Conference attendees in Las Vegas are accustomed to encountering people standing on the street, aggressively trying to hand them flyers for, well, let’s just say for a variety of different services.
So it was a surprise, and a sign of the times, when someone standing on the Las Vegas Strip handed me a flyer for something else entirely during the Amazon Web Services re:Invent cloud conference this week.
“NEED GPU?” it read, in bold letters.
The promotional materials were from a company touting what it described as the “largest stockpile of GPUs available for the best price” — underscoring the soaring demand and short supply of the graphics processing units instrumental for training artificial intelligence models.
It’s a new world, and of course AI was the big theme inside the longrunning AWS re:Invent conference, as well. The company’s announcements included a new AI assistant for work called Amazon Q.
Before heading back to Seattle, I got a chance to speak with Matt Wood, AWS vice president of product, about the new service and the new era of AI for business.
Several of his comments illustrated the rapid evolution of technology this year:
The rise of generative AI this year: “I have not seen this level of energy and enthusiasm and excitement and engagement from customers probably since the very earliest days of AWS when it was really kicking into high gear. We were thrilled but really having to work hard to keep up with customers’ enthusiasm for building. Very, very similar this year, with generative AI.”
AI and regulated industries: “One of the surprises to me over the past 12 months are the regulated industries. These are industries that potentially don’t have the best reputation for being in the vanguard of technology: insurance, financial services, health care, life sciences, all these sorts of things. But in an ironic twist, all of the regulations that they’ve been working through over the past 20-30 years have been around data privacy, and data governance, and data standards, and structured data quality. They’re all the things you need to have in place to successfully apply your own data to generative AI. … For a very small incremental investment, they can start applying that data with generative AI really, really quickly; really, really easily.”
Changing perspectives on data structures: “I was joking with a customer yesterday, they were saying that they have really, really old data. And a lot of it is structured, but they’ve got this notes field, and it’s just natural language text. And we were joking that, even a year ago, you would have said, ‘I’ve got all this structured data, thank goodness.’ But now you’re like, ‘Oh natural language text, thank goodness, that’s the gold, right?’ So it’s totally changed how you think about the data and where the value is.”
One of the notable aspects of Amazon Q is its ability to connect to business data from a variety of applications, including Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Amazon S3. Asked about the execution of these features, Wood explained that the connections are made through APIs, but he also said there’s more cooperation among cloud rivals than people might expect.
“We have good relationships with with a lot of folks that we compete with in other areas. We sell a lot of Windows licenses on EC2 as an example, and through Amazon WorkSpaces,” he said. “So we have we have really good working relationships. The integration as it’s done under the hood is done through APIs, but that is not because we have any animosity towards these things.”
Hear more highlights from my conversation with AWS VP Matt Wood on this week’s GeekWire Podcast. Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Postscript: On Friday afternoon, the newsletter Platformer reported that some Amazon employees are raising concerns about accuracy and privacy issues involving Amazon Q, which they say have come up in the internal use. Q has been “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data,” according to leaked documents, including “the location of AWS data centers, internal discount programs, and unreleased features,” as Platformer reported.
Amazon downplayed the issues and specifically denied some of the claims.
“Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon. No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback,” an Amazon spokesperson said in statement to GeekWire. “We appreciate all of the feedback we’ve already received and will continue to tune Q as it transitions from being a product in preview to being generally available.”
The statement added, “Amazon Q has not leaked confidential information.”
In the final segment of this week’s show, we listen back to AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s thinly veiled jabs at Microsoft and OpenAI during his re:Invent keynote this week. You may notice that one of those clips is of lower quality. That’s because it’s from my own recorder, sitting in the crowd. The reference was removed from the official Amazon recording after the fact.
Update: Amazon got back to me on this. This portion of the keynote isn’t available for on-demand viewing because they don’t have permission/license to display the CNBC content in the on-demand version. In other words, they weren’t intending to pull any punches by not putting the comment online.
Related Coverage:
- Sphere of influence? Google’s big Vegas ad buy clouds the landscape at Amazon re:Invent
- AWS unveils ‘Amazon Q’ AI assistant, jabs at Microsoft and OpenAI at re:Invent
- Inside the AI chip race: How a pivotal happy hour changed Amazon’s strategy in the cloud
- Amazon puts Fire TV Cube to work, repurposes streaming device for desktop computing
