What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?
An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:
I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.
Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.
A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)
So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.
Riot Games are laying off 530 people, or 11% of Rioters globally.
They say they want to focus on their "core live games" - League of Legends, VALORANT, Teamfight Tactics, and Wild Rift. Development of R&D games such as Project L (the tag-team fighting game) will continue.
Legends of Runeterra will be significantly hit, because it "has faced financial challenges since launch, costing significantly more to develop and support than it generates".
Riot Forge will also be shutting down after the release of Bandle Tale as they "don’t view this as core to our strategy moving forward".