Greetings, AI Explorers!

Today’s edition is packed with major AI breakthroughs and new developments. From “Microsoft launching its new AI Model” to “AI- Powered shopping becoming a reality”, the landscape is shifting fast.

As AI continues to integrate into everyday life, staying ahead of these developments is crucial. Let’s dive in!

Here’s what’s in store for you today:

• 🧠 Microsoft Launches Phi 4: Small AI Models with Big Reasoning Power

• 🚀 Amazon Debuts Nova Premier: Its Most Powerful AI Yet (But With Limits)

• 🛍️ Visa and Mastercard Dive Into AI-Powered Shopping, Ushering in “Agentic Commerce”

LATEST DEVELOPMENT

Phi 4

🧠 Microsoft Launches Phi 4: Small AI Models with Big Reasoning Power

Microsoft has released a new generation of compact AI models under the Phi 4 family, delivering powerful reasoning capabilities in smaller packages — with performance that matches or rivals much larger systems like OpenAI’s o3-mini.

Key Details:

• New Models: Phi 4 Mini Reasoning, Phi 4 Reasoning, and Phi 4 Reasoning Plus.

• Competitive Performance: Phi 4 Reasoning Plus matches OpenAI’s o3-mini on the OmniMath benchmark despite being much smaller in size.

• Compact and Capable: Designed to run efficiently on low-latency, resource-limited devices like edge hardware or educational platforms.

• Training Strategy: Combines synthetic problems, OpenAI model distillation, and reinforcement learning to balance performance with size.

The Bigger Picture:

Phi 4 is part of Microsoft’s ongoing strategy to democratize powerful AI, proving that bigger isn’t always better. By making high-performing reasoning models open and lightweight, Microsoft is enabling more accessible AI innovation — especially where compute power is limited.

Will Phi’s compact brilliance force other giants to rethink their “bigger is better” approach?

NOVA PREMIER

🚀 Amazon Debuts Nova Premier: Its Most Powerful AI Yet (But With Limits)

Amazon has unveiled Nova Premier, the crown jewel of its Nova model family, built for tackling complex, multi-step tasks- but it stops short of true reasoning capabilities, putting it at odds with top-tier models from OpenAI and Google.

Key Details:

• Nova Premier: Amazon’s most capable AI model to date, supporting text, image, and video input (but no audio).

• Massive Context: Can process up to 1 million tokens (~750,000 words) at once.

• Benchmark Mixed Bag: Strong on knowledge retrieval (SimpleQA) and visual understanding (MMMU), but lags on coding (SWE-Bench), math, and science benchmarks.

• Pricing: On Amazon Bedrock, $2.50 per million input tokens and $12.50 per million output- matching Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro.

• No “Reasoning” Mode: Unlike OpenAI’s o4-mini or DeepSeek’s R1, Premier doesn’t slow down to think- it's fast, not fact-checky.

• Use Case: Optimized for distillation- training smaller models to mimic its behavior for narrow, efficient applications.

The Bigger Picture:

Nova Premier signals Amazon’s ambition to stay competitive in the AI arms race - even if it isn’t aiming for the same “reasoning-first” direction as rivals. Instead, it’s playing to strengths in infrastructure, developer tooling, and enterprise scale.

Can Amazon carve out an edge by powering others’ AI behind the scenes - even if its own model isn't the smartest in the room?uture of personalized education - on-demand, multilingual, and voice-driven?

E-COMMERCE

🛍️ Visa and Mastercard Dive Into AI-Powered Shopping, Ushering in “Agentic Commerce”

The credit card titans are stepping beyond payments and into full-blown AI-powered personal shopping, giving AI agents the green light to browse, recommend, and even buy - all while you sit back and let the algorithm do the heavy lifting.

Key Details:

• Visa’s “Intelligent Commerce”: Lets AI agents shop based on user preferences and limits, turning Visa into more than just a payment processor.

• Mastercard’s “Agent Pay”: Enables AI chat agents to curate, recommend, and purchase — even choosing the most cost-effective way to pay.

• Trusted Partnerships: Both companies are collaborating with tech powerhouses including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, IBM, Mistral AI, and Stripe.

• Personalized Experiences: Think AI stylists that shop for your birthday party outfit — using weather data, your vibe, and venue details to pick and purchase the perfect look.

• Payment Integration: Mastercard will lean on tools like One Credential to streamline payments made by AI on your behalf.

• Industry Wave: This comes alongside similar moves from PayPal, Amazon (“Buy for Me”), Google, Perplexity, and OpenAI, all exploring agentic commerce.

The Bigger Picture:

We’re watching the checkout line vanish in real time. Visa and Mastercard are turning your cards into AI-powered assistants, aiming to make autonomous shopping the norm — with security, personalization, and smart recommendations baked in.

The future of e-commerce might not be browsing — it might be briefing your AI and letting it shop while you live your life. Ready to let your card do the clicking?

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📰 Everything else in AI today

• 🇨🇳 NVIDIA: China not behind in AI race

• 🧠 Murati: $2B raise, full board control

• 🎬 Runway: Gen-4 lets photos guide consistent characters

• 💻 Microsoft: AI writes 30% of company code

• 📱 Xiaomi: MiMo matches bigger models on reasoning

• 🖼️ F-Lite: 100% licensed open image model released

• 🗣️ Duolingo: 148 new AI-driven language courses launched