Technology drives growth, and the pace of change is accelerating.
That’s why, despite no clear regulatory framework, the world’s biggest tech firms aren’t about to stop their breakneck race to win the artificial intelligence era.
In fact, from a bird’s eye view, they look to be only interested in speeding things up.
With initiatives that span from training for large language models (LLMs) for generative AI to the hardware that will power the next wave of computing, blue chip giants like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, NVIDIA, and IBM have captured headlines while deploying wave after wave of groundbreaking products.
Now, Amazon is seeking to firmly insert itself into the emergent space.
“We’re about three steps into a 10K race,” Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky said about his company’s AI plans earlier this week (June 27) at the 2023 Collision Conference in Toronto.
And while the eCommerce titan doesn’t have its own ChatGPT-style AI product, it wants to provide the tools and infrastructure for enterprise customers to build their own — by leveraging the massive cloud computing capabilities of its AWS platform.
“Customers around the globe are hungry for guidance about how to get started quickly and securely with generative AI,” AWS said in a statement.
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Amazon wants to become the Switzerland of generative AI development
As announced last week (June 22), Amazon has gone so far as to set up a new “Generative AI Innovation Center.”
AI model training and development is typically time-consuming as well as worryingly error-prone, as it involves a ton of labor-intensive, tedious human-led tasks and close supervision by data scientists. Separately, once that training is done, novice users often struggle to diagnose problems with the model or determine how exactly to fix it.
That’s why Amazon vowed to invest $100 million into its Generative AI Innovation Center program, which is meant to connect industry experts with AI-curious AWS customers and partners worldwide to “accelerate enterprise innovation and success” with generative AI and machine learning (ML) tools by letting companies pick their own software and models.
But beyond just the know-how, building and running AI models is also quite expensive — and requires a degree of computing power not commonly found in most firm’s back offices.
That’s why Amazon views its cloud capabilities as a competitive advantage and silver bullet in the AI arms race.
Very few firms are able to afford, much less already have, the operational ability paired with the security to execute an effective AI strategy wholly themselves.
With many businesses already storing their data in AWS, the company sees an attractive opportunity to provide a holistic AI-powered data strategy to help enterprise customers shepherd their data into the backend of generative AI LLM products.
As Jeremiah Lotz, managing vice president, digital and data at PSCU, told PYMNTS Monday (June 26), “the only threat of AI is to businesses who aren’t able to leverage the technology themselves.”
Still, both Microsoft and Google also provide their own cloud storage products — and both already boast advanced, proprietary LLMs: Bard and ChatGPT, which have been infused into nearly every product the two tech firms offer.
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A frothy competitive landscape
As PYMNTS reported, “AI” was mentioned more than 200 times on earlier first quarter earnings calls by Meta, Microsoft, and Google’s parent company Alphabet earlier this year.
But Amazon is facing more than just another form of competition from its perennial ecosystem rivals.
The AI industry as a whole remains under regulatory scrutiny around the globe as lawmakers themselves race to both understand and curb any potential bad behavior or unintended consequences of the innovative technology’s rapid rise and commercialization.
“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, has said.
Until regulation does appear, “Pandora’s box has been opened,” Wasim Khaled, CEO and co-founder of intelligence platform Blackbird.AI, told PYMNTS this Thursday (June 29).
Still, all the uncertainty may make the path AWS is forging an attractive one — providing enterprise customers with the stability of a neutral cloud platform to leverage as an AI testing sandbox, rather than trying their luck out in the wild west of other providers.
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