The largest chipmaker for smartphones, PCs, and game consoles, Nvidia, has made a record $14bn profit for the last quarter. Gross profit went through the roof, reaching 151 billion yuan, thanks to the great demand for its artificial intelligence processors, including the H100 AI GPUs.
With AI growing at such a fast pace, Nvidia needed to find a way to stay ahead of the competition, and as such, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, decided that the company would be releasing new chip designs annually. Indeed, this is a vast departure from the days when the company rolled out new chips every two years. Huang during the Q1 2025 earnings call also affirmed the Blackwell successors to the current Blackwell architectures called Rubin will be launched in 2025. This implies that the next big news to come from AI will be the R100 AI GPU, which is set to hit the market this year.
It’s not just their AI chips that are changing; this new strategy seems to be all-encompassing for Nvidia. In the interview, Huang stated that they will step up the launch of new CPUs, GPUs, networking devices, and switches. ”We are going to take all of our products line and move them forward faster,” he said.
Nvidia’s H100 AI GPUs are being adopted at a fast pace, because of the current advancements in AI in almost all sectors. These compact chips are in high demand, and some companies buy more than 100000 pieces of such chips. For example, social media platform Meta, the company behind Facebook, is planning on having over 350000 H100 GPUs operational by year-end. He urged the company to push forward and remain pioneers in AI advances stating, “Are you the ones who are going to introduce awesome and new working AI or are you going to be the ones tweaking the existing working AI?”
The company’s CFO also revealed that the automotive field is likely to turn into its largest market in the data center division in the current fiscal year. For example, Tesla aims to purchase 35,000 H100 GPUs to advance its self-driving car initiative.
In the same camp, Nvidia’s record profits and their new aggressive approach demonstrate that this firm is determined to spearhead the movement towards the incorporation of AI in every field through constant innovation aimed at delivering better technologies in shorter cycles.
Prime Not Enough? Amazon’s AI-Powered Alexa May Come at a Price
The company is set to introduce a new form of its Alexa voice assistant this year, driven by generative artificial intelligence. However, it will cost about a monthly fee for this enhanced service which was revealed by insiders familiar with the matter. However, what Amazon aims to offer here is not going to be under the $139 per year Amazon Prime membership.
The features have been added specifically so that the new Alexa could potentially better rival more advanced AI conversational chatbots offered by OpenAI and Google. These competitors have recently developed chatbots that can perform two-party conversations, detailed and also are capable of translating languages in live time.
A couple of months back, Business Insider covered how Alexa is to be improved and how Amazon is to come up with a subscription service. This upgrade comes at a time when Alexa which was once considered a groundbreaking technology in voice recording, now appears to be less progressive as compared to other modern forms of artificial intelligence. Speaking in an interview last year, Amazon’s former Senior Vice-President for devices and services, David Limp, as much said that the firm was planning to monetize Alexa by selling a more powerful version of this assistant.
Since it was launched in September 2014, Alexa has been adopted for basic functionality such as turning on lights, ordering food delivery, asking questions, playing music, and much more. However, with the advancement in technology especially in the AI arena, there is always pressure that builds up on Amazon to ensure that Alexa is restyled to fit this new change. Further pressure has been felt of late especially after Andy Jassy became Amazon’s CEO in 2021. Jassy has recently concentrated on cost-cutting solutions that apply to Amazon, and this is why Alexa is not entirely a focus for the company. He has spoken admiringly about Alexa’s current capabilities, albeit often admitting that it could be much better, and has criticized its shortcomings, for instance in being unable to offer real-time sports results.
However, Amazon is still ready and willing to advance Alexa through further updates and features. Their annual shareholder letter of CEO Jassy also depicted the ongoing process to advance Alexa via generative AI as a smarter and more effective one. At Alexa, many members have been reassigned and are now involved with Amazon’s AGI programs. This structural change may help improve Alexa’s positioning as it targets another area of the growing AI market.
Amazon reported that over 500 million Alexa-compatible devices have been resold, which means Alexa is in many houses around the world. Amazon has a large client base, especially with the recently added Alexa users; this poses an opportunity for it to harness its new AI features. However, the cost expenses that come with using generative AI are slightly on the high side and are approximated to be about 2 cents per query. Internal discussions also focus on making the subscription price equal to 20 US Dollars per month yet some argue this should be cheaper.
