It's taken Amazon a while, but the tech giant has finally jumped on the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot bandwagon. The firm has just unveiled its version of ChatGPT called'Q' – which may be a reference to the ingenious tech boffin in the James Bond films. Q – designed for employees in fields such as IT, software, customer service and more – lets workers ask questions that are specific to their companies. Among its skills are summarising meetings, explaining programming code and locating information from hundreds of company documents. Q comes soon after Elon Musk announced his own'sarcastic' AI bot called Grok that will be integrated within X (formerly known as Twitter).

Anthropic's chief executive Dario Amodei met with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the heads of DeepMind and OpenAI in May to discuss the potential risks from AI - from disinformation to national security and even "existential threats" - and the voluntary actions and regulation required to manage them.

This week at Amazon Web Services' re:Invent 2020 conference, Amazon announced Amazon Monitron, an end-to-end machine-monitoring system composed of sensors, a gateway, and a machine learning model that detects anomalies in vibration (structure-borne sound) or temperature and predicts when equipment may require maintenance. Machine condition monitoring was also the topic of a challenge at the Workshop on the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2020), in November, in which Amazon took the top three spots, out of 117 submissions. The challenge was to determine whether the sounds emitted by a machine -- such as a fan, pump, or valve -- were normal or anomalous. Forty academic and industry teams submitted entries, an average of almost three submissions per team. In a pair of papers (paper 1 paper 2) we presented at the workshop, we describe the two different neural-network-based approaches we took in our submissions to the challenge.

The release of Amazon's smartphone barely two years ago which has gone under could have as well never existed. The company received applause for its ideas regarding the'Fire Phone' with 3D screen effect powered by its four camera system developed in Lab 126, which is a Silicon Valley secretive web. This applause was later retrieved after it proved to be a commercial disaster. Developed with Amazon's OS with a high price margin, it got its users disappointed after it failed to pose as a challenge for Google or Apple smartphones. Apart from the faults that were seen in the phone, the company happened to enter the market when the market has already been taken over which was why they only managed to sell a few thousands while others were selling in millions and billion.