Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says AI benefits ‘will surprise us all’

Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy is finally going all-in on generative AI. In his annual letter to shareholders On Thursday, Amazon’s chief said the technology is the company’s next big product opportunity, along with Marketplace, Prime and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Jassy also explained why Amazon is uniquely positioned to thrive in the era of generative AI, explaining how the company has all the pieces in place to be the go-to technology company for the generative AI needs of business and consumer customers. .

“The amount of social and business benefits arising from the solutions that will be possible will surprise us all,” Jassy wrote in his letter. “We are 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 companies like Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL), which have spent the past year boasting about their AI offerings and launching new generative-powered products and services. by AI.

But Amazon has invested heavily in technology, including investing $4 billion in AI startup Anthropicwhich has become something of a core offering for the company, similar to how Microsoft positions its relationship with OpenAI.

Now, Jassy appears ready to promote Amazon as a major generative AI player like its rivals. This includes defining the company’s approach to technology, from the chips used to train and run AI models to applications like the 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 important offerings that differentiate Amazon from the competition. Inference refers to using AI models to complete tasks.

And while Jassy said Amazon offers a wide range 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 in a at a time when Nvidia chips are in short supply and the price to run AI models skyrockets.

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Jassy also appeared to attack his Big Tech rivals when it comes to the AI ​​models themselves, saying that Amazon offers models from a number of companies, including Anthropic, Stability AI, Mistral, Meta, Cohere and Amazon’s own models, rather than of just one big AI model.

“Customers don’t just want one model,” said Jassy. “They want access to multiple models and model sizes for different types of applications.”

While Microsoft and Google offer various AI models to their business customers, the companies have spent much of their time promoting their respective AI platforms. Microsoft regularly points to its relationship with ChatGPT developer OpenAI as a key factor that differentiates it from other big tech companies, while Google is focused on releasing and marketing its Gemini-based models.

Jassy also highlighted Amazon’s efforts to build its own generative AI applications, including its Amazon Q platform for AWS developers and chatbot Rufus. I used an earlier version of Rufus and although I found it useful in some ways, it is also prone to errors when answering some questions.

Now that Amazon is entering the generative AI domain full force, it will be interesting to see how Microsoft and Google respond. We’ll find out more when both companies hold their respective developer conferences next month.

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.

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