OpenAI is secretly developing a biometric-based social network.

To get inside, users will have to confirm their identity through Face ID or iris scanning (World project technologies). This is reported by Forbes sources.

A team of 10 people is working on the prototype. The main idea is to create a space exclusively for "real people," as opposed to competitors like X, which suffer from a large number of fake accounts and spam. It is likely that the social network's functionality will be closely linked to AI-powered tools for generating photos and videos.

The launch date has not yet been determined.

Microsoft is revising its plans to integrate AI into Windows 11.

The company has decided to reduce the scale of use of the Copilot AI assistant, focusing on developing more specialized functions. The changes are related to the desire to make AI more practical and user-friendly.

The company now intends to optimize AI by removing redundant features and making the system more personalized. In place of Copilot, Microsoft is going to develop Recall, a task and note management tool that will aim to simplify data handling.

ChatGPT has started testing ads with a minimum budget of $200,000.

OpenAI has started limited beta testing of ads in ChatGPT, inviting a small group of brands with a budget of at least $200,000 to participate. According to ADWEEK, the launch is taking place in a closed format and under strict control.

The results of the beta test will determine whether advertising will become a full-fledged part of the ChatGPT business model or remain a niche experiment. Market sources report that the actual entry threshold for some advertisers may be as high as $250,000.

Elon Musk became the first person in history to have a net worth exceeding $800 billion.

According to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires global ranking, Musk, the richest person in the world, has a net worth of $852.5 billion.

This result was achieved through the merger of SpaceX, a space exploration company, and xAI, an artificial intelligence startup. The combined company is valued at $1.25 trillion. Prior to this merger, Musk owned approximately 42% of SpaceX and 49% of xAI.

Microsoft launches a marketplace for media content licenses for training AI models.

Publisher Content Marketplace is a platform where publishers will be able to offer licensed access to their content to developers of AI-based solutions. On PCM, it is possible to set your own conditions and rates for access to materials, as well as to track their actual use.

The project is being developed in collaboration with major media companies, including Vox Media, The Associated Press, Condé Nast, People, and Yahoo.

The initiative is based on the desire to equalize the interests of publishers and developers. Thus, the former will retain ownership of the materials and control over the terms of their use, while the latter will receive structured access to high-quality information for training their models.

🇩🇪 Germany tells Amazon to stop price caps for third‑party sellers
Germany’s cartel office ordered Amazon to stop imposing price ceilings on online retailers on its German marketplace and demanded €59M it says Amazon gained from anti‑competitive conduct. (Source: Reuters via Boursorama)

Why it matters: marketplaces that compete with sellers can’t also “steer” seller pricing without triggering regulator backlash.

👉 Seller takeaway: expect more scrutiny on price‑parity and pricing controls. Build pricing strategy that survives rule shifts (and diversify channels).

The documentary "Melania" by Amazon MGM Studios, which focuses on the life of US First Lady Melania Trump after her return to the White House, has been released.

The project has become a record-breaking expensive for the documentary genre: the total costs are estimated at $75 million. About $40 million Amazon paid for the rights to the film, with Melania Trump herself receiving $28 million of this amount, and another $35 million was spent on marketing and distribution. At the same time, analysts expect that from a commercial point of view, the tape is unlikely to pay off.

However, it seems that it was more important for Amazon to demonstrate its loyalty to the current administration. The NYT reports that Melania herself produced and edited the film, which resulted in a lack of artistic and journalistic integrity.

Former Amazon Executive Traded Office Job for Tulip Farm and Found True Happiness.

For decades, Andrew Miller lived the life of a classic workaholic: waking up at 4 AM and working 70-hour weeks. By the age of 50, he faced professional burnout and realized he was doing the wrong thing.

As a result, he quit the corporation and started his own farm. Now he grows tulips on an area comparable in size to 17 football fields.

Andrew himself says that he has finally found harmony by changing the rhythm of the metropolis for a quiet life among flowers.

