Amazon’s Satellites Take Flight

The Elon Musk company Space X’s Starlink, where constellations of low earth orbit satellites provide internet access across the world, has been an outstanding success and is a monopoly. That is now about to change with Amazon launching 27 satellites on April 28, 2025, as the first lot of its Project Kuiper, which is targeting the same market. According to Amazon, “The satellites will travel at a speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,359km per hour) on orbit and circle the planet approximately every 90 minutes.”

Altogether, Amazon plans to launch 3,236 satellites. It is still less than half of Starlink’s count, but will be a base from which to target the segment. More than 2,000 employees of Amazon are part of this venture that involves an outlay of $10 billion. Unlike the speed and efficiency with which Musk unleashed Starlink, Project Kuiper has been a story of delay. It has been in the works since 2019 and was slated to have its first satellites operational by last year. The sector’s US regulator, Federal Communications Commission, has given it a deadline to launch half its total fleet by next year, something that it might not be able to meet. Services being provided through the Amazon satellites just launched will be available later in the year.

ChatGPT’s Shopping Update

OpenAI has launched a shopping option on its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT challenging Google Shopping. The key difference is that unlike the latter, the chatbot’s results will not throw up advertisements. When users look for products using the search feature, the chatbot will provide images of products as well as details such as pricing and reviews, and will also include direct links to websites where purchases can be made.

Reddit Goes Local

Reddit first introduced an AI-powered translation tool that allowed users to translate posts into French in France, and followed it up with such features for languages in other countries. It has now announced this for Indian languages too, first for auto-translating posts into Hindi, soon followed for Bengali. People only versed in Indian languages can now join a conversation taking place in another language on any of the platform’s subreddits.

Chip Wars

Chinese companies, struggling for years to build high-end chips that could compete with those from the US giant Nvidia, are now developing promising alternatives. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Huawei is testing its most powerful AI processor yet. Called Ascend 910D, this latest iteration, it is believed, could be more powerful than Nvidia’s H100. The first batch of samples is expected to come out by late May.

artificial intelligenceChatGPTNvidiaRedditTech talktechnology