Amazon has added $2.75 billion to its initial September 2023 investment of $1.25 billion in Anthropic, completing its announced $4 billion stake in the artificial intelligence startup formed in 2021 by former members of OpenAI. As part of the resulting strategic collaboration, Anthropic’s most powerful models, including the Claude 3 series, are available on Amazon Bedrock, a service providing fully managed foundation models. Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider and Amazon says Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips “to build, train, and deploy its future models.” Read more

Messaging app Telegram has added business account features to create a custom start page, listings, maps, hours of operation, chatbot support and more. Anyone can turn their Telegram account into a Telegram Business account, and users don’t need coding skills. Public channels with 1,000 or more subscribers can receive 50 percent of the revenue from ads shown in their channels. Based in Dubai, Telegram says the channels of its global users generate over 1 trillion monthly views. In February it unveiled an ad program that adopted the TON blockchain’s Toncoin as its native currency. Read more

OpenAI has debuted a new text-to-voice generation platform called Voice Engine, available in limited access. Voice Engine can generate a synthetic voice from a 15-second clip of someone’s voice. The synthetic voice can then read a provided text, even translating to other languages. For now, only a handful of companies are using the tech under a strict usage policy as OpenAI grapples with the potential for misuse. “These small scale deployments are helping to inform our approach, safeguards, and thinking about how Voice Engine could be used for good across various industries,” OpenAI explained. Read more

Google’s YouTube has created a new model for its Shorts feed that lets creators share short-form videos as exclusive content for their paying viewers. The feature gives creators an opportunity to share exclusive content with their most ardent fans, in addition to other perks for paying subscribers, like badges, custom emojis, live streams and more. TikTok recently loosened its subscription requirements for creators, allowing more of them to participate. In March, the ByteDance owned service said it is renaming TikTok Live as “Subscription” and is opening it to “regular creators,” letting them post exclusive content that paying users can see. Read more

Microsoft-owned business and employment-focused social platform LinkedIn plans to add games and a vertical-scroll feed of short videos. But the career-centric platform will still be all work, even as it adds play. The intent is to have the TikTok-like video feed filled with professionally themed content, and the games will be geared toward relationship building, while also potentially getting people to spend more time using LinkedIn. The video feed is in the test phase, while code hinting at the direction of the gaming feature has been discovered by some astute app watchers. Read more