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LimeWire buys Midjourney competitor BlueWillow after relaunching as a Creator Studio

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A strange cowboy is arriving in the Wild West of generative AI. Last year, LimeWire, once notorious for music piracy and shut down by the music industry, moved into content creation under new owners. It acquired BlueWillow, a popular generative AI image creation platform that competes with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, today to expand that.

Despite being founded earlier this year, BlueWillow took off due to rising interest in generative AI, Discord becoming a popular platform for creatives to use these tools, and its free main version. With 2.5 million members and 500 million+ images created, BlueWillow claims to be Discord’s second-largest AI image-generating community (Midjourney is first).

The plan is to keep BlueWillow on Discord and integrate its functionality into LimeWire’s website’s paid and advertising-based free creator service tiers. LiveWire will use it to launch more media services.

Financial terms are unknown, but BlueWillow talent will not be acquired. Ritankar Das, the company’s founder and CEO, said in an interview that the BlueWillow team is advising LimeWire on the platform during a transitional period, but they plan to leave en masse to work on a stealth AI venture.

The deal shows LimeWire’s commitment to growing its user base and revenue. The startup raised $17.5 million through token sales from Arrington Capital (run by Mike Arrington, the founder and former editor of this site), Kraken, Crypto.com Capital, CMCC Global, Hivemind, Deadmau5, and others to build an NFT marketplace for music creators in its relaunch. Early this year, sources estimated its value at $60 million.

LiveWire founders Paul and Julian Zehetmayr have diversified into building a platform to create and distribute content, with NFTs now “more of a sideline” rather than LimeWire’s core business.

LimeWire’s core business needed more tools. We hired engineers to build subscription and other features for creatives, but we used third-party integrations for AI-based image generation. LimeWire acquired BlueWillow to offer its own image generation tools and expand to video and audio generation.

Besides expanding that tech stack, BlueWillow will add users: Julian Zehetmayr told an interviewer that LiveWire has “thousands” of smaller creators in its long tail and 100 “bigger creators” on its platform.

And like Midjourney, BlueWillow was bootstrapped and funded by the founder. Das is a wunderkind who graduated from Berkeley at 18 with a double degree in bioengineering and chemical biology in three years, then studied at Oxford and Cambridge and founded a health tech startup that CirrusDx acquired in 2022.

Das started BlueWillow to learn how generative AI tools worked and could be built, not to make money.

He said, “What we saw was that a lot of people were developing generative AI models for images,” and he wanted to join the tech “Cambrian explosion”. However, Das and his team found that there were dozens of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the market, and using them together would speed up the process of building the basic service and let engineers focus on improving user interfaces and other front-end features to make using BlueWillow easier.

“Making it really easy for users” became the main goal, and BlueWillow built its own “weights” and customizations to improve image making depending on what it was used to illustrate and for whom. «Architects and advertisers require different looks and feels, so we built for each.»

Long-term, Das and his team didn’t want to scale and build the next phase of BlueWillow because compute power is expensive. There were no immediate plans to raise money, so when LimeWire called, it seemed easy to sell.

As Editor here at GeekReply, I'm a big fan of all things Geeky. Most of my contributions to the site are technology related, but I'm also a big fan of video games. My genres of choice include RPGs, MMOs, Grand Strategy, and Simulation. If I'm not chasing after the latest gear on my MMO of choice, I'm here at GeekReply reporting on the latest in Geek culture.

Gaming

Helldivers are angry at Arrowhead because the community manager was fired without due process

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Throughout history, it has become evident that, in the face of tyranny, those who cherish liberty and democracy will stop at nothing to defend them. They will fight relentlessly, using every last round of ammunition and shedding the final drop of blood. In a stunning turn of events, it appears that developer Arrowhead is facing a potential revolution, as previously loyal Helldivers 2 players who once supported the developer are now expressing their outrage. They passionately advocate for justice and the inclusion of the undemocratically dismissed community manager, who has affectionately been nicknamed “General” Spitz, into the official in-game lore.

