Amazon’s growth contracted in Q1, with revenue up 9 percent compared to 13 percent a year ago. That was good enough to outperform Wall Street forecasts, with overall sales increasing to $155.7 billion, compared with $143.3 billion in Q1 2024. In addition, Amazon Web Services sales grew by nearly 17 percent to $29.3 billion. Yet Amazon share price fell by up to 4.3 percent after hours, a reflection of a Q2 forecast the company says could be affected by newly imposed tariffs. “Obviously, none of us know exactly where tariffs will settle, or when,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts on the Q1 earnings call. Continue reading Amazon Reports Strong Quarter, Braces for Impact of Tariffs

Artificial intelligence is making big inroads in shopping, with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all announcing AI-enhanced purchasing. Unveiled at the Visa Global Product Drop event, Visa Intelligent Commerce enables AI “to find, shop and buy for consumers based on their pre-selected preferences,” Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said, noting “each consumer sets the limits, and Visa helps manage the rest.” That news came a day after Mastercard introduced Mastercard Agent Pay and PayPal emphasized agentic efforts at its Dev Days event last week. Agentic commerce is the use of AI to transact on behalf of a customer or business. Continue reading Visa, Mastercard and PayPal Embrace AI Agentic Commerce

Meta Platforms revenue for Q1 was $42.3 billion, up 16 percent year-over-year and besting Wall Street estimates of $41.3 billion. Profits were up 35 percent to $16.6 billion, hurtling past analyst estimates of $13.6 billion. Advertising, up nearly 15 percent for the quarter compared to last year, comfortably passed $41 billion, driving the revenue performance. Meta began Q2 by launching its anticipated standalone Meta AI app. Built with natively multimodal Llama 4 models, the company is positioning the Meta AI app as “a personal AI designed around voice conversations,” according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Continue reading Meta Touts 35 Percent Q1 Profit Jump, ‘Personalized’ AI App

Microsoft has “tapped on the brakes” of its spending on artificial intelligence, reducing capital expenses by more than $1 billion in the first three months of 2025. But after 10 straight quarters of increased AI outlay, momentum continues to propel the sector forward with new data center commitments in 16 countries and the expansion of the Phi small language family with the debut of Phi-4 (that supports text, visual and voice inputs). The moves come on the heels of $70 billion in sales for the first three months of 2025, when profits were up 18 percent to $25.8 billion. Continue reading Microsoft Reduces Spending on AI but Momentum Continues

Online graphic design platform Freepik, has unveiled F Lite, a text-to-image generator that the company says was trained only on licensed content, making it safe for commercial use. The 10 billion-parameter F Lite — currently available in two openly-licensed versions — was developed in partnership with Fal.ai, a San Francisco-based AI startup that uses a proprietary inference engine and APIs to enable fast training, inference, and scaling of image, video, audio, and multimodal AI models. Freepik Head of AI Iván de Prado describes F Lite as “a significant milestone in open, responsible AI.” Continue reading Freepik Introduces a Responsibly Trained AI Image Generator

LG has revealed more information about its 2025 premium QNED evo lineup of LCD smart TVs in sizes ranging from 50 to 100 inches. QNED evo is the branding for LG’s 2025 LCD and LED TVs, which compete in the mid-range and high-end with models from Samsung, Hisense and TCL. The new QNED9M, the first LG QNED TV able to transmit audio and video wirelessly using LG’s True Wireless technology, allowing set-top boxes and gaming devices to be placed away from the TV for a clutter-free look and easier wall mounting. Last week LG announced it was adding direct access to Xbox gaming to its webOS portal. Continue reading LG’s 2025 QNED TVs Feature Mini-LED and a Wireless Model

IBM plans to invest $150 billion over the next five years to fuel the U.S. economy. Included in the spending plan is more than $30 billion devoted to research and development for mainframe and quantum computers to be manufactured in the U.S. The announcement comes as President Trump is pressing global companies to invest more here, including with trade tariffs that threaten to make products manufactured overseas more expensive to sell at home. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says the company has “been focused on American jobs and manufacturing since our founding 114 years ago.” Continue reading IBM Unveils 5-Year Plan for $150B in Manufacturing and R&D

