Amazon Launches Rufus AI Shopping Assistant


Amazon and Nvidia deepen partnership: 2M Nvidia GPUs for AWS over two years, including Blackwell Ultra, Rubin, Rubin Ultra, for LLM training/inference, 2027-2028. In-house chips coexist but Nvidia dominates. Previous 1M+ commitment doubled on strong demand, per Nvidia earnings call.....
Twitch faces a class action over using streamers' broadcasts, clips, and chats to train Amazon AI models without consent or pay. Small streamers filed a 37-page suit alleging breach of implied contract and unfair competition. Issue: opt-out AI training and weak opt-outs, sparking backlash.....
Amazon is rolling out Alexa+ free to all compatible US Fire TV devices, no Prime needed. It adds conversational search, smart home control and AI recommendations. Previously limited to newer Fire TVs with non-Prime users paying $19.99/month, now no extra subscription needed.....
U.S. media exposed an AI cost control incident at Amazon: Engineers used Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model to handle routine tasks such as matching authors with product data, resulting in an $18 million bill, exceeding the budget by 860%. The project was delayed for five months and ultimately failed to be implemented, leading to massive waste due to high computing power consumption.
Amazon is strategically scaling back its AI R&D, halting active development of most Nova models, including flagship models and video/image generators, shifting to maintenance for existing customers. This follows the disbanding of its AGI division and closure of related labs. Proprietary models struggle to compete, so Amazon pivots to infrastructure strength, building Amazon Athena—a unified platform to integrate third-party cutting-edge models fo....