Investment of $100 Million by Amazon to Educate Cloud Customers on Artificial Intelligence
The cloud division of Amazon, which is the leading provider of cloud services, is creating a software that will assist clients in creating and launching innovative artificial intelligence products. This move is aimed at competing with Microsoft and Google in the generative AI market.
Amazon Web Services is investing $100 million to establish the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, which will connect customers with the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning experts. They help a number of healthcare, financial services and manufacturing clients build custom applications using new technology. Highspot Inc. and Twilio Inc., which sell sales and marketing software, are early adopters of the innovation center, Amazon said.
The goal is to help sell more cloud services and get customers to turn to AWS when building new generative AI applications instead of Microsoft’s Azure, which has already taken an early lead thanks to partnerships with ChatGPT maker OpenAI or Alphabet Inc. .’s Google, which pioneered much of the early technology that supported this new frontier.
“We’re bringing our in-house AWS experts free of charge to a whole range of AWS customers, focusing on people with a significant AWS presence, helping them step up their efforts to get reality with generative AI, to get beyond the talk,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said Thursday at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco.
Amazon unveiled its own generative AI tools earlier this year, but longtime employees and customers found the announcement unusual, Bloomberg reported in May. One customer who tested the tools gave the technology an “imperfect” rating, while people familiar with AWS product launches wondered if Amazon released the AI tools to counter the perception that it was lagging behind Microsoft and Google.
Amazon has denied that its generative AI tools have been rushed or incomplete, saying the technology is ready for customers to test and provide feedback. Asked about Amazon’s position in the AI race, Selipsky said, “Are we really going to talk about a three-step to 10,000 race? Amazon has always taken a much longer-term view of the world than any other company.
With the viral releases of OpenAI’s Dall-E imaging software and ChatGPT chatbot, companies are rushing to incorporate the technology into their products and services, and cloud giants are positioning themselves to cash in. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh estimates that the market for generative AI, where artificial intelligence models analyze volumes of data and use it to generate new images, text, audio and video, could grow 42 percent to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032.
