New York Times Agrees First AI Deal with Amazon 🤝

Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,

The New York Times has agreed to its first AI licensing arrangement, partnering with Amazon to allow the tech giant to use the newspaper's editorial content across its AI platforms.

Let's check it out!

Read Time: 4.5 min

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

• The New York Times and Amazon Ink AI Licensing Deal 🤝

• China’s DeepSeek Releases Update to Its R1 Reasoning Model

• AI Tutorial: How to make ChatGPT your default assistant on Android

• AI Tools to check out

• AI Findings/Resources

• The Latest in AI and Tech 💡

AI News

AMAZON

The New York Times and Amazon Ink AI Licensing Deal 🤝

The New York Times Company and Amazon have announced a multi-year agreement that will bring “editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,” marking the publisher's first licensing deal tied to generative AI.

Details:

• As part of the agreement, Amazon will include summaries and brief excerpts of The Times’ content in products like Alexa, and will also be able to use Times articles to train its AI models.

• In addition to content from The Times, Amazon will also get access to material from The Athletic, the outlet’s sports-focused site, and its recipe hub, NYT Cooking.

• The companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but it’s the first of such agreements for Amazon, as the company is still playing catch-up with OpenAI, which has signed multiple similar deals with publishers like The Washington Post, Axel Springer, The Guardian, and more.

The agreement comes as the NYT continues its legal battle with OpenAI and Microsoft after suing them for copyright infringement in 2023. For Amazon, the partnership offers an opportunity to enhance its AI offerings, while The Times gains a valuable new revenue source and a potential subscriber acquisition channel.

Source

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DEEPSEEK

China’s DeepSeek Releases Update to Its R1 Reasoning Model

China's DeepSeek has launched an upgraded version of its R1 AI model, named R1-0528, which is said to rival the performance of ChatGPT's o3 and Gemini Pro.

Details:

• The enhanced model boasts improvements in mathematics, coding, and general logical reasoning, and claims to significantly reduce “hallucinations.”

• The R1-0528 model ranks just behind OpenAI’s o4-mini and o3 reasoning models on LiveCodeBench, a site that benchmarks models against different metrics.

• The company did not make an official announcement; the upgrade was released on the AI model repository Hugging Face.

• Despite the advancements, this new model, like the first one, is being criticized for its refusal to answer contentious questions, with reports that it is “substantially” more censored than the previous version. 

DeepSeek rose to prominence earlier this year after its free, open-source R1 reasoning model outperformed offerings from rivals including Meta and OpenAI, with a much lower cost and shorter development time, shocking global markets and sparking concerns that U.S. tech giants were overspending.

Source

AI Tutorial

How to make ChatGPT your default assistant on Android

You can make OpenAI’s voice assistant the default option if you prefer chatting with ChatGPT over Gemini. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to the Play Store and search for ChatGPT.

2. On the app description page, scroll to the bottom and tap Join under the "Join the beta" section. When prompted, tap Join again to confirm.

3. Install ChatGPT, open the app, and sign in or create an account.

4. Open your device’s settings and select Apps from the menu.

5. Select Choose default apps at the top of the screen, then select Digital assistant app (by default, it's set to Google).

6. Select Digital assistant app again and choose ChatGPT, which should be listed as an alternative option.

7. Now, to activate ChatGPT, simply long-press the home button or swipe up from the bottom corner, depending on whether you're using three-button or gesture navigation.

And that’s it. ChatGPT is now your default assistant on Android.

AI Tools to check out

🗣 HappyScribe: AI-powered language services.

🧙 Vizard: Turn your long video into viral clips.

✅ Dzine: One subscription for all AI visual tools.

👨‍💻 Emergent: Creates production-ready applications from natural language—no developers required.

🎶 TemPolor: AI-powered royalty-free music platform.

AI Findings/Resources

📚 Learn to collaborate with AI systems effectively, efficiently, ethically, and safely – Anthropic course

😱 Author called out after leaving AI prompts in book

👉 How to deploy AI safely – Microsoft

🔮 Chinese tech groups prepare for AI future without Nvidia

🌐 9 career paths that will thrive in the new economy

The latest in AI and Tech

Hume launches new EVI 3 model with rapid custom voice creation

The Emotive voice AI startup is launching EVI 3, the third iteration of its Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) model, which can interact with users using a wide variety of humanlike voices. The new model lets users create custom voices through conversation and aims to set a new standard for naturalness, expressiveness, and “empathy.”

Meta AI already has 1 billion active users

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this achievement during the company's annual shareholder meeting, emphasizing the rapid growth of the platform. The launch of a standalone Meta AI app in April contributed to this surge in user engagement.

Tencent introduces HunyuanVideo-Avatar

The model allows users to bring pictures to life by uploading a photo and audio, generating lifelike speech or singing with dynamic visuals.

HunyuanVideo-Avatar’s single-character mode is open-source and live on the Hunyuan website, supporting up to 14 seconds of audio. Multi-character mode will be open-sourced soon.

Manus introduces Manus Slides

This new feature will allow Manus to create stunning and structured presentations instantly with a single prompt.

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Gina 👩🏻‍💻