Amazon Recruits Thousands to Test AI Service Competing with Microsoft and Google
According to an executive, Amazon.com’s cloud division has attracted numerous customers to test its service, competing with Microsoft and Google in a crucial field of artificial intelligence.
The company also announced new AI tools on Wednesday, including a program to build more conversational customer service agents, access to technology from startup Cohere and to create clinical notes for the health system after a patient visit.
Organizations including Sony, Ryanair and Sun Life have been experimenting with Amazon Bedrock, a service the company announced in April that allows companies to create applications using different AI models, said vice president Swami Sivasubramanian. Such creative technology can produce new text, images and other content on command.
“Our mission is to make every company an AI company,” said Sivasubramania in an interview on the sidelines of a summit hosted by the cloud services provider in New York.
Amazon Bedrock is the company’s response to services announced by Google and Microsoft, cloud rivals that have developed or marketed artificial intelligence that has received significant public attention. Microsoft has invested in OpenAI, the startup that created ChatGPT and the AI model known as GPT-4.
Amazon’s disclosure of thousands of previously unreported Bedrock users shows that its efforts are also generating interest.
On Wednesday, it was announced that the company wants to offer an unprecedented range of AI models to win business, including access to updated technology from Anthropic and Stability AI. Amazon’s role as the largest cloud service provider by revenue – which already hosts countless amounts of customer data – also sets it apart, the company has said.
Amazon Bedrock will be generally available to all customers very “soon,” Sivasubramanian said. He declined to say when the company plans to first address the cost allocation and corporate control issues.
Industry has continued to struggle with the cost of AI more generally. Microsoft on Tuesday announced its highest quarterly capital spending since at least the 2016 fiscal year as it builds data centers to support artificial intelligence and battles other cloud companies for key chips from Nvidia.
Asked if Amazon has given companies with big AI ambitions a deadline to secure access to the chips, Sivasubramanian said: “We’re working with them to make sure we understand their ramp-up schedule.” Meanwhile, the company expanded access to technology based on Nvidia chips, which it deemed more effective in training AI.
The cloud provider also previewed Agents for Amazon Bedrock, which allows companies to create chatbots that perform tasks and provide more personalized responses based on data they own.
An airline could build a virtual agent that books a flight for a passenger based on, for example, the customer’s price, destination and seat requests. The business potential of such agents has taken Silicon Valley by storm recently.
And as part of its AI work, the company specifically appealed to the healthcare industry. It announced a service called AWS HealthScribe that allows software makers to build applications to transcribe and analyze doctor-patient conversations.
The 3M unit plans to use this to speed up clinical documentation, the companies said.
