In a memo sent to employees, T-Mobile said it will be raising prices on some of its older plans, starting with the next bill. CNET reports: The memo was sent out by Jon Freier, president of T-Mobile's consumer group. The note doesn't list which plans are affected, but Freier specifically says that those on the carrier's latest assortment of Go5G plans will not see their prices increase. The same goes for the "millions of customers" who are covered by T-Mobile's Price Lock guarantee, which he says will continue to be in effect for those people. Freier says in the memo that T-Mobile is raising prices on older plans "for the first time in nearly a decade" and that the increases are designed to "keep up with rising inflation and costs." It isn't known exactly how many people will be affected by the change. The note says that it will affect a "small portion" of T-Mobile's customers. Those with free lines from the carrier will not see increases on those lines, T-Mobile confirmed to CNET. The company expects to notify all affected customers on Wednesday. T-Mobile previously tried to move customers on older, generally cheaper plans to some of its newer, pricier ones last year, only to back off the plan amid backlash. Whereas with that move people had the option to call T-Mobile's support and push back against the change, a source familiar with the company's plans tells CNET that this option won't be available with this new rate hike.

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Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: The latest RISC-V port updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel. Most notable with today's RISC-V merge to Linux 6.10 is now supporting the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel. RISC-V joins the likes of x86_64, LoongArch, and ARM64 already supporting the use of the in-kernel Rust language support. The use of Rust within the mainline Linux kernel is still rather limited with just a few basic drivers so far and a lot of infrastructure work taking place, but there are a number of new drivers and other subsystem support on the horizon. RISC-V now supporting Rust within the Linux kernel will become more important moving forward. The RISC-V updates for Linux 6.10 also add byte/half-word compare-and-exchange, support for Zihintpause within hwprobe, a PR_RISCV_SET_ICACHE_FLUSH_CTX prctl(), and support for lockless lockrefs. More details on these RISC-V updates for Linux 6.10 via this Git merge.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hopes that replacement fuels for airplanes will slash carbon pollution are misguided and support for these alternatives could even worsen the climate crisis, a new report has warned. There is currently "no realistic or scalable alternative" to standard kerosene-based jet fuels, and touted "sustainable aviation fuels" are well off track to replace them in a timeframe needed to avert dangerous climate change, despite public subsidies, the report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank, found. "While there are kernels of possibility, we should bring a high level of skepticism to the claims that alternative fuels will be a timely substitute for kerosene-based jet fuels," the report said. [...] In the U.S., Joe Biden's administration has set a goal for 3 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel, which is made from non-petroleum sources such as food waste, woody biomass and other feedstocks, to be produced by 2030, which it said will cut aviation's planet-heating emissions by 20%. [...] Burning sustainable aviation fuels still emits some carbon dioxide, while the land use changes needed to produce the fuels can also lead to increased pollution. Ethanol biofuel, made from corn, is used in these fuels, and meeting the Biden administration's production goal, the report found, would require 114m acres of corn in the U.S., about a 20% increase in current land area given over to to the crop. In the UK, meanwhile, 50% of all agricultural land will have to be given up to sustain current flight passenger levels if jet fuel was entirely replaced. "Agricultural land use changes could threaten global food security as well as nature-based carbon sequestration solutions such as the preservation of forests and wetlands," the report states. "As such, SAF production may actively undermine the Paris agreement goal of achieving greatly reduced emissions by 2050." Chuck Collins, co-author of the report, said: "To bring these fuels to the scale needed would require massive subsidies, the trade-offs would be unacceptable and would take resources aware from more urgent decarbonization priorities." "It's a huge greenwashing exercise by the aviation industry. It's magical thinking that they will be able to do this." Phil Ansell, director of the Center for Sustainable Aviation at the University of Illinois, added: "There's an underappreciation of how big the energy problem is for aviation. We are still many years away from zero pollution flights. But it's true that the industry has been slow to pick things up. We are now trying to find solutions, but we are working at this problem and realizing it's a lot harder than we thought. We are late to the game. We are in the dark ages in terms of sustainability, compared to other sectors."

