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AWS CEO Matt Garman Wants to Reassert Amazon's Cloud Dominance in the AI Era
As Google and Microsoft continue to surge, the AWS chief lays out his pitch: cheaper, reliable AI delivered at hyperscale. You might think Amazon's biggest swing in the AI race was its $8 billion investment in Anthropic. But AWS has also been building in-house foundation models, new chips, massive data centers, and agents meant to keep enterprise customers locked inside its ecosystem. The company believes these offerings will give it an edge as businesses of all shapes and sizes deploy AI in the real world. WIRED sat down with AWS CEO Matt Garman ahead of the company's annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to discuss his AI vision, and how he plans to extend Amazon's lead in the cloud market over its fast-rising competitors, Microsoft and Google.
Sick baby ants sacrifice themselves to save their colony
New research shows ill pupae emit a chemical signal before ever leaving their cocoons. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Ants are some of nature's most selfless animals. They practice social distancing when ill, consistently act for the good of the colony, and will die to protect their queen from outsiders. This evolutionary drive is so strong that at least one ant species will even willingly sacrifice before they leave their cocoons.
Amazon Has New Frontier AI Models--and a Way for Customers to Build Their Own
Nova Forge lets Amazon's customers train frontier models for different tasks--a potential breakthrough in making AI actually useful for businesses. Amazon has announced a new family of frontier artificial intelligence models--and a new way for customers to build frontier models of their own. The ecommerce giant announced the second generation of its Nova AI models at re:Invent, a company conference held in Las Vegas. The models are nowhere near as popular as those offered by rivals like OpenAI and Google, but Amazon's plan to make them highly customizable could see them gain traction with its cloud users. Amazon detailed two improved large language models, Nova Lite and Nova Pro; a new realtime voice model called Nova Sonic; and a more experimental model called Nova Omni that performs a simulated kind of reasoning using images, audio, and video as well as text.
Windows 11 adds 'streaming' to Notepad: Watch AI type letter by letter
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Windows 11 adds'streaming' to Notepad: Watch AI type letter by letter The feature will at first only be available on Copilot+ PCs, but will later come to regular AMD and Intel PCs. Microsoft continues to build out Copilot AI support in Notepad for Windows 11. The latest update introduces so-called "streaming" in the minimalist text editor, reports Windows Latest . Instead, here's what it means: you can now watch Copilot write out its AI-generated text letter by letter, similar to how it works on ChatGPT and other AI chatbots.
The CEO Who Believes AGI Is Already Here
Welcome back to, TIME's new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? The three most valuable private companies in the U.S. have big reputations: OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic. But the fourth, Databricks, flies a little more under the radar. This company, which is currently raising funds at a valuation of $134 billion according to reports this week, is a quiet workhorse of the AI revolution.
The fight to see clearly through big tech's echo chambers
'The encroachment of technology can feel inevitable.' 'The encroachment of technology can feel inevitable.' The fight to see clearly through big tech's echo chambers Today, I'm mulling over whether to upgrade my iPhone 11 Pro. How to see through Silicon Valley's narrative The encroachment of technology can feel inevitable. It may have always, but increasingly it's a perception bolstered by big tech's own friendly media bubble. But at the same time as big tech's echo chambers are growing louder, so do critical voices from within.
AI threatens to widen inequality among states: UN
Artificial intelligence risks increasing inequality between developed and developing countries, a United Nations report has warned. The report, titled "The Next Great Divergence" and released by the United Nations Development Programme's Asia and Pacific regional bureau on Tuesday, calls for urgent, coordinated policy action to manage the impact of the technology. "We think that AI is heralding a new era of rising inequality between countries, following years of convergence in the last 50 years," Philip Schellekens, the bureau's chief economist, told a briefing in Geneva, according to the Reuters news agency. The report argues that AI, like the Industrial Revolution before it, has the potential to unlock unprecedented opportunities or deepen existing divides, across a global landscape marked by vast gaps in wealth, skills, and digital access. Even wealthier countries would suffer if poorer states were left behind by the AI revolution, said Schellekens. "If inequality continues to rise, the spillover effects of that in terms of the security agenda, in terms of undocumented forms of migration, will also become more daunting," he worries.
The Download: AI's impact on the economy, and DeepSeek strikes again
Any far-reaching new technology is always uneven in its adoption, but few have been more uneven than generative AI. That makes it hard to assess its likely impact on individual businesses, let alone on productivity across the economy as a whole. At one extreme, AI coding assistants have revolutionized the work of software developers. At the other extreme, most companies are seeing little if any benefit from their initial investments. That has provided fuel for the skeptics who maintain that--by its very nature as a probabilistic technology prone to hallucinating--generative AI will never have a deep impact on business. To students of tech history, though, the lack of immediate impact is normal.