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Attendees walk through an expo hall during Amazon Web Services’ Reinvent conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas on Nov. 29, 2022.

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Amazon‘s cloud computing division is laying off hundreds of employees in its physical stores technology and sales and marketing units, the company confirmed Wednesday.

“We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact,” an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement. “We didn’t make these decisions lightly, and we’re committed to supporting the employees throughout their transition to new roles in and outside of Amazon.”

The cuts were first reported by GeekWire.

Amazon’s lucrative AWS unit has seen its sales growth decelerate in recent quarters as companies trimmed their cloud spend amid rising interest rates. Amazon executives expressed some optimism in February when they said the market is starting to show signs of a reacceleration.

The cuts to AWS’ store technology team come after Amazon said it would remove cashierless checkout systems in its U.S. Fresh stores. The AWS unit includes teams overseeing the cashierless tech, called Just Walk Out, as well as its Dash smart carts and Amazon One palm-based payment technology. The store technology team was moved out of Amazon’s retail group and folded into its cloud computing division in 2022.

The AWS spokesperson said the company decided to make cuts to the store technology division “as a result of a broader strategic shift in the use of some applications in Amazon’s owned as well as in third-party stores.”

Amazon continues to trim its headcount after more than a year of mass layoffs. Beginning at the end of 2022 and continuing through 2023, Amazon initiated the largest layoffs in its history, cutting more than 27,000 jobs across almost every area of the company. So far this year, Amazon has laid off employees in its Twitch, Audible, Buy with Prime, and Prime Video and MGM Studios units.

Employees in the U.S. will continue to receive their pay and benefits for at least 60 days, and they will be eligible for a severance package.

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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.

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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 to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for $100,000 a year

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Amazon to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for 0,000 a year

Attendees pass an Amazon Web Services logo during AWS re:Invent 2024, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024.

Noah Berger | Getty Images

Amazon has found a way to let cloud clients extensively customize generative AI models. The catch is that the system costs $100,000 per year.

The Nova Forge offering from Amazon Web Services gives organizations access to Amazon’s AI models in various stages of training so they can incorporate their own data earlier in the process.

Already, companies can fine-tune large language models after they’ve been trained. The results with Nova Forge will lean more heavily on the data that customers supply. Nova Forge customers will also have the option to refine open-weight models, but training data and computing infrastructure are not included.

Organizations that assemble their own models might end up spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which means using Nova Forge is more affordable, Amazon said.

AWS released its own models under the Nova brand in 2024, but they aren’t the first choice for most software developers. A July survey from Menlo Ventures said that by the middle of this year, Amazon-backed Anthropic controlled 32% of the market for enterprise LLMs, followed by OpenAI with 25%, Google with 20% and Meta with 9% — Amazon Nova had a less than 5% share, a Menlo spokesperson said.

The Nova models are available through AWS’ Bedrock service for running models on Amazon cloud infrastructure, as are Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 models.

“We are a frontier lab that has focused on customers,” Rohit Prasad, Amazon head scientist for artificial general intelligence, told CNBC in an interview. “Our customers wanted it. We have invented on their behalf to make this happen.”

Nova Forge is also in use by internal Amazon customers, including teams that work on the company’s stores and the Alexa AI assistant, Prasad said.

Reddit needed an AI model for moderating content that would be sophisticated about the many subjects people discuss on the social network. Engineers found that a Nova model enhanced with Reddit data through Forge performed better than commercially available large-scale models, Prasad said. Booking.com, Nimbus Therapeutics, the Nomura Research Institute and Sony are also building models with Forge, Amazon said.

Organizations can request that Amazon engineers help them build their Forge models, but that assistance is not included in the new service’s $100,000 annual fee.

AWS is also introducing new models for developers at its Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Nova 2 Pro is a reasoning model whose tests show it performs at least as well as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT-5.1, and Google’s Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview, Amazon said. Reasoning involves running a series of computations that might take extra time in response to requests to produce better answers. Nova 2 Pro will be available in early access to AWS customers with Forge subscriptions, Prasad said. That means Forge customers and Amazon engineers will be able to try Nova 2 Pro at the same time.

Nova 2 Omni is another reasoning model that can process incoming images, speech, text and videos, and it generates images and text. It’s the first reasoning model with that range of capability, Amazon said. Amazon hopes that, by delivering a multifaceted model, it can lower the cost and complexity of incorporating AI models into applications.

Tens of thousands of organizations are using Nova models each week, Prasad said. AWS has said it has millions of customers. Nova is the second-most popular family of models in Bedrock, Prasad said. The top group of models are from Anthropic.

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