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According to CNBC, Amazon plans to enhance its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI and introduce it to customers through a monthly subscription service. While the price point has yet to be determined, sources say it will not be included in the company's $139-per-year Prime offering. From the report: The team is now tasked with turning Alexa into a relevant device that holds up amid the new AI competition, and one that justifies the resources and headcount Amazon has dedicated to it. It has undergone a massive reorganization, with much of the team shifting to the artificial general intelligence, or AGI, team, according to the three sources. Others pointed to bloat within Alexa, a team of thousands of employees. As of 2023, Amazon said it had sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices, giving the company a foothold with consumers. [...] One source estimated the cost of using generative AI in Alexa at 2 cents per query, and said a $20 price point was floated internally. Another suggested it would need to be in a single-digit dollar amount, which would undercut other subscription offerings. OpenAI's ChatGPT charges $20 per month for its advanced models. Still, they point to Alexa's installed user base, with devices in hundreds of millions of homes, as an opportunity. Those who worked on Alexa say the fact that it's already in people's living rooms and kitchens makes the stakes higher, and mistakes more costly if Alexa doesn't understand a command or provides unreliable information. [...] Amazon will use its own large language model, Titan, in the Alexa upgrade, according to a source.

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The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to advance a bill that would make it easier for the Biden administration to restrict the export of AI systems, citing concerns China could exploit them to bolster its military capabilities. From a report: The bill, sponsored by House Republicans Michael McCaul and John Molenaar and Democrats Raja Krishnamoorthi and Susan Wild, also would give the Commerce Department express authority to bar Americans from working with foreigners to develop AI systems that pose risks to U.S. national security. Without this legislation "our top AI companies could inadvertently fuel China's technological ascent, empowering their military and malign ambitions," McCaul, who chairs the committee, warned on Wednesday. "As the (Chinese Communist Party) looks to expand their technological advancements to enhance their surveillance state and war machine, it is critical we protect our sensitive technology from falling into their hands," McCaul added. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The bill is the latest sign Washington is gearing up to beat back China's AI ambitions over fears Beijing could harness the technology to meddle in other countries' elections, create bioweapons or launch cyberattacks.

