Adobe Announces AI Assistants for Creative Cloud - DTNS 5134

This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 28th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow the context of those stories and help each other understand. Today, Adobe brings a lot more AI to its creative suite at Adobe Max 2025. A ton of AI. We'll talk all about it. I'm Jason Howell. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Adobe Max 2025, as we just mentioned, happening right now, and the company has announced a bunch of new features for its creative cloud suite, a suite that I use almost every single day. So I'm definitely very interested in some of this. Do you use the creative cloud suite? I used to, but it got really expensive when all I was using was Premiere. I wasn't using the AI stuff and all the other tools, so I kind of let it go. It was actually this year I let it go. Yeah. It was really pricey and I've considered it, but they have a bunch of new features. Maybe it'll win some of you over and you guessed it. Most of it has to do with artificial intelligence. What doesn't these days? Firefly, version five, which is Adobe's generative AI tool, now supports on the image front four megapixel quality, which they say photo realistic results. So very high detail as far as that's concerned. Also the ability to train custom AI models for individuals. I believe that was a feature that was more or less exclusive, I think, to the enterprise users now that's coming down to individuals. So that could be interesting. This is a feature that I've been really wanting layered image editing. And so the idea here, my understanding of this is generative AI, yes, but keeping layers intact or adding kind of AI elements to particular layers so you're not. So it doesn't like in the past, some of the AI editing has been a little more destructive. And so this is this is kind of the way that they're achieving a different result that gives you a little more flexibility, let's say, the ability to move, resize, replace. Also harmonize visual elements, so retaining shadows or kind of the color consistency or whatever without artifacts. When you're bringing elements into an image, they've really refined that. But that's the image stuff and fire, firefly is known for its image stuff within the creative cloud suite, but they're expanding into audio as well. So now users can generate soundtrack, which is something we've had on a lot of other, you know, gen AI services. They have like a mad libs style prompting system. So you just pick the different characteristics and it gives you like four generations that you can choose from. And you can, you know, redo those and everything fully licensed soundtrack that you get from this. So everything's fully licensed. You can also match it to a given video. So if you upload a video, it'll match the tone and the energy and give you a few different options based on what it sees inside of the video. Generating speech, of course, 15 languages of support at launch. Also emotional inflection support. So you can actually cue it and say, this part of the text should be sad. This part should be whispering, that sort of stuff. And there's also a web based video editor so you can imagine Rob editing your videos with just words. You don't have to imagine it. Sounds good to me. Yeah. Does that sound appealing? That sounds good to me. I'm like, that's one of those things where I'm like, I don't know that I can hand over the keys so easily. So I use a tool called Descript and you can just type what you want and it just does it. And it's like, that's my speed. I never really got into the audio. The audio definitely not the visual stuff in Adobe Suite. So when you say they're going to add some of these, you know, generating soundtrack type effects, that's what may be saying, maybe I should go back and look at, you know, the Adobe products again, because the audio stuff is what I was using before. But yeah, for all of the visual stuff, if I've actually got to go in there and do stuff like you talked about layers, I know what Photoshop layers are. If I've got to get that deep in the weeds, I'm not using the tool. I'll just go. Yeah. Yeah. Just give me a tool that just generates it for me and whatever I get is what I get. Yeah, totally. I can completely understand that. Yeah. And as far as the music is concerned, like, you know, I, when I hear generated AI music, I can't not hear the kind of AI glossy imperfection kind of layer that tells me almost immediately, oh, those vocals are generated or whatever. There's just something about them that is very glossy and weird and not something that I, it's, it's difficult for me to get over. Having said that, there are plenty of times where as you can, you know, you can certainly attest, I imagine where we're creating something, we're editing something and we need a music bed and it just needs to be a bed. It needs to be in the background. It doesn't need to be foreground. It doesn't need to be all attention on this piece of music. And for that, like something, you know, having the ability to generate like a background soundtrack and just layer it