Amazon Q: AWS launches AI tool to rival ChatGPT and Bard

New platform will provide responses that include citations and source links, AWS says

Globally, AI investments are projected to hit $200 billion by 2025. Reuters

Amazon Web Services has launched a generative artificial intelligence tool as it rivals Google-owned Bard and Microsoft-backed OpenAI in the fast-growing industry.

Amazon Q was announced at AWS’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

It came almost one year after the start-up OpenAI launched its ChatGPT, which gained instant popularity for its use of generative AI, allowing it to produce human-like text in response to minimal input.

Amazon Q is focused on businesses and customers can get “fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content and take actions” based on their information repositories.

It aims to enable employees to streamline tasks, and accelerate decision making and problem solving.

The tool can also customise its interactions with different users based on an “organisation’s existing identities, roles and permissions”, AWS said.

“Amazon Q builds on AWS’s history of taking complex, expensive technologies and making them accessible to customers of all sizes and technical abilities,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS.

“By bringing generative AI to where our customers work … whether they are building on AWS, working with internal data and systems, or using a range of data and business applications … Amazon Q is a powerful addition.”

ChatGPT and Bard are two front-runners in the burgeoning field of generative AI.

In September, the Abu Dhabi government-supported research centre the Technology Innovation Institute launched Falcon 180B – an advanced version of its flagship language model – to boost generative AI in the region.

Investors have put more than $4.2 billion into generative AI start-ups in 2021 and 2022 through 215 deals after interest surged in 2019, recent data from CB Insights showed.

Globally, AI investments are projected to hit $200 billion by 2025 and could possibly have a bigger impact on gross domestic product, Goldman Sachs Economic Research said in a report in August.

Amazon Q’s preview version is available and many of its features are free.

But after the preview period, it will cost $20 a person each month for business users.

AWS chief executive Adam Selipsky said that prompts asked on Amazon Q and business customers’ content will not be used to train any foundation models.

According to the query, Amazon Q will provide concise responses that include citations and source links.

Amazon Q is currently available only for users of Amazon Connect – the company’s cloud contact centre that enables organisations to deliver better customer experiences at lower costs.

It will be soon available on other platforms including Amazon Supply Chain, which allows customers to monitor their supply chains.

“New Amazon Q capabilities help our analysts build dashboards in hours when it used to take days,” said Christoph Albrecht, data engineering and analytics consultant at car maker BMW, one of the early users of Amazon Q.

“We are seeing an even greater impact with our business users, where Amazon Q is accelerating critical business decisions at the highest levels.”