What Did Amazon Do This Week? - 3-12-2023 [+180 LINKS]
What Did Amazon Do This Week? - 3-12-2023 [+180 LINKS]
PACKED RE:INVEST OVERSHADOWED BY Q HALLUCINATIONS
AWS hosted its annual come-to-Jesus meeting this week. re:Invent saw thousands travel to Vegas to press the Amazon flesh. New chips, services, initiatives and products were all announced, but there’s a big problem.
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Amazon announced more than ten big things at AWS re:Invent this week, along with a slew of smaller updates. Here’s their blog for the entire event. The main announcement? A ‘we’ve got generative AI tool too’ announcement for the (terribly named) generative AI assistant ‘Q’ that has tongues wagging for all the wrong reasons (see below). Here’s a rundown of everything that was announced:
Amazon Q - generative AI assistant specifically for work will help corporate customers search for information, write code and review business metrics. Q will also be in Connect.
AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2 next-gen AWS-designed chips
Updates for Amazon Bedrock and more models
Five new Amazon SageMaker capabilities
‘AI Ready’, Amazon’s plan to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people by 2025
Three new AWS serverless innovations
New security features and capabilities
Four new capabilities for AWS Supply Chain
Amazon One Enterprise - palm prints at the ready to enter the office
Amazon S3 Express One Zone - a new purpose-built storage class for running applications that require extremely fast data access
AWS Cloud Institute - a virtual program to train developers.
Four new integrations for a zero-ETL (extract/transform/load) future
Overall, all these announcements will meet with investor, media and customer approval. The issue? Q (essentially Microsoft’s Copilot) doesn’t seem to be fully baked yet. According to Platformer, employees are leaking information that there are big accuracy and privacy issues. According to the leaked documents, Q has severe hallucinations (it makes up answers) and leaks confidential data. Not just any leaks either, big chonky ones, including the location of AWS data centres, internal discount programs, and unreleased features. Not a good look if you are pitting this against the likes of OpenAI, which, while not perfect, doesn’t leak information like this. A key thing to get right if you are selling something based on being more secure than consumer-grade tools like ChatGPT.
Amazon reacted with a statement that played on the preview element of Q: “Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon,” a spokesperson said. “No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback. We appreciate all of the feedback we’ve already received and will continue to tune Q as it transitions from being a product in preview to being generally available.”
Of course, Amazon will be working round the clock to fix any and all issues to show the world it has chops in the generative AI space and isn’t just here to partner till the cows come home. Faster and cheaper chips are great, but hooking AWS customers further in to Amazon with a tool that works specifically with, and for, their business is almost like digital handcuffs.
SO WHAT?
These announcements will help the profitable division be even more profitable making investors happy and less worried about Amazon’s generative AI trajectory. As will patent applications for an automated machine learning “pre-trained model selector. The reports about Q will concern all, but time will tell if the issues discussed will remain or cause people to abandon the good ship OpenAI anytime soon. Should Q go well, Amazon has another card to play and another thing to get further push claws into your business.
