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Amazon is successfully marching toward making same-day or next-day delivery the standard for Prime loyalty club members. Recently Amazon said it reached an important milestone in that direction. So far this year, the company delivered 1.8 billion packages to US Prime members on the same or next day, around four times the speed in 2019. Over the past four years, Amazon has invested money and resources in revamping its warehouses and delivery network, reducing delivery times from two days to less than one day. Those efforts were stalled by supply chain and labor market challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the…

Mike Coop, chief investment officer at Morningstar Investment Management, says market participants are "overconfident" in their ability to predict the long-term impact of AI. Despite the setback so far this month, optimism about AI's potential to boost future profits has lifted the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite over 38% for the year, while the S&P 500 is up over 16%. Some analysts have speculated that a bubble could form because of the concentration of market growth in a few large technology stocks. Shares of Nvidia ended Thursday trading up 190% this year, while Facebook parent company Meta Platforms was up over 154%…

As pressure grows on Google to explain how it plans to monetize artificial intelligence, the company is launching what it believes to be its largest and most capable model. Three sizes will be available for the large language model Gemini: Gemini Ultra, which is the largest and most capable category; Gemini Pro, which scales across a variety of tasks; and Gemini Nano, which is reserved for specialized tasks and mobile devices. For the time being, the company intends to license Gemini to clients via Google Cloud so they can utilize it in their apps. Developers and enterprise clients can use…

Google's cloud business announced in a release recently that it has launched several new tools for retailers using generative artificial intelligence to enhance online shopping experiences and other retail operations. One of the new products in the suite is a chatbot with generative AI that retailers can use on their websites and mobile applications. According to Google, virtual agents can converse with customers and make product recommendations based on their preferences. According to Google Cloud's vice president of strategic industries, Carrie Tharp, "Generative AI has morphed from a barely recognized concept to one of the fastest-moving capabilities in all of…

Amazon’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services said yesterday that it is investing $100 million in a Generative Artificial Intelligence center to help firms use Generative AI. The announcement shows AWS recognizes the importance of the current moment in generative AI space and the significance of being in the talks, alongside competitors Microsoft and Google. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said, “You ask yourself the question — where are the different runners three steps into a 10K race? Does it really matter? The point is, you’re three steps in, and it’s a 10K race.” Amazon said, “The Company will add some data scientists, engineers, and…

Activision Blizzard's $69 billion acquisition by Microsoft has been completed, the company announced in a regulatory filing on Friday. It's the biggest deal Microsoft has ever made in its 48-year history, and it comes after the company allayed regulators' concerns about competition in the U.K. and Europe and won a favorable decision from a U.S. district judge. Early on, the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority approved the deal, paving the way for the closing. With the acquisition, Microsoft gains access to a wide range of popular video game franchises, including Warcraft, Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Diablo, Overwatch, StarCraft, and…

Yann LeCun, the chief scientist at Meta and a pioneer in deep learning, stated that he thinks it will take decades for current AI systems to resemble sentient beings with common sense and the capacity to do more than just creatively summarize massive amounts of text. His viewpoint differs from that of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who declared recently that AI will surpass humans in several mentally demanding tasks in less than five years, making it "fairly competitive" with humans. "I am familiar with Jensen," LeCun declared at a recent celebration honoring the Fundamental AI Research team's tenth anniversary at…

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that its Copilot virtual assistant is now available for small businesses to subscribe to through the company's productivity apps. Additionally, customers can register for a new paid version of Copilot if they purchase Microsoft 365 software. The updates will assist Microsoft in introducing generative artificial intelligence to a larger number of its clientele. Last year, OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot gained popularity; it can create natural-sounding text in response to a brief written command. By granting more access, the business may be able to begin paying for the construction of the AI-enabling data center infrastructure. Notwithstanding competition from…