Disney Plus and Hulu Post First Profit; OpenAI Releases Deepfake Detector; Microsoft Hit with Spanish Startups’ Complaint

On today’s news digest: Disney Plus and Hulu Post First Profit; OpenAI Releases Deepfake Detector; Microsoft Hit with Spanish Startups’ Complaint 

For the first time on Tuesday, Disney Plus and Hulu have posted a profit. Disney’s earnings report shared that both streaming services made USD$47m (£37.44m) combined in the last quarter, marking an enormous turnaround from the reported loss of USD$587m (£467.52m) at the same time in 2023. However, Disney’s overall streaming business was still not entirely profitable: operating losses of USD$65m (£51.77m) were reported for ESPN Plus, dragging down total profits. 

Amidst concerns about AI’s potential to misinform people during upcoming elections, OpenAI is releasing a tool designed to detect content created by its own image generator, DALL-E. The detector will be shared with a small group of disinformation researchers, who will be tasked with testing the tool in real-world situations to determine potential improvements. OpenAI reported that the detector could correctly identify 98.8% of images created by DALL-E 3 (the latest version of its AI image generator model) – acknowledging however, that it was not designed to detect images produced by other companies’ image generators. OpenAI also acknowledged that the tool is only a small part of what will be needed to fight deepfakes as we enter an AI-led future. 

In the antitrust ambit, Microsoft is again under scrutiny. On Tuesday, a Spanish startup group filed a complaint against Microsoft’s cloud practices to the Spanish antitrust regulator. In recent years, the Spanish Startup Association – which represents over 700 startups in the region, has cited many allegations of Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices. The association has called on the Spanish regulator to launch an investigation into the tech giant.  

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