Amazon joins Microsoft, Google in AI race spurred by ChatGPT

The world’s largest cloud provider wants to become the Switzerland of generative AI and let companies pick their own software and models.

Amazon Web Services is so far avoiding a major investment in an outside AI company or consumer-facing tools. (Photo by DENIS CHARLET / AFP)

Amazon’s cloud computing division announced new artificial intelligence offerings Thursday, becoming the latest tech giant to try to cash in on generative AI, the technology behind ChatGPT.

Unlike Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft, which have announced products for the general public, Amazon’s Amazon Web Services 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.

“This whole area is really, really new and it truly is day one in generative AI,” said Adam Selipsky, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, in an interview. “There’s going to be a lot of invention by a lot of different companies.”

AWS, which is the largest provider of cloud computing services in the world, is the latest tech company to lay out its generative AI strategy. The top cloud companies have been pushing the new tools they say will revolutionise work and creativity, in part in hopes of reinvigorating demand for cloud-computing services that has been cooling.

The three largest cloud companies — AWS, Microsoft and Google — have put generative AI at the centre of their sales pitches recently to try to capitalise on the explosion in interest in the technology, which has wowed users with its ability to perform functions like drafting memos and producing computer code at near-human levels of sophistication.

“The entire world is scrambling right now,” said Shishir Mehrotra, the CEO of AI document startup Coda and an early tester of AWS’s new AI products.

He said the current rush for companies to ready themselves for this new technology resembles the shift from computers to smartphones.

Each of the cloud infrastructure leaders has begun marking out their own lanes. Microsoft has been in front thanks to its multibillion-dollar investment in the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI. Google has invested hundreds of millions into another generative AI developer, Anthropic.

Both Microsoft and Google, via its chatbot Bard, have also invested in AI tools that are aimed largely at consumers.

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.

“We believe that customers are going to need a lot of different generative AI models for different purposes, and it is unlikely that any one model is going to serve all customers or even all the needs of one customer,” said Mr. Selipsky.

AWS is selling access to multiple large language models, allowing companies to build generative features off more than one.

It is a strategy that some big tech companies diving into generative AI are already taking. For example, last month Salesforce Inc. announced a generative AI tool, Einstein GPT, that is built on OpenAI’s tech. But the company also has a tool for Slack, which it owns, that is built on Anthropic’s Claude model.

“I don’t think generative AI is a market where there’s a huge winner-take-all dynamic,” said Coda’s Mr. Mehrotra.

Among the models AWS is making available through its program are ones made by Anthropic, Stability AI and AI21 Labs.

Also in the group is AWS’s language model, called Titan, which can perform similar functions like taking natural language prompts and turning them into blogs and emails.

AWS said its AI will be more suited for businesses because it can be trained only on a customer’s data — say its internal cache of documents — rather than the broader set of webpages that other models use. That could make it a safer choice for businesses that are nervous their private data could end up shared and mixed up with other companies’.

Another feature the company is pushing is CodeWhisperer, which generates and fixes computer code. It will compete directly with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which uses generative AI. Previously Amazon had made CodeWhisperer available only to a small number of users.

The Wall Street Journal