Google Rolls Out Veo 3.1 🤖!

Partnerships galore and product rollouts only indicate one thing: Tech-tober is far from over 😅.

Hello and welcome to issue #129 of the Neural Frontier. 

Today, we’re diving into two exciting partnerships, as well as a product rollout (yes, it’s Veo again) from tech giants, Google. 

Let’s go! 🏃‍➡️

In a rush? Here's your quick byte: 

🤖 Google rolls out Veo 3.1!

🍟 OpenAI partners with Broadcom to produce chips.

🤝  Spotify partners with record labels to develop new AI products!

🎭 AI Reimagines: Too early for a Christmas bakery?

🎯 Everything else you missed this week.  

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week.

🤖 Google rolls out Veo 3.1!

Google DeepMind is rolling out Veo 3.1, the latest update to its AI-powered filmmaking tool, Flow, giving creators more control, audio support, and realistic visuals. Since Flow launched five months ago, users have generated over 275 million videos, inspiring new ways to tell stories with AI.

Veo 3.1 builds on Veo 3 with improvements in audiovisual quality, prompt adherence, and realism, turning images into videos that look and sound more lifelike.

Here’s what you need to know:

🎨 Refine Your Narrative With Audio: Veo 3.1 introduces rich, generated audio across existing Flow features, allowing creators to craft fully immersive scenes. Key capabilities include:

• Ingredients to Video: Use multiple reference images to control characters, objects, and style. Flow creates the final scene to match your creative vision.

• Frames to Video: Provide starting and ending images, and Flow generates a smooth transition bridging the two, ideal for cinematic or epic sequences.

• Extend: Create longer, seamless shots that continue from the final second of a previous clip, perfect for extended establishing shots.

✂️ Edit Your Videos With Precision: New editing capabilities let you refine clips mid-creation, ensuring your vision is fully realized:

• Insert Elements: Add anything imaginable, from realistic props to fantastical creatures, with Flow automatically managing shadows, lighting, and scene integration.

• Remove Objects: Seamlessly remove unwanted items or characters; Flow reconstructs the background to make it appear as if the object was never there.

🚀 Start Creating With Veo 3.1: Veo 3.1 is available through:

• Flow for creators

• Gemini API 2 for developers

• Vertex AI 3 for enterprise customers

• Gemini App

🍟 OpenAI partners with Broadcom to produce chips.

OpenAI is teaming up with Broadcom to produce its own AI chips, aiming to power its growing fleet of AI data centers. 

This move is designed to reduce reliance on NVIDIA and ensure sufficient computing power for applications like ChatGPT and Sora, as OpenAI works toward its goal of developing superintelligent AI.

Here’s the lowdown:

⚡ Massive Scale of Deployment: The partnership will allow OpenAI to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators, equivalent to the output of roughly 10 nuclear reactors. Broadcom will start rolling out racks of equipment in the second half of 2026, with full deployment expected by the end of 2029.

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, calls the deal “a critical step in building the infrastructure needed to unlock AI’s potential and deliver real benefits for people and businesses.”

⚙️ Why Custom Chips Matter: Designing its own chips enables OpenAI to:

• Embed learnings from frontier AI models directly into hardware.

• Optimize compute performance for large-scale AI workloads.

• Unlock new levels of capability and intelligence across OpenAI products.

This initiative complements other infrastructure partnerships, including:

• 10-gigawatt deal with NVIDIA

• 6-gigawatt deal with AMD

These collaborations have become possible after OpenAI modified its exclusive arrangement with Microsoft for AI compute.

🌐 Industry Context: Custom AI chips are part of a broader industry trend as major tech players—including Meta, Google, and Microsoft—look to:

• Secure critical supply chains amid surging demand for AI hardware.

• Reduce dependence on NVIDIA’s AI chips while maintaining flexibility for future models.

While custom chips have yet to threaten NVIDIA’s dominance, the approach strengthens alternative chipmakers, with Broadcom poised to benefit significantly from OpenAI’s deployment plans.

🤝 Spotify partners with record labels to develop new AI products!

Spotify announced a series of partnerships with major record labels to create AI tools designed to prioritize artists and songwriters, ensuring fair compensation and giving creators control over AI usage. 

Partner labels include Sony, Universal, Warner, and Merlin. The initiative focuses on building responsible AI products that respect copyright and allow artists to opt in if they want AI to interact with their work.

Here’s the 411:

⚡AI Background: Spotify has already introduced generative AI experiences, including:

• AI DJ – plays a personalized selection of songs for listeners.

• AI-driven playlist creation – lets users request playlists using natural language prompts.

However, the company faced criticism after an AI-generated band’s music went viral, sparking debates about the future role of human musicians.

To address this, Spotify recently:

• Revamped its AI policy to reduce spam and prevent mass uploads of AI-generated content.

• Adopted the DDEX music labeling system to flag when AI tools were used in music creation.

🎵 Upcoming AI Features for Artists 

The new GenAI initiatives will:

• Allow artists and rights holders to opt in or out of AI usage for their content.

• Track when their music is incorporated into AI-generated tracks.

• Ensure some form of monetary compensation for creators when AI uses their work.

• Expand beyond artists to include distributors and other rights holders over time.

Spotify emphasizes that these tools are being built to reflect artists’ consent and rights, rather than allowing AI to operate unchecked.

🔬 Spotify’s AI Research & Development

To support this effort, Spotify has:

• Established a generative AI research lab and dedicated product team.

• Begun work on the first AI music tools aligned with the principle that creators should choose how they participate.

• Plans to expand the AI ecosystem responsibly, combining innovation with rights protection.

🎭 AI Reimagines: Too early for a Christmas bakery?

Today’s showcase brings snow, a vintage bakery, and a tale of the ember season. Too early? We know, but we just couldn’t help it!

See for yourself! 😄

🎯 Everything else you missed this week.

🤝 Meta partners with semiconductor design company, Arm.

🛍️ Walmart partners with OpenAI to allow shopping for Walmart’s products from within ChatGPT.

🤖 Anthropic unveils Claude Haiku 4.5.

🦿 Figure 03 is here.

💼 Slack rolls out new AI features.

⚡ The Neural Frontier’s weekly spotlight: 3 AI tools making the rounds this week. 

1. ⚡ JustCopy.ai: JustCopy.ai is a rapid application development platform offering 1000+ production-ready templates built by engineers from companies like Stripe, Netflix, and Airbnb, with full-stack features including authentication, databases, payments, and auto-scaling infrastructure.

2. 🚀 Rocket: Rocket is a one-prompt application builder that generates full-stack, production-ready apps from a single natural language description, including backend infrastructure, database schemas, authentication, and deployment configuration.

3. 🎓 X-Pilot: X-Pilot is an AI-powered educational video generator that transforms course ideas and documents into professional instructional videos with animations, voiceovers, and visual elements in under an hour.

Wrapping up… 

This week brought a healthy mix of partnership announcements and, in true shipping season fashion, a wealth of product releases. 

Next week’s arrivals? You’ll just have to wait and see 😀. 

As always, stay curious, hit that Subscribe button, and we’ll catch you next week on the Neural Frontier! ✨.