Amazon is ramping up its AI activity, reportedly planning to release its own advanced reasoning model as part of the company’s Nova family. The Nova line was introduced in December at re:Invent and the new addition could debut as early as June. Its reasoning prowess is being compared to the abilities of OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1. But reports say Amazon is taking the hybrid reasoning approach embraced by Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Amazon has a 10 percent stake in Anthropic). The e-retail giant is also preparing for an agentic AI push, having established a dedicated unit, reports say. Continue reading Amazon Plans an AI Push with Nova Reasoning Model, Agents

A standalone Meta AI app is in the works for Q2, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The move is aligned with Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stated intent to propel his company to the forefront of artificial intelligence by year’s end, vaulting ahead of competitors such as OpenAI, Alphabet, Anthropic and xAI. “This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg said in January during a Q4 earnings call with analysts. Continue reading Meta Plans Its Own Standalone AI App to Take On ChatGPT

Over a year after teasing a next-gen Alexa virtual assistant, Amazon is releasing an AI-powered version called Alexa+. The new personal assistant can do things like order groceries for the household, facilitate event planning, manage smart home utilities and security, and, of course, shop online. “She’s smarter, more conversational, more capable,” according to Amazon SVP of Devices & Services Panos Panay. Strategically priced to entice the AI-curious into Amazon membership, Alexa+ costs $20 per month as a standalone service or comes free with Amazon Prime ($15 per month or $139 per year). Continue reading Amazon’s AI-Powered Alexa+ is Agentic with Computer Vision

Anthropic has released a new frontier model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, described as the industry’s first “hybrid AI reasoning model.” The new Claude is different in that it can both respond to questions in real time or, alternatively, “think” about a problem for a prolonged period of time — basically as long as a user would like. Users can choose between “near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user” by selecting the appropriate “reasoning” capability for Claude, Anthropic says. Along with the new model, Anthropic is also debuting a command line tool for agentic coding, Claude Code. Continue reading Anthropic Introduces a New Claude Hybrid Reasoning Model

Anthropic is launching an AI Economic Index aimed at understanding the technology’s effects on labor markets and the economy over time. The Anthropic Economic Index kicks off with a report that indicates the most concentrated uses of AI today are in software development and technical writing tasks. The information was culled by analyzing data from millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai with the goal of revealing how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across global markets. It also found that AI usage trends more toward augmenting human capabilities (57 percent), compared to using it for automation (43 percent). Continue reading Anthropic Launches Economic Index to Track the AI Economy

Amazon is predicting more than $100 billion in capital expenditure for AI in 2025. The majority of that will be invested in the AWS cloud division, according to Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy, indicating Big Tech is not planning to back down on AI. Amazon’s Q4 profit hit $20 billion, an 88 percent increase over the same period in 2023, and full year profit was $59.2 billion, a 94 percent increase, on revenue of $638 billion, an 11 percent rise. On an earnings call, Jassy said the $26.3 billion in Q4 2024 capex spending “is reasonably representative” of what the company can be expected to spend on an annualized basis this year. Continue reading AWS Cloud Computing Generates Half of Amazon’s Q4 Profits

Anthropic has created a method to defend AI models against “jailbreaks” — unauthorized workarounds to get an AI model to do things it was trained not to do, like providing instructions for building chemical weapons. Called Constitutional Classifiers, the system was 95 percent effective in identifying and preventing jailbreaks of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in a test environment. In an effort to drum up real-world red-teaming, the company offered cash prizes of up to $15,000 to anyone who could jailbreak its Sonnet AI model. After some 3,000 hours of attempts by 185 participants, none claimed an award. Now the company is offering additional incentives. Continue reading Anthropic Will Award Cash for Jailbreaking AI Defense System

An internecine AI battle has erupted between Alibaba and DeepSeek. Days after DeepSeek dominated several news cycles with its affordable DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model and the multimodal Janus-Pro-7B, Alibaba released its latest LLM, Qwen 2.5-Max, available via API from Alibaba Cloud. As with DeepSeek, Alibaba is looking beyond its domestic borders, but the fact that a public-facing AI battle is heating up between Chinese companies indicates the People’s Republic isn’t going to quietly cede the AI race to the U.S. Alibaba claims Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms models from DeepSeek, Meta and OpenAI. Continue reading Alibaba Plans to Take On AI Competitors with Qwen2.5-Max

