Hi Everyone. This is Take Off, your personal tech news barista. We'll whip up frothy, piping hot insights that'll give you that extra jolt you need to tackle the day.

Here's what we're serving up today:

• No Luck Swiping? AI is here! 👉📱

• It’s Raining Lawsuits for Amazon🧑‍⚖️

• Asteroids ☄️

• Futuristic Fridays 🔮

No Luck Swiping? AI is here! 👉📱

Ever wondered why AI hasn't infiltrated your love life yet? Well folks, that day has finally arrived.

Gone are the days of the thumb gym, AKA incessant swiping on dating apps. Say hello to the age of AI-facilitated romance!

It's no surprise that the AI gold-rush has targeted the juicy $4.6 billion dating apps market.

1/ A Little Teaser, Maybe?

First up, we have Teaser AI that takes digital wooing to a new level. Before you swipe left or right, it lets you chat with an AI version of your potential match. Who needs real people when bots can do the trick, right?

2/ A Helping Bot

Not entirely comfortable handing your heart over to AI? YourMove.AI is here to rescue. Think of it as a digital Cyrano de Bergerac, assisting you with profile creation, brainstorming those ice-breaking openers, and crafting witty replies.

3/ The Elite AI Matchmaker

Last but not least, Teleport is a new invite-only app, flaunting an "AI matchmaker that learns from a user’s every activity." For a not-so-cheap $111/month, it delivers just 3 handpicked matches per week.

If the idea of AI in your dating life still gives you the heebie-jeebies, why not go all-in and just marry an AI? A lady in the Bronx did just that, pledging eternal virtual love to her AI companion, Eren.

A recent survey found 74% respondents saying emotional relationships with AI chatbots don't count as cheating.

It's worth noting though that the survey was run by Illicit Encounters, a site for those seeking affairs, so the results aren't exactly reliable.

It’s Raining Lawsuits for Amazon🧑‍⚖️

Two kids on the block that do not seem to be getting along at all recently are Amazon and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Amazon seems to be in some hot water (again), with the FTC gearing up to throw a lawsuit fiesta with the e-commerce giant at the top of the guest list.

What’s the lawsuit about?

The allegation on Amazon is that it’s playing a nasty game of favorites on its online marketplace by rewarding merchants who use its logistic services and giving the cold shoulder to those who don't.

• Third-party merchants pay a commission to Amazon on each sale and can also pay the giant for services such as warehousing, shipping and advertising, for a fee obviously.

• Amazon has created these optional services so necessary that it’s tough doing good biz without them. This had led to the company’s average cut from each sale jump to over 50% from 35%.

FTC’s Love Hate-Hate Relationship with Amazon

FTC has already let loose three legal Rottweilers on Amazon this year with the above lawsuit allegedly being the The Big One.

• Amazon was fined over $30 million for failing to delete kid’s data collected by Alexa speakers and allegedly spying on users via Ring devices.

• They've sued them for allegedly bamboozling consumers into signing up for Prime membership and making cancellation harder than escaping a labyrinth.

• They're also taking a magnifying glass to Amazon's proposed $1.65 billion acquisition of Roomba maker iRobot Corp.

Dayum! Even my ex didn't have so many issue with me!

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

Sir Richard Branson's rocket plane enters commercial service. The rocket plane, Unity, carried three Italians to conduct experiments in space. 🌌✨.

Narwhal for Reddit is sticking around. Popular third-party Reddit apps like Apollo and RIF are shutting down but Narwhal will live on, with a new subscription model.💡🔄

Microsoft is boosting Bing and Edge with new AI-powered shopping tools. This includes auto-generated buying guides, review summaries, and a Price Match feature. 🛍️🤖

🔮 Futuristic Fridays 🔮

Harvard's popular coding course, CS50, is going high-tech, with an AI instructor teaching from this fall. Professor David Malan hopes this will offer a near 1:1 teacher-student ratio, supporting individual learning styles 24/7. 🤖🎓

A new study has shown how a "smart hand exoskeleton" can help stroke patients relearn skills like playing music. The glove-like device mimics natural hand movements and even has sensors to provide tactile feedback! 🎵🤖

MIT's CSAIL has trained a system, MAGE, to understand and generate images. It turns images into "semantic tokens" and then fills in gaps, achieving image recognition and creation. It's a promising step for advanced computer vision models, though still a work in progress 🚀💻.

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