Amazon cloud executives share their latest AI strategies, and why choice matters more than owning the top model

• Amazon is emphasizing customer choice over market dominance with its AI strategy.
• Amazon unveiled a new series of AI models called Nova this week.
• Amazon's Bedrock tool supports diverse models from multiple providers, unlike OpenAI.

Amazon believes AI models are not in a winner-take-all market.

The company drilled down on this message during this week's re:Invent, the annual extravaganza for its Amazon Web Services cloud unit. Even after unveiling a new series of homegrown AI models called Nova, which, by some measures, are as powerful as other market leaders, Amazon stressed the goal is to provide more choice to customers.

AI models have become the new battleground for tech supremacy since OpenAI released its popular ChatGPT service in late 2022. Companies have rushed to up the ante, trying to outperform each other in model performance.

Amazon has largely been absent from this race. Instead, it has tried to stay neutral, arguing that the generative AI market is so big and varied that customers will want more model choices that fit their different needs. Amazon still believes this is the right approach.

"There are some that would want you to believe there's just this one magic model that could do everything — we never believed in it," Vasi Philomin, AWS's VP of generative AI, told Business Insider. "There'll be many, many winners and there are really wonderful companies out there building some amazing models."

Different positioning

As part of this, Amazon has used Bedrock, an AI development tool that gives access to many models, as its main horse in the AI race. This approach differed from OpenAI, and Meta, which mostly focused on building powerful models or chatbots. Google has a leading AI model in Gemini, but also provides access to other models through its Vertex cloud service, and Microsoft has a similar offering.

This week, Amazon further leaned into its strategy, announcing an array of new updates for Bedrock, including a marketplace for more than 100 specialized models and a distillation feature that fine-tunes smaller, more cost-effective models. It also unveiled new reasoning and "multi-agent" collaboration features that help build better models.

Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS's VP of AI and data, told BI that AWS "pioneered" the model-choice approach and intends to continue to promote it as a "core construct" of the business.

"GenAI is a lot bigger than a single chatbot or a single model to reach its full potential," Sivasubramanian said.

More companies appear to be taking the multi-model approach. According to a recent report by Menlo Ventures, companies typically use 3 or more foundation models in their AI services, "routing to different models depending on the use case or results."

As a result, Anthropic, which Menlo Ventures has backed, doubled its share in the AI model market to 24% this year, while OpenAI's share dropped from 50% to 34% year-over-year, according to the report.

'Choice matters'

Amazon may have no choice but to stick to this narrative. When OpenAI captivated the world with ChatGPT a couple of years ago, Amazon was caught flat-footed, leading to an internal scramble to find answers, BI previously reported. Its first in-house model, called Titan, drew little attention.

Having its own advanced, powerful AI models could help Amazon. It might attract the largest AI developers and promote AWS as the leader in the AI space. It would potentially also encourage those developers to continue building within AWS's broader cloud ecosystem.

Amazon isn't giving up on building its own advanced models. Last year, it created a new artificial general intelligence team under the mandate to build the "most ambitious" large language models. On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled the early results of that effort with its Nova series, which includes a multimodal model capable of handling text, image, and video queries.

Still, Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy downplayed any notion of Nova going after competitors. He said he's been surprised by the diversity of models developers use and that Nova is just one of the many options they will have.

"There is never going to be one tool to rule the world," Jassy said during a keynote presentation this week.

It's hard to know how successful this approach is as Amazon doesn't break out its AI revenue. But Jassy was even more bullish on the AI opportunity during October's call with analysts. He said AWS was now on pace to generate "multi-billion dollars" in AI-related revenue this year, growing at "triple-digit percentages year over year." Amazon's AI business is "growing three times faster at its stage of evolution than AWS did itself," he added.

Rahul Parthak, VP of data and AI, go-to-market, at AWS told BI that Nova's launch was partly driven by customer demand. Customers have been asking for Amazon's own model because some prefer to deal with one vendor that can handle every aspect of the development process, he said.

Amazon still wants other models to thrive because its goal isn't about beating competitors but offering customers "the best options," Parthak added. He said more companies, like Microsoft and Google, are following suit, offering more model choices via their own cloud services.

"We've been pretty thoughtful and clear about what we think customers need, and I think that's playing out," Parthak said.

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