🛸Drone Deliveries Powered by Amazon

Hey TEDchats Fam!

Happy Friday! Imagine ordering toothpaste or a phone charger and seeing it glide through the sky to your doorstep within an hour. Amazon’s new drone delivery service in Phoenix turns that vision into reality, bringing daily essentials faster than ever before.

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Amazon Takes Flight in Phoenix!

After completing trials in California and Texas, Amazon’s drone delivery service is now officially live in Phoenix’s West Valley, Arizona, offering ultra-fast delivery to customers' doorsteps in an hour or less. With a catalog of 50,000 eligible items under five pounds, shoppers in the metro area can now order household, health, and tech products delivered by Amazon’s state-of-the-art MK30 drones. These drones, approved to fly beyond the line of sight, are 50% quieter than their predecessors and designed to operate in light rain, though deliveries are limited to daylight hours and favorable weather conditions (see Amazon’s announcement).

AI Boom Propels Nvidia to $3.65 Trillion Market Cap

Nvidia has overtaken Apple as the world’s largest company by market capitalization, reaching a staggering $3.65 trillion, fueled by an 850% stock growth since late 2022. This meteoric rise reflects Nvidia’s foundational role in the AI boom, as its GPUs power some of the world’s largest and most advanced language models. While Apple recently introduced its own generative AI, Nvidia remains the key player for AI infrastructure. However, competition is on the horizon, as OpenAI reportedly explores proprietary systems with Broadcom, hinting at potential shifts in the AI hardware landscape (read more).

OpenAI Acquires Chat .com Domain

In a bold move, OpenAI has acquired the coveted Chat .com domain, previously bought for $15.5 million by HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah. This high-profile domain now redirects users to ChatGPT, giving OpenAI a sleek new URL to capture traffic directly to its AI chatbot. The acquisition doesn’t indicate a rebranding—ChatGPT will continue under its established identity—but marks a strategic investment in digital presence. With Shah hinting at shares as part of the deal, this acquisition highlights OpenAI’s commitment to cementing its position in the AI landscape with premium digital real estate (see Shah’s announcement).

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🤯 MIND SPARK

Meta AI Goes Military: Meta now permits the U.S. government and defense contractors to use its Llama AI model for national security. Aligned with U.S. standards, Llama supports applications in logistics, counter-terrorism financing, and cybersecurity. Partners like Oracle and Lockheed Martin are integrating it for maintenance and data analysis, strengthening U.S. competitiveness in global AI (see Meta’s announcement).

Budget Bot Built for Clean-Up: In just four days and for a mere $250, roboticists from UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich programmed a robot arm to tackle spills with the help of GPT-4o. This low-cost innovation used only 100 demos and a visual language model to create seamless human-robot interaction, opening up new possibilities for affordable robotic helpers (see demo).

Upgrade to ChatGPT Plus Directly from iOS Settings: Apple’s iOS 18.2 beta update lets users subscribe to ChatGPT Plus directly from the iPhone Settings menu. This integration eases access to GPT-4’s features, hinting at more in-app AI upgrades as Apple reportedly explores similar options with Google’s Gemini.

Notepad Steps into the Future with AI Rewrite: Microsoft has added an AI-powered Rewrite feature to Notepad, allowing users to rephrase, adjust tone, or alter text length with just a right-click. Aimed at streamlining content editing, this update marks a major leap for the minimalist app first launched in 1983 (see Microsoft’s announcement).

Google’s New AI Hub in Saudi Arabia: Google has partnered with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) to launch a “new AI hub” in the country’s Eastern Province, focusing on Arab language models and “Saudi-specific AI applications”. While details are limited, the location raises questions due to Saudi Arabia’s fossil fuel ties, highlighting the tension between tech innovation and environmental impact (see PIF’s announcement).

Prime Video Unveils an AI Recap Feature! Amazon Prime Video introduces 'X-Ray Recaps', an AI-powered tool that delivers instant text summaries of TV series, individual episodes, and even specific scenes. Perfect for quick catch-ups, this feature analyzes video segments and subtitles to generate concise, spoiler-free recaps (see Amazon’s announcement).

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