The Download: Veo 3’s subtitles problem, and the future of our planet’s resources

Google’s generative video model Veo 3 has a subtitles problem

As soon as Google launched its latest video-generating AI model at the end of May, creatives rushed to put it through its paces. Released just months after its predecessor, Veo 3 allows users to generate sounds and dialogue for the first time. It sparked a flurry of hyperrealistic eight-second clips stitched together into ads, ASMR videos, imagined film trailers, and humorous street interviews.

But others quickly found that in some ways the tool wasn’t behaving as expected. When it generates clips that include dialogue, Veo 3 often adds nonsensical, garbled subtitles, even when the prompts it’s been given explicitly ask for no captions or subtitles to be added. And getting rid of them isn’t straightforward—or cheap.Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

MIT Technology Review Narrated: This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources

We’re in the middle of a potentially transformative moment. The materials we need to power our world are beginning to shift from fossil fuels to energy sources that don’t produce the greenhouse-gas emissions changing our climate. Metals discovered barely more than a century ago now underpin the technologies we’re relying on for cleaner energy, and not having enough of them could slow progress.

Take neodymium, for example. Its potential future reveals many of the challenges we’ll likely face across the supply chain for materials in the coming century and beyond.

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