that the company is not currently training GPT-5, the successor to its AI language model GPT-4. Altman made the statement in response to an open letter that requested labs like OpenAI pause development of AI systems "more powerful than GPT-4" due to concerns about their safety. However, Altman noted that the company is still expanding the capabilities of GPT-4 and considering the safety implications of such work.
• Instagram Reels has announced a series of updates aimed at creators, including a dedicated section for trending audio and hashtags, expanded access to its Gifts monetization feature in more countries, enhanced editing tools, new Reels insights, and more. The update comes with new tools and insights that capture total and average watch time, as well as notifications when someone starts following them directly from their Reel.

The direct quote is even better:

"A joy, an absolute joy! And we can make this the headline of the article. 'An absolute joy to be strangled by Nic Cage.' It's so fun, because he's dressed as Dracula, and Nic goes 110 percent into whatever role he is, so it was so little acting and just responding to what's in front of you. We had this incredible set design, and we have Nic dressed up as Dracula, and the menace, but also in that scene we got to play with all sorts of stuff, push the comedy a little bit, push the fear a little bit. But it's so fun to be in a practical world, and play with practical things, and given the breadth to find new moments within the script. It was awesome."

I don't know yall, I don't know. Yes? No? Have an open mind? All I know is at :34 my man was SPRINTING.

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