Amazon is pouring billions into AI, ignoring investor skepticism.

According to a report by the Financial Times, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have spent a combined $106 billion in the first six months of 2024 to build the infrastructure needed to develop artificial intelligence, despite growing skepticism among Wall Street investors about the return on such investments.

The company executives, ignoring stock market concerns, are planning to continue to increase their investments over the next 18 months.

In the US corporate world, there is already excitement about using large language models to further automate the hiring process. According to a 2023 survey, 10% of companies were already using AI in recruiting, and another 30% planned to start doing so in 2024.

The New York Times and other leading news sites are blocking the webbot of the new OpenAI search engine

OpenAI's new search engine SearchGPT has faced the fact that leading news sites, including New York Times, blocking its web bot. These are 14 out of 1,000 web publishers, including Wired, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ.

One of the reasons for this decision is the lack of trust in OpenAI. The company, in turn, claims that it does not train its language models on the data obtained.

OpenAI has created its own anti-cheat, but not yet for general use.

The OpenAI algorithm, which recognizes text from a chatbot, appeared a year ago and is already ready for release. However, the company's management is in no hurry to publish it. The reason is that 2/3 of respondents are confident that the tool will not work correctly.

OpenAI assures that the anti-cheat works with almost 100% accuracy. He sees something like "watermarks" in the text generated by ChatGPT, which cannot be seen by humans. However, the protection can be bypassed by machine translation into another language and vice versa. In addition, OpenAI is worried that if too many users are given access to the anti-cheat, the algorithm will certainly be exposed and then deceived. At the first stage, access only for educational institutions is discussed.

Alibaba will start charging sellers a software fee of 0.6% for each confirmed transaction on the Tmall and Taobao platforms. Alibaba plans to introduce a new measure on September 1, 2024. However, according to a source close to the company, Alibaba may refuse to introduce a commission for small merchants.

According to experts, the new measure will increase Alibaba's core revenue from sales and will become an additional factor in the growth of shares.

A US seller is selling a crypto hamster on eBay.

Seller on eBay claims that:

✅ Hamster kombat personal real account 2,9M profit per hour and growing
✅ Blum 48k + 54 tickets
✅ TapSwap 11M coins

"Transfer method: transferring tg phone number to yours", - the seller writes.

Tencent invested $300 million in Chinese AI unicorn Moonshot

The startup is now valued at $3.3 billion. Beijing venture capital firm Gaorong Capital and Alibaba Group also took part in the investment round.

Monshot AI has raised more than $1.3 billion since 2023, not counting its latest round, according to Crunchbase.

Moonshot AI is one of six fast-growing Chinese startups vying to become the leading AI company in China.

ChatGPT app earned $28 million in July.

This is the highest figure ever. ChatGPT's revenue in July from sales in the App Store and Google Play amounted to $28 million (the amount after deducting commission). 83% of the app's revenue comes from the Apple store.

The big jump in ChatGPT app revenue came after OpenAI released the GPT-4o model in May.

Pantone has launched a trend color forecast service.

The new online platform is called Color Insider. According to the company, the use of trendy corporate colors increases brand awareness by 87%, so the new service will be useful for a wide range of entrepreneurs, including those on marketplaces. Based on analytical data and quantitative assessment, the service will publish reports with forecasts of color trends, dividing them into categories: short-term, long-term and local.

Join TON at Istanbul Blockchain Week

TON will take part in the annual conference Istanbul Blockchain Week 2024 as a Diamond Sponsor. Representatives of TON Society, TON Foundation and TON Studio will perform on the main stage of the event on August 14. The topic of the speech is the development of Web3 on TON and the crypto-revolution in Telegram.

Orenair has opened access to DALE 3 for users without a subscription.

Previously, only ChatGPT subscribers with Plus and Enterprise accounts could generate images using DALE. Now it can be done for free, but there is a limit of two pictures per day. To fully use the neural network, you still need a paid subscription.

A US startup has rolled out a “chastity belt” for those who can’t tear themselves away from their phones. This is a case with a lock for $100 that blocks the screen and prevents you from scrolling social networks. The key will have to be given to someone reliable.

Looking ahead, eBay is surely hoping for artificial intelligence (AI) to be the secret sauce powering its results higher. It's labored for years to weave AI functionalities into its site, with one familiar example being the auto-listing feature for sellers. This handles one of the more monotonous tasks for such users, providing a concise and cleanly written description of the item that will (hopefully) help it get sold.

A more recently introduced feature is an AI-powered background enhancement tool for product photos. It's helpful because, after all, we humans are visual creatures and we respond to pretty pictures. Although the results aren't quite what the company hypes as "professional grade imagery," they are an improvement and they do make the goods look more attractive.

Management does not break out its costs for developing, launching, and maintaining those AI functionalities. Yet a glimpse at the income statement for the quarter shows that the company's product development expenses have actually -- and admirably -- come down across the past year, to $379 million from $392 million. That matches the trajectory of overall operating expenses, which saw a slight reduction over that span to help lift the bottom line.

Amazon has partnered with TikTok.

