Food delivery startup Wonder is acquiring media company Tastemade for around $90 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Founded in 2012, Tastemade produces food, travel, and home videos and operates several free, ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels.
The acquisition gives Wonder access to a content studio, production company, and advertising business. Wonder will leverage all of these assets to promote its brands to a wider audience, the company says.
The deal marks Wonder’s latest step toward its mission to create a mealtime “super app.” Wonder founder and CEO Marc Lore, who was previously Walmart’s head of e-commerce, wants to turn Wonder into an AI app that not only tells you what to eat but also automatically orders it for you from Wonder kitchens.
With this acquisition, users may soon be able to place a delivery order for a dish that they’re seeing being prepared by a chef on a Tastemade streaming channel.
Wonder’s past acquisitions include Blue Apron and Grubhub. The startup has raised a total of $1.6 billion to date.
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Drew Taggart and Alex Pall of The Chainsmokers, joined by Dan Lorenc, the founder of Chainguard.Image Credits:Barak Shrama/ Slava Blazer Photography / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.
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TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 at Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley.Image Credits:Max Morse for TechCrunch
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GV CEO David Krane on what it takes to manage 800 investments in five years at StrictlyVC SF.Image Credits:Slava Blazer Photography
The U.K. government is pushing forward with plans to attract more AI companies to the region through changes to copyright law that would allow developers to train AI models on artists’ content on the internet — without permission or payment — unless creators proactively “opt out.” Not everyone is marching to the same beat, though.
On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a “silent album,” protesting the planned changes. The album — titled “Is This What We Want?” — features tracks from Kate Bush, Imogen Heap, and contemporary classical composers Max Richter and Thomas Hewitt Jones, among others. It also features co-writing credits from hundreds more, including big names like Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, and Hans Zimmer.
But this is not Band Aid part 2. And it’s not a collection of music. Instead, the artists have put together recordings of empty studios and performance spaces — a symbolic representation of what they believe will be the impact of the planned copyright law changes.
“You can hear my cats moving around,” is how Hewitt Jones described his contribution to the album. “I have two cats in my studio who bother me all day when I’m working.”
To put an even more blunt point on it, the titles of the 12 tracks that make up the album spell out a message: “The British government must not legalize music theft to benefit AI companies.”
The album is just the latest move in the U.K. to bring attention to the issue of how copyright is being handled in AI training. Similar protests are underway in other markets, like the U.S., highlighting a global concern among artists.
Ed Newton-Rex, who organized the project, has simultaneously been leading a bigger campaign against AI training without licensing. A petition he started has now been signed by more than 47,000 writers, visual artists, actors, and others in the creative industries, with nearly 10,000 of them signing up in just the last five weeks since the U.K. government announced its big AI strategy.
Newton-Rex said he has also been “running a nonprofit in AI for the last year where we’ve been certifying companies that basically don’t scrape and train on great work without permission.”
Newton-Rex arrived at advocating for artists after having batted for both sides. Classically trained as a composer, he later built an AI-based music composition platform called Jukedeck that let people bypass using copyrighted works by creating their own. Its catchy pitch, where he rapped and riffed on the virtues of using AI to write music, won the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition in 2015. Jukedeck was eventually acquired by TikTok, where he worked for some time on music services.
After several years at other tech companies like Snap and Stability, Newton-Rex is back to considering how to build the future without burning the past. He’s contemplating that idea from a pretty interesting vantage point: He now lives in the Bay Area with wife Alice Newton-Rex, VP of product at WhatsApp.
The album release comes just ahead of the planned changes to copyright law in the U.K, which would force artists who do not want their work used for AI training purposes to proactively “opt out.”
Newton-Rex thinks this effectively creates a lose-lose situation for artists since there is no opt-out method in place, or any clear way of being able to track what specific material has been fed into any AI system.
“We know that opt-out schemes are just not taken up,” he said. “This is just going to give 90% [to] 95% of people’s work to AI companies. That’s without a doubt.”
The solution, say the artists, is to produce work in other markets where there might be better protections for it. Hewitt Jones — who threw a working keyboard into a harbor in Kent at an in-person protest not long ago (he fished it out, broken, afterwards) — said he’s considering markets like Switzerland for distributing his music in the future.
But the rock and hard place of a harbor in Kent are nothing compared to the Wild West of the internet.
“We’ve been told for decades to share our work online because it’s good for exposure. But now AI companies and, incredibly, governments are turning around and saying, ‘Well, you put that online for free …” Newton-Rex said. “So now artists are just stopping making and sharing their work. A number of artists have contacted me to say this is what they’re doing.”
The album will be posted widely on music platforms sometime Tuesday, the organizers said, and any donations or proceeds from playing it will go to the charity Help Musicians.
The New York Times is now allowing its product and editorial teams to use AI tools, which might one day write social copy, SEO headlines, and code, reports Semafor.
The news came to staff via an email, in which the publication announced the debut of its new internal AI summary tool called Echo.
The New York Times also shared a suite of AI products that staff could use to build web products or develop editorial ideas, alongside editorial guidelines for using AI tools. The paper’s editorial staff is encouraged to use AI tools to suggest edits, brainstorm interview questions, and help with research. At the same time, staff was warned not to use AI to draft or significantly revise an article or input confidential source information.
Those guidelines also suggest the Times might use AI to implement digitally voiced articles and translations into other languages.
Semafor reports that The Times said it would approve AI programs like GitHub Copilot programming assistant for coding, Google’s Vertex AI for product development, NotebookLM, some Amazon AI products, and OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API through a business account.
The New York Times’s embrace of AI tools comes as it is still embroiled in a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI on the publisher’s content.
