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[ad_1] Jimmy Butler #22 of the Miami Heat dribbles against Jamal Murray #27 of the Denver Nuggets during the fourth quarter in Game Five of the 2023 NBA Finals at Ball Arena on June 12, 2023 in Denver, Colorado. Justin Edmonds | Getty Images Sport | Getty Images The National Basketball Association's upcoming decision on which companies will acquire the TV and streaming rights for its live games could transform the entire media industry. Based on preliminary discussions between media executives and league officials, Comcast 's NBCUniversal, Google 's YouTube TV, Amazon , Apple and even Netflix may challenge or join the incumbents as rights holders, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Spokespeople at NBCUniversal, YouTube, Amazon, Apple and Netflix declined to comment. Every media rights renewal for the NBA is an important event because it only happens about once a decade. The last rights deal was...

[ad_1] Bloomberg Creative | Bloomberg Creative Photos | Getty Images When Elon Musk announced his offer to buy Twitter for more than $40 billion , he told the public his vision for the social media site was to make sure it's "an inclusive arena for free speech." Musk's actions since closing the deal last year have illuminated how he sees the balance internet platforms must strike in protecting free expression versus user safety. While he's lifted restrictions on many previously suspended accounts including former President Donald Trump's , he's also placed new limitations on journalists' and others' accounts for posting publicly available flight information that he equated to doxxing . The saga of Musk's Twitter takeover has underscored the complexity of determining what speech is truly protected. That question is particularly difficult when it comes to online platforms, which create policies that impact wide swaths of users from differen...

[ad_1] Google was working on an AI-powered mobile chatbot app for Gen Z users that features interactive digital characters, CNBC has learned. However, the company recently "deprioritized" those efforts amid an internal reorganization, according to materials seen by CNBC. Typically, when a product is deprioritized at Google, work on it ceases. Called "Bubble Characters," the app featured a choice of a talking digital character that would interact in conversations with Gen Z users, according to internal documentation viewed by CNBC. The company had been working on it since Q4 2021. Google declined comment to CNBC. The app's description states that it featured "human-like" conversations that "take action" and are "interesting for GenZ." The conversations were powered by large language models, which are massive data sets used to understand and generate human-like text. "What started out as something from a science fiction nov...