underneath, like, okay, that, that sounds actually really useful. That's really useful and the ability to have it build or minimize where you need to based on this, on the spoken text. That's where it gets hard. Well, you've got to go through 50, 60 different tracks or try to figure out which one just has the right timing and if you can kind of build it in there, I can see where that would be useful. The other thing that I'm liking on the, on the audio side is that a lot of times when you have an author that's doing their own voiceover for their own book, they know it so well that they almost bored reading it. So they, they, they're very monotone in the way they deliver it. So if you could actually use AI to give a motion where they, where there wasn't necessarily some, that, that would be, it would just make work easier. It would, it would, it would be a lot less retakes. Yeah. Love that. That's, that's interesting. Although I'm sure some people are throwing rotten tomatoes at their, at their headphones right now. If you're listening in headphones, cause they're like, no, just, you know, hire, hire humans to redo the work. And yes, that's always the case here. In this case, it was a human that did it. It was just that you need to fix what the human did instead of going back in totally and then having to redo that part because it just didn't have the mood you needed. Yes. Indeed. Indeed. Now, Adobe also announced something called project moonlight. This is in private beta right now. It's essentially it's AI assistance, assistance, plural that all work together across Adobe's apps. So think of like a, like a, like an Adobe, a unified Adobe chat bot that allows you to kind of hop between apps and kind of draws a through line between, cause I mean, you know, as well as I do, and most people listening who are familiar with creative cloud suite, I mean, it is massive. There are apps all over the map. I don't think right out of the gate project, moonlight connects to every single app in creative cloud suite, but you can imagine that's what they're working towards. And you know, they, we're kind of driving towards this idea of collaboration, right? Like I, I'm an independent creator. I work in this room that I'm recording this podcast right now, you know, most of my time, and it's just me and the dogs. I don't really have a someone or this case, something to bounce ideas off of, but if it's an agent system, an agentic system built into the tool that I use regularly, hopefully that gives, you know, greater context, greater understanding and access to these tools on a deeper level. And maybe that inspires certain things from me as a creative individual. Yeah. I can see where if, if you weren't thinking about another tool that's in the suite, that this, that could add something visually or add something auditorily that would enhance whatever years you're creating and it just comes up, Oh, I didn't even think about that. So you kind of, you know, you play with it and you end up making something that you weren't even thinking about making before. Joel, love it. And then finally, just real quick, I did, I was involved with the kind of press briefing a couple of days ago. So I've had a little bit of time to kind of think about some of these tools and, and, and announcements that they're rolling out, but I didn't know about this. YouTube shorts will soon let creators use Adobe premieres edit tools directly within the mobile app. So they're going to be granting them exclusive access to a ton of, you know, premieres, AI features, effects, transitions. So essentially Google and YouTube working closer with the Adobe suite. And in this case, Adobe premiere on the mobile device, because I think the Adobe premiere mobile app just launched recently, if I'm not mistaken, I haven't used it, but giving shorts creators more tools, whether you like it or not, because some people are like, I don't want to see, you know, AI generated stuff in my shorts feed. This is making it easier to do that. And we're seeing more and more of this right now in the shorts world. So. So here's the question. Is this for people who have Adobe premier licenses or is this for anyone who's using shorts? Oh, that's a good question. I did not look into whether it was limited to just Adobe creative cloud users or not. I'd have to look that up. And I don't want to, don't want to interrupt the flow right now, but that's a really good question because that's important. Not everybody who's producing shorts necessarily automatically is paying the, you know, the pretty large monthly fee for premiere. If I had to guess, and it's totally a guess, so all, you know, all warnings there, I would guess that there would be some sort of access directly and immediately because I didn't see anything called out to say just for paying members. So it could be that, you know, that kind of freemium model to where this is what you can do for free. Right. And if you want more, click buy here. So. Could be. Interesting stuff nonetheless. And I'm sure as, as a, you know, paid creative cloud user, I'll definitely be playing around with some of this stuff as I go forward just to kind of see