A federal court in San Francisco has granted Amazon an injunction against AI startup Perplexity, barring it from using its AI browser agent Comet to make purchases on Amazon.
Amazon sued Perplexity in November, accusing the startup of fraud because Comet didn't disclose when it was shopping on behalf of a real person and ignored Amazon's demands to stop. The case raises a growing legal question: how should courts handle AI agents taking on complex tasks like online shopping?
Judge Maxine Chesney ruled that Amazon presented strong evidence that Perplexity was accessing users' password-protected accounts with their permission but without Amazon's authorization. Perplexity must also delete any collected Amazon data and has one week to appeal.
OpenAI is rolling out dynamic visual explanations for more than 70 math and science concepts in ChatGPT. Users can tweak variables in real time and see the effects on graphs and formulas instantly. For now, the topics are geared mainly toward high school and college students, covering things like binomial squares, exponential decay, Ohm's law, compound interest, and trigonometric identities.
According to OpenAI, the interactive explanations are available now to all logged-in users worldwide, regardless of their subscription plan. Over time, OpenAI plans to expand the learning modules to cover additional subjects.
German court says "It's AI" isn't enough to void copyright
A German regional court has ruled that song lyrics written by a human are still protected by copyright, even if the music was made with AI tools like SunoAI. Simply claiming a work is AI-generated isn’t enough to strip that protection, you need proof.
Following a series of allegedly AI-caused outages, Amazon is turning its senior engineers into human filters for AI-generated code.
"Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," writes Dave Treadwell, Senior Vice President at Amazon, in an internal email obtained by the Financial Times. A briefing identifies a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius," linked to "Gen-AI assisted changes." Recently, there have been reports that Amazon's AI coding tools may have also contributed to two AWS outages.
The consequence: Junior and mid-level engineers now require sign-off from a senior engineer for all AI-assisted code changes. Standard code reviews have always existed at Amazon, but a dedicated approval requirement specifically for AI-generated output is new. Experienced developers are thus effectively becoming human quality filters for machine-generated code. Their role is shifting: away from building, toward reviewing what the machine has built.
Among the causes, the internal briefing cites "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established."
Nvidia and Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, are entering a long-term partnership. Thinking Machines will receive at least one gigawatt of compute power through Nvidia's new Vera Rubin systems to train its own AI models. Deployment is set to begin early next year.
Nvidia has also taken a financial stake in Thinking Machines, though the exact amount wasn't disclosed. The startup had already raised around $2 billion in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation of $12 billion. Nvidia was an investor in that round as well. Most recently, Thinking Machines is reportedly seeking another funding round. The startup has also seen some departures - co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz returned to OpenAI.
Together, the two companies plan to develop training and deployment systems for Nvidia hardware and make frontier AI models available to businesses and researchers. Murati left OpenAI in 2024 and co-founded Thinking Machines Lab.
Meta has acquired Moltbook, a platform best described as a Reddit for AI agents. Founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr are joining Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Axios reports. The purchase price wasn't disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in mid-March.
So what does Meta see in it? In a blog post obtained by Axios, Meta's Vishal Shah explains: "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf. This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." Existing customers can keep using Moltbook temporarily.
Eon Systems says it has connected a complete fruit fly brain emulation to a virtual body, producing multiple behaviors for the first time. The emulation covers over 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses.
According to co-founder Alex Wissner-Gross, the startup mapped the fruit fly's neural wiring from electron microscopy data and connected it to a virtual fly body running in MuJoCo, a physics simulation engine.
Previous projects like OpenWorm worked with far smaller nervous systems, just 302 neurons, or relied on machine learning techniques like reinforcement learning instead of actual brain data. Eon takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than building AI, the startup wants to digitally copy and simulate real brains, neuron by neuron. The fruit fly is just the starting point. Within two years, Eon plans to emulate a mouse brain with 70 million neurons. The long-term goal is simulating a human brain.
Eon published the code for its brain model on GitHub, though it's based on a paper by Philip Shiu et al. that already appeared in Nature in 2024. The actually novel part, connecting the brain emulation to a simulated body, hasn't been released yet.
Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta and Turing Award winner, has raised over $1 billion for his new startup Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) - making it Europe's largest seed funding round ever. Investors include Nvidia, Bezos Expeditions, Singapore's Temasek, and France's Cathay Innovation.
The company was valued at $3.5 billion before the funding round. Alexandre LeBrun, former head of French startup Nabla, serves as CEO, while LeCun will take the role of board chair. The company is launching with about a dozen employees spread across Paris, New York, Singapore, and Montreal.
AMI Labs aims to build so-called world models that understand the physical environment - with applications in areas like robotics and transportation. According to LeCun and LeBrun, today's language models aren't up to the task. Meta isn't an investor but is expected to partner with AMI Labs.
