Once a modest online seller of books, Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world, and its former CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s most wealthy person. We track developments, both of Bezos and Amazon, its growth as a video producer, the popular Prime service, as well as its own hardware, which includes the Amazon Kindle e-reader, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV streaming boxes.
The company is laying off fewer than 100 staffers in its books division, Reuters reports. The company cut about 100 jobs on its devices and services team last month.
[reuters.com]
0Amazon MGM Studios is reportedly making a movie that will depict the rollercoaster couple of days in November 2023 when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ousted by the board, then pulled an “Uno Reverse” and was re-hired, after which nearly all of the board members in question subsequently departed.
Luca Guadagnino is in talks to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with Andrew Garfield in talks to play Sam Altman. Production could begin as soon as this summer, per the report, with filming locations in San Francisco and Italy.
[hollywoodreporter.com]
I always enjoy Pablo Rochat’s delightfully unhinged projects whenever they cross my social media feeds and this one is no exception. It appears to be a work in progress, and really needs no further explanation but I will make two notes: 1) the tiny hats! 2) watch to the end for a great reaction.
The original deal between Amazon and Stellantis, first announced in 2022, was to create a “digital cockpit” for “millions” of Jeep, Dodge, and Ram vehicles — similar to how Google has developed operating systems for a handful of key automakers. But after three years, the two companies are now “winding down” that aspect of their partnership, Reuters says. (The e-commerce company also said it would purchase electric Ram ProMaster delivery vans; no word on whether that deal went through.) And it’s not looking good for a future Amazon in-car experience, as Reuters notes that most of the company’s Digital Cabin staffers have resigned or left the company.
[reuters.com]
Amazon engineers related their experience creating software to The New York Times:
The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines ... One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
The Times likens the shift to that of Amazon warehouses, where robots “have increased the number of items each worker can pick to hundreds from dozens an hour.”
Former Surface chief Panos Panay left Microsoft for Amazon nearly two years ago, and now rumors are emerging that Amazon is in the early stages of creating a “large-sized foldable device” that might compete with Huawei’s folding laptop. That’s the rumor from Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who says the device, if development progresses, is “projected to enter mass production in late 2026 or 2027.” Perhaps the Surface Neo will finally become an Amazon reality.
An Amazon spokesperson gave the figure to Reuters, adding, “...of course, some are employees and their families, but the overwhelming majority are customers that requested early access.”
However, Reuters says it found no evidence of Alexa Plus in the wild when searching “dozens of news sites” and social media.
Update May 17th: Amazon Spokesperson Eric Sveum emailed this statement to The Verge:
It’s simply wrong to say that Alexa+ isn’t available to customers—that assertion is false. Hundreds of thousands of customers have access to Alexa+ and we’re constantly inviting more customers that have requested Early Access.
[reuters.com]
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Amazon showed off a first image of Nicolas Cage as the live-action Spider Noir for the upcoming Prime Video and MGM Plus TV show. A premiere date hasn’t been shared yet.
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In a video posted by the Amazon Project Kuiper LinkedIn account, we see what Ars Technica calls the first look at the low-Earth orbit satellites Amazon launched earlier this week to face off with Starlink.
Ars draws some conclusions about them based on the fuzzy video, noting that their trapezoidal design is comparable to SpaceX competitor Eutelsat’s OneWeb satellites.
He is planning to sell up to 25,000,000 Amazon shares over a period ending May 29th, 2026, according to an SEC filing. (Perfect timing to be able to afford GTA VI.) The shares are worth up to $4.75 billion, The Guardian reports.
[theguardian.com]
CEO Andy Jassy shared the stat on today’s earnings call, reports TechCrunch. Given how many Alexa-enabled devices are out there, though, that’s still probably a pretty low number, relatively.
The AI-powered assistant officially launched to a “small number” of customers at the end of March.
[techcrunch.com]
The company is busy building its lineup of Nova AI models, which includes video and voice generation and an agentic shopping tool. The latest launch is Premier — first teased when the Nova line made its debut — and it’s the most powerful yet, though it’s not a reasoning model. Instead, it’s designed for multistep tasks and training other models via distillation.
The ecommerce giant says the investment will help grow its rural network to more than 200 delivery stations and create over 100,000 new jobs. Amazon is aiming to triple the size of its rural delivery network by the end of next year, while “cutting average delivery times in half.”