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FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed (PDF) disclosure rules for AI-generated content used in political ads. "If adopted, the proposal would look into whether the FCC should require political ads on radio and TV to disclose when there is AI-generated content," reports Quartz. From the report: The FCC is seeking comment on whether on-air and written disclosure should be required in broadcasters' political files when AI-generated content is used in political ads; proposing that the rules apply to both candidates and issue advertisements; requesting comment on what a specific definition of AI-generated comment should look like; and proposing that disclosure rules be applied to broadcasters and entities involved in programming, such as cable operators and radio providers. The proposed disclosure rules do not prohibit the use of AI-generated content in political ads. The FCC has authority through the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act to make rules around political advertising. If the proposal is adopted, the FCC will take public comment on the rules. "As artificial intelligence tools become more accessible, the Commission wants to make sure consumers are fully informed when the technology is used," Rosenworcel said in a statement. "Today, I've shared with my colleagues a proposal that makes clear consumers have a right to know when AI tools are being used in the political ads they see, and I hope they swiftly act on this issue."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geo-locate devices. Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly available data from Apple to track the location of billions of devices globally -- including non-Apple devices like Starlink systems -- and found they could use this data to monitor the destruction of Gaza, as well as the movements and in many cases identities of Russian and Ukrainian troops. At issue is the way that Apple collects and publicly shares information about the precise location of all Wi-Fi access points seen by its devices. Apple collects this location data to give Apple devices a crowdsourced, low-power alternative to constantly requesting global positioning system (GPS) coordinates. Both Apple and Google operate their own Wi-Fi-based Positioning Systems (WPS) that obtain certain hardware identifiers from all wireless access points that come within range of their mobile devices. Both record the Media Access Control (MAC) address that a Wi-FI access point uses, known as a Basic Service Set Identifier or BSSID. Periodically, Apple and Google mobile devices will forward their locations -- by querying GPS and/or by using cellular towers as landmarks -- along with any nearby BSSIDs. This combination of data allows Apple and Google devices to figure out where they are within a few feet or meters, and it's what allows your mobile phone to continue displaying your planned route even when the device can't get a fix on GPS. With Google's WPS, a wireless device submits a list of nearby Wi-Fi access point BSSIDs and their signal strengths -- via an application programming interface (API) request to Google -- whose WPS responds with the device's computed position. Google's WPS requires at least two BSSIDs to calculate a device's approximate position. Apple's WPS also accepts a list of nearby BSSIDs, but instead of computing the device's location based off the set of observed access points and their received signal strengths and then reporting that result to the user, Apple's API will return the geolocations of up to 400 hundred more BSSIDs that are nearby the one requested. It then uses approximately eight of those BSSIDs to work out the user's location based on known landmarks. In essence, Google's WPS computes the user's location and shares it with the device. Apple's WPS gives its devices a large enough amount of data about the location of known access points in the area that the devices can do that estimation on their own. That's according to two researchers at the University of Maryland, who theorized they could use the verbosity of Apple's API to map the movement of individual devices into and out of virtually any defined area of the world. The UMD pair said they spent a month early in their research continuously querying the API, asking it for the location of more than a billion BSSIDs generated at random. They learned that while only about three million of those randomly generated BSSIDs were known to Apple's Wi-Fi geolocation API, Apple also returned an additional 488 million BSSID locations already stored in its WPS from other lookups. "Plotting the locations returned by Apple's WPS between November 2022 and November 2023, Levin and Rye saw they had a near global view of the locations tied to more than two billion Wi-Fi access points," the report adds. "The map showed geolocated access points in nearly every corner of the globe, apart from almost the entirety of China, vast stretches of desert wilderness in central Australia and Africa, and deep in the rainforests of South America." The researchers wrote: "We observe routers move between cities and countries, potentially representing their owner's relocation or a business transaction between an old and new owner. While there is not necessarily a 1-to-1 relationship between Wi-Fi routers and users, home routers typically only have several. If these users are vulnerable populations, such as those fleeing intimate partner violence or a stalker, their router simply being online can disclose their new location." A copy of the UMD research is available here (PDF).

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Microsoft is adding screenshot prevention controls in Edge to block you from taking screenshots at work. "It's all designed to prevent you from sharing screenshots with competitors, relatives, and journalists using Microsoft Edge for Business," reports PCWorld. From the report: Specifically, IT managers at corporations will be able to tag web pages as protected, as defined in various Microsoft policy engines in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Intune Mobile Application Management and Microsoft Purview, Microsoft said. The screenshot prevention feature will be available to customers in the "coming months," Microsoft said. It's also unclear whether third-party tools will be somehow blocked from taking screenshots or recording video, too. Microsoft will also roll out a way to force Edge for Business users to automatically update their browsers. The feature will enter a preview phase over the next few weeks, Microsoft said. "The Edge management service will enable IT admins to see which devices have Edge instances that are out of date and at risk," Microsoft said. "It will also provide mitigating controls, such as forcing a browser restart to install updates, enabling automatic browser updates or enabling enhanced security mode for added protections."

