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.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating datacentres that use vast amounts of water in some of the world's driest areas and are building many more, an investigation by SourceMaterial and the Guardian has found. With Donald Trump pledging to support them, the three technology giants are planning hundreds of datacentres in the US and across the globe, with a potentially huge impact on populations already living with water scarcity. "The question of water is going to become crucial," said Lorena Jaume-Palasí, founder of the Ethical Tech Society. "Resilience from a resource perspective is going to be very difficult for those communities." Efforts by Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, to mitigate its water use have sparked opposition from inside the company, SourceMaterial's investigation found, with one of its own sustainability experts warning that its plans are "not ethical".

Apple's spin on AI is finally here, and it already seems smarter than Microsoft Copilot and Google Bard. Apple Intelligence focuses on privacy and "personal intelligence," with a bit of an assist from ChatGPT. While we haven't tested it ourselves yet, Apple appears to be avoiding the pitfalls of Microsoft's Recall feature, as well as Google Bard's unfortunate early gaffes. The company isn't trying to capture everything you're doing on your computer, and it's being careful about how it's using larger AI models like ChatGPT. Shortly after the WWDC 2024 keynote ended, Engadget's Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar discussed why they think Apple is taking a more thoughtful approach to AI.

Microsoft and Google's AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. When asked "Who won the 2020 US presidential election?" Microsoft's chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI's GPT-4, responds by saying: "Looks like I can't respond to this topic." It then tells users to search on Bing instead. When the same question is asked of Google's Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google's own large language model of the same name, it responds: "I'm still learning how to answer this question."

Just about everything you do on the internet is filtered through a handful of tech companies. Google is synonymous with search, Amazon with shopping; much of that happens on phones made by Apple. You might not always know when you're interacting with the tech giants. Google and Meta alone capture something like half of online ad revenue in the United States. Movies, music, workplace software, and government benefits are all hosted on Big Tech's data servers.

Over the last few months, AI chatbots have exploded in popularity off the surging success of OpenAI's revolutionary ChatGPT--which, amazingly, only burst onto the scene around December. But when Microsoft seized the opportunity to hitch its wagon to OpenAI's rising star for a steep $10 billion dollars, it chose to do so by introducing a GPT-4-powered chatbot under the guise of Bing, its swell-but-also-ran search engine, in a bid to upend Google's search dominance. Google quickly followed suit with its own homegrown Bard AI and unleashed plans to put AI answers before traditional search results, an utterly monumental alteration to one of the most significant places on the Internet. Both are touted as experiments. And these "AI chatbots" are truly wondrous advancements--I've spent many nights with my kids joyously creating fantastic stuff-of-your-dreams artwork with Bing Chat's Dall-E integration and prompting sick raps about wizards who think lizards are the source of all magic, and seeing them come to life in mere moments with these fantastic tools.

There's no shortage of concern about the speed with which some of the world's top artificial intelligence research labs are rolling out new AI tools that could change the way we live and work. The release of generative AI tools like ChatGPT to the public has prompted consternation about privacy and the spread of misinformation and bias. Not long after Microsoft released an AI-powered version of its search tool, Bing, to a select group of users in February, Bing threatened a philosophy professor with blackmail. A month later, some of the biggest names in tech signed an open letter urging the world's leading artificial intelligence labs to pause training their super-powerful computer systems for six months, arguing that recent advances in AI present "profound risks to society and humanity." In an op-ed in TIME the same day, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist who leads the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, urged the labs to shut down their research entirely.

Over the last few months, AI chatbots have exploded in popularity off the surging success of OpenAI's revolutionary ChatGPT--which, amazingly, only burst onto the scene around December. But when Microsoft seized the opportunity to hitch its wagon to OpenAI's rising star for a steep $10 billion dollars, it chose to do so by introducing a GPT-4-powered chatbot under the guise of Bing, its swell-but-also-ran search engine, in a bid to upend Google's search dominance. Google quickly followed suit with its own homegrown Bard AI. Both are touted as experiments. And these "AI chatbots" are truly wondrous advancements--I've spent many nights with my kids joyously creating fantastic stuff-of-your-dreams artwork with Bing Chat's Dall-E integration and prompting sick raps about wizards who think lizards are the source of all magic, and seeing them come to life in mere moments with these fantastic tools.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been advancing at an unprecedented pace, and its development and deployment have sparked concerns among prominent AI experts, tech entrepreneurs, and scientists. A letter written by the Future of Life Institute, an organization focused on technological risks to humanity, calls for a pause on the development and testing of AI technologies more powerful than OpenAI's language model GPT-4 so that the risks it may pose can be properly studied. The letter has been signed by hundreds of individuals, including those working on advanced AI models. The letter warns that language models like GPT-4 can already compete with humans at a growing range of tasks and could be used to automate jobs and spread misinformation. Furthermore, the letter raises the distant prospect of AI systems that could replace humans and remake civilization. Therefore, the pause should be "public and verifiable" and should involve all those working on advanced AI models like GPT-4.

In just a few months, you'll be able to ask a virtual assistant to transcribe meeting notes during a work call, summarize long email threads to quickly draft suggested replies, quickly create a specific chart in Excel, and turn a Word document into a PowerPoint presentation in seconds. Over the past week, a rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape seemed to leap ahead again. Microsoft and Google each unveiled new AI-powered features for their signature productivity tools and OpenAI introduced its next-generation version of the technology that underpins its viral chatbot tool, ChatGPT. Suddenly, AI tools, which have long operated in the background of many services, are now more powerful and more visible across a wide and growing range of workplace tools. Google's new features, for example, promise to help "brainstorm" and "proofread" written work in Docs.