US Presses for TikTok’s Sale or Ban; SkyShowtime and Paramount Announce Ad Sales Partnership; Meta’s Llama 3 Available

On today’s news digest: US Presses for TikTok’s Sale or Ban; SkyShowtime and Paramount Announce Ad Sales Partnership; Meta’s Llama 3 Available

A revised version of the divest-or-ban TikTok bill in the US has passed the House 360-58, as part of a larger proposal related to sanctions on foreign adversaries. It goes alongside bills which seek to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, as well as military aid to Israel and Ukraine. With the TikTok bill bound to these measures, the Senate will need to consider it more urgently than it would for a regular standalone bill. The video giant posted a statement claiming the House is “using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance” to push through the ban. So far, the previous bill which passed the House last month with 352-65 in favour, has lingered in the Senate. The revised version would give ByteDance nine months (instead of the previously set six) to sell the video giant. Joe Biden is in support of the proposal, with intention to sign it – if this happens, TikTok has said it’s prepared to challenge it.  

In the TV landscape, SkyShowtime and Paramount Advertising International have announced an ad sales partnership. Through the deal, Paramount will handle SkyShowtime’s advertising sales across all of its markets. Their global ad sales business will give advertisers unified access to premium advertising across more than 20 European markets. SkyShowtime’s new Standard with Ads plan, which will display an average of four to five minutes of ads per hour, will be available from 23rd April. 

Meanwhile, Meta’s latest AI model Llama 3, is now available. The tech titan says the model is a “major leap” forward in terms of performance from its previous Llama models. Users should expect more steerability and higher accuracy on answering questions, with the model having been trained on 750 billion words – seven times the size of the training set used for its Llama 2 model. Interestingly, Meta also said it used AI-generated data to create longer documents for Llama 3 to train on.

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