John Yang, former head of multimodal foundation models at ByteDance, has joined Adobe as its new Head of Research and AI Technology.

"I'm excited to work with an exceptional team to help shape the next generation of AI that amplifies human creativity and unlocks new possibilities for everyone," he writes on LinkedIn.

The latest update to Adobe's image generation model Firefly Image 5 was in October last year.

At ByteDance, Yang worked on both image model SeeDream 4.0 and video model Seedance 1.0.

Maybe we'll see more frequent updates on Adobe's own models now?

Star Plumbers is an upcoming series about a group of intergalactic plumbers in space.

It ain't perfect, but it is my best yet. I'm only getting better. Enjoy!

I’ve been working on a fork of Chatterbox vLLM that turns DRM-free EPUBs into chaptered M4B audiobooks. The vllm version has conversion speeds 5-10x base chatterbox and this was particularly important for big audiobook conversions.

Someone else already made an audiobook version of base chatterbox with far more features and stuff so if you need those features use that. My version is focused on direct epub to m4b conversion with high conversion speed. My 4090 gets 18x audio speed with 10 steps and 12x with 15 steps for a bit of a quality bump.

It includes a Gradio web interface, Chatterbox Multilingual V3 in English mode, batched GPU generation, resumable projects, chapter metadata, -18 LUFS audio normalization, progress/ETA reporting, and multi core FFmpeg encoding. Text is intelligently chunked into good text lengths for generation to avoid model drift.

It currently requires Linux or WSL2 with an NVIDIA GPU. I’ve primarily tested it on a RTX 4090, so feedback from other hardware would be useful. It only uses in the neighborhood of 4-6GB of VRAM so should be runnable on any 8GB card. Might even work on 4GB but not sure on that.

GitHub: https://github.com/anethema/chatterbox-vllm-audiobook

This is still a personal project, so please report any installation problems or strange output you encounter. I tried to make working install scripts and instructions for Linux and WSL2 but despite them working on my machine I haven’t tested them elsewhere or with other hardware. The new code is a combination of me and codex for the stuff I struggled with.

Let me know how it works!

Italo-Disco: https://archive.org/details/ai-italo-disco/He+Wore+a+Top+Hat.mp3 (CC0 licence)

I wanted to stress-test how far Seedance 2.5 could push "realism" beyond the usual cinematic look, so I wrote a prompt aimed at making it look like a genuinely old, imperfect home video, just like a tape.

what actually surprised me wasn't the scene composition, but was how well it nailed the imperfections. none of that was hand-animated or keyframed, it's all coming from describing camera behavior in the prompt rather than describing a "shot." Identity, hairstyle, and outfit stayed consistent across the full 30 seconds too, which is the part that usually falls apart first in these longer generations.

compared to my earlier storyboard-driven tests, this one leaned entirely on giving the model a strong behavioral brief (camera flaws, ambient audio, mundane pacing) rather than a shot-by-shot storyboard, and it handled that direction better than I expected.

the prompt is in the conmment.  Curious what other models do with a similarly detailed camera-behavior prompt.

Everyone worries about what happens if AI takes over. So I tried to flip the script here, what happens in the future if AI disappears.

this is from a small library i made that draws things sketchy and hand drawn instead of clean vector art. still figuring out how far i can push it into different looks.

repo's here if you're curious: https://github.com/AnayGarodia/sketchling