Amazon is planning to dramatically undercuts Spotify and Apple with a music streaming service that costs just 5 per month. The firm is working on a music subscription service that would only work on its Echo hardware, tech news website Recode reported, citing sources. Amazon would like to launch the services in September, but has not finalized deals with major music labels and publishers, Recode reported. Amazon would like to launch the services in September, but has not finalized deals with major music labels and publishers, Recode reported. Amazon was preparing to launch a standalone music streaming subscription service at 9.99 per month, in line with major rivals, Reuters reported in June, citing sources.

Amazon.com is expected to release a cheaper music service exclusively for its Echo devices, according to a report from Recode. The service will cost substantially less than other subscription music services, at either 4 or 5 per month, Recode's Peter Kafka reports. Most monthly music subscriptions cost about 10 per month. Amazon declined to comment on the reports. Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post. Details on the reported service are thin, but it seems that users will be able to listen to on-demand, ad-free music through Amazon's smart-home devices.

Rumors about Amazon's Spotify and Apple Music competitor are surfacing once again, and from the sounds of it, the service may launch sooner rather than later. Following a report in January from The New York Post, Recode says Amazon will launch a new music streaming service possibly as soon as September--potentially with a very interesting twist. The purported music service will feature two tiers. The first is the standard 10 per month streaming service, with all the millions of tracks that come with said services. The second possibility, however, is what Amazon is probably truly excited about.

Researchers at Google are working on a way to use neural networks, the building blocks of modern artificial intelligence, to make our picture files smaller without sacrificing quality. To consumers, smaller files means more available space on phones, tablets, and computers, but for tech companies like Google that offer unlimited photo storage, smaller photos could reduce server load, power consumption, and improve transfer speeds. This sort of idea has made its way into pop culture thanks to HBO's Silicon Valley, where the fictional compression startup Pied Piper uses neural networks to optimize how they shrink files. Google's work teaches neural networks how to scrimp and save data by looking at examples of how standard compression works in random images from the internet, according to a technical paper published on ArXiv. The paper shows that neural networks can beat standard JPEG compression on standard tests, according to the Google team.

Amazon.com, Inc. wants a piece of the fast-growing music streaming business, and is reportedly looking to launch its own subscription service in September. Along with the regular 10 a month for all you can stream option -- like other services such as Apple Music and Spotify offer -- Amazon is also considering a cheaper package exclusive to its hardware, according to Recode. The second service will cost 5 a month -- half of what other similar services usually charge -- and will work only on Amazon's Echo hardware, allowing users to stream unlimited music without any ads. There have been 5 streaming offers before, but they usually streamed web radio stations instead of allowing users to listen to songs on demand. The Recode report, which cited unnamed sources, added that Amazon has still not reached final agreements with music labels, with one of the issues being whether the company will charge 4 or 5 for the cheaper service.

China's Cheetah Mobile, considered the world's leading mobile security and utility app developer, is preparing to accelerate its transition into a viable content-focused business, following a US 57 million purchase of media app operator News Republic in the second quarter. "This is a huge step for us," chief technology officer Charles Fan Chenggong told the South China Morning Post. "We can potentially reshape the news industry by introducing a strong, artificial intelligence-driven, personal news delivery service." The acquisition marks the most-ambitious bet to date by the New York-traded Cheetah Mobile, amid its recent struggle to boost advertising income. Analysts at the Blue Lotus Research Institute in Hong Kong said Cheetah had good "synergy" with News Republic, which works with more than 1,650 media partners.

Back in June, reports came out that Amazon plans to launch a 10-a-month standalone music service similar to Spotify, Apple Music and other subscription-based options out there. According to Recode, though, the tech titan is also gearing up to introduce a second, cheaper offering that will only cost you 5 a month. It will only work with the company's Alexa-powered Echo speakers. Other than that, Recode says it's just like your typical paid music service: you can choose what to play, and you won't get interrupted by ads. Amazon's Echo speakers can already play music from various sources, including Spotify, Pandora and its very own Prime Music.

The winners of the Hugo Awards were announced at a gala ceremony in Kansas City, Mo., on Saturday, marking a good night for women and authors of color, and a very bad one for the "Puppies." Writers N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, both of whom are African American women, won the novel and novella awards, respectively. It was a defeat for the groups the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies, who for two years have semi-successfully gamed the nominations for the Hugos -- which along with the Nebula Awards are generally considered the preeminent awards in science fiction and fantasy -- in an attempt to advance their anti-diversity agendas. Jemisin, who won for her novel "The Fifth Season," referenced the Puppies in her acceptance speech, io9 reports. "Only a small number of ideologues have attempted to game the Hugo Awards," Jemisin said.

Part of being the training data arm of today's (and tomorrow's) biggest AI and machine learning initiatives means every day we're talking to people building the coolest dang stuff. Hearing about what our customers are up to and what's on their roadmaps is so interesting--these are the technologies of the future! Many of these peeps are just like our customers were before signing on: building mind-blowing things, but facing significant challenges, especially around acquiring and annotating training data. And okay, of course we're interested in their projects and problems--we aim to boost and solve them (respectively). We all like to have a peek into the experiences of our peers, to know what sort of developments they're cookin' up, where they're finding success, and what roadblocks they're hitting.

Silicon Valley, or the Greater Bay Area, is the 18th largest economy in the world, more than half the size of Canada's economy and bigger than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. This is because the region has become the world leader in research and development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, software and virtual reality. "Software is eating the world," said Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen famously in 2011. It was controversial but prescient. Five years later, software-driven machines and drones perform surgery, write news stories, compose music, translate, analyze, wage war, guard, listen, speak and entertain.