like, does this add any actual useful tools to the arsenal? The layering thing I know I'm going to find use for that. That's really, that's, that was the immediate win for me. So I'm excited about that. Detain us as made possible by you, the listener, thanks to Paul Boyer, D laser, Brad and our new patrons, non-circulating and Jim. All right, there's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. Open AI has officially and formally completed its recapitalization as it's restructured into a for-profit corporation under the oversight of a non-profit foundation. The new structure lets open AI group raise funds freely as well as acquire companies while the open AI foundation retains legal control. Microsoft now holds about 27% of open AI while the foundation owns 26%. The rest is held by investors and employees. Yeah. So I mean, this has been a long time coming. So this is this news today, obviously a big deal because we've been waiting and expecting this to happen by the end of the year. And I'll be honest, like I've been talking about this to some degree or another for the last year, it feels like, because this news has been so slow, slowly bubbling up. And yet it's still really hard for me to wrap my head around the overarching kind of what this means outside of the fact that open AI no longer has its, well, open AI, the range are off as far as open AI making, you know, turning a profit and, you know, appeasing shareholders and Microsoft, obviously a part of that. Beyond that, it just kind of, it gets a little confusing for me. I know that there are a lot of people that are not happy with this that I'm seeing a lot of negative sentiment. A lot of folks aren't happy, but I think one of the things and why maybe you and I don't necessarily completely notice and understand exactly what's going to be different here is because open AI for the last year and a half at least has been running like it is a publicly yes, you know, like a public and you're, you know, that is not a, that is not a not for profit. And they've gotten a little bit of trouble for that, but they've they've been structuring and been running that way. So it's always seemed like this was just an inevitability. They were going to eventually get this done. They need to make, they definitely needed to make Microsoft happy. You know, part of this is that, you know, the, the attorneys general in Delaware and California have agreed to this and that also, that also dismisses the Elon Musk lawsuit where he didn't want this to happen because he was one of the co-founder. So, so all of those things needed to get figured out. And I think we're just at the point where all that stuff has gotten figured out and they're going to move on. And I don't think it'll seem much different than what open AI has been doing for probably the last 18 months or more. But the upside is much different, you know, the potentially for, for all parties involved. Now Tom is at the airport and he got there and he's like, Hey, I'm just going to hop in the dock and jot some things down for you with this open AI story. Let me tell you, Tom is a machine. He just sat down and I saw him like word for word hammering out little, little bits and pieces of knowledge about this thing. So just a few tidbits and I'll share his analysis. Um, Microsoft's ownership reduced to 27% from 32.5%. So a little bit of a drop there, still getting a 20% cut of revenue as it did before. Open AI may increase that now since there is not a revenue cap. Also getting exclusive access to open AI's new technology. That includes AGI put that in quotes until 2032. It does not get access to open AI hardware. Microsoft loses exclusivity. It's exclusivity as cloud provider to open AI. But Tom did include some analysis on this just to kind of put a button on it and then we can, you know, see what else we have here in the briefs. Tom says this keeps Microsoft benefiting from open AI's rise without being the only company to benefit also gives open AI the freedom to act like a normal public company. It also tries to preserve the spirit of protecting humanity. That was the foundation of the organization. A lot of people saying, well, you're going against, you know, your original, um, your original cause, let's say, uh, Tom continues, hence the public benefit designation, Altman, not taking any stock in the PBC, which is a part of this news and the charter for the nonprofit parent company, which remains in control. So there you go. Thank you, Tom. There's, there's important news here from Microsoft because recently in recent times, uh, I wouldn't say that open AI and Microsoft have not been friends, but they have definitely not been besties. There's been consternation and forth back and forth between the two. So, so yes, Microsoft, they, they don't have the stake that they had before. They lost five and a half percent, but it's very clear that for the foreseeable future, Microsoft is still getting, um, you know, 20% of the revenue, um, and that could go up. The new structure allows that to go up. So we can see maybe that friendship actually, uh, you know, get, get a little bit closer than, than what has been in, in