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Artificial intelligence

Jeff Bezos wants to help you get your junk in your trunk

April 24, 2018

Not satisfied with dropping off parcels inside your home, Amazon can now deliver packages to the trunk of your car.

The news: According to Bloomberg, the e-commerce giant has partnered with General Motors and Volvo to create an app that allows car owners to give keyless access to their trunks for delivery. The service is available to Amazon Prime members in 37 US cities.

Details: The app is part of Amazon Key, a service launched last year that lets delivery agents leave packages inside a house when no one is there. Customers buy a smart lock along with a cloud-based security camera and can then approve and monitor deliveries remotely.

Not so fast: In-home and in-car deliveries might remove the risk of parcels being stolen from people’s porches, but Amazon Key wasn’t hacker-proof when it launched. Researchers from Rhino Security Labs showed late last year that someone could knock the security camera offline. While down, the system just showed a freeze frame of your house, leaving you no way of knowing whether someone was rummaging around inside. Researchers (and hackers) will certainly be poking at the defenses of this new app, too.

Deep Dive

Artificial intelligence

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch

Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.

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Illustration by Rose Wong

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