Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
After bringing the AI assistant to the Xbox mobile app, Windows 11, and the Xbox Ally, Microsoft is ready to launch it on the Xbox.
Meta AI can also help you fill out listings using photos of your items.
Amazon has expanded its Alexa Plus personality styles with a new “Sassy” option. The chili pepper icon hints at this Alexa’s “unfiltered personality,” but don’t worry, Amazon is keeping the spice mild, with only “occasional censored profanity.”
Chris K.:
Programming your robot to swear then programming it to censor its own swearing is something
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The company postponed its next AI model, codenamed Avocado, from this month until at least May, the NYT reports. Performance apparently falls short of rivals like Google.
Meta’s spent billions trying to catch up, and Avocado will be its first major release since hiring Scale’s Alexandr Wang to revamp its efforts.
Narayen told investors today that AI-first products “should be our next billion-dollar business,” and that he will leave the role he’s held since 2007 once the board names a successor. He’s overseen its Creative Cloud rollout, big bets on the future of AI, and its abandoned $20 billion attempt to acquire Figma.
Narayen:
The next era of creativity is being written right now — shaped by AI, by new workflows and by entirely new forms of expression. Adobe has never waited for the future to arrive. We’ve anticipated it. We’ve built it. And we’ve led it.
Brief, Sweet, and Chill options launched in January for Alexa Plus, and now there’s also Sassy, an “unfiltered personality with razor-sharp wit, playful sarcasm, and occasional censored profanity.”
The clever comebacks-equipped voice is adults-only and requires additional verification checks, but it’s no Microsoft Tay, M3gan, or AIA. Where the Sweet version leads with “I’m radiating pure joy,” this one suggests mayhem and being “ready to wreck some things together.”
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the history of the NSA and mass surveillance in America, and why Anthropic’s fight with the Pentagon should worry us.
Ben Affleck’s AI startup, recently purchased by Netflix for around $600 million, has a different approach to gen AI.
Claude can now communicate across Excel and PowerPoint, saving you from needing to keep switching tabs or re-explaining datasets at every step. Anthropic said it’s Claude “carrying the conversation across apps without losing track of what’s happening in either.”
The newly-launched Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) 300 chip is designed to train ranking and recommendations systems across Instagram and Facebook. And while the upcoming MTIA 400, 450, and 500 will be “capable of handling all workloads,” Meta says it will mainly use them for generative AI inference “in the near future and into 2027.”
[Meta Newsroom]
Mark Zuckerberg famously built Facebook, and the rest of Meta, on a “move fast and break things” philosophy, but one commenter has suggested that Grammarly’s new sloppelgangers could suggest a new approach for the industry.
tsmuse:
move fast and loot everything
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Co-founder Jack Clark, who will lead the new Anthropic Institute, said he had “no concerns” about research funding.
Now users in Canada, New Zealand, and India can access Chrome’s built-in Gemini AI assistant, which has added support for more than 50 languages, including Spanish, French, Hindi, and Chinese.
Along with answering questions about what’s on your screen, Gemini in Chrome can help you do things like send messages in Gmail, create a table comparing products in your tabs, and remix images you see online.
Bluesky user @lifewinning.com just coined a catchy term for Grammarly’s AI agent masquerading as Verge staff members. After backlash last week, Superhuman says writers can now email them to opt out of Grammarly’s “expert review” feature.
“A little offended Grammarly didn’t make a sloppelganger of me.”
On Tuesday, Amazon expanded access to its Health AI platform beyond just One Medical members to include Amazon.com and its app, alongside an introductory offer for Prime members.
Similar to ChatGPT for Healthcare, Amazon says its Health AI is a HIPAA-compliant tool to answer general health questions, analyze medical records, and connect users to medical professionals through One Medical.
Coco Robotics, which makes autonomous delivery robots, announced on Tuesday that it’s partnering with Niantic Spatial, the AI spinoff of the Pokémon Go developer. Niantic’s geospatial AI model, which was trained on images from AR scans in Pokémon Go, will help Coco’s robots find their way to your house.
Amazon’s eCommerce SVP, Dave Treadwell, called an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to address recent outages linked to AI coding agent errors, the Financial Times reports. That includes more oversight around AI coding, with Treadwell announcing that “junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes.”
[Financial Times]
They joined a new initiative called Utilize that aims to use strategies like battery storage and virtual power plants to make more use of the electrons already available to the grid. It’s a plan that’s supposed to make electricity more affordable as opposition grows to data centers blamed for higher utility bills.
The AI startup, founded by ex-OpenAI executive Mira Murati, will team up with Nvidia on a “long-term gigawatt scale strategic partnership” to power TML’s AI model training. The news comes after multiple founding members of the startup left for OpenAI at the same time earlier this year.
[Thinking Machines Lab]
During an interview with Bloomberg, Emil Michael, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, says Anthropic’s move to sue the Pentagon was an “expected reaction” to its designation as a supply-chain risk.
“I don’t think there’s a scenario where this gets resolved in that way,” Michael says, Bloomberg reports.
His Paris-based startup, Advance Machine Intelligence, just raised $1 billion to build AI world models.
It’s another big bet on what might be the next big thing in AI: systems trained on the physical world, not just text and images.
