Amazon

Cargo airline Air Transport International (ATI) flies half of all US aircraft carrying cargo for Amazon. Its pilots have voted to authorize a strike, citing low pay and high turnover.

“We’re watching our carrier disintegrate,” Mike Sterling, chair of the ATI pilots’ union, tells Wired.

If negotiations between the union and ATI continue to stall, a strike could start next year. That could complicate deliveries for Amazon, which has its own track record of resisting workers’ efforts to unionize.

Amazon Prime just released the season 4 teaser trailer for The Boys at CCXP in Brazil. There’s plenty of the show’s familiar satire of the US’ political and societal landscape in it, and Homelander looks like as much of a nightmare as ever.

The season comes next year.

Amazon Prime video is counting down to something to do with the new Fallout show that’s coming next year. A “live report from Galaxy News” on YouTube has a camera pointed at a Valut-Tec vault that almost certainly doesn’t have any dead people and giant roaches in it.

We’ve got a little over 30 minutes until whatever is going to happen happens.

It still isn’t entirely clear how the advent of AI filmmaking tech is going to disrupt the entertainment industry.

But it feels pretty significant that Amazon reportedly fired longtime producer Joel Silver not of his alleged harassment towards female executives, but as retaliation in response to his refused to “Use artificial intelligence to finish a movie during the strike.

No surprise: “I don’t,” she tells DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Why not? “I just haven’t.”

Her commission is now suing Amazon for alleged monopoly behaviors.

At re:Invent 2023, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said the second generation of the company’s Trainium chip can train models four times faster than its predecessor. Trainium 2 has three times the memory as the first chip.

Amazon’s adaptation of The Boys only just got to college with its Gen V spin-off, but the streamer has already greenlit yet another expansion of the franchise — this time set in Mexico — courtesy of Blue Beetle’s Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, Diego Luna, and Gael García Bernal.

Peter Desantis, general manager of AWS EC2, announced during a re:Invent keynote that the new chip helps figure out how to correct errors — like flipping a binary code from a 1 to a 0 — that occasionally pop up when working with quantum computing queries. If quantum computing errors are mitigated, it could pave the way for more usable quantum computing, Desantis said.

“We are still in the very early stages, but this chip represents an important step in error correction for quantum computing.”

Instead of relying on hard drives, thin clients like the cube offload most computing power to the cloud and can connect virtual desktops remotely. AWS’ Melissa Stein said the company wants to provide a low-cost option for clients in high employee turnover spaces, like call centers, to provide access to enterprise applications.

“We looked for options and found that the hardware we used for the Amazon Fire TV Cube provided all the resources customers needed to access their cloud-based virtual desktops. So, we built an entirely new software stack for that device, and since we didn’t have to design and build new hardware, we’re passing those savings along to customers.”

The AWS thin clients will cost $195, or $280 bundled with a hub to connect a second monitor, with a monthly $6 management and maintenance fee.

Amazon’s free Fire TV Channels service is adding more sports content to its mix today: highlights from the NBA, Big Ten, SEC, and Big 12 are now available, as well as Fox Sports’ 24/7 linear channel. and shows from the Locked On Podcast Network. The service already had content from Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, NBC Sports, and others.

Two things about this:

1. The great re-bundling of TV just keeps accelerating, and sports is really leading the way, and

2. Amazon announced this in a post on Medium, which... what?

Amazon Prime Video plans to inject “shoppable” ads into the first-ever Black Friday NFL game.

According to the WSJ, the Friday afternoon game between the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins will feature “exclusive” online shopping deals advertised with on-screen QR codes throughout the action.

Yeah, ‘cos that's just the incentive I need to tune into a football game on my day off — more ads.

In a memo sent to employees, Daniel Rausch, the vice president of the Alexa and Fire TV team, says Amazon is eliminating “several hundred roles” as the company looks to build up efforts in AI:

As we continue to invent, we’re shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers — which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI. These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated.

Ahead of Black Friday and a wave of holiday shopping, Amazon says it uses “advanced AI” tools to spot inauthentic product reviews on the platform.

Amazon has long had a problem with fake reviews, sometimes involving networks of thousands of people buying them via Facebook or WeChat. In 2022, Amazon sued the admins of over 10,000 Facebook groups in an effort to crack down on fraudulent reviews.

The entire eight-episode season will premiere on February 2nd, 2024, Amazon announced on Thursday. The show co-stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was originally set to co-star but left the show in 2021.

After sending its Project Kuiper test satellites into space last month, Amazon confirmed its systems achieved “nominal or better performance.” It even successfully connected to the internet through the satellite and conducted a two-way video call.