Tech Roundup: Amazon Interests AI, Ghost ActivityPub Integration & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Meta begins rolling out Meta AI features across its family of apps for users in the European Union, after it was forced to halt the practice of training its AI models by tapping data from users in the region.
• Google tests a new change in YouTube where "viewers who haven't recently engaged with a channel despite having been sent recent push notifications will not receive push notifications" in an effort to cut down the number of notifications they receive.
• OpenAI announces plans to "release a powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning in the coming months."
• Apple releases iOS 18.4 with broader Apple Intelligence rollout to Europe, India and Singapore; ships visionOS 2.4 with Apple Intelligence and a Spatial Gallery app that features Apple-curated media, with "new content released regularly." (The updates also bring 'Find My' to South Korea for the first time, allowing users in the country to keep track of devices, belongings and loved ones.)
• Newsletter platform Substack rolls out a TikTok-like video feed in its app, initially featuring short-form videos under 10 minutes.
• Amazon launches its Alexa+ AI-enhanced voice assistant to some customers; unveils Nova Act, a general purpose AI agent to control a web browser and independently perform some simple actions.
• Nokia and Amazon settle a long-running, global patent dispute over Amazon using Nokia's video tech in Prime Video and its devices, without disclosing the terms.
• Mozilla says it's developing a privacy focus email client called Thundermail as part of an upcoming paid Thunderbird Pro service.
• TikTok says it will shut down its Instagram rival TikTok Notes on May 8, 2025; directs users to Lemon8.
• OpenAI makes its new image generator, powered by the GPT-4o model, to all users, as it hits 20 million paid subscribers, up from 15.5 million at the end of 2024; launches o1-pro, which uses more compute than o1 for "consistently better responses."
• Apple says the iPhone 16 series will be available in Indonesia from April 11, 2025, after the government lifted a sales ban following Apple's US$ 300 million investment plan.
• Microsoft expands Copilot+ PC features like Live Captions and Cocreator, previously exclusive to models with Snapdragon chips, to models with AMD or Intel chips.
• Amazon rolls out Interests, an AI-powered shopping tool for finding products by passion or hobby, to all U.S. users; experiments with a new AI chatbot called Health AI to answer health and wellness questions.
• Meta launches a pilot program on Instagram designed to let U.S. schools flag any potentially rule-violating post or account for prioritised review; tests a "Write with Meta AI" prompt on Instagram that gives users AI-generated suggestions to help write comments under other users' posts.
• Google releases TxGemma, a collection of open models built on Gemma that are designed to improve the efficiency of therapeutic drug development; debuts real-time AI video Gemini Live features, including the ability to "see" phone screens and phone camera feeds, for Gemini Advanced subscribers.
• Discord plans to roll out third-party ads on its mobile apps, starting with a mobile pilot for Video Quests, video ads that let users earn rewards, in June 2025.
• Messaging app Telegram crosses one billion monthly active users, up from 950 million in July 2024; makes US$ 547 million in profits in 2024, and calls WhatsApp "a cheap, watered-down imitation."
• Newsletter service Ghost launches support for ActivityPub integration in beta for Ghost(Pro) subscribers, letting them share their posts across the fediverse.
• Microsoft partners with Swiss startup Inait to deploy an AI model that simulates mammal brain reasoning to advance fields like financial trading and robotics.
• Quora launches a cheaper US$ 5/month premium tier for its Poe AI assistant, alongside a new US$ 250/month plan that it says is better for more "expensive" models like GPT-4.5 and o1-pro.
• Anthropic adds web search powered by Brave in preview for Claude 3.7 Sonnet for paid users in the U.S. (It's worth noting that Brave also underpins Mistral's Le Chat's search functionality.)