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AWS re:Invent brought 60,000 people to Las Vegas this week. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
LAS VEGAS — Amazon’s artificial intelligence strategy came into focus this week with the unveiling of Amazon Nova, its new family of homegrown AI models, a new Amazon Bedrock marketplace, and more news from AWS re:Invent.
It turns out we’ve seen this before. As the company’s AI strategy emerges, there are numerous similarities to its e-commerce business, including low cost, broad selection, products from Amazon and its selected vendors, and a marketplace. (This Fortune piece by reporter Jason Del Rey explores these parallels in detail.)
After spending four days in Las Vegas soaking in the news, attending sessions, and talking with AWS executives and attendees, my colleague John Cook and I offered our takeaways and dissected Amazon’s AI strategy on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, recorded on location at the GeekWire Studios booth on the show floor.
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John Cook and Todd Bishop record the GeekWire Podcast at re:Invent. (GeekWire Photo / Holly Grambihler)
Top takeaways
Bezos and Amazon see AI as the new electricity: The company is positioning AI as a fundamental layer that will be integrated into every application and service, similar to how electricity became a ubiquitous utility.
Amazon is seeking to demonstrate that it has been an AI company for many years, even if the recent perception has been that it is behind in the field.
AWS CEO Matt Garman said he sees AI inference as a fourth building block for AWS, joining cloud computing, storage and database services.
Amazon’s Trainium, Inferentia, and Graviton processors were a big focus, continuing to evolve as an alternative to Nvidia and other companies.
Amazon is applying its classic e-commerce playbook to AI, focusing on providing choice and lower costs, among other parallels between the strategies.
The company is offering its own AI models as an alternative to other providers like Anthropic, similar to how Amazon Basics competes with brand names.
Andy Jassy, the former AWS CEO, was back on stage at the event for the first time this year since becoming Amazon CEO, describing how Amazon is using AI to build and shape own products and services.
Jassy said Amazon is focused on practical, customer-centric applications of AI rather than just showcasing the technology,
Major cloud providers see AI as a key driver, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others racing to integrate AI capabilities into their cloud platforms and services.
As the largest cloud provider, Amazon has the advantage of leveraging a big base of existing customers as it seeks to expand further into AI infrastructure, services, and applications.
However, much of the focus for customers is still on more basic services — cloud, storage and database — underscoring the need for Amazon and other cloud providers to continue innovating in these areas.
Despite all of the buzz and interest in artificial intelligence, it’s not yet clear how how fundamental AI will be in the near-term versus the long-term to unlock business value for cloud services.
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