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s shopping capabilities, adding product recommendations to help users discover products and brands. The chatbot’s results for shopping queries will now automatically include things like prices, images and ratings, much like searches using Amazon or Google Shopping. The company says that products it features in shopping search results “are chosen independently and are not ads.” With the company under pressure to turn a profit, a challenge for many AI startups, that could of course change. The company is reportedly already working with partners to ensure pricing is up to date. Continue reading OpenAI Improves ChatGPT for Shopping with Built-In Pricing

China’s Alibaba Group has released a Qwen3 LLM series said to be at the leading edge of open-source models, nearly achieving the performance of proprietary models from AI competitors OpenAI and Google. Alibaba says Qwen3 offers improvements in reasoning, tool use, instruction following and multilingual abilities. The Qwen3 series features eight new models — two that are mixture-of-experts and six built on dense neural networks. Their sizes range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. The size and scope of the Alibaba slate maintains China’s accelerated AI pace in the wake of DeepSeek’s game-changing debut. Continue reading Alibaba Touts Advance in Open-Source AI with Qwen3 Series

China’s Huawei Technologies is getting ready to test its newest AI processor, which the company believes is powerful enough to replace high-end chips from U.S. rival Nvidia, whose top-tier products are prohibited from export to China due to a trade embargo. Huawei’s AI ambitions suggest a superpower competition over semiconductors gearing up despite the U.S. government’s attempt to stymie Beijing. Huawei expects to receive its first samples of its latest AI processor, the Ascend 910D, as early as next month, and is reportedly casting about for tech firms capable of testing it out. Continue reading Huawei’s Processor Could Chip Away at Nvidia Market Share

YouTube is testing a new AI Overviews feature for search and discovery powered by Gemini. A “small number” of YouTube Premium subscribers in the U.S. will notice a video results carousel popping up for some English-language search queries. The feature taps AI to highlight clips from videos deemed most helpful for a particular search. Initially, the feature will appear in response to practical inquiries, aiming for a more helpful response to things like product inquiries and requests for information about a place or activity. The idea is to provide quick highlights from several videos. Continue reading YouTube Testing Gemini-Powered AI Overviews for Searches

Adobe has released its free Content Authenticity web app in beta. The app is designed to help protect creators’ work and allows them to embed a request that generative AI models don’t use their work for training. Users can apply tags for up to 50 images at once. In addition to applying tags, users can customize and inspect Adobe Content Credentials using the the Adobe Content Authenticity browser extension for Google Chrome. The information is invisible until the inspection tool is opened and can include links to a creator’s social media account, website or other identifying attributes. Continue reading Adobe Launches Its Content Authenticity App in Public Beta

Perplexity AI has entered into a deal with Motorola to preinstall its artificial intelligence search engine technology in Motorola smartphones, giving buyers three free months of Perplexity Pro, which costs $20 per month and includes a deep research feature. Earlier this year, Motorola launched a Moto AI beta program to test core features like “Catch me up,” “Pay attention” and “Remember this” prompts. Based on feedback, Motorola says it has enhanced these features further as well as developed new AI experiences that will be available on the new generation of Razr and Edge devices. Continue reading Motorola Will Preinstall Perplexity on New Razr, Edge Models

TSMC introduced its new logic process technology, A14, at the company’s North America Technology Symposium in California. Designed to drive AI forward with faster computing and greater power efficiency, the 1.4nm A14 process is expected to be a boon to smartphones, expanding their on-board capabilities. The company says A14 is an improvement over TSMC’s N2 2nm node, set to go into volume production later this year. TSMC plans to begin producing chips using the A14 process in 2028 for AI clients including Nvidia, the company told reporters and analysts on the eve of its conference. Continue reading TSMC Says New A14 Tech Will Make ‘Smartphones Smarter’

News from Adobe MAX London 2025 spanned new Firefly image models to a refreshed web app that includes third-party image generators, an AI agent that automates Photoshop, an updated Firefly mobile app coming soon to iOS and Android, and the Firefly Video model in general release. The latest release of Firefly “unifies AI-powered tools for image, video, audio, and vector generation into a single, cohesive platform and introduces many new capabilities,” according to Adobe, which says that since its debut nearly two years ago, creatives have used Firefly to generate more than 22 billion assets worldwide. Continue reading Adobe Unveils Two New Image Models and Array of Products