In typical fashion, an overnight Change.org petition (courtesy of RPS) has garnered nearly 4,500 signatures at the time of writing. This is an attempt to make Arrowhead reevaluate their decision to let go of Spitz, a community manager who has been an integral part of the community since the game’s release. In the midst of the PC/PSN account linking debacle, Spitz, like a game critic sensing the winds of fate, rallied the community on Discord (as seen on Twitter) to express their discontent through reviews, refunds, and other means. It enhances our influence in the discussions with Sony. They completely disregard our discord.

After the chaos subsided the following day (yesterday), Spitz addressed the community, describing this action as “almost.” It hasn’t exactly resulted in their termination. Shortly after, a final transmission was confirmed where Spitz disclosed that they had been released, expressing their resilience by saying, “Every war has its casualties.”

On May 7, 2024, around 11:45 PST, the Helldivers Discord community made an interesting discovery. It seems that the community manager, Spitz, had been unexpectedly removed from his position, and any evidence of his previous involvement in the discord was completely wiped out. This incident seems to have ignited a revolution, with Helldivers demanding the immediate reinstatement of Spitz and his immortalization in the game for his self-sacrifice.

“We strongly advocate for the official canonization of General Spitz in Helldivers lore. Embracing the spirit of liberation. Supporting democracy. For the betterment of the game and its devoted community.

It’s interesting to see how this situation unfolds. Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt himself commends the determination of players in the Sony showdown, but there seems to be a hint of contradiction here. “General” Spitz provided us with some thought-provoking words to ponder: “I was well aware of the potential consequences when I made my statement about refunding and altering reviews; nevertheless, I remain steadfast in my position. I fulfilled my role as a representative of the community, just as I was expected to.

Spitz is no longer the Community Manager.
byu/Tabub inHelldivers

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Ciri from The Witcher expresses her hope that fans will give Liam Hemsworth a fair chance in his portrayal of Geralt

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Netflix’s The Witcher has been at the forefront of the recent trend of video game IP transitioning to TV, alongside HBO’s The Last of Us and Amazon’s Fallout adaptations. In 2022, it was announced that Henry Cavill would be stepping away from his role after Season 3, making way for Australian actor Liam Hemsworth to become The White Wolf in Season 4.

In an interview with Collider (courtesy of Eurogamer), Freya Allen, the actress who plays Ciri in the series, has reached out to fans who may find the change to be a challenge. Allen expressed his view of the situation, acknowledging that it may not be ideal and that fans can be quite critical. He mentioned that he doesn’t want to speak on behalf of Hemsworth, but based on his understanding, it seems like Hemsworth is aiming to inject some heartfelt elements into the project. I’m eagerly anticipating his performance after all that training. And he’s truly a delightful individual. I hope people give him a fair chance, you know?

It’s unclear why Henry Cavill decided to depart from the show, despite his previous commitment to stay for the entire seven seasons if needed. Netflix has announced that The Witcher has been renewed for a fifth season, which will be the final installment of the series.

 

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CEO of Helldivers 2 commends the remarkable determination displayed by the community during the intense Sony showdown

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The experience for Helldivers 2 players has been quite turbulent lately, and we’re referring to a community that is accustomed to leaping from great heights into the most intense and terrifying battlegrounds imaginable. In the midst of a highly debated PSN account requirement for PC players and facing intense backlash, Sony has made a surprising reversal, yielding to the overwhelming force of public opinion. The CEO of Arrowhead, Johan Pilestedt, has displayed an intriguing attitude throughout this challenging period. He has shown remarkable composure, actively engaging with community managers and experiencing the difficulties they face firsthand.

Pilestedt expressed his admiration for the community’s determination and praised their ability to work together on Twitter, following Sony’s reversal. He sarcastically expressed gratitude towards Sony for their “prompt and efficient choice to make PSN linking optional.”

In the future, Pilestedt expressed his vision of working closely with PlayStation and the players to establish a groundbreaking benchmark for the concept of a live game. The aim is to foster a strong partnership between developers and the community, ultimately resulting in an unparalleled gaming experience.

What are your thoughts on the commotion surrounding Helldivers 2? What are your thoughts on Sony’s involvement, Pilestedt’s attitude, and the community’s reaction? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.

 

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