Amazon wants investors to know that it will not be left behind in the most recent arms race among Big Tech companies about artificial intelligence.
Using the same technology that powers ChatGPT and other comparable AI chatbots, Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy wrote to shareholders on Thursday that the business is “investing heavily” in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
“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 substantially invest in these models across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences,” Jassy stated in his letter to shareholders.
The comments, which are a part of Jassy’s second annual shareholder letter since becoming CEO, allude to the pressure that many tech businesses experience in articulating how they might capitalize on the fast developing market for AI solutions. Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), and Microsoft (MSFT) have all talked about their increased focus on generative AI technology since ChatGPT was made available to the general public in late November.
This technology can produce intriguing essays, stories, and pictures in response to user suggestions. Jassy claims that Amazon wants to make machine learning chips more affordable so that “small and large companies can afford to train and run their LLMs in production.” For the purpose of producing responses to user prompts, large language models are trained on enormous amounts of data.
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday morning, Jassy stated that “most companies want to use these large language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years, most companies don’t want to go through that.”According to Jassy, “what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that is already big and great, and then they want to have the ability to customize it for their own purposes.”
Amazon on Thursday introduced a brand-new service called Bedrock in light of this. According to a blog post by Amazon, it effectively makes foundation models—large models that have already been trained on a ton of data—from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon accessible to customers via an API.
According to Jassy, Bedrock “will change the game for people.” He was quoted by CNBC.
Jassy also praised AWS’s CodeWhisperer in his letter to shareholders. He claimed that this AI-powered tool “revolutionizes developer productivity by generating code suggestions in real time.”
I think LLMs and generative AI will be so transformational that I could write a full letter about them, but I’ll save that for a later letter, Jassy said. “Let’s just say that LLMs and Generative AI are going to be big deals for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon.”
In the letter, Jassy also reminisced on guiding Amazon through “one of the harder macroeconomic years in recent memory,” a period that saw the e-commerce behemoth ax 27,000 positions as part of a big effort to cut expenses.
In the letter, Jassy stated that there were “an unusual number of concurrent challenges this past year” before detailed the actions that Amazon took to reconsider some of its free delivery options, give up on some of its physical store concepts, and drastically reduce overall staff.
Jassy’s compensation package was worth about $1.3 million, according to information released by Amazon in a securities filing on Thursday, and the CEO did not earn any additional stock awards in 2022. (Jassy received a pay package in 2021 that was primarily made up of stock awards and valued his overall salary at about $212 million.))
Jassy wrote in his letter that despite the difficulties at Amazon, he is “optimistic and energized by what lies ahead.” “I firmly believe that our best days are ahead of us,” Jassy continued.
