Amazon has launched Alexa+, a new AI-powered version of its voice assistant, designed to be more intelligent and personalized. The updated assistant, powered by generative AI, aims to enhance user interaction by managing tasks such as booking tickets and controlling smart home devices. Alexa+ is available for free to Amazon Prime members, while others can subscribe for $19.99 per month. Amazon's warehouses now utilize three-quarters of a million robots, and Alexa incorporates 20 different AI models, with billions of parameters dedicated to language processing. Amazon's head of Artificial General Intelligence, Vishal Sharma, emphasized the pervasive influence of AI across the company, stating that 'no part of Amazon is unaffected by AI.' This includes the deployment of AI in Amazon Web Services (AWS), where new text-generating models called Nova are tested against public benchmarks. Sharma dismissed the notion that open-source AI models could reduce the need for computational resources, highlighting the necessity for increasing intelligence in various scenarios. Amazon has also launched the Bedrock service within AWS, allowing companies to mix and match foundational models, including China's DeepSeek. In addition to AI advancements, Amazon has introduced a quantum computing chip named Ocelot, positioning itself in the race to develop practical quantum computers. This development follows similar efforts by competitors like Microsoft and Google, with Amazon's chip focusing on error correction, a critical aspect of quantum computing technology. Amazon is also building a huge AI compute cluster on its Trainium 2 chips in partnership with Anthropic, in which it has invested $8 billion. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's xAI has released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, using an enormous data center in Memphis containing around 200,000 GPUs.