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: The first crewed test flight of Boeing's long-delayed Starliner spacecraft won't take off as planned Saturday and could face a longer postponement as engineers evaluate a stubborn leak of helium from the capsule's propulsion system. NASA announced the latest delay of the Starliner test flight late Tuesday. Officials will take more time to consider their options for how to proceed with the mission after discovering the small helium leak on the spacecraft's service module. The space agency did not describe what options are on the table, but sources said they range from flying the spacecraft "as is" with a thorough understanding of the leak and confidence it won't become more significant in flight, to removing the capsule from its Atlas V rocket and taking it back to a hangar for repairs. Theoretically, the former option could permit a launch attempt as soon as next week. The latter alternative could delay the launch until at least late summer. "The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy," NASA said in a statement Tuesday night. "There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed. NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People whose names get mangled by autocorrect have urged technology companies to fix the problem faster, with one person whose name gets switched to "Satan" saying: "I am tired of it." People with Irish, Indian and Welsh names are among those calling for improvements to the systems that operate on phones and computers as part of the "I am not a typo" campaign. "It is important that technology becomes more inclusive," said Savan-Chandni Gandecha, 34, a British Indian content creator whose name, which means monsoon moonlight, has been autocorrected to Satan. "My name has also been corrected to Savant," he said. "It is sometimes corrected to Savan, or the hyphen is not accepted by online forms and that irks me," he said. "Even in India my name gets corrected to "Sawan", and it's not just an English issue. It's a multi-language thing." The campaign has estimated that four out of 10 names of babies born in England and Wales in 2021 were deemed "wrong" or "not accepted" when tested on Microsoft's English dictionary. Dhruti Shah, a journalist, has backed the campaign after seeing her name autocorrected to "Dirty" and "Dorito". She said: "My first name isn't even that long -- only six characters -- but yet when it comes up as an error or it's mangled and considered an unknown entity, it's like saying that it's not just your name that's wrong, but you are." The campaign group -- established by a group of people working in the creative industries in London -- wrote an open letter to technology companies, which pointed out that between 2017 and 2021, 2,328 people named Esmae were born, compared with 36 Nigels. Esmae gets autocorrected to Admar, while Nigel is unchanged. "There are so many diverse names in the global majority but autocorrect is western- and white-focused," said Gandecha. Rashmi Dyal-Chand, a professor at Northeastern University in the US whose name is sometimes corrected to Sashimi, is supporting the latest campaign and said: "For people with names like mine, autocorrect is not convenient and helpful. It is unhelpful. And yes -- it is harmful." "We all increasingly rely on smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps that use autocorrect. Yet autocorrect incorporates a set of defaults -- including dictionaries -- that help some of its users to communicate seamlessly at the expense of others who cannot." Karen Fox, whose children are called Eoin and Niamh, said of autocorrect: "The red line bothers me -- I didn't choose the 'wrong' name for my child. Tech companies update dictionaries with slang all the time and I think it should be an easy thing to do and definitely a priority."

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Nvidia reported fiscal first-quarter earnings surpassing expectations with strong forecasts, indicating sustained demand for its AI chips. Following the news, the company's stock rose over 6% in extended trading. Nvidia also said it was splitting its stock 10 to 1. CNBC reports: Nvidia said it expected sales of $28 billion in the current quarter. Wall Street was expecting earnings per share of $5.95 on sales of $26.61 billion, according to LSEG. Nvidia reported net income for the quarter of $14.88 billion, or $5.98 per share, compared with $2.04 billion, or 82 cents, in the year-ago period. [...] Nvidia said its data center category rose 427% from the year-ago quarter to $22.6 billion in revenue. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in a statement that it was due to shipments of the company's "Hopper" graphics processors, which include the company's H100 GPU. Nvidia also highlighted strong sales of its networking parts, which are increasingly important as companies build clusters of tens of thousands of chips that need to be connected. Nvidia said that it had $3.2 billion in networking revenue, primarily its Infiniband products, which was over three times higher than last year's sales. Nvidia, before it became the top supplier to big companies building AI, was known primarily as a company making hardware for 3D gaming. The company's gaming revenue was up 18% during the quarter to $2.65 billion, which Nvidia attributed to strong demand. The company also sells chips for cars and chips for advanced graphics workstations, which remain much smaller than its data center business. The company reported $427 million in professional visualization sales, and $329 million in automotive sales. Nvidia said it bought back $7.7 billion worth of its shares and paid $98 million in dividends during the quarter. Nvidia also said that it's increasing its quarterly cash dividend from 4 cents per share to 10 cents on a pre-split basis. After the split, the dividend will be a penny a share.

