🛒 Amazon Alexa+ Arrives on Web for $19.99/Month 🛒
Amazon expands Alexa+ beyond Echo devices with browser-based access and agentic capabilities.

Amazon has launched Alexa.com, bringing its AI-powered Alexa+ assistant to web browsers for the first time and marking a direct challenge to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok. The move signals Amazon's push into the crowded web-based AI assistant market. Alexa+ Arrives on Web for $19.99/Month, though it remains free during Early Access and permanently free for Prime members. The assistant supports agentic capabilities through integrations with Expedia, Yelp, Uber, and OpenTable, enabling users to complete tasks without leaving the chat interface. Amazon reports usage has surged dramatically, with shopping interactions up 5x and cooking queries up 3x. The Alexa mobile app is also being redesigned around a chatbot-first experience.

🚗 NVIDIA Alpamayo Lets Self-Driving Cars Explain Decisions 🚗
New 10B-parameter system uses chain-of-thought reasoning to handle rare edge cases.

At CES 2026, NVIDIA unveiled Alpamayo, a 10-billion-parameter autonomous driving system that generates reasoning traces alongside driving trajectories. CEO Jensen Huang declared "the ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here." Unlike traditional black-box systems, NVIDIA Alpamayo Lets Self-Driving Cars Explain Decisions through chain-of-thought reasoning, addressing regulatory concerns around AI transparency. The Mercedes-Benz CLA will be the first vehicle to integrate Alpamayo when it launches in Europe in early 2026. NVIDIA is also releasing AlpaSim, an open-source simulation framework, alongside 1,700+ hours of real-world driving data to accelerate industry-wide development.

🤖 Claude Code Builds Year-Long Project in One Hour 🤖
Google engineer shares how Anthropic's coding assistant replicated her team's distributed agent system.

Google Principal Engineer Jaana Dogan revealed that Anthropic's Claude Code replicated in roughly one hour what her team had spent over a year building—a working distributed agent system. With minimal prompts, Claude produced a usable prototype that captured the core functionality. Claude Code Builds Year-Long Project in One Hour, illustrating how AI-assisted development has evolved from simple code completion to full system orchestration. This capability shift raises fundamental questions about software development workflows and team structures, signaling that competitive pressure from AI coding tools is reshily impacting how engineers approach complex projects.

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⚡ NVIDIA Vera Rubin Chips Ship Sooner Than Expected ⚡

The accelerated rollout of Vera Rubin gives NVIDIA a significant capability jump over competitors. At CES 2026, Jensen Huang unveiled the platform as Blackwell's successor, delivering 5x faster inference, 3.5x faster training, and 10x lower cost per token. The six-chip supercomputer architecture is designed for reality simulations used in model training. Vera Rubin enters full production in H2 2026, with major cloud providers already committed to deployment.

🦾 Boston Dynamics Unveils Electric Atlas for Hyundai Factories 🦾

Integration with Gemini Robotics positions Atlas as the first major humanoid to run on frontier AI models. Boston Dynamics revealed its fully electric Atlas robot, standing 6'2" with 110-pound lift capacity and real-time tactile sensing. Hyundai plans to deploy Atlas in factories starting 2028, targeting 30,000 units annually. The partnership with Google DeepMind brings Gemini Robotics AI to the humanoid platform.