Amazon

Amazon gets FAA approval to expand US drone deliveries

Amazon has received approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly its delivery drones longer distances, the company announced on Thursday. Amazon says it can now expand its Prime Air service, which uses delivery drones to fly individual packages, to more customers.  The FAA requires that operators maintain a line of sight to […]

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Amazon is rolling out AI voice search to Fire TV devices

Amazon is rolling out an AI-powered search feature to Fire TV that would enable Alexa to answer open-ended questions about TV shows and movies, and deliver more specific recommendations tailored to users’ preferences.  Announced at Amazon’s annual devices event last September, the feature is powered by a proprietary large language model (LLM). The AI understands

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Data-labeling startup Scale AI raises $1B as valuation doubles to $13.8B

Scale AI, which provides data-labeling services to companies that want to train machine learning models, has raised a $1 billion Series F round from a slew of big-name institutional and corporate investors that include Amazon and Meta. The fundraise is a mix of primary and secondary funding, and is the latest in a slew of

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AWS confirms will launch European ‘sovereign cloud’ in Germany by 2025, plans €7.8B investment over 15 years

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing business, has confirmed further details of its European “sovereign cloud,” which is designed to enable greater data residency across the region. The company said that the first AWS sovereign cloud region will be set up in the German state of Brandenburg, and will go live by the end

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Meesho, an Indian social commerce platform with 150M transacting users, raises $275M

Meesho, a leading e-commerce startup in India with about 150 million transacting users, has secured $275 million in a new funding round, the company disclosed in a securities filing. The new funding is part of a larger financing round that is likely to include secondary transactions and balloon to over $500 million, people familiar with

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Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

How does Amazon CTO Werner Vogels — a man worth untold millions, who during the COVID-19 pandemic outright bought the small Central Amsterdam Airbnb he’d been living in — spend his days? From the looks of it: building AI-powered meeting-summarizing apps. Go figure. In a post this week on Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill,

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Bedrock Studio is Amazon’s attempt to simplify generative AI app development

Amazon is launching a new tool, Bedrock Studio, designed to let organizations experiment with generative AI models, collaborate on those models, and ultimately build generative AI-powered apps. Available in public preview starting today, the web-based Bedrock Studio — a part of Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI tooling and hosting platform — provides what Amazon describes in

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TechCrunch Minute: Audible deploys AI-narrated audiobooks. Can it replace the human touch?

AI is coming for audiobooks, and that is not an entirely bad thing. But it is a cause of concern in the realm of audio titles and the folks who make them today. Audible is making it easy for authors to generate AI-narrated audiobooks, and as in many cases of AI showing up in an

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