YouTube announces AI features from Google DeepMind for Shorts creators
Veo in Dream Screen
YouTube
YouTube on Wednesday announced artificial-intelligence features for creators on its Shorts platform that tap into Google‘s DeepMind video-generation model.
The features, known as Veo, will allow creators to add AI-generated backgrounds to their videos as well as use written prompts to generate standalone, six-second video clips. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said he hopes Veo will enable creators to produce more Shorts videos with the help of AI.
“Everything that we showed with AI was meant to really enhance the work that you do, make it faster, more efficient, to bring your creative ideas to life faster,” said Mohan, speaking at the Made on YouTube event in New York.
The Veo AI backgrounds are an upgrade over a similar AI-generation feature announced by YouTube in 2023 called Dream Screen. The company said its Veo AI background feature will roll out later this year while the six-second AI clips will become available in 2025.
Other announcements at the event included new features in the YouTube Studio app that will allow creators to use AI to generate titles, thumbnails and video ideas. Those features will roll out in late 2024, YouTube said.
Creators have been exploring various ways to leverage generative AI technology. Creators have used the new technology to insert clips in their videos or produce entirely AI-generated videos.
However, some creators expressed concerns that their videos on YouTube are used to train the AI models that built Veo.
“I don’t know how I feel about all this AI stuff,” said Thomas Simons, a comedian with more than 15 million subscribers on YouTube. “It doesn’t fill me with confidence and love.”
There has been criticism that other services like Facebook have become overrun by spammy, AI-generated content. There are also concerns that AI-generated content could violate intellectual property protections.
YouTube’s AI-generated content will be watermarked and will have a label indicating it was created by AI, the company said.
Generative AI places a new perspective on the creator economy, giving creators free access to tools utilized by large language models.
We “really sit at the nexus of that technology and creativity,” Mohan said. “Putting those two things together gives us this unique lens that everything we build is really about enhancing that human creativity.”
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Cheng Xin | Getty Images
Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.
Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:
- Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
- Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected
Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”
Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.
CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.
“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.
Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.
For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.
Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.
Okta shares have gained about 4% this year.
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Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.
The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.
Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.
The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.
Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.
Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.
Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.
Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.
“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.
Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.
On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.
Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”
The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.
In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.
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