Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon’s Alexa business is laying off “several hundred” employees, including those on its recently launched artificial general intelligence team, Business Insider has learned.

On Friday, Amazon’s VP of Alexa and Fire TV Daniel Rausch told his team about the layoffs, saying it’s intended to shift the company’s resources to focus on generative AI.

“As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI. These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated,” Rausch wrote in the email, obtained by BI.

It was inevitable. Amazon, which got its start selling books, is getting into the car business.

The e-commerce giant along with new partner Hyundai announced Thursday at the 2023 LA Auto Show that it will start selling vehicles on its website in the second half of 2024. Hyundai vehicles will be the first vehicles sold on Amazon.com’s U.S. store with other brands following later in the year.

The Amazon car sales section will allow customers to shop for vehicles in their area based on a range of preferences, including model, trim, color, and features, choose their preferred car, and then check out online with their chosen payment and financing options. Customers will be able to buy a vehicle online and then pick it up or have it delivered by their local dealership, according to Amazon.

“Whoever leads in AI will rule the world,” President Vladimir Putin declared at an address commencing the 2017 Russian school year. Six years later, despite intense focus from senior leadership and heavy investment from the federal budget and state-owned enterprises, Russia remains a laggard in this field, hobbled by international isolation and structural challenges.

Military, political, and business leaders in Moscow have long understood the importance of controlling the information space to secure their grasp on power. After the scare of social media powered “color revolutions” on Russia’s doorstep, Moscow doubled down on these efforts. But facing both headwinds intrinsic to the nature of generative AI and deep, self-inflicted wounds from the war in Ukraine, the window for Russia to take a lead is closing quickly.

Russia’s leaders were caught flat-footed by the rise of social media. The supposed dangers of emerging technology were brought to the fore by Chisinau’s so-called “ Twitter revolution,” when protests organized in part on American social networks prevented Moldova’s ardently pro-Russian Party of Communists from winning the election in 2009.

The onslaught of press, research and perceived urgency has done little to prepare business and information technology leaders to deploy artificial intelligence-powered technologies.

That’s according to the first Cisco AI Readiness Index, issued Tuesday. The company used a double-blind survey of over 8,000 business and IT leaders worldwide.

The findings are alarming. Although 97% of the organizations say that the urgency around deploying AI tech has risen in the last six months, only 14% feel they’re prepared to deploy and utilize it.

The company on Wednesday announced Astro for Business, a version of its household robot that it’s framing as a crime prevention tool for retailers, manufacturers and a range of other industries, in spaces that are up to 5,000 square feet. Astro for Business is launching only in the U.S. to start, and it comes at a steep price point of $2,349.99.

Amazon unveiled Astro, its first home robot, in September 2021. The squat, three-wheeled device can roll around the house to answer Alexa voice commands, and it has a 42-inch periscope camera that allows it to see over countertops or other obstacles to check if a stove has been left on, among other tasks.

Two years on from its debut, the original Astro, which costs $1,599, is available in limited quantities and on an invite-only basis.

Microsoft launched its big AI push earlier this year as part of its Bing search engine, integrating a ChatGPT-like interface directly into its search results. Now less than a year later, it’s dropping the Bing Chat branding and moving to Microsoft Copilot, the new name for the chat interface you might have used in Bing, Microsoft Edge, and Windows 11.

Microsoft initially talked up the Google search competition for its AI ambitions earlier this year, but it now looks like it has its sights set on ChatGPT instead. The Bing Chat rebranding comes just days after OpenAI revealed 100 million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis. Despite a close partnership worth billions, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to compete for the same customers seeking out AI assistants, and Microsoft is clearly trying to position Copilot as the option for consumers and businesses.

“Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will now simply become Copilot,” explains Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft 365. The official name change comes just a couple of months after Microsoft picked Copilot as its branding for its chatbot inside Windows 11. At the time it wasn’t clear that the Bing Chat branding would fully disappear, but it is today.

OpenAI has placed a temporary ban on new sign-ups for ChatGPT Plus following a surge in demand for the service.

ChatGPT Plus is the $20 per month, premium version of the now infamous chatbot. It includes a host of extra features, including the recently added GPTs—personalized chatbots that are focused on a specific task, such as teaching you how to play chess or negotiating better business deals.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims a surge in usage of the service since the launch of GPTs and other new features announced at its recent developer conference has forced the company to act.

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Fine-tuning large language models (LLM) has become an important tool for businesses seeking to tailor AI capabilities to niche tasks and personalized user experiences. But fine-tuning usually comes with steep computational and financial overhead, keeping its use limited for enterprises with limited resources.

To solve these challenges, researchers have created algorithms and techniques that cut the cost of fine-tuning LLMs and running fine-tuned models. The latest of these techniques is S-LoRA, a collaborative effort between researchers at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

Barbara Corcoran almost missed out on “the best hire” she ever made — all because the prospective employee seemed too introverted.

“When I started my business [in 1973], I needed people to join my real estate company,” the millionaire investor and real estate entrepreneur said in a recent TikTok video. “But I had little to offer, and good people were really hard to get.”

In walked Esther Kaplan, who would eventually become Corcoran’s business partner and longtime president of The Corcoran Group. But at the time, Kaplan didn’t seem like the right fit for the sales position she’d applied for, Corcoran said.