Amazon is ramping up its AI activity, reportedly planning to release its own advanced reasoning model as part of the company’s Nova family. The Nova line was introduced in December at re:Invent and the new addition could debut as early as June. Its reasoning prowess is being compared to the abilities of OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek-R1. But reports say Amazon is taking the hybrid reasoning approach embraced by Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Amazon has a 10 percent stake in Anthropic). The e-retail giant is also preparing for an agentic AI push, having established a dedicated unit, reports say. Read more

Google plans to launch video- and screen-sharing capabilities for Gemini Live by the end of the month as part of the Gemini app on Android, according to discussions coming out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. Previewed a year ago as Project Astra, the new functionality will allow Gemini Live to accept a video stream captured in real time by the phone’s camera and answer questions about the feed in a conversational way, based on voice input, screen-sharing live videos with Gemini on mobile as Gemini 2.0 currently offers desktop users. Read more

Digg, a link-based aggregator website that was an Internet staple circa 2012 then faded, has been acquired by founder Kevin Rose in partnership with Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit. The site gained popularity by tapping crowdsourced voting, allowing users to vote content up or down. Thanks to AI, the duo feel the timing is right for Digg to make a comeback. “We’ve hit an inflection point where AI can become a helpful co-pilot to users and moderators, not replacing human conversation, but rather augmenting it, allowing users to dig deeper, while removing repetitive burdens,” Rose says. Read more

Flora is a new software interface built by AI creatives for creative AI applications. Much like Apple reinvented the personal computer UI to make it feel natural for people who were not IT specialists, Flora aims to reframe the way designers and artists interact with generative AI. “AI tools make it easy to create, but lack creative control,” the startup’s founder Weber Wong says, opining that such tools have proven “great for making AI slop, but not for doing great creative work.” Wong’s goal is to make an AI interface everyone will find comfortable and intuitive, simplifying use and curating “the best text, image, and video models.” Read more

A standalone Meta AI app is in the works for Q2, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The move is aligned with Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stated intent to propel his company to the forefront of artificial intelligence by year’s end, vaulting ahead of competitors such as OpenAI, Alphabet, Anthropic and xAI. “This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg said in January during a Q4 earnings call with analysts. Read more