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🔓 Thursday’s AI Report:
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LATEST IN AI
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⚡ Amazon finally launching AI Alexa?
🚨 Our Report — Amazon is holding an event in New York, on February 26th, where it's rumored it will be launching the long-awaited, AI-powered Alexa.
🔓 Key Points:
There’s reportedly a “Go/No-go” cut-off meeting on February 14th, but the next-gen Alexa is expected to be powered by Amazon’s foundational model—Nova—so it can respond, conversationally, to multiple commands.
Although Amazon hasn’t officially announced the impending release, speculation has been mounting since it failed to hold its annual product event in September, after reportedly struggling for months with major setbacks.
Amazon has been trying to release the AI-powered Alexa since 2023 to compete with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s CoPilot, Google’s Gemini, and Apple’s Siri (which is supported by ChatGPT).
🔐 Relevance — Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been actively trying to cut costs across Amazon since 2022, especially from within the Devices and Services division (which includes Alexa) as—while many people have Alexa-enabled devices in their homes—they’ve struggled to monetize them (as an example, Echo devices have lost the company over $25B over the years), which makes us wonder what the monetizing strategy will be for the new Alexa, although if rumors are to be believed, Amazon is considering a $5 to $10 monthly fee.
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TOGETHER WITH KOLENA
The rise of autonomous AI agents brings exciting possibilities but also the critical need for robust evaluation.
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🔥 Google’s breakthrough announcements
🚨 Our Report — During its quarterly earnings report, Google made many announcements, including making its reasoning model—Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking—available to all users on the Gemini app, confirming the impending release of Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental (it was accidentally revealed after it was spotted in Google’s changelogs last week), and introducing Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, a cheaper, more efficient model (possibly a challenge to DeepSeek’s controversial R1?).
🔓 Key Points:
Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking (launched in December) works through problems, showing its ‘thought’ process, and integrates with YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Search instead of relying solely on its own data.
Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental is Google’s “most capable model” and can handle complex prompts, execute code, and process 1.5M words in one go (meaning it could process all 7 Harry Potter Books, in one prompt).
Google downplayed DeepSeek’s impact, saying “it's obvious that models could become more cost-efficient over time,” and calling Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite its “most cost-efficient model” that outperforms its predecessor, 1.5 Flash.
🔐 Relevance — This comes as reports suggest that Google will spend up to $75B to develop its AI models this year—a huge increase from the $32.3B it spent in 2023—as it races to catch up and compete with its main rivals, which include OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic.
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🎬 Musk wants Blade Runner lawsuit dropped
In October last year, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, was sued by Alcon Entertainment for using AI-generated Blade Runner images for a Tesla press event, without consent, therefore violating copyright laws.
Alcon’s lawsuit alleges that Musk (and Warner Bros. Discovery) asked to use images from the “Blade Runner 2049” film to promote the new Tesla, 24 hours before the event, something which Alcon denied.
Musk’s lawyers plan to ask the courts to drop the case and intend to dismiss all accusations “for relief with prejudice,” meaning that—if they’re successful—the case will be dismissed permanently, and can’t be refiled.
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TRENDING AI TOOLS
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PRACTICAL AI
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Prompt Inspiration
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LIVE Q&A
❓ Who: Jake George. Jake is an AI agent expert and founder of Agentic Brain, which builds custom AI agents that understand your business and are trained on cutting-edge data and tactics, so you can automate your pipeline without increasing headcount.
⌚ When: Friday 7th February, at 11 AM EST
🎓 Where: Skool
🙋♂️ What: Tomorrow, and every Friday, AI agent expert, Jake George, will be going Live, on Skool, to answer any question you have about AI agents.
‼️For more information about this, and our future Live AI Q&A sessions, visit us at Skool.
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RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
STARTUPS
Name: Synthesia
Funding raised: $157M
Synthesia—which uses AI and basic scripts to create videos and avatars in 130 languages—has secured funding from the likes of Google Ventures and Accel, and has big outfits among its 55,000 clients, including Reuters and Accenture.
PODCASTS
In this podcast, Pete Pachal—founder of The Media Copilot—discusses what he thinks the future of journalism and AI looks like.
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