Reporting from Las Vegas … Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky doubled down on the new era of artificial intelligence with a series of product announcements and thinly veiled but repeated criticism of Microsoft and OpenAI.
Addressing thousands of developers at its annual re:Invent conference here this morning, the cloud giant announced “Amazon Q,” which Selipsky described as “a new type of generative AI powered assistant designed to work for you at work,” with initial applications for AWS developers available in preview.
Amazon Q can leverage business data from a variety of applications, including Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Amazon S3, while respecting privacy and security controls to prevent unauthorized access, according to a rundown of the features on stage by Matt Wood, AWS vice president of artificial intelligence.
“Amazon Q is going to make a huge difference for businesses,” Selipsky predicted, adding later that it’s “just the start of how we’re going to continue to reinvent the future of work.”
Amazon has more than its share of Star Trek fans, starting with founder Jeff Bezos. “Q” is the name of a character in the franchise who’s described as “an extra-dimensional being of unknown origin who possesses immeasurable power over time, space, the laws of physics, and reality itself, being capable of altering it to his whim.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared with Selipsky to announce an expanded partnership with Amazon Web Services. Nvidia’s widely used H100 GPUs are used for running AI models in the company’s EC2 P5 instances for deep learning and high-performance computing.
Also appearing on stage with the AWS CEO was Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, discussing their recently announced partnership, in which Amazon will invest up to $4 billion in the startup as a counterpoint to the duo of Microsoft and OpenAI.
Amodei said the companies are working to optimize Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia AI chips “for our use cases and hopefully for other use cases,” signaling potential broader impact.
Without mentioning Microsoft by name, Selipsky made the Redmond company a recurring theme as he sought to differentiate AWS from its rival in the cloud and AI. After announcing a new version of Amazon’s Trainium chip for training AI models, for example, he alluded to Microsoft’s recent announcement of its own Maia AI Accelerator.
“Meanwhile, a lot of other cloud providers are still just talking about their own AI chips,” he said.
Discussing Amazon’s Bedrock service, which provides access to a wide range of large language models, Selipsky contrasted the approach with Microsoft’s tight partnership with OpenAI, without mentioning the companies by name, alluding to the recent turmoil at the AI powerhouse involving the ouster and return of its CEO Sam Altman.
“You don’t want a cloud provider who’s beholden primarily to one model provider,” Selipsky said. “I think the events of the past 10 days have made that very clear.”
Later, he showed a Nov. 9 CNBC story about Microsoft restricting employee access to ChatGPT, saying he “can’t conceive” of other cloud providers offering generative AI services for customers when they’re not confident their models and data are secure.
