Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers will soon have as many robots as human employees reading destination labels, packing orders and loading conveyor belts. Amazon serves 310 million customers worldwide, using various robot configurations to aid 1.56 million employees to process and deliver inventory and handle other businesses. Now the company has delivered its one millionth robot, to a facility in Japan. With artificial intelligence making a beeline toward white-collar work and warehouse robots poised to elbow aside manual laborers, global economics could shift on the practices of this company alone. Read more

Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) is the name of the new AI unit for which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been aggressively recruiting. The division will be led by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who joined last month after Zuckerberg paid an estimated $15 billion for Scale AI, where Wang was CEO and co-founder. Nat Friedman, who ran GitHub for Microsoft from 2018 to 2021, will “partner with Alex to lead MSL” heading products and applied research, Zuckerberg said in an internal memo. The new group will encompass Meta’s AI foundations, product and FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) teams as well as the lab for next generation models. Read more

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has released a new multimodal model called Qwen VLo that can understand and generate images. Available for free in preview through Qwen Chat, it can use image or text prompts to generate pictures, and accepts text in multiple languages, including Chinese and English. It can also edit, change backgrounds and switch styles, handling multiple image edits in sequence. An upgrade over January’s Qwen 2.5-VL release, Qwen VLo uses progressive generation, allowing users to see the image creation in progress, and Alibaba says it’s particularly good at making inline adjustments to fine-tune images. Read more

British phone maker Nothing Technology Limited has announced the Phone (3), with a divergent look and major camera upgrades that cater to its young fanbase. At a launch event in London, Nothing CEO Carl Pei said his company, which also makes headphones and earbuds, will go “all-in” marketing its new Android flagship smartphone against premium offerings from Samsung and others. It starts at $800, 25 percent more than the Phone (2), but Pei says there are plenty of upgrades — including four 50MP cameras and a circular mini-LED screen on the back of the device. Roughly the size of a quarter, the secondary screen displays data in a retro-looking dot matrix format called the “Glyph Matrix.” Read more

Apple has changed its European App Store policies in response to the Digital Markets Act, in hopes the move will help ward off a potential fine of up to $585 million for violating the 2022 law in the way it charges commissions from third-party developers selling apps through links in the App Store. The European Union threatens fines of up to $60 million per day for DMA violations. A European Commission spokesperson said the body is assessing whether Apple’s new terms bring the company into compliance. The Commission is requiring the company “to make a series of additional changes to the App Store,” explains Apple, adding that “we disagree with this outcome and plan to appeal.” Read more