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Microsoft's Windows Recall feature is attracting controversy before even venturing out of preview. From a report: The principle is simple. Windows takes a snapshot of a user's active screen every few seconds and dumps it to disk. The user can then scroll through the snapshots and, when something is selected, the user is given options to interact with the content. Mozilla's Chief Product Officer, Steve Teixeira, told The Register: "Mozilla is concerned about Windows Recall. From a browser perspective, some data should be saved, and some shouldn't. Recall stores not just browser history, but also data that users type into the browser with only very coarse control over what gets stored. While the data is stored in encrypted format, this stored data represents a new vector of attack for cybercriminals and a new privacy worry for shared computers. "Microsoft is also once again playing gatekeeper and picking which browsers get to win and lose on Windows -- favoring, of course, Microsoft Edge. Microsoft's Edge allows users to block specific websites and private browsing activity from being seen by Recall. Other Chromium-based browsers can filter out private browsing activity but lose the ability to block sensitive websites (such as financial sites) from Recall. "Right now, there's no documentation on how a non-Chromium based, third-party browser, such as Firefox, can protect user privacy from Recall. Microsoft did not engage our cooperation on Recall, but we would have loved for that to be the case, which would have enabled us to partner on giving users true agency over their privacy, regardless of the browser they choose."

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A consumer-grade spyware app has been found running on the check-in systems of at least three Wyndham hotels across the United States, TechCrunch reported Wednesday. From the report: The app, called pcTattletale, stealthily and continually captured screenshots of the hotel booking systems, which contained guest details and customer information. Thanks to a security flaw in the spyware, these screenshots are available to anyone on the internet, not just the spyware's intended users. This is the most recent example of consumer-grade spyware exposing sensitive information because of a security flaw in the spyware itself. It's also the second known time that pcTattletale has exposed screenshots of the devices that the app is installed on. Several other spyware apps in recent years had security bugs or misconfigurations that exposed the private and personal data of unwitting device owners, in some cases prompting action by government regulators. pcTattletale allows whomever controls it to remotely view the target's Android or Windows device and its data, from anywhere in the world. pcTattletale's website says the app "runs invisibly in the background on their workstations and can not be detected."

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau declared on Wednesday that customers of the burgeoning buy now, pay later industry have the same federal protections as users of credit cards. From a report: The agency unveiled what it called an "interpretive rule" that deemed BNPL lenders essentially the same as traditional credit card providers under the decades-old Truth in Lending Act. That means the industry -- currently dominated by fintech firms like Affirm, Klarna and PayPal -- must make refunds for returned products or canceled services, must investigate merchant disputes and pause payments during those probes, and must provide bills with fee disclosures. "Regardless of whether a shopper swipes a credit card or uses Buy Now, Pay Later, they are entitled to important consumer protections under long-standing laws and regulations already on the books," CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a release. The CFPB, which last week was handed a crucial victory by the Supreme Court, has pushed hard against the U.S. financial industry, issuing rules that slashed credit card late fees and overdraft penalties. The agency, formed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, began investigating the BNPL industry in late 2021.

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WhatsApp's security team warned that despite the app's encryption, users are vulnerable to government surveillance through traffic analysis, according to an internal threat assessment obtained by The Intercept. The document suggests that governments can monitor when and where encrypted communications occur, potentially allowing powerful inferences about who is conversing with whom. The report adds: Even though the contents of WhatsApp communications are unreadable, the assessment shows how governments can use their access to internet infrastructure to monitor when and where encrypted communications are occurring, like observing a mail carrier ferrying a sealed envelope. This view into national internet traffic is enough to make powerful inferences about which individuals are conversing with each other, even if the subjects of their conversations remain a mystery. "Even assuming WhatsApp's encryption is unbreakable," the assessment reads, "ongoing 'collect and correlate' attacks would still break our intended privacy model." The WhatsApp threat assessment does not describe specific instances in which it knows this method has been deployed by state actors. But it cites extensive reporting by the New York Times and Amnesty International showing how countries around the world spy on dissident encrypted chat app usage, including WhatsApp, using the very same techniques. As war has grown increasingly computerized, metadata -- information about the who, when, and where of conversations -- has come to hold immense value to intelligence, military, and police agencies around the world. "We kill people based on metadata," former National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden once infamously quipped. Meta said "WhatsApp has no backdoors and we have no evidence of vulnerabilities in how WhatsApp works." Though the assessment describes the "vulnerabilities" as "ongoing," and specifically mentions WhatsApp 17 times, a Meta spokesperson said the document is "not a reflection of a vulnerability in WhatsApp," only "theoretical," and not unique to WhatsApp.

