Tech giant Amazon has been conspicuously absent from the mounting AI wars in Silicon Valley, despite its years-long development of voice assistant Alexa and investment in cloud computing and machine learning.
But at a recent all-hands meeting for cloud computing employees, executives assured staffers that the company hasn’t fallen behind.
“We have a lot happening in the space,” Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s vice president of database, analytics and machine learning, said at the March meeting, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. “We have a lot coming, and I’m very excited to share some of our plans in the future.”
When generative AI exploded onto the scene with the launch of ChatGPT in November, it was the formerly nonprofit research group OpenAI that won laurels. Tech giants Google and Microsoft (the latter of which invested billions in OpenAI) scrambled to catch up, launching chatbot products Bard and Bing, respectively, not long after.
But Amazon was nowhere in the mix, despite operating a massive cloud computing business, having the most employees and a market valuation of more than a trillion dollars.
Amazon Web Services has announced partnerships with AI companies like Stability AI and Hugging Face, which will allow other companies to use Amazon’s infrastructure to build artificially intelligent products. The company uses machine learning across many of its business divisions, including Alexa and search on Amazon.com. But its failure to launch a consumer-facing generative AI has left some to speculate that the company is lagging.
Recently, a select group of venture capitalists and AI company founders gathered at the Cerebral Valley AI conference, where Amazon appeared to be noticeably absent. Some attendees said it seemed like the tech giant had fallen behind its peers in the AI race.
At the recent all-hands meeting, executives seemed to push back on that idea.
Chatbots are just “one example of an application of these kind of models,” Sivasubramanian said.
