Alexa is getting a big makeover for the ChatGPT era.

Amazon announced a new premium tier for its voice assistant called Alexa+, which will offer a slew of new generative AI-powered capabilities, at a flashy event in Manhattan this week. The long-awaited upgrade will make Alexa chattier, better at following complex instructions, and more integrated with services like food delivery apps or news publishers, Amazon execs said.

“It's a complete re-architecture that has never been done at this scale, and it's the largest integration of services, agentic capabilities and LLMs that we know of anywhere,” Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, said at the event.

Ever since ChatGPT redefined what an AI chatbot could be more than two years ago, Amazon’s Alexa has suffered by comparison. Panos Panoy, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, conceded the current Alexa too often mishears, misunderstands, or forces users into “Alexa speak,” an unnatural style of speech adapted to the system’s shortcomings.

Panoy framed generative AI infusion as finally delivering on the original vision for Alexa. “Until right this moment, we have been limited by the technology,” he said.

Agent Alexa: The new rollout consists of much more than “taking an LLM and jacking it into the original Alexa,” as Rausch put it.

For one, Alexa+ spans groups of systems and capabilities Amazon refers to as “experts.” They specialize in tasks like booking reservations, ordering groceries, or monitoring your home with connected devices–all presumably performed more conversationally and adeptly than current Alexa integrations. These experts draw on “tens of thousands” of integrations from partners ranging from smart-home manufacturers and ticketing services to food delivery apps and news publishers.

It also allows for complex agentic capabilities in a self-directed manner, like following a sequence of tasks to locate a kitchen repair service and schedule an appointment to fix an oven, Rausch said. Execs also demonstrated how Alexa+ might ingest documents like a recipe, then answer specific questions about its contents.

Keep reading here.—PK

Earlier this month, 22 states filed a lawsuit against New York’s new climate superfund law, which requires companies—past and present—that have contributed significantly to creating greenhouse gases to “bear a share of the costs of needed.”

The lawsuit claims the law encroaches on the federal government’s power to regulate interstate policy and that it goes against the due process clause by retroactively penalizing “a select few energy producers who lawfully extracted and refined fossil fuels.”

The law isn’t the first of its kind: Vermont passed a climate superfund act in May of last year, which is also facing a legal challenge. But environmental lawyer Amanda Halter told Tech Brew that it inspired backlash because of New York’s economic might. Halter is a partner in Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP’s Environmental & Natural Resources practice.

“[New York has] such an enormous economy,” Halter said. “If this law actually survives—in whole or in part—the implications of that are enormous.”

Halter says it and Vermont’s law were modeled off of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, a federal superfund act Congress enacted in 1980. CERCLA has been “resilient to legal challenges” and allows the EPA to retroactively hold parties responsible for environmental contamination.

But if the New York law is found unconstitutional, Halter said that could threaten CERCLA.

“If this whole concept of retroactivity gets a fresh look, and these laws fail in part on that basis,” she told Tech Brew, “I think you'll see some clever lawyers saying, ‘hey, let's re-look at the retroactive components of CERCLA and revisit whether that still is constitutional.”

What’s next: An initial hearing has yet to be scheduled, and New York Attorney General Letitia James hasn’t made a comment on the lawsuit. In a statement to multiple news outlets, Governor Kathy Hochul’s deputy communications director for energy and the environment Pat DeMichele said “corporate polluters should pay for the wreckage caused by the climate crisis — not everyday New Yorkers.”

“We look forward to defending this landmark legislation in court,” DeMichele said.—TC

Apple’s had quite the month: The company said it will commit over $500 billion in domestic manufacturing and expansion over the next four years, it might be rolling out a whole new design for the iPhone, and it topped the Clean200 list of sustainable companies for the third year in a row.

The list—on which Apple is followed by battery manufacturer CATL, Microsoft, and Tesla—ranks companies based on how much revenue eachput toward sustainable processes and materials, like green HVAC systems, sustainable agriculture, and water efficiency technologies.

• To be eligible for the list, companies must be large cap, publicly traded, and “earn more than 10% of total revenues from clean sources.”

Andrew Behar, the CEO of As You Sow, the non-profit that produces the list alongside magazine Corporate Knights, told Tech Brew that the more money a company makes—in general aids—its ability to be able to spend on sustainability.

“The most revenue [gets] you higher up,” Behar said. “Apple makes a lot of money, so that’s significant: The way that they have their minerals mined, the way that they get certified, all that stuff.”

Behar told Tech Brew that As You Sow and Corporate Knights created the list in 2016 to help people who wanted to “move away” from owning stock in oil and gas companies find alternatives in which to invest.

“If you had invested $10,000 in the Clean200 and then every year updated your portfolio, you would more than double outperform the all world energy index,” Behar said. “We're just trying to help people with analysis—we're not investment advisors.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

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