Amazon is slashing 16,000 jobs in a second wave of layoffs at the e-commerce giant in three months, as the company restructures and leans on artificial intelligence. Wednesday's cuts follow the 14,000 redundancies that the Seattle, Washington-based company made in October. The layoffs are expected to affect employees working in Prime Video, Amazon Web Services, and the company's human resources department, according to the Reuters news agency, which first reported the cuts. In a memo to the employees, shared with Al Jazeera, Amazon said workers in the United States impacted by the cuts will have a 90-day window to find a new role in the company. "Teammates who are unable to find a new role at Amazon or who choose not to look for one, we'll provide transition support including severance pay, outplacement services, health insurance benefits [as applicable], and more," Beth Galetti, senior vice president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, said in the note provided to Al Jazeera.

UK launches taskforce to'break down barriers' for women in technology The government has launched a new taskforce it says will help women enter, stay and lead in the UK tech sector. Led by technology secretary Liz Kendall, it will see female leaders from tech companies and organisations advise the government on how to boost diversity and economic growth in the industry. BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, recently suggested women accounted for only 22% of those working in IT specialist roles in the UK. Ms Kendall said the Women in Tech group would break down the barriers that still hold too many people back. When women are inspired to take on a role in tech and have a seat at the table, the sector can make more representative decisions, build products that serve everyone, she said.

Spotify partnering with multinational music companies to develop'responsible' AI products The market-leading music streamer is collaborating with the Sony, Universal and Warner music groups - whose combined rosters feature artists including Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift - to create new AI features. The tension between the music industry and some tech firms has already led to three major labels suing AI companies whose tools create music from user prompts. If the music industry doesn't lead in this moment, AI-powered innovation will happen elsewhere, without rights, consent, or compensation." Both Udio and Suno have said their technology is designed to generate new musical output and does not reproduce specific artists' work. The head of Universal Music Group, Sir Lucian Grainge, wrote in a memo to staff this week that Universal would seek an artist's consent before licensing use of their voice or existing songs to an AI company.

Gabriela Cibils is on a mission - to help turn Paraguay into the Silicon Valley of South America. When she was growing up in the landlocked country, nestled between Brazil and Argentina, she says the nation wasn't super tech focused. But it was different for Ms Cibils, as her parents worked in the technology sector. And she was inspired to study in the US, where she got a degree in computing and neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating she spent eight years working in Silicon Valley, near San Francisco, with roles at various American start-ups.

How China is challenging Nvidia's AI chip dominance The US has dominated the global technology market for decades. But China wants to change that. The world's second largest economy is pouring huge amounts of money into artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Crucially, Beijing is also investing heavily to produce the high-end chips that power these cutting-edge technologies. Last month, Jensen Huang - the boss of the global AI chip industry leader, Nvidia - warned that China was just nanoseconds behind the US in chip development.

The news: Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. Why it matters: The team hopes their work could usher in an era of robots that are far more useful and require less detailed training for each task. Incorporating LLMs into robotics is part of a growing trend, and this may be the most impressive example yet.

"We've got an open consultation but that consultation is fixed and inadequate," she said. The government has proposed four options in its consultation. It describes such an outcome as "the primary object of this consultation". "Why have a preferred choice if it is an open consultation?" said Kidron. "What I say to MPs is, if you are members of a government that has put all its chips on growth, why is that same government undermining creative industries that bring 126bn to the UK economy and is giving away for free the property rights of 2.4 million people who work in those industries? The creative industries impact every constituency, region and nation," she said.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez grilled FBI Director Chris Wray on AI and China during a hearing held by the House select committee on China. U.S. Vice President JD Vance will attend a two-day high-level summit focusing on artificial intelligence in Paris next week, his first scheduled trip abroad since taking office, a French diplomatic official said Tuesday. The AI Action Summit on Feb. 10-11 will gather heads of state and top government officials, CEOs and other actors involved in the tech sector, which has been shaken up by galloping advances. Vance has not made any official foreign trips since his inauguration last month. The White House had no immediate comment.

With its focus on innovative products and cutting-edge technology, the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has not historically paid much attention to energy companies. But there were signs of a shift at this year's Las Vegas event, as the tech sector begins to confront its substantial energy needs, which are certain to grow as cloud computing and artificial intelligence advance. "If you'd asked me to do CES five years ago, I wouldn't necessarily have seen the point," said Sebastien Fiedorow, chief executive of the French start-up Aerleum, which manufactures synthetic fuel from carbon dioxide.

Axios reported on Friday that Apple CEO Tim Cook will donate 1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration, the latest tech company figure to do so. These donations--which aren't covered by campaign finance law and can be unlimited--signal a clear willingness to work with the Trump administration and a desire to curry favor with the once and future president. The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up. In December, Meta and Amazon donated 1 million to the inauguration committee, and OpenAI's Sam Altman said he planned to do the same. Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have both donated 1 million apiece (even as the company's chief legal officer Tony West is vice president Kamala Harris' brother-in-law).