Alexa+ comes for ChatGPT’s web turf

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Last yr, Alexa stepped into the AI ring with a serious + upgrade. Now, it’s breaking free from the speaker to fight on a brand new turf.

With a brand new standalone Alexa.com and a redesigned mobile app, Amazon’s assistant is expanding into the browser for the primary time — and right into the chatbot arena with ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and the very Claude the corporate is betting billions in.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Amazon brings Alexa+ to the net

• Nvidia’s open-source AI for self-driving cars

• Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana

• 40M+ people use ChatGPT every day for health advice

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

🌐 Amazon brings Alexa+ to the net

The Rundown: Amazon just introduced Alexa.com, a brand new browser-based interface that brings its newly AI-infused Alexa+ assistant to the net — directly difficult rivals like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok within the chatbot space.

The main points:

• Early Access users can access Alexa+ through any browser for research, writing, and planning tasks, marking a first-time extension beyond devices.

• Alexa+’s agentic capabilities expand with firms like Expedia, Yelp, Angi, and Square joining Uber and OpenTable for reservations, services, and more.

• Amazon says engagement has surged because the Alexa+ rollout, with users shopping and cooking with the assistant at 3-5x previous rates.

• The Alexa mobile app can also be getting a chatbot-first redesign, elevating conversational AI because the essential feature as an alternative of leaving it buried in menus.

Why it matters: Amazon’s massive investment in Anthropic makes this chatbot push a bit strategically awkward, with the corporate betting billions on Claude while also attempting to position Alexa in an identical space. But with distribution across one in every of the few actually used AI-integrated devices available on the market, Alexa+ definitely sits in a novel position.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

🤑 Get probably the most out of your AI investment

The Rundown: Successful AI transformation starts with deeply understanding your organization’s most crucial use cases. This practical guide from You.com walks through a proven framework to discover, prioritize, and document high-value AI opportunities.

On this AI Use Case Discovery Guide, you’ll learn tips on how to:

• Map internal workflows and customer journeys to pinpoint where AI can drive measurable ROI

• Ask the proper questions in terms of AI use cases

• Align cross-functional teams and stakeholders for a unified, scalable approach

Get the Guide.

NVIDIA

🚗 Nvidia’s open-source AI for self-driving cars

The Rundown: Nvidia just launched Alpamayo at CES 2026, a brand new family of open-source AI models and tools designed to assist autonomous vehicles reason through complex driving scenarios like a human would.

The main points:

• Alpamayo 1 is a 10B-parameter “chain-of-thought” model that breaks down problems step-by-step to handle rare cases that fall outside of coaching data.

• The model generates driving trajectories alongside reasoning traces, essentially explaining why it made each decision.

• Jensen Huang called it the “ChatGPT moment for physical AI,” when machines begin to reason and act in the true world.

• Nvidia can also be releasing AlpaSim, an open-source simulation framework, and 1,700+ hours of real-world driving data.

Why it matters: Waymo and Tesla have proven robotaxis can work, but their billions in proprietary R&D aren’t exactly replicable. Nvidia’s open-sourcing of Alpamayo changes the maths, with any automaker or startup now capable of construct reasoning-based AV systems without ranging from zero.

AI TRAINING

🖼️ Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn tips on how to use Nano Banana Pro to generate a full 9-image Instagram feed from a single inspiration photo, turning your product shots into cohesive, high-quality visuals for social media campaigns.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Gemini → Tools → Create Images, ensure Pro mode is enabled, and upload an inspiration image that reflects your required style or aesthetic

2. Upload your product image, describe it, then prompt with: “Create a 9-image Instagram feed for this product with varied angles, people, and environments”

3. Click Undergo generate your 9-image grid. Review results and, if needed, ask Nano Banana to regenerate or isolate specific shots

4. Download your favorite visuals and post them on to Instagram, TikTok, or your brand’s storefront for an quick, consistent feed

Pro tip: The more specific and visually aligned your examples are, the higher the AI matches your required aesthetic.

PRESENTED BY GENSTORE

🤝 Introducing your AI founding team

The Rundown: Genstore gives solo sellers something they’ve never had — an AI agent team that handles the work that wears you down, so you possibly can deal with your brand, product, and vision.

With Genstore, you possibly can:

• Turn your story into a totally built store in minutes

• Delegate research, marketing, and ops to AI agents that work like co-founders

• Grow your enterprise without burning out doing ten jobs alone

Meet your AI founding team and stop constructing alone.

AI RESEARCH

🏥 40M+ people use ChatGPT every day for health advice

The Rundown: OpenAI just released a brand new report revealing that over 40M people globally turn to ChatGPT for health information every day, with over 5% of all messages now related to healthcare topics.

The main points:

• Common uses include symptom checking, decoding medical jargon, spotting billing errors, and preparing for doctor visits.

• 70% of health-related chats occur outside normal clinic hours, with around 600K weekly messages coming from rural “hospital deserts.”

• Users send 1.6-1.9M medical insurance questions weekly, covering plan comparisons, billing disputes, and claim appeals.

• The report also included policy proposals urging the FDA to create clearer pathways for AI medical devices.

Why it matters: Healthcare is clearly already a large AI use case — and with wearable integrations, medical breakthroughs, and OAI’s push for clearer FDA pathways, it’s only getting greater. The policy proposals tucked into the report hint at a future where ChatGPT’s personalized insights may appear to be a digital doctor.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🗣️ Unwrap Customer Intelligence – Turn unstructured customer feedback into data-backed insights that inform your product roadmap*

• 🤖 Alexa.com – Amazon’s AI experience across voice, mobile, and web

• 🧠 Falcon H1R – TTI’s hybrid reasoner with strong math and coding capabilities

• 📝 Granola – Enhance meeting notes with transcriptions right from Mac audio

*Sponsored Listing

📰 Every thing else in AI today

Boston Dynamics and Google DeepMind announced a partnership to integrate Gemini Robotics AI models into the corporate’s Atlas humanoids.

OpenAI researcher Jerry Tworek revealed that he’s leaving after seven years, having contributed to OAI’s first coding systems and led the team behind reasoning AI.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny posted a guide to how he uses the agentic coding tool, including running as much as 15 parallel sessions at a time.

OpenAI CPO Fidji Simo outlined the corporate’s 2026 product roadmap in a brand new blog, detailing plans to remodel ChatGPT right into a proactive “personal super-assistant”.

Abu Dhabi’s TII released Falcon H1R 7B, a small, hybrid reasoner that outperforms rivals as much as 7x its size on math and coding while running at double the inference speed.

Microsoft renamed its Office 365 productivity suite to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app,” using the identical name as its AI assistant for the rebrand.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Lawrence R. in Recent Jersey:

“Annually, my friends and I engage in an NFL Playoff fantasy league inbuilt Google Sheets. My friend manually runs all tasks from gathering the list of players to point totals. This yr, I vibe-coded with Claude to automate the sheet.

With Claude, I built proper documentation, including a roadmap, workflow, tech spec, etc., and Claude provided the code files that I inserted into the Google Apps Script. We then back-tested using last yr’s NFL Playoff results, comparing against our previous Google Sheet. Now this yr’s Sheet can have automated scripts that may construct a Player Database, Collect Stats through an API, and calculate Point Totals for our teams!”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Meta’s chief scientist leaves with parting shots

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Neuralink’s bet to scale brain surgery

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Agibot’s tiny, portable humanoid

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create IG product shots with Nano Banana Pro

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4 PM EST Friday: AI Foundations Bootcamp Pt. 1

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown