Alexa+ comes for ChatGPT's web turf

PLUS: Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana Pro

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

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

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Amazon brings Alexa+ to the web

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

  • Create Instagram product shots with Nano Banana

  • 40M+ people use ChatGPT daily for health advice

  • 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

Image source: Amazon

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

The details:

  • 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 companies like Expedia, Yelp, Angi, and Square joining Uber and OpenTable for reservations, services, and more.

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

  • The Alexa mobile app is also getting a chatbot-first redesign, elevating conversational AI as the main feature instead 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 company betting billions on Claude while also trying to position Alexa in a similar space. But with distribution across one of the few actually used AI-integrated devices on the market, Alexa+ definitely sits in a unique position.

TOGETHER WITH YOU.COM

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

In this AI Use Case Discovery Guide, you’ll learn how to:

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

  • Ask the right questions when it comes to AI use cases

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

NVIDIA

Image source: Nvidia

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

The details:

  • 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 training 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 real world.

  • Nvidia is also 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 math, with any automaker or startup now able to build reasoning-based AV systems without starting from zero.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn 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 desired 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 Submit to 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 directly to Instagram, TikTok, or your brand’s storefront for an instant, consistent feed

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

PRESENTED BY GENSTORE

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 can focus on your brand, product, and vision.

With Genstore, you can:

  • Turn your story into a fully built store in minutes

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

  • Grow your business without burning out doing ten jobs alone

AI RESEARCH

Image source: OpenAI

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

The details:

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

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

  • Users send 1.6-1.9M health 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 massive AI use case — and with wearable integrations, medical breakthroughs, and OAI's push for clearer FDA pathways, it's only getting bigger. The policy proposals tucked into the report hint at a future where ChatGPT’s personalized insights may look like a digital doctor.

QUICK HITS

  • 🗣️ 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

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

OpenAI researcher Jerry Tworek revealed that he is 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 up to 15 parallel sessions at a time.

OpenAI CPO Fidji Simo outlined the company's 2026 product roadmap in a new blog, detailing plans to transform ChatGPT into a proactive "personal super-assistant".

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

COMMUNITY

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 New Jersey:

"Each year, my friends and I engage in an NFL Playoff fantasy league built in Google Sheets. My friend manually runs all tasks from gathering the list of players to point totals. This year, 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 year's NFL Playoff results, comparing against our previous Google Sheet. Now this year's Sheet will have automated scripts that can build a Player Database, Collect Stats through an API, and calculate Point Totals for our teams!"

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

That's it for today!

Before you go we’d love to know what you thought of today's newsletter to help us improve The Rundown experience for you.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

See you soon,

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

Reply

or to participate.