Zoom Introduces a New AI Companion Tool

Earlier this month Zoom introduced the Zoom AI Companion 3.0 which the company has promised will be an all in one sort of solution with a Custom AI Companion add-on that will empower users with easy creation and deployment of custom AI agents and tailored AI solutions. 

The goal is to offer lifelike AI avatars for meetings, live translations, the ability to generate clips from presentations, and proactive agentic AI that can help users free up their time, show up prepared, keep meetings on track, and create rich content based on meeting conversations and more.

“Around the world, millions of people are using Zoom to connect with their colleagues and customers, but they could be getting so much more out of those conversations with the help of AI,” said Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom. “AI Companion 3.0 will provide deeper insights from their conversations to help them get more done at work and drive better business outcomes, regardless of whether they’re working in Zoom Workplace, in person, or across compatible apps and integrations.”

Included in the new companies will be features like photorealistic avatars in Zoom Meetings,  Real-time voice translation for Meetings that will allow participants to hear meeting speech in their preferred language, apps in Team Chat to help them more easily manage and discover Zoom Apps, and a personal favorite generative collaborative whiteboards.

Hyundai Plans Major US Based Robotics Investments

The Hyundai Motors groups isn't all about cars! The company has been a major tech investor and has recently made several big moves in the robotics field including their acquisition and partnership with Boston Dynamics. Earlier this year, Hyundai Motor Group announced it will invest $21 billion in the U.S., including a $6 billion investment to drive innovation and expand strategic partnerships with U.S. companies. As part of this new investment, the Group will purchase tens of thousands of Boston Dynamics robots 

Doubling down on that commitment Hyundai late last month announced they will expand that investment to $26 billion in the U.S. from 2025 to 2028. The additional $5 billion will be dedicated to advancing the Group’s strategic initiatives in automotive, steel, and more specially robotics. The major investment will allow the group to build a new state-of-the-art robotics facility with an annual capacity of 30,000 units, serving as a U.S. Robotics Innovation Hub for design, manufacturing, testing, and deployment. This initiative will position Hyundai Motor Group at the forefront of the global robotics ecosystem and a major leader in the US robotics market! 

Through these initiatives, Hyundai Motor Group expects to create around 25,000 new direct jobs in the United States over the next four years. The Group is also accelerating technology commercialization through its U.S.-based tech affiliate Motional for autonomous driving — while expanding collaboration with leading American companies in future technologies, including AI, robotics, autonomous driving.

Read more: 

• Hyundai x Boston Dynamics: Welcome to the future of mobility
• Boston Dynamics & Hyundai Motor Group Expand Collaboration to Drive Mobility Manufacturing & Innovation
• Uniting Humans and Robots - Hyundai Motor Group and Boston Dynamics’ Vision For the Future of Work and HR Evolution

Netflix Offers More Netflix House Details

Are you ready to see your favorite Netflix shows brough to life? Netflix this week offered up some new details on the company's new immersive fan based experience that does just that! The two colossal complexes set to open later this year in Philadelphia and Dallas, with Las Vegas slated for 2027, transforms over 100K square feet of former department store space into interactive experiences based on Netflix's most popular content. 

Dive into the world of your favorite Netflix shows at Netflix House, where entry is completely free! Once inside, you can choose from a mix of free and paid activities to immerse yourself in the fun. ake selfies with beloved characters like Queen Charlotte, enjoy screenings of hit movies like KPop Demon Hunters, have a meal and a cocktail at NETFLIX BITES, or embark on an adventure with friends, channeling the ONE PIECE crew. 

According to Netflix guests will be able to experience interactive sets from most of their most popular shows including Wednesday, Squid Game, ONE PIECE, Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters, Love Is Blind, and A Knives Out Mystery franchise  Since each Netflix House regularly updates its offerings, you may have an entirely different adventure the next time you return. 

For full details 

New Smart Glasses May Help the Hard of Hearing

Smart glasses have been looking better and better these days with advances in technology and improvements with AI, Now a new tech company is launching a pair of “always-on” AI-powered smart glasses that listen to, record, and transcribe every conversation and then display relevant information to the wearer in real time. Halo, the startup that’s developing the technology says their "goal is to make glasses that make you super intelligent the moment you put them on.”

“The AI listens to every conversation you have and uses that knowledge to tell you what to say … kinda like IRL Cluely,” Ardayfio told TechCrunch during their interview.  “If somebody says a complex word or asks you a question, like, ‘What’s 37 to the third power?’ or something like that, then it’ll pop up on the glasses,” Ardayfio added. 

While the goal of Halo and the company's founders isn't specially to augment hearing for the hearing impaired it is easy to see how the new devices and their ability to hear what you [should] hear and automatically feed you insights on the display could be beneficial to deaf and hard of hearing users. Halo would give you the ability to not just instantly understand your conversations more clearly, it could also translate for you, have recall of previous conversations and/or help you accurately answer questions you may not have fully understood! 

For now, Halo X glasses only have a display and a microphone, but no camera, although the developers are exploring the possibility of adding it to a future models. Users will still need to have their smartphones handy  as the glasses are tethered to an accompanying appt. So you'll need your phone to help power the glasses and get “real time info prompts and answers to questions,” per Nguyen.  Under the hood, the smart glasses use Google’s Gemini and Perplexity as its chatbot engine, according to the two co-founders. Gemini is better for math and reasoning, whereas they use Perplexity to scrape the internet, they said. 

The Halo X is available for -pre-order for $249 now with no details on exact shipping dates.

