Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy is finally going all in on generative AI. In his annual letter to shareholders on Thursday, the Amazon chief said the technology is the company’s next major product opportunity, up there with Marketplace, Prime, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Jassy also laid out why Amazon is uniquely positioned to thrive in the age of generative AI, explaining how the company has all of the pieces in place to be the go-to tech firm for both enterprise customers’ and consumers’ generative AI needs.
“The amount of societal and business benefit from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all,” Jassy wrote in his letter. “We’re optimistic that much of this world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS.”
Amazon has kept a relatively low profile when it comes to generative AI compared to the likes of Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL), which have spent the last year boasting about their AI offerings and debuting new generative AI-powered products and services.
But Amazon has been investing heavily in the technology, including pouring $4 billion into AI startup Anthropic. This has become a kind of flagship offering for the company, akin to how Microsoft positions its relationship with OpenAI.
Now, Jassy seems ready to push Amazon as a major generative AI player like its rivals. That includes laying out the company’s approach to the technology, from the chips used to train and run AI models to apps like its Rufus chatbot for Amazon’s Marketplace and Amazon Q, which writes and debugs code for AWS users.
In his letter, Jassy touted Amazon’s investments in its Graviton CPU chips, as well as its Trainium chip for training AI models and Inferentia chip for inferencing those models, as key offerings that set Amazon apart from the competition. Inferencing refers to using AI models to complete tasks.
And while Jassy said that Amazon offers a vast array of Nvidia (NVDA) chips to its customers for training and deploying AI models, he positioned Amazon’s chips as viable alternatives that can meet customers’ needs at a time when Nvidia’s chips are in short supply and the price to run AI models soars.
Jassy also appeared to take a shot at his Big Tech rivals' AI models themselves, saying that Amazon offers models from a slew of companies, including Anthropic, Stability AI, Mistral, Meta, Cohere, and Amazon’s own models, rather than just one major AI model.
“Customers don’t want only one model,” Jassy said. “They want access to various models and model sizes for different types of applications.”
While Microsoft and Google offer multiple AI models to their enterprise customers, the companies have spent much of their time hyping their respective AI platforms. Microsoft regularly points to its relationship with ChatGPT developer OpenAI as a major factor that differentiates it from other Big Tech firms, while Google is focused on rolling out and hyping its Gemini foundation models.
Jassy also pointed to Amazon’s efforts to build its own generative AI apps, including its Amazon Q platform for AWS developers and Rufus chatbot. I used an early version of Rufus, and while I found it helpful in some respects, it’s also still prone to errors when answering some queries.
Now that Amazon is going full force into the generative AI realm, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft and Google respond. We’ll find out more when both companies host their respective developer conferences next month.
Email Daniel Howley at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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