Amazon has introduced Lens Live, an AI-powered update to the Amazon Lens shopping tool. The app, which works in concert with Amazon’s Rufus shopping assistant, uses smartphone cameras much like Google Lens does with visual search. Pinterest Lens is another such app. But the purpose-built Rufus ties it even more closely to the shopping experience with instant scanning, real-time product matches and insights from Rufus. Lens Live is already available to tens of millions of U.S. users on iOS in the Amazon Shopping app with plans to roll out to all U.S. customers in the coming months. Read more

Two new Google infrastructure projects will benefit from a nearly $20 billion Alphabet cash infusion. Reported in recent weeks: a $9 billion cloud and AI server facility expansion in Virginia and $9 billion to be spent on new construction and an existing plant upgrade in Oklahoma. Google has also committed $1 billion to AI training and support from the community college to university levels in both states. Such ambitions do not stop at U.S. shores. AWS has earmarked $4.4 billion to construct and operate cloud centers in New Zealand while OpenAI seeks investors for an India build-out. Read more

Microsoft is rolling out its first internally developed AI models. Branded Microsoft AI (MAI), the two initial releases are MAI-Voice-1, a “highly expressive and natural speech generation model,” and MAI-1-preview, a mixture-of-experts LLM designed for consumer facing applications. The move demonstrates Microsoft’s intent to move beyond exclusive reliance on OpenAI models to power its Copilot assistant and other applications. By striking out on its own, Microsoft is paving a smoother road for OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit entity, which the company is scheduled to initiate by the end of the year. Read more

As ByteDance approaches the latest U.S. deadline to sell TikTok or face being banned here, it continues to add new features, with barely a ripple of news concerning a sale. The legislation that contained the sales clause became law in April 2024. The most recent of several extensions was issued in June, pushing the deadline to September 17. In July Reuters reported a deal was “close,” with TikTok building a new U.S. version of its app ahead of a planned sale “to a group of investors.” Now the platform is adding voice notes to DMs and image uploads in chats. Up to nine images or video clips can be added to individual or group chats. Read more

OpenAI and Anthropic — rivals in the AI space who guard their proprietary systems — joined forces for a misalignment evaluation, safety testing each other’s models to identify when and how they fall short of human values. Among the findings: reasoning models including Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, and OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini resist jailbreaks, while conversational models like GPT-4.1 were susceptible to prompts or techniques intended to bypass safety protocols. Although the test results were unveiled as users complain chatbots have become overly sycophantic, the tests were “primarily interested in understanding model propensities for harmful action,” per OpenAI. Read more