📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Amazon’s New AI-Powered Alexa Is a Half-Working Mess

Amazon has infused its famed assistant Alexa with the power of artificial intelligence — an upgrade that’s apparently come with some serious drawbacks and headaches.

As The Verge reports, the company is set to launch new hardware later this week as part of an effort to bring its new-and-improved Alexa Plus service to more customers. To test it, Verge senior reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy was able to get early access to Alexa’s new ChatGPT-like smart home experience.

But things haven’t gone smoothly.

“Today, running on underpowered hardware and with what feels like a surface-level integration into my smart home, Alexa Plus often leaves me frustrated,” Pattison Tuohy wrote. “There’s power under that hood, but it feels largely inaccessible. The assistant desperately needs something to make it more compelling — and better hardware could be the answer.”

For one thing, the whole thing sounds clunky. While the reporter lauded the system for recognizing more natural language prompts — allowing her to lock doors, adjust the thermostat, or set reminders — many requests took “up to 15 seconds for a response.” Even checking the weather could take over ten seconds, an eternity compared to simply glancing at a smartphone app.

Those pain points are especially incriminating considering how many resources and billions of dollars companies like Amazon have been pouring into AI tech. The mega retailer is planning to spend over $100 billion this year on cloud computing and AI infrastructure buildouts — but given the sorry state of its flagship smart home assistant, it’s hard to say if consumers will be swayed.

Another problem is that hallucinations remain a major problem plaguing the current crop of AI-powered tools. Translating woefully incorrect information into the real world could have all sorts of unpredictable consequences in a smart home; in spite of all the high-tech features, for instance, Pattison Tuohy couldn’t get Alexa to properly control her bathroom fan.

That’s on top of pesky problems she’d already encountered earlier in the summer, when the smart assistant got confused following simple recipes and tried to “gaslight” her when she asked for clarity. It also told her that it “can’t actually make coffee,” despite being connected to a smart Bosch coffee maker.

Alexa Plus also excitedly told her she could get a two-day ticket to the Dollywood theme park for $42 a day — which was entirely incorrect (in reality, the ticket was $122 for a two-day pass.)

“LLMs aren’t designed to be predictable,” Pattison Tuohy argued, “and what you want when controlling your home is predictability.”

Back in January, Amazon AI team lead Rohit Prasad told the Financial Times that the company still had to sort out “several technical hurdles” before rolling out the already long-awaited feature.

“Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” he said at the time.

It’s an admirable idea, but it sounds like the tech just isn’t there yet.

Besides slow hardware and unpredictability, the e-commerce giant’s desire to sell you stuff has remained a top priority. Following the company’s early access rollout in May, tech journalist Casey Newton was also unimpressed with his experience with the company’s Alexa Plus-enabled Echo Show 5 device.

During an August episode of the New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast, Newton found that the device “constantly invites you to spend money with Amazon.” Even when he asked Alexa Plus what it was capable of, it offered him to “explore Gen Z music trends” — only to have it advertise the company’s Amazon Music subscription service.

The “Hard Fork” hosts were also dogged by issues with tech’s reliability, with Newton’s cohost Kevin Roose finding that Alexa Plus had lost the “ability to reliably set and cancel alarms” — a “core thing that I use this product for.”

“And so I said to Alexa, ‘Alexa, cancel the alarm,’” he said on the show. “Silence. Nothing. This is a command that I have issued probably 1,000 times.”

More on Alexa AI: Amazon’s New Alexa AI Sounds Like a Dystopian Nightmare

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📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: OpenAI Releases List of Work Tasks It Says ChatGPT Ca

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has released a new evaluation, dubbed GDPval, to measure how well its AIs perform on “economically valuable, real-world tasks across 44 occupations.”

“People often speculate about AI’s broader impact on society, but the clearest way to understand its potential is by looking at what models are already capable of doing,” the company wrote in an accompanying blog post.

“Evaluations like GDPval help ground conversations about future AI improvements in evidence rather than guesswork, and can help us track model improvement over time,” OpenAI added.

It’s one of the most straightforward attempts to justify its AI models’ financial viability to date, following skepticism that the tech may prove to be a dead end. Experts have often criticized the company’s boastful marketing, such as CEO Sam Altman claiming that its GPT-5 model had achieved “PhD-level” intelligence.

In “early results,” GDPval found that “today’s best frontier models are already approaching the quality of work produced by industry experts” — a clear shot across the bow at critics who say the tech isn’t up to the demands of the workplace.

The 44 occupations where “AI could have the highest impact on real-world productivity” included a litany of professions including real estate sales agents, social workers, industrial engineers, software developers, lawyers, registered nurses, customer service representatives, pharmacists, private detectives, and financial advisors.

The specific tasks, as laid out in a paper, range from creating a “competitor landscape for last mile delivery” for a financial analyst, assessing “skin lesion images” for a registered nurse, and designing a sales brochure for a real estate agent.

Surprisingly, the company found that its competitor Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 was the “best performing model” after being graded by industry experts across 220 tasks, followed by GPT-5, which “excelled in particular on accuracy.”

An extra powerful version of GPT-5, called GPT-5-high, was “rated as better than or on par with the deliverables from industry experts” just over 40 percent of the time. GPT-4o, which was released more than a year ago, scored a mere 13.7 percent.

To be clear, OpenAI is treading carefully around the subject of replacing human jobs altogether. Its language suggests that AI will “support people in the work they do every day” instead of saying outright that anyone could soon be out of work because of AI. That’s unsurprising, considering the negative optics of celebrating the loss of employment.

At the same time, whether that’s really an honest interpretation of the industry’s motives and end goals remains dubious. AI executives have long boasted about replacing human labor with AI — drastic cost-cutting measures that are already starting to backfire for some companies.

There’s also good reason to take OpenAI’s latest evaluation results with a massive grain of salt. We’ve already seen the use of AI cause major headaches for software developers, lawyers, and even customer service representatives, often requiring more human oversight, not less.

Hallucinations, in particular, remain a major sticking point, undercutting the output of large language model-based tools, forcing users to spend more time combing over the output of AIs for false information.

And while AI often excels at generating bursts of text in a particular style, it’s easy for it to go off the rails during longer and less predictable tasks.

Real-world tasks are rarely “clearly defined with a prompt and reference files,” OpenAI admitted.

“Early GDPval results show that models can already take on some repetitive, well-specified tasks faster and at lower cost than experts,” the company wrote. “However, most jobs are more than just a collection of tasks that can be written down.”

More on OpenAI: NBA Coach JJ Redick Says He Spends Hours Talking to His “Friend” ChatGPT

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