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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

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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