Ronald Gladden star of ‘Jury Duty’ has signed an overal deal with Amazon MGM Studios. /Variety
Amazon has a spports docuseries with Mark Wahlberg about Drug Kingpin Owen Hanson in the works. /Deadline
Amazon’s Prime Video will split a group of ten NASCAR races with Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT. /Variety
Amazon has hired Dan Berger (Amblin) as VP of Global Media & Entertainment Communications. /Deadline
Amazon Studios Global Formats Chief CJ Yu left the company. /Deadline
Amazon is working on a Mexican ‘The Boys’ spinoff. /Deadline
Amazon released a trailer for ‘Fallout’. /Deadline
Amazon cancelled ‘Riches’. /Deadline
Amazon is working on a Jamie Lee & Nikki Glaser comedy series called ‘Unsettling’. /Deadline
Amazon Prime Video has signed ‘Tinder Swindler’ Producers for a new crime documentary titled ‘Dead in the Water’. /Variety
‘Bye Bye Barry’ overtook ‘Kelce’ to become Prime Video’s most-watched documentary film in the US. /Deadline
Amazon fired Producer Joel Silver over verbal abuse. /Variety
Amazon has renewed ‘Reacher’ for a third season before the secon has aired. /Variety
Amazon MGM Studios and the Jim Henson Company will develop a series based on Brian & Wendy Froud’s Faeries. /Variety
Amazon released a trailer for season four of ‘The Boys’. /Deadline
Amazon will stream Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour from Dec 13. /THR
The lord giveth… Amazon Prime Video will not be moving forward with ‘The Grand Tour’. /Variety
And he taketh away. Amazon confirms ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ will be renewed for fourth season. /Deadline
AWS announced 127 updates this week. /Amazon
Amazon launched AWS S3 Express One Zone, an S3 tier aimed at data-intensive apps with a 10x read speed improvement and a 50% lower request cost than standard S3. /TechCrunch
AWS is experimenting with a chip that can solve key quantum computing problems. /Verge
XXImo became one of the first Visa card issuers in the EU to process payments entirely through the AWS Cloud, as it scales up its services to help customers meet new regulatory requirements. /Amazon
Tripp.com, Axiata, Aerodyne, Amgen, Merck, Accor, LG, Cathay, and BYD selected AWS as their cloud provider (various iterations/focuses). /Amazon
Amazon’s new Echo frame go on sale this week. /Verge
Amazon-Backed E-Plane Startup, Beta, is expanding in upstate NY. /Bloomberg
Amazon unveiled Q, its AI chatbot for workers. /BI
Amazon redesigned the Alexa app. /Verge
Amazon Fire TVs now auto play ads on startup instead of displaying the homescreen. /Verge
Amazon launched Guardrails in preview, a tool to help companies implement safeguards for LLMs, available for foundation models and Agents on Amazon Bedrock. /TechCrunch
Amazon announced they will offer human benchmarking teams to test AI models. /Verge
Amazon updated its own chips line and NVIDA partnership. /Bloomberg
Amazon announced ‘Titan Image Generator’. /Bloomberg
Amazon announced three new AWS serverless offerings designed to help customers manage, scale, and optimize their Aurora, Elastic Cache, and Redshift deployments. /TechCrunch
Amazon is rolling out palm scanning to the office. /CNBC
Amazon announced new AI chip as it deepens Nvidia relationship. /CNBC
Amazon announced AI foundation model enhancements to AWS' automated speech recognition service Transcribe, now supporting 100+ languages, and to Personalize and Lex. /SiliconAngle
Amazon bought SpaceX rocket launches for Kuiper satellite internet project. /CNBC
Amazon touted ‘record-breaking’ sales in kickoff to holiday shopping season /CNBC
Amazon ran a promotion for Prime Student members tobook $25 flights home for the holidays. /Amazon
Amazon UK Country Manager John Boumphrey said selling pre-owned goods in the UK and Europe is a £1B business and Amazon sold 4M+ used items in 2022 in the UK. /Reuters
Amazon opened a second chance store in London, UK. /ChannelX
Amazon now has an Allbirds store. /RetailDive
Amazon confirmed that Cyber Monday and Black Friday weekends surpassed previous year’s figures (no specifics given). /RetailDive
Amazon is still making cuts across the board. /WSJ
iRobot’s share price plunged 17% after the EU warned the deal could restrict competition although EU lawyers didn’t want to get involved. /CNBC /Reuters
Amazon avoided a full strike with Spanish workers. /Reuters
Amazon employees have been sharing what it’s like to be on a performance plan. /BI
Amazon and the International Organization for Migration, signed a deal for global disaster relief. /Amazon
Amazon is listing more of its distribution facilities for sublease. /SupplyChainDive
Amazon’s CTO gave a rare interview about culturally aware LLMs, developer productivity and FemTech. /TechCrunch
Amazon announced a program to train two million people in AI skill. /ChannelX
Amazon is looking for more space in Miami. /Bloomberg
Amazon overtook UPS (US) for deliveries. /Reuters
Amazon held an exclusive meeting at its cloud conference to give 'XXL' customers like Salesforce a forum to air grievances. /BI
Amazon signed the ‘Online Fraud Charter’. /Independent
Amazon broke federal labor law by calling Staten Island union organizers ‘thugs,’ interrogating workers. /CNBC
Deliveroo is expanding into goods. /Reuters
Lina Kahn (FTC) does not subscribe to Amazon Prime. /Verge