News

Dubai-Based Noon Has Eliminated 10% Of Its Workforce

Employees in the marketing and advertising departments were laid off.

Published

1 year ago

April 24, 2023

Nour Nasir

Noon

After an initial surge during the height of the pandemic, many tech companies are now announcing cutbacks as the global economy continues to slump. Despite a generally buoyant digital economy, many Middle Eastern companies are also beginning to feel the strain as profits decline. One of those companies, Noon, recently issued a statement announcing layoffs of around 10%.

According to founder Mohamed Alabbar, Noon recently reduced its workforce to minimize costs, noting that the marketing and advertising departments of the Middle Eastern rival to Amazon were targeted for cuts.

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“We’ve been cutting costs and reducing staff for the past year and a half,” said Alabbar.

In 2021, Noon hoped to raise $2 billion from investors to aid further expansion across the Gulf e-commerce market. In February, the company acquired fashion e-retailer Namshi in a bid to expand its digital products and services with new fashion and lifestyle brands.

News

Adobe Reveals New AI Tools That Will Wow Photoshop Novices

The company is forging ahead with its Firefly-based AI features, but some professionals have copyright concerns.

Published

11 hours ago

April 24, 2024

Nour Nasir

Adobe

On Tuesday, April 23, Adobe announced a beta version of Photoshop boasting several fresh features aimed at helping users generate new images and manipulate existing files through text prompts. The latest generative AI additions harness the power of Adobe’s new Firefly Image 3 model.

Among the highlights of the update is the Generate Image tool, designed to generate images based on textual cues, providing users who struggle with a blank canvas a starting point to work from. Additionally, Generative Fill, an existing tool for background completion or image expansion, now incorporates a Reference Image function. The enhancement enables users to guide the tool’s output towards a specific aesthetic or theme by uploading an image as a reference.

adobe photoshop ai update firefly image 3 model

The new AI tools significantly simplify the process of translating creative ideas into images and should be useful to both Photoshop novices and seasoned pros. Firefly Image 3 now has the ability to produce astonishingly realistic images, and its enhanced understanding of text prompts is now considered industry-leading.

Despite facing scrutiny over its training data and a backlash from certain segments of the creative community, Adobe remains committed to integrating generative AI features into its entire software suite. The company continues to assert that Firefly is a safe, ethical option for commercial use and positions it as an alternative to competitors like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion —both of which have faced allegations of using copyrighted material without proper attribution or compensation.

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Despite Adobe’s confidence in Firefly’s abilities, recent findings have uncovered that its training dataset includes AI-generated images sourced from Midjourney and similar platforms, raising questions about the integrity of Adobe’s claims regarding the model’s commercial viability.

While Adobe maintains that its generative AI models are trained on licensed or public domain content from Adobe Stock, enthusiast Nick St. Pierre recently pointed out on X (formerly Twitter) that “over 13% of all images on Adobe Stock are AI-generated,” and that “most of the generated content comes from Dalle and Midjourney”.