Amazon unveils new AI assistant for businesses

Amazon Web Services increased its focus on generative artificial intelligence (AI), announcing new chips to help train AI models, and a deeper partnership with chipmaker Nvidia to support demand for generative AI applications.

The company also unveiled a preview of its new generative AI assistant, Amazon Q, tailored to businesses that is designed to be used at work.

“I really believe this is going to be transformative,” chief executive Adam Selipsky said.

The new Amazon Q assistant can be used with other AWS services to write code, troubleshoot network connections and generate tests, tasks that could save companies hours of manpower.

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AWS is trying to fill a gap left in the adoption of generative AI in businesses. Security and privacy concerns have led to the banning of the use of other available generative AI applications by some companies, who do not want their data to be used in the software.

“We’re just getting started and we see a lot more potential uses of generative AI,” he said.

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The announcements were made at the 12th annual AWS Re:Invent event, Amazon’s developer conference which is taking place in Las Vegas this week. Some 50,000 attendees are expected to pass through the halls before it closes on Friday. Among the other announcements were new storage products for customers to hold their most frequently accessed data, accelerating data processing and potentially cutting costs for companies.

AWS also unveiled the new generation of its own server chip, Graviton 4, promising the most powerful and energy-efficient chip the company has ever built. Amazon released the first version of the chip, which is used in AWS servers and data centres, in 2018, with the second following in 2020 and Graviton 3 launched last year.

“We were the first to develop and offer our own server processors,” Mr Selipsky said. “We’re now on our fourth generation in just five years. Other cloud processors have not even delivered on their first.”

The company also said it would further develop its partnership with global tech company Salesforce, integrating more products across data and AI.

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Salesforce is one of the company’s major customers. The two companies announced at the event that they would significantly expand their partnership to bring new capabilities to customers of both companies, including making it easier for developers to build and deploy generative AI applications. AWS also showed off new tools to help businesses use their data more effectively.

“To support, you always have to adapt and evolve to continue to continuously challenge ourselves. We try and think differently. We try to give you the capabilities employees want, even some maybe that you’ve never heard of. This isn’t the work of a few months or even a year, but we’re okay with that. At Amazon, we make bold bets,” he said. “This long-term focus, being willing to think differently and long term is a good thing.”