Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
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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Amazon will hold its annual Prime Day event in June instead of July this year, according to a recent report from Bloomberg. Sources told the outlet the sale will take place in “late June,” though Amazon has yet to confirm the exact timing of its multi-day shopping event.
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.”
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.
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]
It’s a $100 million project meant to limit methane and other pollutants that are even more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. But any company serious about climate change still needs to address their carbon emissions, the most abundant planet-heating pollutant. Both companies’ carbon footprints have grown as they expand data centers for AI.
[https://www.axios.com/2026/03/05/google-amazon-climate-superpollutants]
AI companies could stand together to draw red lines on military AI — why aren’t they?
David Luan, head of Amazon’s San Francisco AGI lab, is leaving to work on something new. Newer than AGI, that is, which is saying something considering that’s still nonexistent.
poliwhirl08:
Wait, the guy in charge of trying to reach AGI is leaving to “cook up something new”??? AGI doesn’t exist, he was literally already trying to cook up something new.
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The multiplayer title, which will shut down on April 9th, reportedly struggled to find players, and developer Glowmade recently laid off staff.
It’s yet another change for Amazon’s gaming efforts, which include ditching MMOs and offloading a MOBA to Ubisoft.
[King of Meat]
Amazon reported $717 billion in sales for 2025, edging ahead of Walmart’s $713.2 billion. Walmart was previously the world’s largest company by sales for over 10 years. However, as Bloomberg notes, Amazon’s cloud computing business made up a large portion of its sales — without AWS revenue, Walmart still outpaces Amazon.
A new report from 404 Media today featured a leaked email from Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who leads the camera maker inside Amazon, saying back in October that he has grander ambitions for the company’s controversial Search Party feature beyond just finding lost dogs.
We had Siminoff on Decoder a few months ago, when I asked him explicitly about using facial recognition to identify people, something the company has since claimed it has no plans to do. Check out what he had to say in the clip below.
The shift comes just a few months after Amazon launched Blue Jay in October, calling it “an extra set of hands” for warehouse employees. Blue Jay wasn’t designed for the smaller, more flexible same-day delivery centers Amazon is focusing on now, though, including micro-fulfillment centers in the back of Whole Foods stores, as Business Insider reports.
Rollout of Amazon’s Fire TV OS redesign announced at CES begins today for US customers. The update hits the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, 4K Max (2nd gen), and Omni mini-LED TVs first, expanding to other products later.
The security camera maker’s Search Party feature, advertised during the Super Bowl, has sparked a surveillance backlash.
After Ring announced that it had canceled integration with Flock Safety, the law enforcement technology company criticized for connections to ICE (a claim it denies) has released it’s own statement and blog post:
Over the past several months, Flock and Ring explored whether their respective platforms could responsibly complement one another in support of public safety. Throughout those discussions, Flock engaged extensively with customers, public officials, and community stakeholders to understand expectations around accountability, transparency, and lawful use.
Based on that engagement, Flock and Ring have chosen to cancel the planned integration.
Ring’s Super Bowl ad focused on how its cameras could be networked to find a missing dog, but for a lot of people, it highlighted the surveillance power hiding in those devices. Now Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has sent a letter to Amazon saying, “Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”
You can read it in full here, but here’s a snippet:
The Search Party ad showed Jamie Siminoff’s vision of what connected cameras can do, and it seems to suggest they will only use that power to find lost dogs.
Amazon’s drones have had a… let’s say, rocky history. On Wednesday, one hit the side of a building in Richardson, Texas, before falling to the ground in smoke. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and damage to the building was minimal, according to Amazon.