recent months. And there's still the ability for open AI to play in the field and, and, and date other people. So to speak. Yeah. Get a little closer. Don't be shy. Okay. Sorry. I, I didn't mean to sing on a podcast, uh, let's move on to Amazon. Amazon announced it is cutting around 14,000 corporate jobs, about 4% of its office workforce, one of its biggest job cuts in company history. It's moving to integrate AI on a deeper level and quote, innovate much faster. Senior VP, Beth Galletti shared that the company needs to operate, quote, like the world's largest startup with an emphasis on fewer management layers, increasing its agility, those kinds of things. Uh, though Amazon is actually performing pretty well, but even though that is true, the company is doubling down on efficiency, which is something its competitors like Microsoft and Meta are doing right now as well. And as far as the staff who are impacted by this, they're going to receive severance internal job assistance benefits, um, kind of saw the writing on the wall for some of this doesn't make it easier, but yet here we are. That's a lot of jobs. So it's a lot of jobs, 14,000 and there were reports, rumors yesterday that it could be as many as 30,000. So at least it's not that it is 14,000 and I do believe that many of the employees will have the opportunity to reposition within the organization because Amazon's not going to stop hiring. They are still hiring for things that they feel like they need to hire for. So if the internal employees that may be displaced by that, they get the opportunity to apply for those jobs, that would be a better thing than then just not being able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. Elon Musk launched Grokkopedia, his take on AI powered online encyclopedia driven by XAI, the platform claims to offer a less biased alternative to Wikipedia with the goal of truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The site resembles Wikipedia's minimalistic appearance with a single search bar around 885,279 articles it launched. The exact process for creating and editing Grokkopedia articles is unclear and critics are questioning if the information on the site's reliability or should they, they're questioning the information on the site's reliability and transparency. So there's questions about it. It's like, you know, Elon is saying that this should be more transparent than it was before. But when you look at some of the articles, let's just say that when you look up university is like, I don't know that that's the definition of a university. If you look up Musk, this seems to have a very, very inflated, you know, idea of self. Let's just, let's just put it that way. So there's, there's, there's some issues here that people see. Which is not unexpected when you look at other, you know, products like Grokk AI and Elon Musk's kind of, you know, his North Star with that and truth as he, you know, continues to hammer, you know, he said truth three times in that goal. So hey, it turns out that's what that's really important to him apparently. Wikipedia has also been a really big target of Elon Musk's. So I would say this is, you know, a little surprise that he would put his attention in this direction just for, you know, of note, Wikipedia, by comparison to Grock, what is it? Grockipedia is 885,000 articles. Wikipedia been around a very, very, very long time has around 7 million articles. All of those written by volunteers, that's really critical to what makes Wikipedia Wikipedia and not having transparency around how these entries are hitting Grockipedia. I don't know. Seems like a, that seems like something that people need to know and understand. Is it just, you know, is it just driven and written by AI or is there, you know, a user involvement and what does that process look like? I'm sure we're going to find out more about that. Well, a fair bit of the content actually is Creative Commons licensed from Wikipedia. So if you look at this, if you look at this and say, wow, that looks exactly like this Wikipedia article because it may actually be the creative common license from Wikipedia to pull some of that content off. Yeah. There's that. A new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge and also the company Metta have found that ultra HD TVs with 4K or 8K resolution show little to no noticeable improvement in image sharpness, sharpness over standard 2K screens in average sized living rooms. So they found that the human eye has its own resolution limits, meaning most eyes can't detect all those extra pixels at typical viewing distances within those spaces. The testing was done with participants using fine pattern imagery, also text to give the team an idea of the threshold at which those extra pixels basically become wasteful and useless. They released a nice chart for your reference, also an online calculator so you can pick the right combination of specs and hardware for your own space. I thought this is fascinating, right? Because from a technology perspective, it's just ingrained in me that more is better, more resolution is better, higher resolution is better than less