Why Reddit is Blocking the Internet Archive for AI Scraping (and its $200M Plan)

Reddit is now restricting the Internet Archive (IA) from indexing its popular threads, a move prompted by Reddit's discovery that some AI companies were circumventing its scraping policies. Instead of scraping Reddit directly, these firms were allegedly pulling data from the IA's archived content. In response, Reddit is now limiting the Wayback Machine to only archive screenshots of its homepage. This means the archive will no longer be a comprehensive record of deleted posts, user activity, or various subreddit cultures. This restriction significantly reduces the IA's utility as a resource for documenting and preserving Reddit's vast content.

Reddit's spokesperson, Tim Rathschmidt, suggested that the Internet Archive could take steps to better protect against AI scraping. Rathschmidt also cited privacy concerns, stating that the Wayback Machine problematically archives content that users have deleted. He noted that until the IA can better "respect user privacy" and comply with Reddit's policies regarding deleted content, the restrictions would remain in place. Although some Redditors previously used the Wayback Machine to find deleted comments, many others have pointed out that several alternative tools exist for this purpose.

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It's probable that Reddit's decision is also financially motivated. The company has recently made lucrative licensing deals with AI companies like OpenAI and Google, with the Google deal reportedly worth $60 million over three years. Reddit expects to earn over $200 million from similar licensing agreements in the next three years. By limiting the Internet Archive's access, Reddit may be aiming to force AI firms to strike similar deals directly with them, rather than getting their data for free from the Wayback Machine.

Conclusion

This situation highlights a growing tension between content platforms, AI companies, and digital archivists. While Reddit claims its primary concern is user privacy and protecting against policy violations, the financial incentives from licensing deals with AI firms are a significant factor. For the Internet Archive, this presents a challenge to its mission of preserving the open web, as a major source of online discourse is now largely inaccessible for archiving. The ongoing discussions between Reddit and the Internet Archive will likely determine the future of how Reddit's content is preserved and accessed outside of its platform.

You can learn more about this topic by visiting these articles from The Verge and Ars Technica.

Note this content was summarized by Google Gemini 

Return Fraud Becomes a $100 Billion Problem

 We might love those easy one click and no questioned asked return policies, but with that ease of use comes some major drawbacks for retailers. U.S. retailers are grappling with a steep rise in return fraud — those coming from customers who have chosen to stretch the limits on return windows, wear or use an item and send it back, or sometimes just return a different item entirely! The value of fraudulent returns reached a new high of $103 billion in 2024, according to research compiled by Appriss Retail and Deloitte Business Consulting. 

In 2024, the total value of returned goods in the US was estimated at a total of $685bn. According to a recent article by Business Insider and estimated 15% or over $103 billion was paid back in the form of fraudulent returns. This staggering figure represents a serious challenge for the retail industry. This trend is fueled by a combination of factors, including the explosion of e-commerce, the increasing sophistication of fraudsters (both individuals and organized retail crime groups), and the ongoing challenges retailers face in balancing customer convenience with robust fraud prevention measures.

When it comes to trying to pull a fast one on Amazon or Wal-Mart many dismiss the overall negative impacts. All of which are eventually felts directly by other consumers.. 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐯𝐞 & 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 (𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐮𝐞 𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐬𝐞𝐭). Sellers have to bear the costs associated with:

• Customer Service
• Packaging
• Logistics
• Processing

𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬 can 𝐭𝐲𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐚𝐝𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨 $𝟐𝟎-$𝟔𝟎 𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐭𝐞m𝐦:

• 15% of returns are fraudulent (write off).
• A portion of returns are lost in transit.
• Returned items sell for cents in the dollar.
• Seller fees are incurred (for a second time).

Many categories often see return rates of 10-30%, with  buyers’ remorse (no fault of the seller). It doesn’t matter how efficiently you reprocess and remarket returns, there is a major sustainability issue here - stemming from returns policies themselves. Many retailers are drawing back on their very lenient polices and updating their return policies, with a trend towards shorter return windows and stricter rules, particularly when it comes to select item categories. In may cases theyare placig strict controls over their once favoravble 'no recipet' returns and even limited the numbers of returns a single customer can make in a given time frame!

Your Next Uber Might Be A Lucid Robotaxi

Uber is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in EV maker Lucid and autonomous driving startup Nuro in a massive deal that will see 20K robotaxis in the U.S. over the next six years starting with the first city in 2026.

The details:

• Piloting this ambitious plan is Lucid’s upcoming Gravity SUV, a luxury SUV starting at $79K, outfitted with Nuro’s Level 4 autonomy suite. 
• Nuro’s fleet of vehicles currently operates in California and Texas, with 1M autonomous miles traveled without any major safety incidents.
• The robotaxi experience will be exclusive to Uber’s app, leveraging its routing and delivery infrastructure, with the ride-hailing giant investing $300M in Lucid.
• Fleet ownership falls to Uber, and Las Vegas is ground zero for prototype testing, with the first public deployment city set to be revealed in 2026.

The fleet will be owned by Uber or a third-party fleet management partner and the first vehicles will launch in as-yet-to-be-determined US city in 2026.

“This is a very, very big deal,” Dave Ferguson, co-founder and president of Nuro, said in an interview. “In terms of the scale and the hard commitments and the meat behind it, it is by far the biggest partnership deal that Uber has announced or done.” Uber is investing $300 million in Lucid, a spokesperson for the automaker, Nick Twork, confirmed. The investment in Nuro will be “significantly more than that,” Ferguson said, though he declined to share an exact figure. As part of the deal, Uber will take a seat on Nuro’s board of directors.

“Autonomous vehicles have enormous potential to transform our cities for the better,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber. “We’re thrilled to partner with Nuro and Lucid on this new robotaxi program, purpose-built just for the Uber platform, to safely bring the magic of autonomous driving to more people across the world.”