When Samsung showed off its latest smartphones in Paris yesterday, a big part of its focus was on the AI software inside rather than the foldable displays on the outside.

The big picture: The focus on AI is likely to continue when Google unveils its latest Pixel devices at an event next month and when Apple debuts new iPhones this fall.

Driving the news: Samsung used a media event yesterday to unveil two foldable phones — the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6 — along with new watches, earbuds and the Galaxy Ring, a competitor to Oura.

• But the big push, both on stage in Paris and in marketing materials, was on AI software.
• That includes an expansion of Samsung's homegrown translation app and new transcription capabilities, as well as features that tap Google services, such as circle-to-search and the Gemini chatbot.

Fun fact: Samsung mentioned AI two dozen times in its press release announcing the new phones.

Zoom out: Google and Apple are next.

Google has scheduled an Aug. 13 "Made by Google" press event and is putting AI front and center.

• The company is expected to announce updated Pixel phones and devices and new Android operating-system features.
• At its I/O developer conference in May, Google highlighted a wide range of AI work, though it's not clear what will be ready in time for launch alongside the new Pixel devices.

Apple is likely to put its AI features, dubbed Apple Intelligence, at the forefront when it debuts the iPhone 16, likely some time in September based on past years.

• At WWDC, Apple laid out a broad strategy that includes modest features such as custom emoji and an AI image playground, along with a significant improvement to Siri and the eventual ability to use AI to find information stored across mail, messages and other apps.
• In addition to the Apple-designed features that run either on-device or in a secure private cloud session, the next version of iOS will also allow people to directly query ChatGPT from within Siri.
• Apple is expecting AI-driven demand to fuel a 10% bump in iPhone sales in the second half of this year — from 81 million in 2023's second half to 90 million, per supplier sources cited by Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, the Apple rumor mill is expecting only minor hardware updates to the new iPhones this fall.

• Normally that might dampen interest in upgrades. But Apple has said that, of its existing models, only the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max will be able to run Apple Intelligence.
• That means most people who want to try out Apple's approach to AI will need a new phone.

Yes, but: The onus will be on each of the companies to prove that their AI features are more than party tricks.

• Apple will have the added challenge that not all of the features it has announced are coming with the launch of Apple Intelligence — some of the more significant ones are unlikely to arrive until 2025.

Amazon Web Services announced updates across several of its AI products yesterday as it aims to outpace competitors.

Why it matters: AWS' lead in cloud has been narrowing, and the company is betting that speedy development of AI products will make its cloud services more attractive to customers.

What they're saying: "We've done over 320 generative AI major feature launches into general availability this year, and that's more than twice than all of the other large cloud providers combined," Matt Wood, AWS' vice president of AI products, told Axios in an interview earlier this week.

Driving the news: AWS announced that its Bedrock customers will have the ability to adjust the behavior of large language models — including Anthropic's Claude 3 — using their own data; in a technique called fine-tuning.

• AWS is also making it easier to combine privately held data to improve accuracy and provide specialized results, and is launching a guardrail feature that detects "hallucinations."
• "Contextual grounding checks can detect and filter over 75% hallucinated responses," Amazon says in a blog post.

The big picture: One of Amazon's primary goals is to make it easier for companies to build their own generative AI products.

• The company also announced AWS App Studio: a generative AI-powered service that can create enterprise-grade applications through natural language instruction.
• "A user simply describes the application they want, what they want it to do, and the data sources they want to integrate with, and in just minutes, App Studio builds an application that could have taken a professional developer days to build from scratch," the company says.

Between the lines: AWS is on track to bring in $100 billion for Amazon this year, driven in part by strong demand for AI capabilities, the company says.

What we're watching: Amazon and its Big Tech peers and competitors are spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI computing power to support new capabilities.

• "TBD on whether there's enough incremental revenues to deliver a positive [return]," Bernstein analysts wrote to clients earlier this year. "But if Big Tech doesn't invest, they leave themselves exposed to disruption."

The U.S. is dominating private sector investment in AI, according to a new report from S&P Global.

Why it matters: AI fever is fueling a boom in the stock market, and is viewed as a linchpin to future economic growth.

Zoom in: The U.S. private sector invested more than three times as much in AI than any other country did from 2013 through 2023, according to the new report.

• The U.S. created 5,509 AI companies during that time, nearly four times second-place China's 1,446.

Yes, but: "Private sector investment in AI is not the entire story," S&P wrote.

• "We expect governments will also play a crucial role in AI's development," especially in China, where much of its "spending on AI is likely to be directly government funded."

• Generative AI may or may not be coming for your job. But it's definitely taken control of the sparkle emoji. (Bloomberg)
• Intuit is cutting 1,800 jobs amid a shift to AI, though it also plans to hire a similar number of workers in various areas. (Silicon Valley Business Journal)

The San Diego Zoo released the first photos of Yun Chuan and Xin Bao, its newly arrived pandas. I was hoping to check out the furry guys on vacation, but they aren't greeting the public for another few weeks.