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Amazon

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.

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Wes Davis
Go read this report on AI’s effects on Amazon’s software labor force.

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.”

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Tom Warren
Is Panos working on an Amazon foldable?

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.

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Wes Davis
Amazon says ‘hundreds of thousands’ now have access to Alexa Plus.

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

[reuters.com]

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Richard Lawler
Amazon laid off about 100 people in the team behind Alexa, Echo, and Zoox.

As reported by Reuters, the job cuts in its devices and services group were part of a “regular business review.” CNBC noted the company has laid off 27,000 employees since the start of 2022, with cuts impacting this group in 2022 and 2023.

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Jay Peters
Here’s Spider Noir.

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.

An image of Spider Noir in the Spider Noir show.
Image: Amazon
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Wes Davis
Sat Deploy.mp4.

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.

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Jay Peters
Jeff Bezos is set to sell billions in Amazon stock.

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.

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Jay Peters
Alexa Plus now has more than 100,000 users.

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.

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Dominic Preston
Amazon’s newest Nova.

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.

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Emma Roth
Amazon will invest $4 billion to bring faster deliveries to rural areas.

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.”

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Richard Lawler
“He did the right thing.”

Said Donald Trump, speaking to reporters today about Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s response quickly disavowing any suggestion that it might tell customers how much Trump’s tariffs have increased the prices on their products. “Jeff Bezos is very nice... He solved the problem very quickly.”

It looks like we have our answer to Nilay’s question.

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Emma Roth
UPS is laying off 20,000 workers as it slashes Amazon deliveries.

UPS revealed the job cuts in its earnings report released today, which it says are linked to “lower volumes from our largest customer,” Amazon. The company announced earlier this year that it will decrease its Amazon deliveries by more than 50 percent by the second half of 2026.

The layoffs will affect around 4 percent of the company’s 490,000 employees. UPS also plans to close 73 of its buildings by the end of June.

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Jay Peters
Independent Bookstore Day vs. Amazon.

Independent Bookstore Day is on Saturday, but Amazon is having a book sale, too, reports Fast Company.

An Amazon spokesperson tells the publication that “The overlap was unintentional. The dates for our sale were set this year to accommodate additional participating countries.”