American multinational technology company Amazon has announced plans to refine and increase the capacity of its artificial intelligence (AI) products in a bid to compete favourably with competitors in the tech and generative AI eco system.
This is as its contemporaries, Google and Microsoft who are equally big-time investors have expressed uncontrolled excitement over the new technology.
Speaking at its recent conference in New York, Amazon disclosed that it will be adding additional memory to so-called agents that automate work for businesses, while opposing claims that Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have taken a lead in developing generative AI.
Both Google and Microsoft recently rolled out their respective generative AI products which can respond almost instantaneously with full sentences or pictures to complicated prompts or queries.
In an interview, vice president of generative AI at Amazon, Vasi Philomin said, the additional memory will enable each new request to be built on requests that had been previously entered.
The vice president also said that it will allow agents to provide more personalized and more seamless experiences, especially for complicated tasks, while citing an example that the updated AI agents could remember for each subsequent request that a user prefers aisle or window seats on a flight. This feature was previously not possible on Amazon’s generative AI.
Similarly, Amazon is planning to update the Q chatbot it unveiled last November.
According to reports, the chatbot aims to make improved suggestions for writing software code, addressing one of the more popular uses for generative AI while making improvements to help customers of its Bedrock service which provides a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, etc, to detect and filter out so-called hallucinations – a prevailing challenge in the generative AI ecosystem whereby AI creates answers to questions or requests that may be wrong or misleading and is consequently breeding mistrust among users.
In a statement, the vice president of AI products at Amazon Web Services, Matt Wood, had in April, disclosed during an interview that AWS, which oversees much of Amazon’s AI development, is on a pace to reach $100 billion in annual revenue, adding that the new controls will help reduce the occurrence of hallucinations by about 75% for certain uses.
Earlier this year, Google was reportedly criticized for an AI-powered search feature that, among other things, recommended users add glue to pizza sauce to ensure cheese sticks to it.
AI is currently one of the world’s leading technological innovations, catering to the diverse needs of millions of users across the globe.
While concerns have been raised over the roles AI play and the impact it would have on manpower for labour and employment opportunities, especially in Africa and in some countries of the western world, the strides thus far recorded and benefits derived thereof are equally overwhelming.
Specifically, generative AIs such as OpenAI’s Chat gpt series and Microsoft’s Bing have helped in shaping the performance of creatives and researchers, thereby providing immediate response to their prompts and making their jobs less tedious.
