Twenty years after being born as an experiment by Amazon to try to sell the excess capacity of its data centers, the subsidiary that the world knows as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most profitable component of the group founded by today’s tycoon Jeff Bezos. And it leads the global market for cloud services, a position disputed by Microsoft with its Azure cloud. At the end of November, AWS held its annual conference in Las Vegas, with 65,000 people attending.
Adam Selipsky has been the CEO of AWS since 2021, when he succeeded Andy Jassy, ??who was appointed to replace the founder, who found a way to enjoy his fortune. Selipsky was the protagonist of the conference, with a leitmotiv: to exploit the close association between the progression of the cloud and the unexpected explosion of generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI, for its acronym in English) that has broken waters this year.
The Gen-AI and those who are in trouble have the status of a media event, but at the same time they are the subject of tiresome sociological treatment in the media and of unproven expectations, as demonstrated by the abundance of hallucinations, as they call the responses. nonsense when faced with poorly formulated questions. However, its results are impressive.
In Las Vegas, Selipsky dropped something that the apologists of the novelty had not thought of: “No one knows how this market, not yet configured, is really going to work. The only one making money is Nvidia, which sells chips to all of us, but the day will come when it starts to be profitable for AWS and its competitors, who sell AI capabilities to companies. On the other hand, consumer applications seem to flourish, but in practice they are not being monetized.” With this warning in the mouth of a guy who is a pleasure to listen to, he was in charge of inaugurating re:Invent 2023. Selipsky came to say that generative AI is not something separate, an invention that came out of nowhere: on the contrary, “without cloud , today there would be no artificial intelligence.”
From which it follows that Gen AI will be the workhorse of AWS in 2024. It is a compensation: AWS, which has been researching AI for years, has been surprised, like all observers, by the appearance of OpenAI and the This dazzling agreement with Microsoft, which has upset more than one person. For this reason, re:Invent 2023 has been a staging of AWS’s leap into the arena to compete with Microsoft (Azure Chat GPT) and with Google Cloud and its brand new Gemini.
AWS presented a plethora of new features in Las Vegas. Among the most notable, Bedrock is a managed service for language models (LLM) and built on learning based on a large volume of data: since 2017, Sage Maker, owned by AWS, has accumulated more than 100,000 customers, probably the largest ML (machine learning) network in the world. The models rethought by AWS will facilitate the necessary replacement of Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant that has already entered decline.
What will be most talked about from Las Vegas is called Q and it is the biggest announcement of re:Invent 2023, a chatbot designed in cooperation with Nvidia, whose founder Jensen Huang guaranteed the audience that AWS will receive them whenever their more modern hardware. To overcome Alexa’s limitations, Q has been trained with 17 years of data held by AWS, to challenge Copilot (Microsoft) and Duet for Workplaces (Google), its competitors. A war to launch new technological weapons
