You would possibly assume Amazon’s greatest swing within the AI race was its $8 billion funding in Anthropic. However AWS has additionally been constructing in-house basis fashions, new chips, large knowledge facilities, and brokers meant to maintain enterprise clients locked inside its ecosystem. The corporate believes these choices will give it an edge as companies of all styles and sizes deploy AI in the actual world.
WIRED sat down with AWS CEO Matt Garman forward of the corporate’s annual re:Invent convention in Las Vegas to debate his AI imaginative and prescient, and the way he plans to increase Amazon’s lead within the cloud market over its fast-rising rivals, Microsoft and Google.
Garman is betting that AI is a service that AWS can ship extra cheaply and reliably than its rivals. By Bedrock, Amazon’s platform for constructing AI apps, he says clients can entry a wide range of AI basis fashions whereas retaining the acquainted knowledge controls, safety layers, and reliability that AWS is understood for. If that pitch holds up, it might assist AWS dominate within the AI period.
“Two years in the past, folks had been constructing AI purposes. Now, persons are constructing purposes which have AI in them,” mentioned Garman, arguing that AI is turning into a characteristic inside massive merchandise slightly than a standalone experiment. “That is the platform that we have constructed, and that is the place I feel you see AWS actually begin to take the lead.”
Most of the bulletins at this yr’s re:Invent fall alongside these strains. Amazon unveiled new, cost-efficient AI fashions in its Nova sequence; brokers that may work autonomously on software program growth and cybersecurity duties; in addition to a recent providing, Forge, that lets enterprises cheaply prepare AI fashions on their very own knowledge.
The stakes are excessive for AWS to get this proper. Whereas Amazon’s cloud unit dominated the smartphone period, smaller rivals like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure have grown at increased charges because the arrival of ChatGPT. Microsoft and Google have surged by tightly integrating with frontier AI fashions—the expertise underlying ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively—attracting enterprises wanting to experiment with cutting-edge capabilities.
This rise of AWS’s rivals has raised questions on Amazon’s broader AI technique, and the way the incumbent will fare within the years to return.
Garman says he’s been listening to these considerations for years, however much less so in latest months. He argues that the tide is popping, pointing to AWS’s stronger-than-expected leads to the corporate’s third quarter as proof that his technique is working.
