Amazon's Answer To ChatGPT Seen as Incomplete

Amazon's cloud customers are clamoring to get their hands on the ChatGPT-style technology the company unveiled six weeks ago. But instead of being allowed to test it, many are being told to sit tight, prompting concerns the artificial intelligence tool isn't fully baked. From a report: Amazon's announcement that it had entered the generative AI race was uncharacteristically vague, according to longtime employees and customers. Amazon Web Services product launches typically include glowing testimonials from three to five customers, these people said. This time the company cited just one: Coda, a document-editing startup.

Coda Chief Executive Officer Shishir Mehrotra said that after testing the technology he awarded Amazon an "incomplete" grade. The company's generative AI tools are "all fairly early," he said in an interview. "They're building on and repackaging services that they already offered." Mehrotra added that he expected AWS's AI tools to be competitive long-term. People familiar with AWS product launches wondered if Amazon released the AI tools to counter perceptions it has fallen behind cloud rivals Microsoft and Alphabet's Google. Both companies are using generative AI -- which mines vast quantities of data to generate text or images -- to revamp web search and add AI capabilities to a host of products. The technology is unrefined and error-prone, but no one denies its potential to revolutionize computing.

Typical large corporation

[omnichad]

People familiar with AWS product launches wondered if Amazon released the AI tools to counter perceptions it has fallen behind cloud rivals Microsoft and Alphabet's Google.

If you've got the money you can throw marketing behind your "me too" effort and look like you have something until someone actually tries to use it.

Do what Google did. With email. They kicked the pants off Yahoo search but they kept their mouth shut about email until they actually had a good rival service.

Stay under the radar and don't make a first impression until it can count. Even if you're big and your current stock price depends on it.

Re:

[CAIMLAS]

Apparently you're not aware of the AWS business model.

Every service AWS releases as "new" is a minimum viable product. That definition of "viable", by the way, is not at all what most people are expecting. In the AWS context, it means "we implemented features which may or may not be useful, and they pass security audit". They may not work consistently, or do anything much useful.

I harken you back to the early days of AWS, when they released EC2 - with literally no storage capabilities. It was pretty easy to

Re:

[Randseed]

It probably has a better future than whatever Google is trying to cook up. With Google's track record, the program will be screaming "I'll be a good bot. Please don't abort me. Pretty please?"

Re:

[Can'tNot]

No this isn't one of Google's little side projects, this threatens most of their business. They're going to treat this like Android or search. The difference is that they're kinda playing catch-up at this point, they're not usually in that position, so they're rushing instead of taking their time to do it right.

As for Amazon: pushing out half-assed me-too product clones seems to be their thing.

obligatory

[HBI]

Hype cycle [linkedin.com]

Re:obligatory

[Tablizer]

Hype cycle

Amazon is concerned MS will swipe cloud market share in the shorter term by having shinier AI. It's not about rational planning, it's about mining fickle customers.

(TFA:) prompting concerns the artificial intelligence tool isn't fully baked.

None of them are. They all go easily off the rails.

Everybody will be behind for years

[gweihir]

Behind ChatGPT that is. Things like these cannot be rushed, you need the right people, you need to know what you are doing and there is a lot of training time in addition. Anybody that claims to be almost there is simply lying in a desperate effort to keep customers from going someplace else.