Amazon Joins the Generative AI Race: A Correspondence with Amazon CEO Jayson Jassy on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
Today, Amazon announced it’s joining the generative AI race. Not by launching its own chatbot, but by making two new AI language models available through its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, which customers will be able to use to build their own bots.
“We have been working on our own LLMs for a while now, believe it will transform and improve virtually every customer experience, and will continue to invest substantially in these models across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences,” Jassy wrote in his letter to shareholders.
The past few months have seen the tech industry foaming at the mouth over the potential of generative AI—algorithms that learn to produce text, code, imagery, and more. The boom has been inspired by the remarkable success of OpenAI’s text-generating bot, ChatGPT, as well as the success of AI-image generators.
Jassy said in a CNBC interview on Thursday morning that most companies don’t want to go through the process of training really good models because it would take a long time.
Jassy said that the goal is to work off of a model that is big and great already and have the ability to change it for their own purposes.
Today, Amazon announced it’s launching a platform called Bedrock, which will provide access to cutting-edge language models from Anthropic and AI21, two startups developing language models that compete with those of OpenAI and Google.
In his letter to shareholders, Jassy also touted AWS’s CodeWhisperer, another AI-powered tool which he said “revolutionizes developer productivity by generating code suggestions in real time.”
In the letter, Jassy also reflected on leading Amazon through “one of the harder macroeconomic years in recent memory,” as the e-commerce giant cut some 27,000 jobs as part of a major bid to rein in costs in recent months.
Amazon disclosed in a Securities filing Thursday that the CEO didn’t receive any new stock awards in the next two years, and that Jassy’s pay package last year was worth some 1.3 million dollars. He got a compensation package of $212 million when he took over as the CEO in 2021.
Generative AI for Amazon and Stability AI: How much do we want? When will we get the answers we need? AWS CEO Adam Selipksy
“Many customers are intently interested in generative AI solutions,” says Adam Selipksy, CEO of AWS. “I would say in most of my customer conversations now questions about generative AI are coming up, with a leading question being, ‘When are we going to be able to get the solutions that we want?’”
Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI so it offers access to the GPT-3.5 model of the language in an application program interface that allows developers to call it directly from their code. Through its cloud platform, PaLM is accessible by anyone.
Selipksy says that it is very unlikely that there is a single model that is the right answer for all customers. “We want to provide choice and flexibility.”
Amazon has two generative language models. Titan Text can generate text from a prompt, and Text Embeddings generates a mathematical representation of text that can be used for tasks such as translation and search.
AWS will also offer access to Stable Diffusion, an AI model for generating imagery, from Stability AI, a startup that is developing a range of open source generative AI models.
Emad Mostaque is the CEO of Stability Artificial Intelligence, which is behind the image model. “[It] is ideal for our open models that can readily go to the customer data.”