Good morning. I’m allergic to cats. So it’s a good thing I didn’t bump into the mountain lion strolling around San Francisco on Monday. We’ve had a lot of strange animal events up here lately. Just two weeks ago, a coyote apparently swam across the bay to Alcatraz Island. And then there’s Claude, the city’s beloved albino alligator who bid adieu to his fans in December.
Of course, for many of SF’s newer residents, the only Claude they know is the one that helps them write code at work every day. Luckily, this zoo’s got room for all types.
Today’s news below.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
[email protected]
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Goodbye Amazon Go
Amazon is abandoning its homegrown physical grocery stores, known as Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh, a humbling end to an effort that began almost ten years ago as the online giant sought to expand its retail dominance into the brick-and-mortar world.
The company will shutter all 15 of its remaining stores Go Stores and 57 remaining Fresh Stores in the coming weeks, GeekWire reported Tuesday. Some of the locations will eventually reopen as Whole Foods stores, the grocery store chain that Amazon acquired in 2017 and which it said will become the focus of its brick-and-mortar retail efforts going forward (It will also continue to offer online grocery shopping via its Fresh delivery service).
Amazon launched its Go stores with the ambitious goal of reinventing how people shop: The stores were designed for customers to grab items off the shelf and then "just walk out," with an array of sensors, cameras, and other behind-the-scenes technology automatically charging the customer's account. The concept never quite cottoned with consumers though and the stores were more of a curiosity than a mass market phenomenon.
Amazon now licenses its "just walk out" technology to other businesses like sports stadiums, where the ability to grab a hot dog without missing any action on the field is a big plus. When it comes to traditional retail shopping however, Amazon seems to be acknowledging that disruption is not always the winning strategy. —AO
The EU wants Google to play fair with competitors
The European Commission is pushing Google to open up its AI and search business. Officials have started a formal process to spell out exactly how Google must give competing AI assistants and services the same kind of technical access to Android features that Google uses for its own Gemini products. The goal is to make sure that independent AI apps can properly integrate on Android phones.
The Commission is also asking Google to share anonymized search data with rival search engines—things like rankings, queries, and clicks—to help competitors improve their services and give people real alternatives to Google Search. The move is part of a wider regulatory squeeze on Google in Europe that has covered search, ads and now AI. Late last year, the EU fined Google nearly €3 billion for ‘abusing’ its position in ad tech.
EU officials have given Google six months to comply, according to Bloomberg. If, after that, Google is found to fall foul of the obligations, the Commission can open an enforcement case that could lead to serious penalties, including fines of up to 10% of Google’s worldwide revenue.—Beatrice Nolan
Hello Kimi: China's latest open source model
The trans-Pacific AI race is back on. Moonshot, a Beijing-based AI firm backed by Alibaba, is turning heads with a new open-source foundation model called Kimi K2.5.
The model can handle both text and visual inputs and offers advanced coding and agent orchestration features. Kimi K2.5 can generate code directly from images and videos, for example, enabling developers to translate visual concepts into functional software. And on the agentic side of things, it can deploy and coordinate up to 100 specialized sub-agents working simultaneously.
New Kimi's release is likely to intensify concerns that Chinese companies have pulled ahead in the global AI race when it comes to open-source models. In fact, Kimi K2.5 has dropped just ahead of a widely anticipated update to China's DeepSee k, the open-source AI model that caused panic among investors of U.S. AI companies last year. —BN, AO
More tech
—X is not OK in the U.K.; New filings show 58% drop in 2024 revenue.
—The AI data center boom's big winner is... A 175-year-old company whose tech your mom baked casserole in.
—Wait, did ByteDance actually win? Let's dig into the TikTok spinoff deal.
—More on Dario's manifesto: Read it for the remedies not the risks.
—TikTok settles teen addiction lawsuit. Meta and YouTube will fight alone.
—Mozilla President's 'rebel alliance.' Is there force enough to fight Big AI?