resolution. So why wouldn't you want it? But there is a ceiling. There's a ceiling for these things. Same thing in audio. So here's the thing. I wonder if they tested this with six to 12 year olds, because I know when I look at my nieces and nephews, when they come over, I've got an 80, an 80 inch, you know, high def TV to my right. They will stand inches away from it because they literally want Mario to be the size that they are. Yeah. Can they see it when they're that close? And the thing here is here is that if you're watching these giant TVs at distance like you really should, you're too far away from it to actually perceive the density difference. But I'm guessing they didn't check with six year olds because they stand right, it's like, I look at my niece and like, how can you literally be that close where you have to turn your head left and right to see what's happening on the screen as compared to just stepping back and watching it. So I want to see the six to 12 year old test. Oh, man, I remember being that that age. Of course, TVs were much different back in the CRT era, but I remember sitting super close to the TV and, you know, parents said, Hey, you got to back off this bad for your eyes. Remember that it's bad for your eyes. Fascinating stuff. Well, we also have some quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news coming in the future. Windows 11 will soon prompt users to run memory scan after a B S O D crash in an attempt to catch and address memory related issue before they cause further problems. Hmm. That's probably pretty handy. Microsoft's next gen Xbox may eliminate its online multiplayer paywall for the first time. This is according to a report by Windows Central's Jez Corden. Probably a good thing since they're going to be significantly more expensive, according to the same report. Yup. Researchers from Murray University and the Max Planick Institute for Software Systems found that AI powered search engines regularly surface sources far outside Google's top organic search results, often prioritizing lesser known websites and alternative information sources. Not necessarily a bad thing automatically, but good to know Google Play Store now requires users to prove their 18 years of age or older. They've got options like ID upload. You can snap a selfie, credit card authorization or third party checks using verify my dot IO. As reported yesterday, Samsung did end up showing off its tri-fold phone design at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit yesterday, though no release date was mentioned and no one was allowed to touch it or fold it. Here it is. That's about all you get. Did it have Fragile on the box or out of this one? Yes. Right. No. I mean, I saw the photo and you could hardly even tell it's a foldable because it's unfolded. It just looks like a display. That's all it looks like. It's a display. It was pretty. It was pretty. It was there. Folks, join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking a Patreon account at Patreon.com/DTNS. We end every episode at DTNS with some shared wisdom, and today, W wanted to add to the discussion from Friday. On the discussion about Apple app tracking transparency, you alluded to the fact that the regulators assert that Apple doesn't apply ATT to their own apps. However, that's a neglecting the fact that Apple's apps don't track users across third-party apps. What ATT addresses, apps can still use the activity within their own apps to target users with ads, since that's beyond the control of the user and Apple. Also, on the other topic of slim phones, the report about the iPhone Air was about Apple reportedly reducing production, not shelving the air entirely. You repeated the assumption that they were done with the air entirely. Just as Samsung has reportedly done, these are two different things. I'm a regular listener, and I enjoy the show. Keep up the good work. Thanks, W. W. Yeah. So, first of all, thank you for the ATT update. Second of all, when I read this email and the slim phone comment, I read this and was like, "Oh!" So I went back to listen, and I was pretty confident that I didn't imply that Apple was getting out entirely, which was the case for most of that story. But near the end of the segment, I did make a couple of comments. I said, "Apple and Samsung are already getting out of the slim game," and then I also said, "Samsung and Apple are exiting," so great catch. I apologize. I sincerely did not mean that, and like I said when I read this, I was like, "No, there's no way," because in my mind, I know that it was just Apple minimizing, and I got it right all the way till the end. I need to stick the landing, podcasting is hard. My apologies. Thanks for keeping me honest. Well, folks, we love to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got insights into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. And thanks to W for contributing to today's show, and thank you for being along for Daily Tech News show. You can keep us in business. All you got to do is become a patron at patreon.com/dtns. We'll see you tomorrow. Timon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.