Amazon to Spend $100 Billion on AI This Year 💰

Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,

Amazon just announced it will spend $100 billion this year to capture a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ in AI.

Let’s get into it!

Read Time: 4.5 min

Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI

• Amazon to Spend $100bn This Year in AI Drive 💰

• Meta Teams Up with UNESCO to Boost Speech and Translation AI

• AI Tutorial: Get Gemini AI to watch YouTube videos for you

• AI Tools to check out

• The Latest in AI and Tech 💡

• AI Findings/Resources

AI News

AMAZON

Amazon to Spend $100bn This Year in AI Drive 💰

Amazon is going all-in on AI, announcing plans to spend a staggering $100 billion in 2025. 

Details:

• Amazon's projected spending in 2025 marks a significant increase from its $83 billion expenditure in 2024.

• The vast majority of the budget will focus on generative AI development within Amazon Web Services (AWS), including data centers, hardware, and networking gear.

• Chief Executive Andy Jassy said he saw “significant signals of demand” for AI services and products and that the jump in spending will be worthwhile, calling it a “once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity.”

Despite last week’s talk about DeepSeek and the lowering of AI budgets, Big Tech shows no signs of slowing down. Amazon’s massive AI spending plans echo other tech giants, including Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta, which are competing to dominate the rapidly growing industry.

Source

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META

Meta Teams Up with UNESCO to Boost Speech and Translation AI

Meta is introducing a new initiative, the Language Technology Partner Program, in collaboration with UNESCO.

Details:

• Meta’s initiative is seeking collaborators who can contribute speech recordings with transcriptions, large amounts of written text, and sets of translated sentences in “diverse languages” to enhance AI models for speech recognition and translation.

• The program prioritizes less-represented languages, with partners working alongside Meta to develop and open-source these models for broader accessibility.

• Meta is also releasing an open-source machine translation benchmark for evaluating the performance of language translation models.

Meta is framing the initiative as philanthropic, but it is also true that the company will ultimately benefit greatly from improved speech recognition and translation models as it expands the languages supported by its AI-powered assistant, Meta AI.

Source

AI Tutorial

Get Gemini AI to watch YouTube videos for you

Google's Gemini 2.0 upgrade brought the Flash reasoning model to all users, but that's not all. Now, Gemini can watch YouTube videos and answer any questions you have about them.

To access the feature, you only need a free Google account.

1. Go to Gemini’s website and sign in. You can also use the Gemini app on your phone.

2. Click on the Gemini menu and select the “2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental with Apps” model. This lets Gemini know you want it to access apps like YouTube.

3. Copy the URL of the YouTube video you want to learn more about and paste it into the chat box along with your questions.

Note: This is an experimental model, so you may need to tweak your prompts for optimal results. Gemini’s reasoning model reveals its thought process and steps, making it easier to refine your queries.

AI Tools to check out

🥒 Pickle: Your AI body double for video calls.

🦙 Prompt Llama: Gather high-quality text-to-image prompts and test the performance of different models with the same prompts.

🤖 WorkBot: An AI platform for customer service and data insights.

📈 Trendtracker: Discover trends that matter instantly.

💬 Concierge: Talk to your apps with natural language.

AI Findings/Resources

🏨 Is this the world's first AI powered hotel?

💡 Why more AI firms should invest in carbon removal solutions

👉 How to get ChatGPT to give you exactly what you want – advice from a prompt engineer

👀 A three-and-a-half-hour YouTube tutorial on how LLMs are trained by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy

The latest in AI and Tech

Lawmakers move to ban DeepSeek AI on government devices

A bipartisan bill seeks to ban the Chinese AI app DeepSeek from federal devices, citing surveillance and misinformation risks.

John Schulman is joining Mira Murati’s startup

The OpenAI cofounder is joining after a brief stint at Anthropic, though Schulman’s new role remains unclear.

UAE to invest billions of euros in France

France’s Emmanuel Macron and the UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal to build Europe’s largest AI data centre in France.

Google edits Super Bowl ad after AI fact error

The tech company removed the error about Gouda cheese after it was called out for an ‘unequivocally’ untrue statistic.

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Gina 👩🏻‍💻