Rohit Prasad, who leads the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the Financial Times the voice assistant still needed to surmount several technical hurdles before the rollout. This includes solving the problem of “hallucinations ...

Amazon is working to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an AI “agent” that can complete practical tasks, Madhumita Murgia

The pursuit of 100 per cent reliability in a system where AI makes all decisions autonomously is a folly. Public benchmarks show that state of the art large language models predict a single step with less than 90 per cent accuracy, leaving little hope for predicting a dozen in a row without error.

The new tranche of money from Google into Anthropic adds to a total investment of $8bn from Amazon, the ecommerce group’s largest-ever venture investment, announced over the past 18 months. Amazon is also working to embed the Claude models into the next-generation version of its Alexa speaker.

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has a new interim chairman: former Amazon executive Doug Gurr (pictured above).

Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Insead, argues that one characteristic that will endure is the physical office serving as a space for spontaneous interactions, building a sense of community and creativity that virtual environments struggle to replicate.

Microsoft commits to restoring Brazil's forests for carbon credits. Deal worth ~$200 million. Big tech invests in nuclear solutions for energy needs.

Amazon agrees to acquire Bengaluru-based digital lending startup Axio, formerly known as Capital Float, for an estimated enterprise value of $150-160

The e-commerce giant has added payment and credit products, though it faces heavy competition from banks and other tech firms. Also, Stripe's layoffs and other news from the world of payments.

Wall Street’s biggest players moved to protect themselves against tech stock dominance in 2024, driving record cash into a fund that splits money evenly across all S&P 500 stocks. The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight exchange-traded fund pulled in $17 billion last year,

WPP has “looked at” switching its primary listing to New York, according to chief executive Mark Read, who will pursue opportunities to take advantage of a “resurgence” in the US as Donald Trump re-enters the White House.

Amazon stock handily topped the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite over the last year, but even more gains could be in store thanks to the ongoing AI revolution.