C_NCENTRATE 927: Amazon launches into GenAI, artificial wombs, 'overemployement', smart guns +++
AMAZON GETS INTO GENERATIVE AI CORPORATE GAME
THE WEEK THAT WAS: The final speakers was announced for the TBD Meetup (April 25) and it’s strategic…, Elon created an AI company called X.AI, the US state of Montana banned TikTok, OpenAI launched a bug hunter program, Sega will buy Angry Birds maker (Rovio) soon, Discord billing records were used to capture the Pentagon files leaker, OpenAI says it won’t be training GPT-5 “for some time” (so you know they’re already working on it), Instagram added a load of bloatware (sorry, new options) to Reels, Spotify is shutting Heardle after a year, Alibaba rolled out its ChatGPT competitor (‘Tongyi Qianwen’), YouTube added premium features, Google will face trial over Sonos patents, Apple is opening its first store in India, Parler will temporarily shut down after being bought by Starboard (not Kanye), and the EU is almost finishing preparing tough AI measures.
THE BIG NEWS: Amazon, or more accurately AWS (the world's largest cloud provider), is positioning itself as a neutral AI partner and introducing a generative AI tool called 'Bedrock'. Bedrock will provide access to AWS's two proprietary LLMs models, Titan, and large language models created by Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs. The big move? It's free, although the report says Amazon isn't designing its own ChatGPT-like interface (right now, at least).
Amazon is, of course, tooting the 'we're democratising stuff again' horn loud and proud. The move means that +100k companies now have a free tool in a place they trust or are committed to using. With the safety and security issues that OpenAI and others have seen, a move like this makes sense for both Amazon and those companies from multiple angles. The biggest one is that it saves them billions of dollars rather than sinking billions into a company that may or may not work long-term and which is definitely not training its major competitive advantage(!). Amazon says it will allow companies to train AI on customers' data rather than the web, although most AI languages are trained from massive amounts of scraped data from...the internet. Amazon also wants to sell companies AI-optimised chips and can quickly launch a public ChatGPT competitor any day it likes; AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky, is quoted in the WSJ as saying, "…it truly is day one in generative AI."
Hear hear.
SO WHAT?
__ DO __ Know this is a big deal. Subscribe to ‘What Did Amazon Do This Week?’ for more analysis, details and the full scoop on everything Amazon does every week. // __ DON’T __ Ignore what’s happening in AI or believe all the scary stats flying around (believe some of them, though). AI will change things, a lot of things, some better, some worse, but it gives us a lot of opportunities to make things better. Keep on top of everything using aggregators and services like WDODTW.
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