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Lady Gaga to Play Free Concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro

Lady Gaga to Play Free Concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro

Yahoo21-02-2025
The post Lady Gaga to Play Free Concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro appeared first on Consequence.
Lady Gaga is set play to what will undoubtedly be one of the largest crowds of her career when she takes the stage for a free concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil on May 3rd, 2025.
Dubbed 'Lady Gaga: Todo Mundo no Rio,' the concert is expected to draw a crowd of over one million people, according to Brasilian officials. Madonna held a similar show at Copacabana Beach in May 2024, attracting more than 1.6 million attendees. Gaga's concert will also be broadcast live on Multishow and TV Globo.
'It's a great honor to be asked to sing for Rio–for my whole career the fans in Brazil have been part of the lifeblood of the little monsters,' Gaga said in a statement. The singer noted that she's been 'dying to come perform for you for years and was heartbroken' when she was forced to cancel a 2017 appearance at Brasil's Rock in Rio after being hospitalized for severe pain.
'Your understanding that I needed that time to heal meant the world to me,' Gaga added. 'I am now coming back and I feel better than ever and am working so hard to make sure this show is one you will never forget. Get ready for MAYHEM on the beach.'
The performance will come shortly after the release of Gaga's new album, MAYHEM, which is set to arrive on March 7th. She's also slated to headline Coachella and appear as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live in the coming months.
Lady Gaga to Play Free Concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro Alex Young
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Google Pixel 10 event live: Updates from the hardware launch today, including Gemini, Pixel Watch and more
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time15 minutes ago

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Google Pixel 10 event live: Updates from the hardware launch today, including Gemini, Pixel Watch and more

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AI Isn't Coming for Hollywood. It Has Already Arrived
AI Isn't Coming for Hollywood. It Has Already Arrived

