Amazon is building a more “generalizing and capable” large language model (LLM) for powering Alexa, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call yesterday. LLM, like ChatGPT, is a deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize, and generate text and other content based on knowledge from massive amounts of text data.
Jassy said that while Amazon has an LLM that will power Alexa, the tech giant is working on one that’s more capable than the current one. The Amazon executive believes adding an Enhanced LLM will help Amazon work toward its goal of building “the world’s best personal assistant,” but acknowledged that it would be challenging to do so across many areas.
“I think when people often ask us about Alexa, what we often share is that if we were just building a smart speaker, it would be a much smaller investment,” Jassy said on the call. “But we have a vision, and we have a conviction about it that we want to build the best personal assistant in the world. And to do that, it’s hard. It’s across a lot of fields and it’s a very wide area. However, if you think about the emergence of big language models and generative AI, it makes models Core is so much more effective that I think it really accelerates the potential to build the best personal assistant in the world.”
Jassy went on to say that he thinks Amazon has a good starting point with Alexa, as it has “a few hundred million endpoints” that are used in the entertainment, shopping, and smart home industries. He also noted that there is a lot of participation from third party ecosystem partners.
“We had a big language model underneath it, but we’re building a much larger, more general and capable model,” Jassy said. “And I think that will really quickly accelerate our vision of becoming the best personal assistant in the world. I think there is an important business model underneath.”
During the call, Jassy highlighted that Amazon has invested in AI and LLMs for years and that while it has the potential to invest heavily in building LLMs, smaller companies don’t, which is why the company launched Bedrock earlier this month. Bedrock provides a way to create AI-powered applications through pre-defined models from startups including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI. Available in Limited Preview, Bedrock also provides access to Titan FMs (Foundation Models), a set of models trained in-house by AWS.
Since its launch last year, ChatGPT has taken over the internet and is becoming increasingly popular. With all the hype surrounding ChatGPT, it’s no surprise that big tech companies are looking to incorporate LLM-based improvements into their own offerings to keep up with the fast-paced AI space. For example, The Information reported yesterday that Apple is developing LLM-based improvements for Siri. It’s worth nothing because Google will likely do something similar for Assistant.
Amazon wasn’t the only company to bring up AI during its quarterly investor call, as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta confirmed their investments in large language models as well. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google will continue to integrate artificial intelligence to enhance search, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company will continue to invest in artificial intelligence, noting that Microsoft has already seen an increase in the use of Bing after updating the search engine with ChatGPT integration. In addition, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, said that the company will invest in artificial intelligence and introduce new AI-related updates across its applications.
Amazon reported first-quarter earnings that beat expectations and initially sent shares higher, but later reversed course after executives raised concerns about continued weakness in cloud growth. Revenue for the quarter increased 9.4% to $127.4 billion, while operating income reached $4.8 billion.