Amazon yesterday announced what it is calling Amazon Bedrock, described as “a new service for building and scaling generative AI applications, which are applications that can generate text, images, audio, and synthetic data in response to prompts.”
The Wall Street Journal writes that this makes Amazon “the latest tech giant to try to cash in on generative AI, the technology behind ChatGPT.
Unlike the offerings from Alphabet and Microsoft, which have been designed for the general public, Amazon’s is “targeting corporate customers. In addition to new AI tools, the company is expanding access to custom-made chips that it says can run AI software more efficiently and cheaply than competitors … AWS is forging a different path, so far avoiding a major investment in an outside AI company or consumer-facing tools. It says it wants to act as a neutral platform for businesses that want to incorporate generative AI features. By not being tied to any one AI startup, AWS is marketing itself as the Switzerland of the cloud giants.”
Gizmodo writes that “all this means the online retail giant isn’t putting any multi-billion dollar investments into a separate company like Microsoft has with OpenAI or sinking billions of dollars into generative artificial intelligence like Google and Meta have. The only direct competition is Amazon’s new CodeWhisperer, a generative AI model used to generate code. Microsoft’s similar GitHub CoPilot has already been sued by developers who say Microsoft blatantly ignored their code license.”
KC’s View:
I’m intrigued by the idea that Amazon decided to take a different approach that the other tech giants. Is this a matter of playing catch-up in an unaccustomed way? Being more surgical and strategic? Or not taking the big swing for reasons connected to economics and budgets?
I have no idea. I don’t even know if this could be characterized as a small swing.
Maybe this is more about mythology than anything else, but I wonder if Jeff Bezos would’ve done something bigger and more consequential.
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