2024-04-14 03:01:25
Microsoft and its ally OpenAI launched a mad race for generative artificial intelligence last year, immediately overtaken by Google. They dominate this now crucial technology, thanks to their ever more efficient models, while Amazon has struggled to stay in the game.
Adam Selipsky, boss of AWS (Amazon’s cloud branch), “disagrees” with this summary.
“We have large and small models, some are very fast, others very precise. Customers need choice,” he continues, citing the qualities of the different models available on the AWS Bedrock platform, like Claude (Anthropic), Llama (Meta), those of Mistral and those of Titan, an Amazon brand.
“Maybe other cloud providers don’t have a great selection,” jokes the executive.
In Silicon Valley as elsewhere, generative AI – production of text, images or even lines of code on a simple request in everyday language – has established itself as an essential industrial revolution.
Especially for cloud companies, which store the data of organizations of all sizes, market AI services, and, now, host the models necessary for this new technology.
Amazon, a pioneer of online commerce but also of the cloud, dominates remote computing. At the end of 2023, AWS had 31% market share, according to Stocklytics.
– “Remain leaders” –
But Azure (Microsoft, 24%) and Google Cloud (11%) are gaining ground.
Thanks to its approximately 13 billion dollars injected into OpenAI, Microsoft is “leading the way”, according to analyst Dan Ives.
The IT giant and Google are competing with generative AI assistants to facilitate the creation of applications and content (emails, advertising campaigns, etc.).
Amazon seems more discreet. AWS is little known to the general public, and Alexa, its voice assistant, does not yet hold conversations like ChatGPT.
“But we have been doing AI for more than 25 years. In 1998, on the e-commerce site it was called +personalization+”, underlines Adam Selipsky.
“We have thousands of AI experts and we quickly pivoted some of them to generative AI,” he adds, notably to design the Trainium chips (training AI models), the platform Bedrock (launched in October) and Amazon Q, an AI assistant.
“If we execute on our plans, and continue to be really creative, I think we will remain the leaders in the cloud.”
Boss of AWS since 2021 – when the former leader, Andy Jassy, replaced Jeff Bezos at the head of Amazon – Mr. Selipsky wants his customers and partners as proof.
Including Nvidia, star of generative AI thanks to its GPUs, ultra-sophisticated processors. The Californian company “just announced on stage, with me, that it is building a ‘super computer’ on AWS, with its chips, to do its own internal research and development,” he insists.
– “Infallible” –
The Seattle firm has above all invested four billion dollars in Anthropic, a rival of OpenAI which also benefits from significant funds from Google.
The start-up will use AWS and Trainium chips to “build future versions of its models”, welcomes Adam Selipsky. “And it will help us improve our technology.”
Asked about the exciting applications of generative AI, he mainly cites examples of productivity gains.
The pharmaceutical company Pfizer, “which has nearly 20 AI pilot projects on AWS, estimates that it will launch (drugs) more powerfully, more quickly, and achieve (up to) a billion dollars in annual savings thanks to to AI,” he says.
Many companies like airlines are creating chatbots to interact with their customers. Even if they are not infallible.
“Societies are finding that human beings are not infallible either,” says Adam Selpsiky. “And in many cases, models perform better, in terms of accuracy and utility, than living agents.”
But the layoffs at AWS have nothing to do with AI replacing employees, he assures.
The cloud platform has just cut hundreds of positions, particularly in sales and marketing, to better focus on its priorities: AI.
“AWS has thousands of job offers,” says the boss. “That was the case yesterday and it will be the case tomorrow.”
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