As tech giants rush to develop and deploy generative AI, Amazon wants the world to know it, too, is working to deploy its own AI.
In his second annual shareholder letter, company CEO Andy Jassy makes it clear that Amazon is working on its own generative AI. After reviewing some of the company’s other endeavors, such as Project Kuiper, its healthcare initiatives, and its grocery business, Jassy sets the record straight regarding its AI development:
One final investment area that I’ll mention, that’s core to setting Amazon up to invent in every area of our business for many decades to come, and where we’re investing heavily is Large Language Models (“LLMs”) and Generative AI.
Jassy makes it clear that Amazon and AWS plan to fully leverage the new technology and give customers the ability to utilize it cost-effectively:
We have been working on our own LLMs for a while now, believe it will transform and improve virtually every customer experience, and will continue to invest substantially in these models across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences. Additionally, as we’ve done for years in AWS, we’re democratizing this technology so companies of all sizes can leverage Generative AI. AWS is offering the most price-performant machine learning chips in Trainium and Inferentia so small and large companies can afford to train and run their LLMs in production. We enable companies to choose from various LLMs and build applications with all of the AWS security, privacy and other features that customers are accustomed to using. And, we’re delivering applications like AWS’s CodeWhisperer, which revolutionizes developer productivity by generating code suggestions in real time. I could write an entire letter on LLMs and Generative AI as I think they will be that transformative, but I’ll leave that for a future letter. Let’s just say that LLMs and Generative AI are going to be a big deal for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon.
With Microsoft, Google, Meta, Alibaba, and Baidu leaning heavily into generative AI, Amazon was a notable exception among Big Tech, at least in terms of what was publicly known. Jassy setting the record straight is likely to reassure investors that the company has no plans of being left behind.