AI This Week

Amazon is accelerating its push into artificial intelligence, rushing a new chip to market to challenge hardware giants Nvidia and Google. The announcement came during the company’s annual re:Invent conference. Alongside the new hardware, Amazon revealed updates to its Nova AI models, including a multimodal version called Omni. The company is positioning its technology on price-performance, arguing that real-world application is the true test of value. Amazon also introduced Nova Forge, a new tool for sophisticated customers like Reddit to customize models with their own data. This move highlights the intense competition for AI customers, with partners like Anthropic using computing power from multiple providers.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has released two new models that reportedly match or exceed OpenAI’s GPT-5. The powerful systems are also completely free. This move could reshape the fierce AI competition between American and Chinese tech firms. DeepSeek claims its models achieve top results by using a new architecture that substantially reduces computing costs for complex tasks. One model has already won gold medals in elite international math and coding competitions, demonstrating its abilities without internet access. This technical success arrives as the company faces growing regulatory challenges in Europe and America over data security and its Chinese origins.

Virgin Australia is the first Australian airline to launch a major collaboration with OpenAI. The partnership aims to create entirely new ways for customers to plan and shop for travel. The airline is already building on OpenAI’s platform, developing a future flight search function that will operate directly within ChatGPT. This system will allow customers to describe their ideal trip in plain language and receive relevant flight options. The initiative is a key part of the airline’s digital strategy and will also equip employees with enterprise-grade AI tools. Virgin Australia CEO Dave Emerson highlighted the focus on improving the customer journey from the very start.

A new executive order by the Trump administration has launched the “Genesis Mission,” a government-wide initiative designed to speed up American AI innovation. The plan directs the Department of Energy and National Laboratories to build an integrated platform. This system will use massive federal scientific datasets to train advanced AI models. The goal is to automate research workflows and quicken breakthroughs in fields like biotechnology and quantum science, potentially shortening discovery timelines from years to mere hours. The Genesis Mission is a central part of a national strategy to compete with China in artificial intelligence. The new directive also rescinds a prior AI safety executive order.

Anthropic turned its AI on itself to measure its own economic impact. In a new study, the company used its Claude model to analyze one hundred thousand real, anonymized user conversations to estimate how much faster AI makes work. The findings are striking. Claude’s analysis suggests it reduces task completion time by approximately 80%, radically shortening jobs that would normally take 90 minutes. When extrapolated across the economy, these gains imply current AI models could increase US labor productivity growth by 1.8% annually for the next decade—a figure that would nearly double the nation’s recent growth rate.