The Morning After: Amazon bets $4 billion on an OpenAI rival

Anthropic built the Claude 2 AI chatbot.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Amazon’s bid for AI glory is in the billions. It’s investing up to $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic to provide advanced deep learning and other services for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers. Google has already invested $400 million in the company, which was founded by former OpenAI executives.

Anthropic recently unveiled its first consumer-facing chatbot Claude 2, accessible by subscription much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The Claude Constitutional AI system is guided by 10 “foundational” principles of fairness and autonomy and is supposed to be harder to trick than other AI. Anthropic is already working on a chatbot it calls Claude-Next, which is supposed to be 10 times more powerful than any current AI.

But it’ll have to impress if it wants to supplant OpenAI’s dominance, at least in the public’s eye. OpenAI’s ultra-popular ChatGPT chatbot is the one to beat, while its DALL-E image generation service has gained even more traction through its hooks into Microsoft’s Bing search.

— Mat Smith

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DJI Mini 4 Pro drone review

The best lightweight drone gains more power and smarts.

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TMA (Engadget)

DJI’s Mini 3 Pro fitting in tons of technology and a high-quality camera into a sub-250-gram drone. Its successor adds omnidirectional obstacle sensors, which eliminate the blind spots on the Mini 3 Pro, and a new feature called ActiveTrack 360, which lets you program camera moves when tracking a subject. The Mini 4 Pro isn’t cheap for a budget drone. It’s $759 for the drone with a battery and RC-N2 controller, but if you’re in the market for a drone in that price range, nothing else can touch it.

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Analogue’s limited-edition transparent Pocket handhelds come in 7 colors

They will be available on September 29 for $250.

It’s only been a few weeks since Analogue released a glow-in-the-dark Pocket console, and I claimed the era of see-through gadgets was over. I was wrong. The same company is now teasing seven transparent Pocket handhelds: clear, smoke, red, blue, orange, green and purple. The retro gaming console will set you back $250 — $30 more than the basic versions. They will launch (and presumably sell out) on September 29 at 8AM PT / 11AM ET.

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The iPhone 15 Pro version of Resident Evil Village lands on October 30

The AAA console game will be the first in a wave of games coming to the iPhone.

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TMA (Capcom)

Resident Evil Village is heading to iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max on October 30. It’ll hit the M1 and M2 models of the iPad Pro and iPad Air on the same day. The base game will cost $40 and its Winters’ Expansion DLC will be an additional $20. It’s expensive for an iPhone game, but Apple has teased a graphically rich, full-fat console game. Hopefully REV delivers on all of that. Other games coming to the iPhone 15 Pro include Death Stranding and Assassin’s Creed Mirage.

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