Amazon is making a new smartphone more than a decade after its Fire Phone flop

More than a decade after Amazon ditched its short-lived Fire Phone, the tech giant is back with a new smartphone, Reuters reports. The new device, internally dubbed “Transformer,” is meant to “sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day.”

The effort comes as Amazon races to upgrade Alexa with generative-AI capabilities. It also reflects a broader shift across Big Tech: from Apple to Google to OpenAI, companies are vying to create and control the devices through which consumers access AI — widely seen as the next major computing platform.

The tool will merge its coding assistant GitHub Copilot, its chat function Copilot, its Copilot Cowork tool, and a new agentic workflow called Autopilot. The move, known internally as “Delivering one Copilot,” will have the dual purpose of simplifying Microsoft’s fragmented desktop AI offerings and finally helping the office software giant gain a foothold on mobile, where competing tools have dominated.

Microsoft is taking a page from frenemy OpenAI’s playbook. In March, OpenAI announced plans for its own desktop super app to combine ChatGPT, Codex, and its Atlas browser into one central workstation.

Forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams’ classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s also the number of unsupervised Robotaxis Tesla has on the road in Texas, the only state where it’s operating autonomous service, according to records from a newly required government database in the state.

That’s much lower than CEO Elon Musk had hoped, as the company struggles to ready its camera-only autonomous vehicles for commercial scale. In 2025, Musk said that the service would be available to “half the population of the US by the end of the year.”

Even smaller competition has more: Avride has 317 and Nuro has 47. Meanwhile, Tesla’s chief rival, Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, has 577 in operation in the state. Nationwide, Waymo’s fleet currently numbers more than 3,000.

Unfortunately for Tesla, figuring out how to actually scale its robotaxi fleet remains the ultimate question.

Report: Microsoft tries to get back in the AI coding game with new model

Microsoft wants to fight its way back into the AI coding field by releasing a new model next week at its annual Microsoft Build developer conference, The Information reports.

The company is expected to announce a new family of models as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman seeks to shore up the company’s own AI offerings and gradually wean it off OpenAI’s technology over the remainder of their $13 billion partnership.

Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.

But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.

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