It is an extremely competitive environment to attract the best minds in AI; companies are fighting for the best talent including Open AI, Microsoft Google, and others. For instance, Amazon has embraced the use of AI and has made massive investments in this area. New business Anthropic receives $2.75 billion in investment in the field of artificial intelligence. As mentioned earlier, this is the largest direct investment that Amazon has made in any other company.
For the new Alexa upgrade, Amazon may be relying on the newly developed large language model, Titan. While there have been issues before, Amazon believes that it now has an opportunity to build upon the current user base as it prepares for this AI upgrade.
Jeff Bezos is currently attached to the innovations projects at Amazon and recently expressed worry about Amazon’s standing within this market. He has been basename proactively asking for reasons, why some, AI startups are choosing other cloud providers rather than AWS.
To sum up, thus, one can state that Amazon is preparing a new version of Alexa R and B that will be more conversational and costly, partnering with a monthly fee. This is a greatly needed step that is in line with the innovation rush and is determined by the desire to make Alexa an interesting and competitive offering in a world of developing and already existing technologies.
Beyond Artificial? Will We Ditch the Term “AI” After Satya Nadella’s Comments?
At the recent Computex event in Taiwan, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella decided to comment on popular AI society’s opinions by stating that the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is one of the most misleading ones in technology. Addressing the audience during a pared event, Nadella elaborated on the issues that stem from this word. He opines to say that this term does not really depict the true picture of what artificial intelligence is all about.
Nadella pointed out that actually the word ‘artificial’ may be misleading because it gives a sense of fake or not natural while it refers to the technologies designed to augment human intelligence and to operate in our physical world to solve real issues. He pointed to the fact that perhaps a more accurate term could highlight a more positive approach to AI and the way it augments human capabilities to do even more.
Nadella went further to state that AI should embrace the tenet of augmenting human intelligence and hence should not simply replace humans in the market. Speaking on the topic, he outlined that AI should be seen as a tool that can assist people in different spheres of their lives, such as healthcare, and/or education, etc., by utilizing means that have hardly ever been considered in the past.
Nadella stressed the crucial need to incorporate AI ethically as well. He noted that technology should be developed with the test of benefiting the society or not passing it up, as he walks out. This is the position that Microsoft takes, the goal it has set for itself, to create an equitable AI and one that the user can trust.
In a nutshell, Satya Nadella himself states that it is unfortunate and unwise to solely refer to Artificial Intelligence. He suggested that someone should take the view that the major potential of AI is in enhancing human functions and not in being fictitious. Nadella enunciates a positive view of AI as an accompaniment that relies on the fundamental principles of ethical practice and contributes to humanity’s well-being.
Check who got the $$ Spotlight $$ today!
- SuperKalam secures $2 million in seed funding for AI-led educational platform. read more
- Nory Raises $16 Million to Expand ‘AI Restaurant Manager’ Product. read more
- Amino Health Secures $10 Million in Funding Round Led by Transformation Capital to Advance Product Investments in AI Care Journeys. read more
- Skribe.ai Raises $3.5M in Seed Funding. read more
- Artemis Raises $1.5M Pre-Seed Funding to Automate Data Cleaning for Analytics and AI. read more
- AI language translation startup DeepL nabs $300M on a $2B valuation to focus on B2B growth. read more
- UnifyApps nets $11M to revolutionize enterprise integrations with Gen AI. read more
- Patronus AI Raises $17M in Series A Funding. read more
- Superlegal, AI-Powered Contract Review Platform for SMBs, Secures $5M in Seed Funding. read more
- Tech Secretary Unveils £8.5M Research Funding Set to break new grounds in AI Safety Testing. read more
- London-based Praktika cements $32.5M to personalize language learning with AI-powered avatars. read more
- Nory raises $16m for AI-powered restaurant management tech. read more
- Bolster raises $14m to enhance AI-driven threat protection with M12 backing. read more
- UK government announces £8.5m in grants for AI safety research. read more
