Over the last few weeks, there have been a few announcements. Some splashy, some under the radar. All with potential impact for news. Today, I share three I think are worth paying attention to, all for different reasons.

1. OpenAI’s reasoning tools show their workings

Named O1 and O3, there is a professional level tool that can reason out complex questions and a slightly more lightweight version that is available to pro users. These are less for question and answer and more to solve strategic questions. 

Check out this example, which could have helped me plan the best time for our upcoming Media, Tech, and AI event in San Francisco (thankfully we chose dates this AI approves of).

What if consumers could use this to help follow reasoning and form their own opinions, seeing which facts they want to switch out or disagree with? Imagine asking, “Which candidate should I vote for?” and seeing everything the system knows about you (a lot, see here) and the various policies.

2. Apple News is getting a “+ Food”

On February 21, Apple announced that “Apple News+ subscribers will soon have access to tens of thousands of recipes, restaurant reviews, kitchen tips, and more, right in the Apple News app.”

As always with Apple, the design is beautiful. And it seems it is being rolled into the US$12.99/month price point. Compare this to NYTimes US$6/month for cooking and US$25 for their all-in subscription. Apple News is currently only in four countries, but in January this year the FT reported “Apple steps up expansion of its News platform.”

While some news organisations report meaningful traffic from Apple, it’s hard not to consider cannibalisation, especially with such an attractive consumer price point. 

3. Grok is actually pretty good

I’ll admit I had preemptively dismissed Grok by X. I have not deleted the X app (and still mostly call it Twitter, but I barely look at it anymore). Then someone messaged me, “Playing with Grok on X. News summary is perfect.” 

This is the summary they sent me:

When I played around with it, I couldn’t replicate the bulleted list. However, I did get an impressive round-up of news. It was more wordy and article-like, as you see below. 

The sourcing was a series of posts on X in a swipeable format plus a clickable box of “relevant Web pages.” Interestingly, the second listing on the Web pages was clearly copyrighted to a media company yet taken from a syndicated site, which shows how convoluted AI licensing can get.

Grok also has advanced capabilities in the same way as OpenAI above so I ran the same query. Grok told me I was wrong — for valid reasons it seems. Again, it’s interesting to see the reasoning. Grok gives you the choice to see it as a bar entitled “thinking for X seconds.” And although a search takes longer — I think this was 37 seconds — the reasoning is excellent.

I should not have been so quick to dismiss Grok. And it also shows there are more LLMs being launched. At the end of 2024, there were four clear winners, as per my report. Grok shows this is up for grabs.

4. Amazon announced its Alexa+

Perhaps the most interesting of all the announcements, at least from a news media perspective, was the most low key: Amazon’s Alexa+. In their words: “It’s not just about knowing a lot of things, it’s about deeply understanding and bringing it all together into an accurate and real-time response.”

Why is this so interesting? 

There are already 600 million Echo devices. These are in people’s homes just waiting for this software update. The voice seems to be as good as OpenAI, and it can also run agentic tasks and seems to plug seamlessly into smarthome set-ups — which means it can actually do useful things right now.

They may be behind the AI race, but it seems Amazon is taking it seriously and has really shown up. 

As with all good AI, it’s highly personalised. As they say: “The new Alexa is highly personalised — and gives you opportunities to personalise further. She knows what you’ve bought, what you’ve listened to, the videos you’ve watched, the address you ship things to, and how you like to pay — but you can also ask her to remember things that will make the experience more useful for you. You can tell her things like family recipes, important dates, facts, dietary preferences, and more — and she can apply that knowledge to take useful action.”

How does it relate to news? 

According to Axios here, Amazon has been in discussion with news media. When I reached out to the team at Amazon, I didn’t get a response. If you’ve been in talks with them, I’d love to hear from you confidentially. And I’ll do more digging over the coming weeks and report back.  

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