WIRED

timean hour ago

  • WIRED

AI Isn't Coming for Hollywood. It Has Already Arrived

Aug 20, 2025 6:00 AM An early winner in the generative AI wars was near collapse—then bet everything on a star-studded comeback. Can Stability AI beat the competition? Photo-Illustration: Mark Harris; Getty Images Lady Gaga probably wasn't thinking that a coup would unfold in her greenhouse. Then again, she was cohosting a party there with Sean Parker, the billionaire founder of Napster and first president of Facebook. It was February 2024, and the singer had invited guests to her $22.5 million oceanside estate in Malibu to mark the launch of a skin-care nonprofit. One of the organization's trustees was her boyfriend, whose day job was running the Parker Foundation. In the candlelit space, beside floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Pacific, Parker's people mingled with Gaga's, nibbling focaccia and branzino alla brace to music from a string quartet (Grammy-winning, of course). 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Since 2022, the number of films and TV shows made in the United States had dropped by about 40 percent, thanks to ballooning production costs at home, competition from overseas, and long-running labor disputes everywhere. AI promised to bring the numbers back up by speeding production and slashing costs: Let computers automate the grunt work of translating dialog, adding visual effects frame by painstaking frame, and editing boom microphones out of a zillion shots. Maybe one day they could even write scripts and act! Two of the industry's biggest unions had gone on strike in part to obtain assurances that generative AI wouldn't replace union jobs in the near term. But every major studio and streaming service was racing to figure out its AI strategy, and a host of startups—Luma, Runway, Asteria—was working on tools to pitch them. Akkaraju saw the opportunity in front of him. Stability AI had the technology. It just needed that Hollywood finish. 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In the years that followed, none of the major studios publicly announced deals with the Screening Room, and in 2020 the company rebranded as SR Labs. Photo-Illustration: Mark Harris; Getty Images That same year, Akkaraju and Parker took over Weta Digital, the visual effects studio behind blockbusters such as Lord of the Rings , Game of Thrones , and Cameron's Avatar movies. Weta developed virtual cameras that let Cameron see a real-time rendering of the artificial environment through a viewfinder, as if he were filming on location in the fictional world of Pandora. One night, Cameron, Akkaraju, and Parker met for dinner to discuss how technology was changing the film industry. 'The tequila was flowing,' Cameron recalls. 'A friendship formed.' Any tension that had existed over the Screening Room melted away. ('I never really talked with him about it,' Akkaraju says. 'He knew, and I knew. It was very funny.') So Cameron is on the board, but is the 'creator in the center,' as Akkaraju said? When I spoke with Parker, he emphasized the importance of using open source models and spoke of 'respect for creators and respect for IP.' He added: 'That sounds potentially kind of rich, coming from me, given my past association with Napster and early social media. But it is a lesson learned.' In June, the company scored a major win when Getty dropped its copyright infringement claims from a broader lawsuit as the trial neared a close in the UK. The US trial is ongoing. Akkaraju said the company 'sources data from publicly available and licensed datasets for training and fine-tuning,' and that when 'creating solutions for a client' it 'fine-tunes using the dataset provided by the client.' When I asked Akkaraju if the company trained exclusively on licensed data, he responded: 'Well, that's the majority of what we're using, for sure.' Even those who are bullish on AI admit that, for the most part, the technology isn't ready for the big screen. Text-to-image generators might work for marketing agencies, but they often lack the quality required for a feature film. 'I worked on one film for Netflix and tried to use a single shot,' says a filmmaker who asked to remain anonymous, not wanting to discuss their use of AI publicly. The AI-generated footage got 'bounced back' from quality control because it wasn't 4K resolution, the filmmaker says. Then there's the problem of consistency. Filmmakers need to be able to tweak a scene in minute ways, but that's not possible with most of the image and video generators on the market. Enter the same prompt into a chatbot 10 times and you will likely get 10 different responses. 'That doesn't work at all in a VFX workflow,' Cameron says. 'We need higher resolution, we need higher repeatability. We need controllability at levels that aren't quite there yet.' 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What are you using, magician?'' he recalls. Irwin started playing around with the tools himself. 'I felt directly tethered to my imagination,' he says. Eventually, he made a presentation for Amazon outlining how he wanted to use generative AI in his production. The company was supportive. 'We film everything we can for real—it still takes hundreds of people,' Irwin tells me. 'But we're able to do it at about a third of the budget of some of these bigger shows in our same genre, and we're able to do it twice as fast.' A burning-forest scene in House of David would have been too expensive to do with practical effects, he says, so AI created what audiences saw. Irwin says he has spoken with the team at Stability but has 'not been able to use their tools successfully on a show at scale.' The comment reflects a theme I found in my reporting: While I was able to identify a number of filmmakers who admitted to toying around with Stability's text-to-image generators, none used the tools professionally—at least not yet. Contains AI-generated imagery. Courtesy of Stability AI The taboo on studios acknowledging their embrace of AI seems to be softening. In July, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told investors the company had allowed 'gen AI final footage' to appear in one of its original series for the first time. He said the decision sped up production tenfold and dramatically cut costs. 'We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper,' he said. Hanno Basse, Stability's chief technology officer, is showing me an image of his backyard in Los Angeles: a grassy lawn surrounded by high hedges, rose bushes crowding a bay window, and a tree in the far left-hand corner. Suddenly, the 2D image unfurls into 3D. A generative AI model has filled in the gaps, estimating depth (how far away the hedge is from the rose bush, the tree from the window) and other missing elements to make the scene feel immersive. Basse can replicate camera moves by selecting from a drop-down menu: zoom in or out, pan up or pan down, spiral. 'Instead of spending hours or days or weeks building a virtual environment and rehearsing your shots, the idea here is actually that you can just take a single image and generate a concept,' Basse says. Contains AI-generated imagery. Courtesy of Stability AI Rob Legato, Stability's chief pipeline architect, seems pleased. A veteran visual effects specialist who worked on Wolf of Wall Street and Avatar , Legato joined the company in March. He was up until 2 am the night before shooting a film and has arrived at this meeting to act as both a company executive and a beta tester. The only issue, Legato says, is the drop-down menu. 'You probably want to combine them and have a slider,' he says. Contains AI-generated imagery. Courtesy of Stability AI Stability AI's offerings are still in their early days. Even Legato admits the version of the virtual camera tool we are looking at has a ways to go before it could be used by a professional. 'Right off the bat my job is unfortunately to be critical,' he says. The conversation drifts to rotoscoping. Legato explains that this process, where an artist sketches over a scene frame by frame, used to take hundreds of hours and was reserved for entry-level animators. Now AI can automatically isolate part of an image and add visual effects. 'You'd never want your child to work on roto,' he tells me. The comment is meant to sound optimistic, but it gets to a looming fear about how AI will impact Hollywood. Namely, that the technology will lead to widespread job losses. 'I hear artists at VFX companies say, 'Hey, I don't want to get replaced.' Of course you don't want to get replaced!' says Cameron. 'If you guys are going to lose your jobs, you're going to lose your jobs over the work drying up versus getting bumped aside by these gen AI models.' The idea, echoed by Akkaraju and Parker, is that as movies become cheaper to produce, more films will get made and overall employment will rise. When pressed on this point, Akkaraju reverts to an extended metaphor. 'Every major transition or technological invention is always met with apprehension at first, and then acceptance, and then it's obvious,' he says. 'When ATMs rolled out in the '80s, all the tellers were really up in arms. They were like, 'That's our job. We give withdrawals, we take deposits, and now you're having this machine do it.' What's happened since then is that there are more teller jobs than ever before, and their average pay is higher, even adjusted for inflation.' Whether the coup that began in Lady Gaga's greenhouse ultimately saves Stability AI, the AI revolution is here and already transforming Hollywood. That collapsing building, that burning forest, that crowd of people you see when you stream a show or go to the movie theater? One person with a keyboard could've made them. The thing about that bank-teller anecdote is that it's often used by techno-optimists—including Stability AI investor Eric Schmidt. What they don't mention is that the number of bank tellers peaked around 2015. Since then, it's been on the decline. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@

Justin Bieber Impersonator Dupes Las Vegas Nightclub, Performs On Stage
Justin Bieber Impersonator Dupes Las Vegas Nightclub, Performs On Stage

Yahoo

time19 hours ago

  • Yahoo

Justin Bieber Impersonator Dupes Las Vegas Nightclub, Performs On Stage

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