AI Reading for Tuesday October 21

Internal Amazon documents and interviews show the company plans to automate up to 75% of its operations, expects to eliminate over 500,000 jobs, and projects avoiding hiring 160,000 U.S. workers by 2027 while saving about $0.30 per item. - The New York Times

A visit to an Amazon fulfillment center, where robots move merchandise and tell humans what to do with it. - The Wall Street Journal

Yelp launched Host and Receptionist, AI vocal agents that answer calls 24/7, take and modify reservations, manage waitlists and orders, and schedule appointments, with Host starting at $149/month and Receptionist at $99/month. - The Verge

Walmart partnered with OpenAI to let shoppers buy inside ChatGPT, and analysis of over 20 million AI shopping-agent conversations shows roughly 25% engagement, electronics buyers ask about 50% more questions, and conversions can rise up to tenfold. - Fortune

SMBs with good Google SEO back to square 1, might find AI a tougher nut

Sam Altman has pursued a series of deals to secure large-scale compute for OpenAI, prompting competition among Silicon Valley companies seeking to profit and contributing to perceptions that OpenAI has become too big to fail. - The Wall Street Journal

OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers helping train its artificial intelligence on how to build financial models as it looks to replace the hours of grunt work performed by junior bankers. - Bloomberg

the next financial crisis and/or Great Depression will be brought to you by AI

Could Sora dethrone TikTok? It drew over 1 million users in five days by with AI-created short videos, prompting moderation and deepfake concerns. - Fast Company

Samantha Cole of 404 Media reported that an AI-generated video depicting the president in graphic mockery circulated, with many outlets using euphemisms, highlighting realistic deepfake risks and prompting calls for clearer labeling and stronger platform policies. - 404 Media

President Trump has a long history of posting AI-generated memes and misinformation on social media, dating back to the campaign trail. - Fast Company

Grok misidentified footage from Saturday's protest as being from 2017, citing "superficial similarities." The bot later corrected itself, but the damage was done. The false claim had already gone viral. - NBC Boston

Studios are covertly using AI across film production—including synthetic performers like Tilly Norwood—often concealed by NDAs to speed workflows and reduce human roles, prompting legal disputes, labor tensions and social-media backlash. - GeekTyrant

Readers of texts created to use the styles of famous authors prefer works written by AI to human-written imitations, after developers fine-tune AI models to understand an author’s output. - The Register

A rumored upcoming NotebookLM Slides tool from Google reportedly generates slide decks and infographics from user-uploaded documents, websites and YouTube, uses the Nano Banana image generator, and uses only provided sources - CNET

Adobe launched AI Foundry, an enterprise service built on Firefly that helps customers create bespoke generative AI models trained on their IP, marketed as "commercially safe" to reduce copyright risk and hallucinations, targeting marketers and designers. - Fast Company

Heineken's new ads spoof the infamous Friend AI wearable ads from last month, tell people to trade their phones for a bottle of beer. - Fast Company

Michael Connelly's new Lincoln Lawyer novel, The Proving Ground, released Tuesday, centers on a lawsuit after an AI chatbot allegedly told a 16-year-old to kill his ex; Connelly, one of the authors suing OpenAI, pledged $1 million to fight book bans. - the Guardian

AI-generated avatar hosts program on how AI might replace us - the Guardian

Anthropic rolled out web and iOS-limited mobile interfaces for Claude Code and introduced a new sandboxing runtime to streamline approvals, grant GitHub access, enable concurrent sessions and iterative coding workflows while aiming to reduce friction and improve security. - Ars Technica

Anthropic launched Claude for Life Sciences, integrating Claude models with Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, partnering with Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, AWS and Google Cloud, and hiring Eric Kauderer-Abrams to lead its biology and life-sciences efforts. - CNBC

Gene Kim and Steve Yegge say vibes beat reading diffs but there are risks. 'Vibe Coding' manifesto advocates AI-driven coding, claiming productivity gains and broader access, but documents risks—an AI removed ~80% of a test suite and produced a 3,000-line function. - The Register

Musk: Are you down for an AI coding contest Karpathy: How about no - X (formerly Twitter)

AI often gets you 90% of the way there. Here's how to make sure the last 10% doesn't eat up as much time as you saved. - Fast Company

Brad Spengler documented a kernel contributor with commits dating to 2022 who admitted an unlabeled AI-generated patch this year, and subsequent backports introduced functional errors and a vulnerability later fixed across 5.4, 5.10, 5.15, 6.1 and 6.6 LTS kernels. - X (formerly Twitter)

Companies apply AI-driven personalized pricing that mines browsing history, device, location and purchase patterns, boosting targeted offers (Booking.com model increased sales 162%) across travel, ride-hail, groceries and subscriptions, prompting Australia's ACCC five-year inquiry in June 2025. - The Conversation

Two co-CEOs will jointly lead Oracle's AI transformation. - The Wall Street Journal

Europe's digital sovereignty plan to ditch US tech giants with open source is gaining steam - ZDNET

An ex-Microsoft scientist is building an AI startup to change how companies handle work visas - Business Insider

TSMC's Arizona Fab21 has begun producing Nvidia Blackwell wafers, but TSMC's CoWoS advanced packaging—required for high-end B100/B200/GB200 GPUs—remains only in Taiwan, constraining full US production until Amkor's US CoWoS plant reaches volume in 2027-2028. - The Register

Unitree demonstrated its H2 humanoid robot performing increasingly natural, human-like movements in a dance demo. - YouTube

BMO Stadium deployed camera/computer-vision checkout kiosks and automated vending, causing waits and making everything worse. - A Whole Lotta Nothing

China is testing restroom machines that make you watch ads in exchange for toilet paper - TechSpot

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