Comcast Sells $1.2bn in Advertising for Olympics; OpenAI and Meta to Release New AI Models; ByteDance Reports 60% Profit Jump

On today’s news digest: Comcast Sells $1.2bn in Advertising for Olympics; OpenAI and Meta to Release New AI Models; ByteDance Reports 60% Profit Jump 

Ahead of this year’s summer of sports, Comcast has sold approximately USD$1.2bn (£950m) of advertising for the Paris Olympic and Paralympic games. The sum reached a new record for the event, with over USD$350m (£275m) of the sales coming from new sponsors. Placements in the opening and closing ceremonies are reportedly already sold out. 

OpenAI and Meta will soon be releasing new AI models, which they claim will be capable of reasoning and planning. OpenAI’s GPT-5 could be available as soon as the summer. Brad Lightcap, the company’s chief operating officer, described how the next generation of their well-known AI model would show progress in solving problems such as reasoning. 

Meta plans to roll out Llama 3 in the coming weeks; it will be embedded into Whatsapp and its Ray-Ban smart glasses. Over the next few months, it will be available in a range of model sizes for different applications and devices. Similarly, Joelle Pineau – vice president of Meta – reported that they are working on figuring out “how to get these models not just to talk, but actually to reason, to plan”. Through the smart glasses, the wearer will be able to, for example, look at a broken coffee machine and receive instructions from a Llama3-powered AI assistant about how to fix it. Meta has also said that they are working on AI being able to plan journeys such as a user’s entire trip from one country to another. 

Meanwhile, ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, has reported a profit jump of 60% for 2023. With such a significant profit increase, the video giant has outpaced both Tencent and Alibaba Group. The rollout of TikTok Shop in many global markets has unlocked new revenue sources beyond digital marketing. TikTok intends to grow the size of its US ecommerce business tenfold this year – however, the platform’s fate in the region is yet to be decided by the US Senate, where it faces a potential ban.   

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