Former Amazon, Meta Scientists Unveil Graphon AI, the First Pre-Model Intelligence Layer, with $8.3M in Seed Funding

The company announced the changes two days before it plans to lay off 10 percent of its work force, or about 8,000 employees.

The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands. Quay Barnett, who leads the efforts as a vice president at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, says his fundamental…

Alexa Plus, Amazon's upgraded AI assistant, can now generate podcasts on "virtually any topic," according to an announcement on Monday. With the update, Amazon says you can give Alexa Plus a topic, and the AI assistant will offer an overview of what its AI hosts plan to talk about, allowing you to steer the conversation and adjust its length before it starts generating the episode. Some "Alexa Podcast" examples shared by Amazon have two AI-generated hosts talking about the history of the Roman Empire, new music, and expectations for the World Cup. Amazon says you can also ask Alexa Plus to generate audio lessons about the Apollo missions, o … Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon’s Alexa+ can now generate custom AI podcasts on demand, as the company expands its assistant into a personalized AI content platform.

State-level political spending by tech giants could reshape regulatory landscapes, influencing national policies through local elections. The post DraftKings, Meta, Andreessen Horowitz spend millions on state elections appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AI research in 2025 was defined by major shifts. The industry moved beyond chatbots and into reasoning systems, autonomous agent and multimodal systems. Last year, companies like Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek, and NVIDIA pushed AI research into new territory with papers focused on reasoning, coding agents, reinforcement learning, and scalable safety systems. Here […] The post Top 10 AI Research Papers of 2025 appeared first on Analytics Vidhya.

Amazon has introduced Alexa for Shopping, combining its Rufus shopping chatbot with Alexa+ across its app, website, and Echo Show devices. The assistant can answer product questions, compare items, track prices, and support shopping reminders. It can also handle scheduled shopping actions and eligible automated purchases. The company said Alexa for Shopping combines Rufus’ product […] The post Amazon launches Alexa for Shopping as Rufus moves behind the scenes appeared first on AI News.

The post Iran Demands Payment from Tech Giants for Strait of Hormuz Internet Cables appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. TLDR Tehran is developing an official framework to regulate and monetize maritime passage through the Strait of Hormuz Access will be restricted to vessels aligned with Iranian interests; ships connected to Washington’s “Project Freedom” will be denied passage Major technology corporations including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon face potential charges for subsea cable infrastructure traversing the waterway Iranian government-affiliated outlets have suggested possible interference with cable systems if payment demands are ignored Earlier reports indicated Tehran might accept cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, for transit fees Tehran is positioning itself to capitalize financially on its strategic hold over the Strait of Hormuz, rolling out initiatives to extract fees from both maritime traffic and international technology corporations for passage through this