Amazon enter the race artificial intelligence (AI). The company has announced the launch of bedrockhis own cloud service for AI-generated text and images. With this announcement, Amazon intends not only not to be left behind in the race for innovation in terms of AI, but also to acquire a dominant position in this segment to face its rivals Open AI and Google.
Specifically, according to the blog post of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in which it is explained this toolthrough bedrock, AWS will offer its users the option of Amazon Titan model and various start-up business models, including Anthropic Claude (a Google-backed rival to ChatGPT from former OpenAI employees), Jurassic-2 by AI21 (a language model that specializes in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch) and stable diffusion (a popular open source image generator). As the publication details, a content marketing manager, for example, can use Bedrock to design a targeted ad campaign for a new line of handbags by feeding it data so it can generate social media posts, ads and texts for the web for each product.
“Most companies want to use these great language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years and most companies don’t want to go through that.”said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazonin an interview with the CNBC. “So what they want to do is build off of a foundational model that’s already big and cool and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that’s what it is bedrock«he explained.
long term investments
The announcement comes shortly after jassy be pointed out in the letter sent every year to shareholders that the company is betting decisively on the generative AI. According to the CEO, Amazon intends to “invest heavily” in the great linguistic models (LLM)with the objective of “transform and enhance virtually any customer experience”. “The reality is that if you operate in a large, dynamic, globalized niche market with many well-funded competitors, conditions rarely stay stable for long”Explain jassy.
So, will invest at all levels, from the consumer, sales, brand and experience creation sectors. Nevertheless, jassy It acknowledges that approximately 80% of retail sales still take place in physical stores. Likewise, the manager has been confident that the current circumstances will be a boost to improve the firm, expand its international expansion and be a leader in the field of health and nutrition: «We will emerge from these difficult macroeconomic times in better shape than we entered«.
However, in the letter he has also referred to the layoffs in the company, something that he has called “difficult decision to make”. Amazon announced at the end of March that it was preparing the dismissal of another 9,000 workers in the following weeks that would be added to the cut of 18,000 jobs already undertaken between the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. The company’s decision to carry out a new round of layoffs sought to optimize costs in a context marked by the «uncertainty that exists in the near future»after the company completed the second phase of its annual budgeting process (‘OP2’).