This will allow users to buy marketplace products without leaving the social network. Amazon representatives did not share the details of the deal, but the TikTok press service stated that users of the social network will be able to link their account to an account on the marketplace. Buyers in the TikTok app will have access to information about prices, delivery times and product characteristics in the same way as in the separate Amazon app. It is unknown how the personal data of the accounts will be used, but users can unlink accounts from each other at any time.

Pavel Durov announced a festive update of the Telegram in honor of the 11th anniversary of the messenger.

What will appear?

✅ “Star reactions” will appear in the form of donations. Stars will be displayed directly on the post.

✅ Earned stars can be exchanged for Toncoin. This is direct monetization of the channel.

✅ Admins will be able to subscribe to their channel by creating an invitation link. You will need to pay for your subscription in “stars” without any extra bots.

✅ A new type of channel “super channels” has appeared - it will be possible to write in them from several people at once.

✅ Also on iOS, files in .pdf, .xls or .docx formats will open in separate tabs in the cart browser.

Revenuе от eBay grew slightly in the second quarter.

In its second quarter, eBay did a decent job of squeezing out bottom-line growth from sales that only inched higher.

On a year-over-year basis, both revenue and gross merchandise volume (GMV; the total value of all products sold via the site) both rose by 1%, to a respective $2.6 billion and $18.4 billion. In the earnings release, eBay mentioned "an uneven discretionary demand environment in our major markets," seemingly to explain those sluggish growth figures.

A more inspiring story was told on the bottom line, where non-GAAP (adjusted) net income bounced 8% higher to $602 million, or $1.18 per share. Although that revenue figure didn't move much higher, it was sufficient to beat the consensus analyst estimate of $2.53 billion. Ditto for adjusted net income, for which those prognosticators were collectively modeling $1.13.

During the quarter, eBay benefited from a focus on certain product categories. It's currently pushing goods in such disparate areas as auto parts and collectibles. That's an offbeat strategy but probably a necessary one. That's because the e-commerce space is not only dominated by monster general retailer Amazon; it's crowded with many smaller operators nipping at its heels.

ChatGPT crashed around the world. The neural network cannot be loaded from either a computer or a smartphone. Perhaps the drop is due to the new model that OpenAI will introduce today.

The founder of the Chinese marketplace Pinduoduo and its subsidiary Temu, Colin Huang, is recognized as the richest man in China. This is evidenced by data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (BBI). The billionaire's fortune as of August 9, 2024 is estimated at $48.6 billion. Huang closes the top 25 richest people in the world.

Amazon will be able to deliver goods by drone in the UK.

The British Civil Aviation Authority has issued permission to the corporation and several other companies to test the delivery of goods using drones.

True, this opportunity existed before, but what has changed?

Previously, companies in the UK could only deliver UAVs with goods while keeping the drones in the operator's line of sight at all times. Now the restriction has been lifted. Amazon said it will launch drone delivery in the country by the end of this year.

Amazon previously launched delivery of orders using drones. One of these “flying couriers” was spotted in the US state of Texas (on video).

Amazon is raising its hiring bar.

The company is bringing back "bar raisers" to the interview process for entry-level software-engineer jobs, internally dubbed "SDE-1 (L4)" positions, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.
Bar raisers have long been a peculiar part of Amazon's hiring process. These people, typically from another team, serve as "objective third-party advisers" during job interviews and ask more-holistic questions related to Amazon's famed leadership principles to evaluate candidates.

But Amazon removed bar-raiser interviews for entry-level engineering jobs and some nonengineering roles in recent years, in part due to the pandemic-fueled hiring boom, BI previously reported. That enabled Amazon to hire more aggressively but led to a drop in the quality of talent in some parts of the company.

"By reintroducing Bar Raisers into the AUTA interview process, the assessment of the Dive Deep and Earns Trust Leadership Principles (LPs) can be better incorporated," the memo, from July, said. "With this change, AUTA is addressing a direct business need and aims to enhance the quality of SDE-1 candidates hired."

Amazon’s troubled drone delivery program faces latest challenge in Texas.

On a recent weekday morning, John Case heard a familiar buzzing outside his quiet suburban home in College Station, Texas. He recognized it immediately as one of Amazon's Prime Air drones, whizzing by on its delivery route to unload small packages of batteries, vitamins and dog treats.

"It sounds like a giant hive of bees," Case, a semi-retired orthodontist, said in an interview. "You know it's coming because it's pretty loud."

Case has lived in College Station for the past 40 years. The drones are a common sight when he and his wife go on their regular walks around the neighborhood. Nurses, police officers and firefighters who work the nightshift talk about it disrupting their sleep during the day, Case said.

Noise complaints are just the latest challenge for Amazon's drone program that's been struggling to get off the ground since the company started testing deliveries in 2022. A mix of regulatory hurdles, missed deadlines and layoffs last year, coinciding with widespread cost-cutting efforts by CEO Andy Jassy, has halted progress of the ambitious service, which was conceived of by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos more than a decade ago.

College Station, located about 100 miles northwest of Houston, has been the main testing ground for Prime Air, as Amazon tries to show it can ferry packages by unmanned aircraft to residents' homes in under an hour. Lockeford, California, south of Sacramento, was supposed to be another test market, but Amazon shuttered its operation there in April. The company is seeking approval from regulators to start deliveries in Tolleson, Arizona, west of Phoenix.