Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, the people critical to the company's ability to get you things fast via Amazon Prime, will soon get Prime subscriptions as part of their employment. The new perk was revealed along with other benefit updates, including an average pay raise, announced by the company on Wednesday.The free Prime subscription will be part of the benefits package for front-line" workers starting early next year," according to a blog post. They'll have free Prime for as long as they are a part of the Amazon team." Amazon Prime typically costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year.As for pay, Amazon says that the frontline workers will be getting at least" $1.50 more per hour beginning next month, which the... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon announced today that it's pumping another $4 billion into Claude AI maker Anthropic, bringing its total funding amount to $8 billion. This latest round follows $1.25 billion last September and another $2.75 billion in March.Along with the money, Amazon wrote in its blog post that Amazon Web Services (AWS) would be named Anthropic's primary training partner" and that the OpenAI rival would use Trainium and Inferentia chips for future models.The investment and deeper partnership align with previous reporting by Reuters that Claude will power Amazon's new Alexa voice assistant. The improved Alexa - the release of which has been delayed - reportedly performed better with Claude than it did when using Amazon's in-house model. The... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon's massive advertising business, which is only surpassed in the US by Google and Meta, is about to get bigger. In addition to selling ads on its sprawling marketplace, it will now let other retailers use the technology powering its $50 billion business on their own websites, as reported earlier by Adweek.The company's new Retail Ad Service beta will let other online stores Deliver contextually relevant ads by leveraging Amazon's two decades of ad tech expertise, driven by machine learning models trained on trillions of shopping signals" across their product, search, and browsing pages.It also plugs the retailers into Amazon's existing advertising customers, as brands already using Amazon's ad system can choose to place their ads on third-party sites. The setup also allows Amazon to pull more profit from retail media" (ads you see in stores or while shopping online) even when the shopping isn't happening on its site, and could give it access to more data - which is something the FTC may have questions about.The path of this business is similar to the launch of Amazon Web Services, which the company built to keep its online marketplace running and loading quickly 24/7 before selling access to the servers as a backbone for other companies' operations, as noted by CNBC.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Like Meta, Amazon is ending some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. In a memo sent last month, Candi Castleberry, Amazon's VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company has been winding down outdated programs and materials" related to its efforts around representation and inclusion, as reported earlier by CNBC and Bloomberg.In the memo, a copy of which Amazon provided to The Verge, Castleberry wrote that over the past few years, Amazon has been evaluating its programs across the company, each of which addresses a specific disparity, and is designed to end when that disparity is eliminated." At the same time, Castleberry noted that the company worked to build programs that are open to all" instead of having individual groups build programs." Castleberry said Amazon aimed to complete the discontinuation of some of these outdated" programs by the end of 2024.Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser declined to identify which programs had been ended.This approach - where we move away from programs that were separate from our existing processes, and instead integrating our work into existing processes so they become durable - is the evolution to... Read the full story at The Verge.