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Amazon is rethinking its grocery business, and as part of that, it will shut down all of its remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores. The company will convert some locations into Whole Foods Market stores.
"While we've seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven't yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion," the company wrote in a blog post. Amazon added that it would help workers at Go and Fresh stores to find positions elsewhere within the company.
For now, Amazon is focusing its grocery efforts on Fresh deliveries, Amazon Now (a 30-minutes-or-less delivery option it recently introduced to compete with DoorDash and Instacart) and Whole Foods. It plans to open more than 100 new Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years.
Amazon also says it will introduce new types of physical locations in the coming years. One concept it's considering is a "supercenter" that would offer a broad selection of goods from Amazon, including household items, groceries and "general merchandise." I dunno, that just sounds like a supermarket to me.
Meanwhile, the checkout-less Just Walk Out tech that the company implemented in Go and Fresh stores is still in use at third-party locations, including hosp
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The French government is saying au revoir to Microsoft Teams and Zoom as it embraces a home-grown alternative. By next year, civil servants across all departments will have switched to French videoconference platform Visio, as EuroNews reports.
As with Teams and Zoom, Visio has an AI-powered transcription tool. Visio runs on a French company's cloud infrastructure as well. The platform has around 40,000 users and it's been in testing for the last year. The government expects the switch to help reduce costs by as much as €1 million ($1.2 million) each year for every 100,000 users.
The decision to ditch Microsoft Teams and Zoom is part of a broader effort to rely less on foreign software services — particularly US ones. Under the Suite Numérique project, France also plans to jettison the likes of Gmail and Slack for government use.
"The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool," David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform, said. "This strategy highlights France's commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or ser
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OpenAI is releasing a new app called Prism today, and it hopes it does for science what coding agents like Claude Code and its own Codex platform have done for programming.
Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research.
That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals — in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography.
"None of this absolves the scientist of the responsibility to verify that their references are correct, but it can certainly speed up the process," said Kevin Weil, vice president of science for OpenAI, when asked during the demo the possibility of ChatGPT generating fake citations.
"We're conscious that, as AI becomes more capable, there are concerns around volume, quality and trust in the scientific community," he later added. "Our view is that the right response is not to keep
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