Hollywood heavyweights sue Midjourney

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The Mouse just lawyered up — and in contrast to media outlets that settled for licensing deals, Disney, Marvel, and other major Hollywood studios are selecting the courtroom over compromise.

With Hollywood playing hardball on Midjourney’s reproduction of its IP in outputs and model training, the AI industry’s fair use defense could also be about to get its hardest stress test yet.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Disney, Universal sue Midjourney over copyright

• TBC goes all-in on AI with Dia browser

• Easy methods to connect Claude to external applications

• Meta’s latest AI learns real-world physics

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MIDJOURNEY

👨🏻‍⚖️ Disney, Universal sue Midjourney over copyright

The Rundown: Hollywood giants, including Disney and Universal, just filed a lawsuit against AI image generation startup Midjourney, alleging that the corporate’s models are a large engine for copyright theft.

The main points:

• The lawsuit marks Hollywood’s first major legal motion against AI corporations, with Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Universal, and others joining forces.

• The group claims that Midjourney built its models by scraping the studios’ iconic characters, allowing users to generate infinite unauthorized knockoffs.

• Dozens of examples were included within the criticism, featuring side-by-side comparisons of characters like Yoda, Shrek, Spider-Man, and Minions.

• Disney’s legal counsel said that while the corporate is ‘bullish’ on the promise of AI, “piracy is piracy.”

Why it matters: While many major media outlets have struck lucrative AI licensing deals for his or her content, Hollywood studios are playing hardball. This case could have major ramifications for AI corporations’ “fair use” claims — potentially setting legal precedents that would impact not only Midjourney but your complete industry.

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THE BROWSER COMPANY

🌐 TBC goes all-in on AI with Dia browser

The Rundown: The Browser Company released its AI-first Dia browser in beta, featuring an integrated chatbot that may see every tab, take agentic actions, and adapt to user preferences and patterns.

The main points:

• Dia integrates its AI directly into the URL bar, allowing users to talk with their open tabs, get summaries, and draft content without leaving their workflow.

• Dia’s chatbot can analyze multiple tabs without delay, draft emails based on a user’s writing style, and use days of browsing history for personalized responses.

• It uses a system of “Skills” or specialized AI agents tailored for specific tasks like shopping or coding that remember context from relevant tabs.

• Beta access launched today for existing Arc users on Mac, with all data encrypted locally and wiped from servers immediately after processing.

Why it matters: The online is trending towards AI and agentic capabilities — and the race to create the most effective “AI-native” browser is officially on. Dia feels directly correct in that AI will evolve to where users are as an alternative of being isolated in platforms, however the likes of Google and OpenAI are undoubtedly coming with powerful solutions of their very own.

AI TRAINING

🔗 Easy methods to connect Claude to external applications

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the way to use Claude’s latest MCP integration to attach AI on to 1000’s of external tools like Google Docs, Slack, WhatsApp, and more via Zapier’s MCP server.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Claude Settings and search for “Add integrations” within the “Search and tools” option

2. Visit the Zapier MCP site, create a free account, and add Claude in “Latest MCP Server”

3. Within the Configure tab, click “Add tool” and seek for apps like Google Docs, or Slack

4. Copy the Integration URL from the Connect tab, return to Claude, and paste it in “Add integrations”

5. Test it! Ask Claude: “Create a brand new Google Doc about [topic]” and watch it work across apps

Pro tip: Start with 1-2 essential tools, test thoroughly, then add more apps as needed. You possibly can edit or disable tools anytime.

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• Deployment flexibility across on-device, on-premises, hybrid, or cloud environments

• Proven accuracy across 55+ languages with multilingual conversation handling

• Infrastructure that handles 500+ years of audio monthly for governments and Fortune 500 corporations

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META

🎢 Meta’s latest AI learns real-world physics

The Rundown: Meta released V-JEPA 2, a “world model” that offers AI systems the power to know physics and predict real-world outcomes — enabling robots to navigate unfamiliar environments and manipulate objects they’ve never seen before.

The main points:

• The 1.2B parameter model was trained on 1M+ hours of video, learning how objects move, interact, and reply to actions within the physical world.

• V-JEPA 2 achieved 65-80% success rates in picking and placing unfamiliar objects in latest environments, using visual goals to plan multi-step tasks.

• Meta claims the model runs 30x faster than Nvidia’s competing Cosmos model while achieving SOTA performance on video understanding benchmarks.

• The corporate also released three latest benchmarks revealing that while humans rating 85-95% on physical reasoning tasks, current AI models struggle.

Why it matters: Grounding AI in physical reality as an alternative of text-based reasoning is a vital development as each AI agents and robots turn out to be increasingly more utilized in real-world tasks. Meta’s approach may help AI adapt to the messy, unpredictable real-world environments on the fly without requiring massive task-specific training datasets.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 o3-pro – OpenAI’s latest top reasoning model that thinks deeper

• 🧠 Magistral – Mistral’s first open-source reasoning model family

• 🎥 Astra – Topaz Labs’ latest AI video upscaler

• 🎆 Krea 1 – Krea’s first image model, featuring advanced control and quality

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🎨 The Rundown – Designer (Brand & Platform)

• ⚡ xAI – Electric Engineer

• 🛡️ Horizon3 – Attack Engineer

• ✍️ Abridge – Technical Author

📰 Every little thing else in AI today

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the corporate’s first open-weight model, expected in June, will take “a bit of more time” but be “very, very well worth the wait.”

Apple execs defended their AI efforts in an interview with the WSJ, saying the corporate made the fitting call to not ship AI Siri that didn’t meet quality standards.

Meta announced latest AI video editing capabilities in its Meta AI app, allowing users to quickly change outfits, locations, lighting, and more with preset prompts.

Mistral launched Mistral Compute, an AI stack offering GPU access, orchestration, and model training services, positioning itself as a substitute for cloud giants.

Windsurf unveiled the Windsurf Browser, giving its Cascade agentic coding assistant full awareness of web activity for in-context support.

Starbucks is piloting Green Dot Assist, a brand new AI tool to assist baristas answer questions and access guidance in real-time.

Midjourney launched video rating, allowing users to explore and rate outputs from its soon-to-be-released video model.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday, June thirteenth, at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the tip of the workshop, you’ll know the way to get significantly more value out of whichever model you utilize, whether it’s o3 or o3-Pro.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team