Neil Cybart 9/3/24 Neil Cybart 9/3/24

Amazon Alexa to Be Powered by Claude, Charging for AI, Apple Rumored to Invest in OpenAI

Happy Tuesday. Welcome to September.

One very quick follow-up to last Thursday’s discussion involving Apple Watch. We talked about my wish for Google to be more original with smartwatches. It’s easy to be different. A much harder goal is to be better.

Today’s update will have an AI theme as we begin with Amazon, move over to AI monetization, and then conclude with Apple / OpenAI. Let’s jump in.

Amazon Alexa to Be Powered by Claude

Here’s Reuters:

“Amazon's revamped Alexa due for release in October ahead of the U.S. holiday season will be powered primarily by Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence models, rather than its own AI, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Amazon plans to charge $5 to $10 a month for its new ‘Remarkable’ version of Alexa as it will use powerful generative AI to answer complex queries, while still offering the ‘Classic’ voice assistant for free, Reuters reported in June.

But initial versions of the new Alexa using in-house software simply struggled for words, sometimes taking six or seven seconds to acknowledge a prompt and reply, one of the people said.

That's why Amazon turned to Claude, an AI chatbot developed by startup Anthropic, as it performed better than the online retail giant's own AI models, the people said.”

Last October, Amazon announced a $4B investment in Anthropic (owns Claude). The news was positioned by Amazon as a “strategic collaboration to advance generative AI.” Anthropic said it would use AWS as its primary cloud provider, which means a portion of that $4B will find its way back to Amazon, while making future foundation models accessible to AWS customers with some features coming to AWS first. It’s not clear if this rumored Alexa/Claude integration was in the works last year and was tied with Amazon’s $4B investment.

As for motives, Amazon is becoming nervous of missing the boat on whatever remaining generative AI buzz and mania is left to squeeze. A year ago, Amazon held a product event where it gave its take on generative AI. As we discussed at the time,

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Neil Cybart 6/7/24 Neil Cybart 6/7/24

Thoughts Heading Into WWDC 2024

Hello everyone.

Apple’s WWDC keynote will be shown on Monday (1 pm ET) at Apple Park (and online). Today’s update will go over my thoughts ahead of next week.

Virtual Member Meetup on Monday. Following the WWDC keynote, there will be a virtual member meetup in the Above Avalon member forum in Slack (available here) on Monday at 6:00 pm ET / 3:00 pm PT. The meet-up will provide an opportunity for members to have conversations in real-time about everything that Apple announced. In addition to participating in the meetup myself, I moderate the discussion topics etc. The discussions are then made available afterwards for other members to read through in Slack. If you have never joined the Above Avalon team in Slack, you can request an invite here. If you have previously been in the Slack team, your email has already been registered and you can just log in. Any updates/changes related to the virtual meet-up will be shared in Slack, so keep an eye there on Monday.

Thoughts Heading Into WWDC 2024

The setup heading into this year’s WWDC can be described as strange. There is an odd situation unfolding on social media and online that boils down to tech and finance circles talking up anything and everything related to generative AI, to the point of sheer pandemonium, while the masses have a more lukewarm approach to everything that has been proposed so far by big Tech.

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Neil Cybart 5/15/24 Neil Cybart 5/15/24

OpenAI’s Spring Update Event, GPT-4o, Apple Hardware at the OpenAI Event

Hello everyone.

Let's jump right into today's update.

OpenAI’s Spring Update Event

In what may become an annual tradition, OpenAI held a spring event to unveil ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates. GPT-4 is OpenAI’s multimodal large language model. The event took place just one day ahead of Google’s annual developer conference and about a month ahead of Apple's WWDC.

The livestreamed presentation (available here via YouTube), which appears to have taken place at OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco, had an audience consisting of two to three dozen people. Judging from the applause, the crowd was comprised of OpenAI employees. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati kicked things off and then guided the presentation along.

Murati anchored the event around three updates:

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