Amazon is joining the reasoning race

PLUS: Cohere's SOTA multilingual vision model

Author

Rowan Cheung
March 05, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. The AI landscape is about to get even more competitive — with Amazon reportedly set to jump into the reasoning race with a powerful hybrid model of its own.

With this new reasoner coming alongside Alexa’s upcoming AI-powered upgrades, could this be the year that finally establishes the retail giant as a true AI powerhouse?

In today’s AI rundown:

  • Amazon’s hybrid reasoning AI model

  • Cohere’s SOTA multilingual vision model

  • Finding perfect prospects with AI

  • OpenAI’s $50M NextGenAI consortium

  • 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AMAZON

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Amazon is reportedly developing an advanced reasoning AI model under its Nova brand—set for a June release—in what would be its most ambitious push yet to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The details:

  • The company aims to create a "hybrid reasoning" system that delivers quick responses and methodical, multi-step problem-solving through a unified model.

  • Cost-effectiveness is a central focus, with Amazon looking to undercut competitor pricing while still delivering top-tier performance.

  • Amazon has reportedly set ambitious goals to rank among the top five models, especially on benchmarks for software development and math skills.

  • The project falls under Amazon's AGI division led by Rohit Prasad—signaling a strategic shift despite the company's massive $8B investment in Anthropic.

Why it matters: Amazon’s stake in Anthropic isn’t holding it back from developing its own rival models—aiming to compete in reasoning while undercutting both rivals and partners on price. With an AI-enhanced Alexa+ also in the pipeline, the retail giant is quickly positioning itself as a serious contender across multiple fronts in the AI race.

TOGETHER WITH UNSTRUCTURED

The Rundown: Contextual chunking is the next level in document retrieval accuracy, and Unstructured is going to show you how it beats Gemini 2.0’s long context windows every time—helping you say goodbye to high error rates and hello to precise RAG apps.

Join Unstructured’s live session to learn:

  • How contextual chunking amplifies retrieval precision

  • Comparisons with Gemini 2.0’s long context window approach

  • Real-world strategies to reduce error rates and build stronger RAG pipelines

COHERE FOR AI

Image source: Cohere

The Rundown: Cohere's non-profit research arm, Cohere For AI, unveiled Aya Vision, an open multimodal AI that brings vision-language capabilities to 23 languages representing over half the world's population—setting new performance benchmarks.

The details:

  • Aya Vision comes in two sizes, with the 8B version outperforming rivals 10x its size and 32B beating those more than 2x its size, like Llama-3.2 90B Vision.

  • The model can interpret and describe images, answer visual questions, and translate visual content across diverse languages—from Vietnamese to Arabic.

  • It has been released under a CC non-commercial license and can be accessed on Kaggle, Hugging Face, or via WhatsApp.

  • Cohere has also open-sourced the Aya Vision Benchmark, which evaluates VLMs on open-ended questions around real-world, multilingual scenarios.

Why it matters: We’ve previously written about AI models breaking down language barriers, and now, breakthroughs like Aya Vision are achieving the same for visual content. Leveraging advanced AI won’t be limited to English-speaking audiences only, with users across the globe soon having access to a powerful universal visual translator.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Perplexity’s Deep Research feature to quickly generate focused B2B prospect lists and craft personalized outreach messages that convert better.

Step-by-step:

  1. Define your targeting criteria clearly (such as industry, company size, location, and pain points).

  2. Head over to Perplexity to generate prospects by entering a specific prompt requesting companies that match your criteria.

  3. Ask it to prioritize and analyze your prospects by identifying the most promising fits and explaining why they'd benefit from your solution.

  4. Generate personalized outreach messages for each priority prospect that reference their specific situation and funding.

Pro tip: You can use separate AI tools for research and content writing, e.g., take your prospect insights from step 3 and feed them into your favorite writing assistant for drafting polished outreach messages.

PRESENTED BY INNOVATING WITH AI

The Rundown: Innovating with AI’s new program, AI Consultancy Project, equips AI enthusiasts with all the resources they need to capitalize on the booming AI consulting market — which is set to grow 8x to $54.7B by 2032.

The program offers:

  • Tools and framework to find clients and deliver top-notch services

  • A 6-month roadmap to build a 6-figure AI consulting business

  • Student landing their first AI client in as little as 3 days

OPENAI

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI announced NextGenAI, a new academic consortium backed by $50M in funding to support AI research and education across 15 leading institutions, including Harvard, MIT, and Oxford University.

The details:

  • The initiative provides research grants, compute resources, and API access to help students, educators, and researchers advance high-impact AI applications.

  • The partner institutions will tackle challenges from reducing rare disease diagnosis time to digitalizing historical texts and public domain materials.

  • The consortium comes after OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu launch last May, an affordable version of GPT-4o created specifically for educational institutions.

  • Notably, Perplexity is also moving in a similar direction, with eventual plans to make its Pro subscription free for students.

Why it matters: AI is on track to completely augment the traditional scientific research and educational structures — and providing top institutions with both the resources and means to integrate the tech more widely into their workflows will help lead to even more rapid advancements across the board.

QUICK HITS

  • 🛡️ Abridge - Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Analyst

  • ⚖️ OpenAI - Employment Counsel

  • 🏗️ Scale AI - Enterprise Product Manager

  • 📢 Metropolis - Marketing Coordinator

Google’s Pixel 10 will reportedly introduce “Pixel Sense”, an on-device assistant capable of processing data from over 15 Google apps to complete different tasks.

Tencent’s Yuanbao AI app surpassed DeepSeek as the top iPhone app downloaded in China this week, coming on the heels of its “fast-reasoning” Hunyuan Turbo release.

ASLP Labs introduced DiffRhythm, an open-weights model capable of generating complete 4-min songs with vocals in just 10 seconds, using lyrics and style prompts.

Amazon created a new dedicated agentic AI group within AWS, with CEO Matt Garman calling it a “potential multi-billion business” that will help users automate tasks.

Cortical Labs launched CL1, the world's first commercial “Synthetic Biological Intelligence” system that combines living human brain cells with silicon hardware.

Cornell and Tel Aviv researchers created ProtoSnap, an AI that matches template characters to ancient cuneiform tablets, unlocking untranslated 3,000-year-old texts.

IPO-bound Coreweave announced the acquisition of AI developer platform Weights and Biases to integrate its capabilities into its cloud infra platform.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said GPT-4.5 will roll out to Plus users in phases “over a few days” and suggested a credit-based system for accessing advanced features like Sora.

COMMUNITY

Join our next workshop this Friday at 3:30 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. You'll learn how to use the latest AI tools to take your coding to the next level, and how we're leveraging AI-powered coding at The Rundown.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team

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