Amazon, Perplexity, and future of AI shopping assistants
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Andy Jassy explains Amazon’s 14,000 layoffs, buying Nvidia chips, upcoming Trainium3 AI chips, AWS capacity and sales growth, and its Bedrock AI agent platform.
Amazon has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity AI, accusing the company of covertly accessing Amazon customer accounts through its agentic shopping technology. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Amazon announced on Thursday the launch of Kindle Translate, an AI-powered translation service designed for authors using Kindle Direct Publishing to broaden their reach. The service initially translates text between English and Spanish and from German to English, as it’s still operating in beta. More languages will be supported over time.
Amazon has sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing Perplexity AI of using its Comet browser agent to make purchases on Amazon without authorization, prompting Perplexity to fire back with a public statement alleging bullying and intimidation from the e-commerce juggernaut.
AWS added more than 3.8 gigawatts of power in just the last 12 months. That's more than any other cloud provider. Amazon's cloud unit now has double the power capacity that it had in 2022. It's on pace to double the power capacity again by 2027.
Amazon's $38 billion cloud deal with OpenAI marks a major endorsement for the e-commerce giant's cloud business after recent setbacks, including ceding market share to rivals and an outage that disrupted large parts of the internet.
The job cuts come as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said he envisions the company relying on AI agents to replace human workers.
Amazon has added generative artificial intelligence (GAI) to its Alexa voice assistant and launched new AI-powered devices for children.