TECHNOLOGY
On Tuesday, Amazon joined the chatbot race by announcing its artificial intelligence assistant: Amazon Q. Unlike ChatGPT and Bard, which are focused on consumers, Amazon Q is designed for workplaces. It aims to help employees with daily tasks, such as summarizing strategy documents, filling out internal support tickets, and answering questions about company policy.
Amazon Q will compete with other corporate chatbots, including Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Duet AI, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise. Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky expressed his belief in Amazon Q’s potential to become a valuable work companion for millions of employees.
With the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI last year, the chatbot race has intensified, with Google, Microsoft, and others following suit with their own chatbot offerings and significant investments in AI development. Amazon, on the other hand, has maintained a more cautious approach to AI, until recently. In September, the company announced a potential $4 billion investment in Anthropic, an AI startup that rivals OpenAI, and plans to collaborate on developing advanced computing chips.
As the leading cloud computing provider, Amazon has an immense collection of business customer data stored on its cloud servers. Adam Selipsky CEO of Amazon Web Services acknowledged that companies are eager to utilize chatbots in their workplaces but are concerned about data security and privacy.
To address these concerns, Amazon has designed Amazon Q to prioritize security and privacy over consumer chatbots. For instance, Amazon Q can adhere to the same security permissions that business customers have already established for their users. In a company where a marketing employee may not have access to sensitive financial forecasts, Amazon Q can emulate that by withholding such financial data from the employee when requested.
Amazon Q can also be granted permission by companies to access their corporate data that is not stored on Amazon’s servers, such as connecting with Slack and Gmail. Unlike ChatGPT and Bard, Amazon Q does not rely on a single AI model. Instead, it utilizes Amazon’s Bedrock platform, which integrates multiple AI systems, including Amazon’s Titan as well as those developed by Anthropic and Meta.
The name “Q” is a nod to the chatbot’s conversational nature, playing on the word “question,” Selipsky explained. It also draws inspiration from the James Bond character Q, known for creating stealthy, helpful tools, and from a powerful “Star Trek” figure, he added.
Amazon Q’s pricing starts at $20 per user per month. Microsoft and Google charge $30 per month for each user of their enterprise chatbots that work with email and other productivity applications.
Amazon Q was among a series of announcements made by the company at its annual cloud computing conference in Las Vegas. Plans to strengthen its computing infrastructure for AI were also unveiled. Additionally, Amazon has expanded its longstanding partnership with Nvidia, the leading supplier of AI chips, to develop what the companies call the world’s fastest AI supercomputer. Source: Amazon
