Today’s news that Canva is set to acquire generative AI startup Leonardo.Ai adds a distinctly Australian flavour to the global AI arms race.
Leonardo.Ai, which will continue to operate as a discrete unit within Canva for the foreseeable future, is an image generation platform built on a particularly attractive foundation: its very own trained AI model.
Canva’s existing ‘Magic Studio’ suite already provides a variety of AI tools, allowing users to intuitively generate and edit images, videos, animations and text. But many of the flashier tools in that suite are currently powered by external AI models from other companies like OpenAI and Google.
In the fast-moving world of AI development, being reliant on someone else’s tech is a vulnerability — one that Canva no doubt understands. Even Microsoft, which made a legendary bet tying itself up with OpenAI and getting first dibs on its valuable frontier models, is shrewdly building its own native capabilities too.
