Amazon plans to use AI to speed up film and TV production while reducing costs. Albert Cheng heads the "AI Studio" at Amazon MGM Studio, which will launch a closed beta program with industry partners in March 2026. Results are expected in May, Reuters reports.
The AI tools aim to bridge the "last mile" between existing AI offerings and what directors actually need. This includes better character consistency across different shots and integration with industry-standard creative tools. Amazon is working with multiple language model providers. Producers like Robert Stromberg ("Maleficent") and animator Colin Brady are already testing the tools, according to the report. The series "House of David" on Amazon is already using AI: for season two, director Jon Erwin combined AI with live-action footage for battle scenes.
Cheng said high production costs are making it harder to create new content. AI should speed up processes but not replace people. Writers, directors, and actors will remain involved in every step. Amazon has cut around 30,000 jobs since October, including at Prime Video.
Altman claims ChatGPT has more users in Texas alone than Claude has across the entire US
OpenAI’s Sam Altman fires back at Anthropic’s anti-ad campaign, but his own warnings about AI persuasion, which came true, make the criticism hard to dismiss.
AI chip startup Cerebras Systems has closed a financing round of over one billion dollars. The funding values the company at around 23 billion dollars, according to a press release. Tiger Global led the round, with Benchmark, Fidelity, AMD, Coatue, and other investors participating.
Cerebras, based in Sunnyvale, California, builds specialized AI chips for fast inference - the speed at which AI models generate responses. The company's approach uses an entire wafer as a single chip, called the "Wafer Scale Engine" (WSE). Its current flagship is the WSE-3.
Chinese company Kling has released video model 3.0. The new model is described as an "all-in-one creative engine" for multimodal creation. Key features include improved consistency for characters and elements, video production with 15-second clips and better control, and customizable multi-shot recording. Audio features now support multiple character references along with additional languages and accents. For image generation, Kling 3.0 offers 4K output, a new continuous shooting mode, and what the company calls "more cinematic visuals."
Ultra subscribers get exclusive early access through the Kling AI website. Official details on a general release, API access, or technical documentation aren't available yet. The Kling team published a paper on the Kling Omni models in December 2025. The YouTube channel "Theoretically Media" got early access and published a detailed first impression video. According to the channel, the model should roll out to other subscription levels within a week.
Anthropic positions itself against advertising while exploring commercial chat transactions. In a blog post, the company says Claude will remain ad-free: no sponsored links, no advertiser-influenced responses. Unlike search engines, users often share personal information in AI chats, and advertising could push conversations toward transactions rather than helpfulness, concerns OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once shared before his company decided to pursue ads after all.
Expanding access to Claude is central to our public benefit mission, and we want to do it without selling our users’ attention or data to advertisers.
Instead, Anthropic plans to fund operations through enterprise contracts and subscriptions. The company is also exploring e-commerce transactions like bookings or purchases Claude handles for users. Anthropic could earn from these, similar to OpenAI's plans. However, the company says Claude's primary goal should always be providing helpful answers.
Alibaba has released Qwen3-Coder-Next, a new open-weight AI model for programming agents and local development. Trained on 800,000 verifiable tasks, the model has 80 billion parameters total but only 3 billion active at any time. Despite this small footprint, Alibaba says it outperforms or matches much larger open-source models on coding benchmarks, scoring above 70 percent on SWE-Bench Verified with the SWE-Agent framework. As always, benchmarks only indicate real-world performance.
Qwen3-Coder-Next competes with much larger models across multiple coding benchmarks while using only 3 billion active parameters. | Image: Qwen
The model supports 256,000 tokens of context and works with development environments like Claude Code, Qwen Code, Qoder, Kilo, Trae, and Cline. Local tools like Ollama, LMStudio, MLX-LM, llama.cpp, and KTransformers also support it. Qwen3-Coder-Next is available on Hugging Face and ModelScope under the Apache 2.0 license. More details in the blog post and technical report.
OpenAI has filled its "Head of Preparedness" position with Dylan Scandinaro, who previously worked on AI safety at competitor Anthropic. CEO Sam Altman announced the hire on X, calling Scandinaro "by far the best candidate" for the role. With OpenAI working on "extremely powerful models," Altman said strong safety measures are essential.
There’s a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it!
Dylan Scandinaro
Scandinaro's Anthropic background adds an interesting layer. The company was founded by former OpenAI employees concerned about OpenAI's product focus and what they saw as insufficient safety measures, and has since become known as one of the more safety-conscious AI developers. Altman says he plans to work with Scandinaro to implement changes across the company.