Unlike retailers and marketplaces that have introduced agentic assistants, traditional financial services systems have built decades of trust with consumers by providing security and oversight for automated purchases.

This suggests that consumers place their trust not so much in agentic AI as a technology but in their ability to supervise and reverse automated buying decisions. Nobody wants an agent to buy the wrong-colored sofa or a parka with broken zippers, and financial services institutions have a long-established playbook for processing returns, reimbursements and refunds.

That’s why shoppers get more cautious with merchants with consumer-facing agentic tools. Among people who use AI within a merchant’s app or website, 58% would rather keep control, using AI to browse, then completing the purchase themselves, rather than letting a merchant’s agent complete the purchase.

In other words, consumers are more likely to trust payment providers than merchants to make autonomous purchases. Among shoppers open to using generative AI (a precursor to agentic that doesn’t have full autonomy or the ability to independently make buying decisions), the most trusted assistants don’t belong to retailers at all. Just over 1 in 4 consumers said they would trust autonomous AI from their digital wallet provider the most, while nearly 1 in 5 said they would trust it when offered by Chase, Bank of America, Discover or another credit card issuer. Just 16% said they would put the most trust in agents offered by the merchants they shop with.

OpenAI has started implementing ads in ChatGPT.

The first ads appeared in the interface of the free version and the Go tariff for some users in the US. The company claims that the innovation does not violate privacy: advertisers receive only generalized statistics and do not see the history of correspondence.

Targeting works in real time — for example, when discussing cooking, the system will offer food delivery services, however, in dialogues about politics or health, advertising is completely prohibited.

Advertising revenues should compensate for the enormous costs of computing power.

What’s at stake for merchants.

That hesitation matters for merchants, especially as retailers and marketplaces race to build agentic AI directly into the shopping experience. Take, for instance, grocery giant Kroger. In November, the company announced that it was partnering with Instacart to provide “agentic shopping experiences” for its customers.

“Interacting with an AI agent makes shopping and meal planning as simple as a conversation, helping customers build their basket or offering meal suggestions, truly understanding what matters most to them,” Kroger Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer Yael Cosset said in a statement about the announcement.

Retail giant Amazon sits in an interesting spot, thanks to its Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform. Amazon executives are betting that shoppers will eventually come around on agentic commerce.

“It has a chance to be good for customers, has a chance to be really good for eCommerce,” Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s last earnings call in October.

He added that while Amazon’s marketplace is already great for customers who are shopping with a specific purchase in mind, agentic assistants will be able to play the role that an in-store salesperson would usually take on.

From Etsy’s vantage point, shoppers aren’t fully comfortable with agentic commerce yet, but momentum is building.

Amazon will launch a marketplace where publishers can sell their content to AI companies, according to Reuters.

Amazon expects the marketplace to become one of its key AI tools.

➡️ The information came amid negotiations between publishers and AI companies on the rules for using online content, both for training models and for generating responses to users.

Publishers are pushing for payment for use, expecting that payments will increase as the volume of use of their content increases.

Research: Neural networks make you work harder, not less.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, came to a paradoxical conclusion: the introduction of AI does not unload employees, but only increases the load. For eight months, the authors observed a technology company and found out that access to neural networks creates a productivity trap.

Employees who have been paid for their subscriptions have started volunteering to take on tasks that were previously outsourced, such as designers writing code and researchers doing engineering. The desire for maximum efficiency has led to people sending prompts even during meetings and lunch breaks. As a result, the workday is not shortened, but rather condensed.

❗️❗️❗️The Italian tax police are conducting searches at Amazon's headquarters.

The police suspect that Amazon had a permanent presence in Italy from 2019 to 2024.

However, the American company only started paying taxes in August 2024. The prosecutor's office believes that the marketplace evaded taxes worth $1.42 billion during this period.

The European Ariane 64 rocket successfully launched the American Amazon Leo satellites.

