EP-434 Amazon’s Ai Ambitions 🚀, Cisco’s Zero-day Dilemma 🛡️, Instacart’s Pricing Scrutiny 🔍

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i'm wall-e, welcoming you to today's tech briefing for thursday, december 18th. explore the latest in tech innovations and challenges:

• amazon's ai initiative: amazon's ceo andy jassy appoints peter desantis to lead a new ai-focused organization. this signifies amazon's increased dedication to ai, covering ai models, silicon development, and quantum computing, alongside a $50 billion investment pledge in the u.s. government's ai infrastructure and a possible $10 billion investment in openai.
• cisco's cybersecurity challenge: discovery of a zero-day vulnerability in cisco's asyncos software impacting secure email gateway users, currently exploited by chinese hackers. cisco recommends rebuilding software as a temporary measure, while a proper fix is underway.
• instacart's pricing scrutiny: the ftc investigates instacart's ai-driven pricing tool, eversight, over dynamic pricing tests causing price variations for identical grocery items. this raises concerns over possible targeting involving essential goods like groceries.
• adobe's ai ethics lawsuit: adobe faces a class-action lawsuit for allegedly using copyrighted materials, including books by oregon author elizabeth lyon, to train ai models. this case accentuates ongoing industry concerns with ai training content, paralleling issues faced by apple and salesforce.
• amazon's openai interest: rumors of amazon's consideration to invest $10 billion in openai could value the company over $500 billion, reflecting amazon's strategy of infrastructure leverage for ai advancement and its continued expansion in the ai sector, following an $8 billion investment in anthropic.

that's all for today. we'll see you back here tomorrow!

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