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An Alibaba Group sign is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, July 6, 2023.

Aly Song | Reuters

Alibaba plans to list its logistics unit Cainiao on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the Chinese e-commerce giant said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday.

Alibaba will continue to hold more than 50% of the shares of Cainiao after the spinoff.

The move is part of one of the most radical shake-ups in Alibaba’s history. In March, the company said it will split its structure into six business units, the majority of which will be able to raise outside funds and go public.

Cainiao is the first of these businesses to officially file for an initial public offering (IPO). Alibaba said that there is “no assurance” that the proposed spinoff will take place.

Alibaba said the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has confirmed that the Cainiao listing may go ahead. The exchange declined to comment on individual listings.

Details have yet to surface on the pricing of shares or on the expected listing date.

Founded in 2013, Cainiao is a logistics network that helps Alibaba fulfil deliveries placed on its e-commerce platforms both in China and abroad. Alibaba aims to fulfil consumer orders within 24 hours in China and within 72 hours anywhere else in the world.

The company took a majority stake in Cainiao in 2017 and holds a nearly 70% interest as of Tuesday.

Delivery speed is a point of competition among Chinese e-commerce firms. Alibaba rival JD.com has focused on same-day delivery to boost the appeal of its platform among Chinese shoppers.

Alibaba said the IPO will enhance Cainiao’s “standalone profile among its customers, suppliers and potential strategic partners, which will help Cainiao to be in a better position to negotiate and solicit more business.”

The Chinese giant added said that the listing will “lead to a more direct alignment of the responsibilities and accountability of the management” of both Alibaba and Cainiao with their operating and financial performance.

The Cainiao IPO plans come after Alibaba announced a major leadership reshuffle in June, when former CEO Daniel Zhang stepped down and was replaced by Eddie Wu. Zhang, who retained leadership of the cloud computing unit, then made a surprise move this month to exit that business. Wu took over as the head of Alibaba’s cloud division.

As well as Cainiao, Alibaba is also looking to list its cloud computing business, though it has not officially filed for a spinoff.

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI’s chatbot is down for some users

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI's chatbot is down for some users

OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is down for some users.

The company said it is “currently experiencing issues,” including “increased ChatGPT error rates,” according to an update on OpenAI’s status page.

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the status page said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Roughly 3,000 people reported issues with the chatbot on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.

The outage comes days after OpenAI disclosed a security breach at Mixpanel one of OpenAI’s data analytics providers.

The breach compromised user information, such as names, emails and other details tied to the OpenAI API.

OpenAI did not disclose how many users were affected, saying in a blog post that an attacker “exported a dataset containing limited customer identifiable information and analytics information.”

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago. As of October, OpenAI said more than 800 million people use the chatbot each week.

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Beta stock jumps 9% on $1 billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

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Beta stock jumps 9% on  billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies strikes $1B electric motor manufacturing deal with Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.

Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.

Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.

Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.

“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.

DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.

The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.

SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.

Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.

“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.

The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.

AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.

Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.

WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software

Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software

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