Amazon Web Services (AWS) is allocating $100 million towards the creation of a new program to help customers design and launch fresh types of artificial intelligence (AI) products, in a bid to compete with cloud service rivals Microsoft and Google. The company is setting up an AWS Generative AI Innovation Centre, which will facilitate partnerships between customers and AWS professionals in the AI and machine learning fields. The program is aimed at clients in finance, healthcare and manufacturing. Amazon hopes the program will lead to a boost in sales of its cloud services as it tries to compete with Microsoft's Azure service and Redmond's partnership with OpenAI, which led to the creation of the language generator ChatGPT, and Google's offering, which pioneered much of the field’s early technology.
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky unveiled the innovation centre at Bloomberg’s technology summit in San Francisco, outlining how free AWS experts will work with companies already using its cloud services, offering advice and assistance on how to develop generative AI applications. The system is being lined up for use by Highspot, Twilio, Ryanair, and Lonely Planet. Amazon launched its own generative AI tools earlier in the year but had come under criticism, with reports stating the announcement was vague and lacked detail. One customer scored the tools an "incomplete", leading to speculation that the budget store was releasing the tools to compete with its cloud rivals' offerings.
However, Amazon has denied that its generative AI tools were rushed or incomplete and said that it is ready for customers to test and provide feedback. Selipsky maintains that Amazon has always taken a more long-term view of the AI market than rivals. The release by OpenAI of its Dall-E image-generation software and ChatGPT chatbot has prompted a rush to incorporate generative AI technology into products and services, with companies looking to develop the field. Bloomberg Intelligence has estimated that the market for generative AI products could grow by 42% to $1.3tn by 2032 as AI models use data to generate new visual, audio and textual outputs.