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The seemingly "never-ending" rain last autumn and winter in the UK and Ireland was made 10 times more likely and 20% wetter by human-caused global heating, a study has found. From a report: More than a dozen storms battered the region in quick succession between October and March, which was the second-wettest such period in nearly two centuries of records. The downpour led to severe floods, at least 20 deaths, severe damage to homes and infrastructure, power blackouts, travel cancellations, and heavy losses of crops and livestock. The level of rain caused by the storms would have occurred just once in 50 years without the climate crisis, but is now expected every five years owing to 1.2C of global heating reached in recent years. If fossil fuel burning is not rapidly cut and the global temperature reaches 2C in the next decade or two, such severe wet weather would occur every three years on average, the analysis showed. [...] The analysis, conducted by climate scientists working as part of the World Weather Attribution group, compared how likely and how intense the wet winter was in today's heated world with how likely it would have been in a world without high levels of carbon emissions. Warmer air can hold more water vapour and therefore produce more rain. Hundreds of "attribution studies" have shown how global heating is already supercharging extreme weather such as heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and storms across the world.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: For those of us who came of age in the early days of personal computing, the names "Intel 486" and "Windows XP" evoke a nostalgic whirlwind of memories. The 486 was the hot new CPU of the early 90s, while Windows XP became a household name and Microsoft's most popular OS over a decade later. But did you ever imagine these two icons of different eras could be merged into an unholy union? Well, start brushing off those vintage 486 rigs, because a modder has actually made it happen. Going by the name Dietmar on the MSFN forums, he has somehow managed to get Microsoft's beloved Windows XP running on the ancient 486 architecture. It's worth mentioning that these two were never meant to coexist. The first 486 chips hit the market way back in 1989, while Windows XP landed over a decade later in 2001. The 486 represented a major breakthrough when Intel unveiled it in 1989. Packing over a million transistors, it remained Intel's primary x86 chip until the arrival of the Pentium in 1993. Such was the processor's longevity that Intel continued manufacturing it for embedded systems until 2007. Still, 486 systems were simply too underpowered to run XP, which needed at least a Pentium-class processor from the 586 generation - or any compatible chip that ran at 233MHz or higher. Meanwhile, the i486 could only do 133MHz. It also needed at least 64MB of RAM and at least 1.5GB of storage.

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The United States has assessed that Russia launched what is likely a counter space weapon last week that's now in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed Tuesday. From a report: "What I'm tracking here is on May 16, as you highlighted, Russia launched a satellite into low Earth orbit that we that we assess is likely a counter space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit," Ryder said when questioned by ABC News about the information, which was made public earlier Tuesday by Robert Wood, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Russia deployed this new counter space weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite," Ryder continued. "And so assessments further indicate characteristics resembling previously deployed counter space payloads from 2019 and 2022." Ryder added: "Obviously, that's something that we'll continue to monitor. Certainly, we would say that we have a responsibility to be ready to protect and defend the space domain and ensure continuous and uninterrupted support to the joint and combined force. And we'll continue to balance the need to protect our interests in space with our desire to preserve a stable and sustainable space environment." When asked if the Russian counter space weapon posed a threat to the U.S. satellite, Ryder responded: "Well, it's a counter space weapon in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite."

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Amazon is upgrading its decade-old Alexa voice assistant with generative AI and plans to charge a monthly subscription fee to offset the cost of the technology, CNBC reported Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of Amazon's plans. From the report: The Seattle-based tech and retail giant will launch a more conversational version of Alexa later this year, potentially positioning it to better compete with new generative AI-powered chatbots from companies including Google and OpenAI, according to two sources familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. Amazon's subscription for Alexa will not be included in the $139-per-year Prime offering, and Amazon has not yet nailed down the price point, one source said. While Amazon wowed consumers with Alexa's voice-driven tasks in 2014, its capabilities could seem old-fashioned amid recent leaps in artificial intelligence. Last week, OpenAI announced GPT-4o, with the capability for two-way conversations that can go significantly deeper than Alexa. For example, it can translate conversations into different languages in real time. Google launched a similar generative-AI-powered voice feature for Gemini.

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