If you've ever been confused about what to watch on a streaming platform, Amazon seems poised to help you with their new AI Topics features.

This is designed to recommend what to watch on their platform based on your interests. It's currently in beta mode, with a wider rollout expected in 2025.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has sent a letter to major studios, stating that their inaction on AI plagiarism has harmed their members. You may remember 2023 summer's WGA protests that delayed a lot of shows and films. While it hopefully doesn't mean they are considering re-striking, it is certainly problematic if the WGA is still complaining about it.

I'm also not sure what exactly the studios could do, because they’d end up engaging in whack-a-mole if you start trying to track down every potential plagiarism from an AI context. Studio, Writers, and AI companies partnering is the best solution for everyone.

Perplexity continues its push to add more advertising clients on its platform, with growing interest from companies. Not everyone though is sold on Perplexity's abilities yet.

eSelf is coming out of stealth with a $4.5 million raise to build interactive AI assistants that are capable of handling a lot of verticals, including education, financial services, and health and wellness. This is an area where we're going to see a lot of competition in the years ahead.

Time Magazine is launching a chatbot in conjunction with Scale.ai that aims to make their website and articles more interactive by providing summaries as well as translating them to other languages.

This is a great step for Time to take. I worry that making a chatbot in 2025 is kind of too little, too late; you need to find ways to use AI as a true level up. For many people like myself, I can easily post any article into whatever LLM I already use, and it's more natural than I would think having to figure out how to work with Times' bot directly.

The Verge is out with their view of Sora, saying it still has a way to go. They break it down, outlining some of the challenges that you may encounter if you use Sora.

ChatGPT gets a video analysis upgrade, along with screen sharing, to help it compete better with Gemini 2, which already has a form of screen and visual recognition. This is going to be a major area of competition: who can recognize the world around you the best. This is everything from translating signs and menus to saying "Here's what's in my fridge; please make me a meal."

Putin is calling on his fellow BRICS countries to create their own AI collaboration and partnership to challenge the dominance of the US and Western Europe. It'll remain to be seen how effective this partnership is, given the general level of distrust that exists. Also, the lack of contributions that I would expect predominantly from Brazil and South Africa.

Character.AI finds itself in even hotter water after being the victim of a lawsuit in Texas. This follows up on the one in October where a mom is suing Character AI for the suicide of her son. Character AI seems to have a big health and safety problem that they need to find some way to address.

Axios breaks down what did and didn't come to pass in the world of AI with legislation and new tech being a major focus.