Jack Dorsey’s financial tech and media firm Block (formerly Square) has released a platform for building AI agents: Codename Goose. Previously available in beta, Goose is primarily designed to build agents for coding and software development, but Block built in many basic features that could be applied to general purpose pursuits. Because it is open source and offered under Apache License 2.0, the hope is that developers will apply it to varied use cases. A leading feature of Codename Goose is its flexibility. It can integrate a wide range of large language models, letting developers use it with their preferred model. Continue reading Codename Goose: Block Unveils Open-Source AI Agent Builder

Perplexity joins the list of AI companies launching agents, debuting the Perplexity Assistant for Android. The tool uses reasoning, search, browsers and apps to help mobile users with daily tasks. Concurrently, Perplexity — independently founded in 2022 as a conversational AI search engine — has launched an API called Sonar intended for enterprise and developers who want real-time intelligent search, taking on heavyweights like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. While to date AI search has largely been limited to answers informed by training data, which freezes their knowledge in time, next-gen tools can pull from the Internet in real time. Continue reading Perplexity Bows Real-Time AI Search Tool, Android Assistant

OpenAI has launched Operator, a semi-autonomous AI agent that uses a proprietary web browser to execute tasks like planning a vacation using Tripadvisor or booking restaurant reservations through OpenTable. “It can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking and scrolling,” explains OpenAI. Operator is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA), and is available in research preview to ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the U.S. Combining GPT-4o’s computer vision capabilities with advanced reasoning, CUA is trained to interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) — parsing menus, clicking buttons and reading screen text. Continue reading OpenAI Operator Agent Available to ChatGPT Pro Subscribers

Google has introduced Gemini 2.0, the latest version of its multimodal AI model, signaling a shift toward what the company is calling “the agentic era.” The upgraded model promises not only to outperform previous iterations on standard benchmarks but also introduces more proactive, or agentic, functions. The company announced that “Project Astra,” its experimental assistant, would receive updates that allow it to use Google Search, Lens, and Maps, and that “Project Mariner,” a Chrome extension, would enable Gemini 2.0 to navigate a user’s web browser to complete tasks autonomously. Continue reading Google Releases Gemini 2.0 in Shift Toward Agentic Era of AI

After years of focusing on AI infrastructure, Amazon is plunging into the frontier model business with the Nova series. The new family of generative AI models includes the text-to-text model Amazon Nova Micro and Amazon Nova Lite for fast, mobile-friendly apps, and at the upper echelon the multimodal Amazon Nova Pro and Amazon Nova Premier for processing text, images and video. Amazon, which is heavy into production via Amazon Studios and MGM, is also launched two specialty models focused on “studio quality” output — Amazon Nova Canvas for images and Amazon Nova Reel for video. Continue reading Amazon Dives into Generative AI with Nova Foundation Models

Amazon Web Services is building a supercomputer in collaboration with Anthropic, the AI startup in which the e-commerce giant has an $8 billion minority stake. Hundreds of thousands of AWS’s flagship Trainium chips will be amassed in an “Ultracluster” that when it is completed in 2025 will be one of the largest supercomputers in the world for model training, Amazon says. The company announced the general availability of AWS Trainium2-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual servers as well as Trn2 UltraServers designed to train and deploy AI models and teased next-generation Trainium3 chips. Continue reading AWS Building Trainium-Powered Supercomputer with Anthropic

Artificial voice startup Hume AI has had a busy Q4, introducing Voice Control, a no-code artificial speech interface that gives users control over 10 voice dimensions ranging from “assertiveness” to “buoyancy” and “nasality.” The company also debuted an interface that “creates emotionally intelligent voice interactions” with Anthropic’s foundation model Claude that has prompted one observer to ponder the possibility that keyboards will become a thing of the past when it comes to controlling computers. Both advances expand on Hume’s work with its own foundation model, Empathic Voice Interface 2 (EVI 2), which adds emotional timbre to AI voices. Continue reading Hume AI Introduces Voice Control and Claude Interoperability