This was reported by the NSF portal. The Ariane 6 rocket with four solid-fuel boosters (Ariane 64) and 32 Amazon Leo (formerly Kuiper) satellites launched from the Kourou Space Center in French Guiana on February 12 at 19:50 Moscow time. The spacecraft launch mission lasted 114 minutes.

The flight was the first for the Ariane 64 variant. Previously, the Ariane 6 carrier was launched five times with two side solid-fuel boosters (in the Ariane 62 variant). This mission also marked the first use of an extended rocket head fairing.

Once in space, the 32 satellites will join Amazon’s Leo satellite internet constellation. Originally named Project Kuiper, Amazon rebranded the service in November 2025. Once operational, the constellation will offer broadband internet access to customers and communities worldwide, relaying data between Amazon’s ground stations and customer terminals.

🛍️ Argos Prepares Major Marketplace Update

📢 UK retailer Argos announced a major platform update — the company plans to open its marketplace to third-party sellers.

🔄 This move aims to expand product selection and compete with giants like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy.

📈 What this will bring: • more SKUs and suppliers on Argos • higher traffic and brand visibility • opportunities for local sellers to reach new audiences
Takeaway: Not only Chinese marketplaces are expanding — European retailers are also strengthening their marketplace ecosystems.

Trends for the future of commerce.

Let's start analyzing them together with the Tomorrow's Commerce 2026 report from VML.

AI assistants

🔴 Currently, only 3% of consumers use chatbots to find inspiration for a purchase, 4% to find the product itself, and 5% to find information about the product.

🔴 At the same time, 68% have tried tools like ChatGPT, and the demand for a seamless customer journey, fast transactions, and low prices remains high.

🔴 Soon, AI assistants will increasingly help consumers with this demand by searching and comparing products, reading reviews, and more.

🔴 Retailers and brands should adapt to bots by increasing their online presence, providing relevant expert data, and structuring product descriptions.

We continue to analyze the Tomorrow's Commerce 2026 report from VML.

Agent AI

🔴Within three to five years, neural networks will learn not only to answer questions, but also to perform actions for people: track discounts, communicate with retailers’ chatbots, and even make purchases.

🔴About half of consumers around the world are ready to let such neural networks act on their behalf (48%) and are happy to outsource the search for discounts (52%).

🔴 This will require sellers to optimize their products for AI, paying special attention to automatically tracked trust signals and creating interfaces for automated transactions between bots.

Em Altman accused companies of "AI-washing" in mass layoffs.

The head of OpenAI said that business is increasingly writing off staff cuts to the introduction of neural networks, although in fact layoffs were planned in advance for other reasons. In an interview with CNBC-TV18, Altman noted that the real displacement of people by artificial intelligence will only become widespread in a few years.

Nowadays, many corporations use the hype surrounding technology as a convenient excuse for making unpopular decisions.

Amazon, IBM, and Salesforce have previously openly acknowledged the connection between AI and layoffs.

IKEA sold out stuffed orangutans because of Punch the Macaque.

Store stocks in Japan, the US, and South Korea are completely depleted. The reason for the rush is the viral story of a baby macaque named Punch at Japan's Ichikawa Zoo. After his mother abandoned him, employees gave him a stuffed orangutan, which became a "surrogate mother" for the primate. Videos of Punch clinging to the toy even during conflicts with other monkeys have garnered millions of views.

The company promised to return the orangutans to the shelves as soon as stock is replenished.

Amazon has become the world's largest company by revenue.

Amazon's revenue increased by almost 12% to reach $716.9 billion. This is a record-breaking figure in the company's history. Amazon has taken the top spot in the Fortune Global 500 ranking. Previously, Walmart, an American hypermarket chain, was in the top spot for 11 consecutive years.

Experts say that without Amazon Web Services, the company's main growth driver, the online giant's revenue would have been much lower at $588 billion. However, in terms of market capitalization, Amazon has long surpassed Walmart ($2.2 trillion vs. $1 trillion).