The rise of generative AI opens up a large new marketplace for the big cloud suppliers, but it surely’s additionally a little bit of a reset. In contrast to the rise of containers, for instance, generative AI is a wholly new market. Some gamers who’ve lengthy lagged behind within the total cloud market — like Google — are explicitly betting on this to vary their fortunes. However for AWS, which means it’s now ready the place it probably has to defend its lead, one thing the corporate isn’t used to and one thing that turned fairly clear in AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s re:Invent keynote right now.
AWS used to make the occasional enjoyable of Oracle throughout its early keynotes. At present, throughout what was a comparatively sedate affair by AWS keynote requirements, there have been quite a few references to Google and Microsoft (and its shut relationship with OpenAI) — and it felt lots like Selipsky was punching down and taking some low cost photographs on the expense of his rivals. That’s not one thing an organization does when it looks like it’s on high of its recreation.
When speaking concerning the AWS information heart footprint for instance, Selipsky famous — as he has finished in earlier keynotes — that AWS ensures that its availability zones are geographically distributed — not simply three zones in the identical information heart. He then particularly defined that if AWS had a setup like that in France and a fireplace broke on the market, the zone would’ve been down. At greatest, that was a thinly veiled reference to Google’s multi-week outage in its Paris information heart earlier this 12 months. AWS, after all, has additionally had its share of outages — similar to each different cloud supplier. Although to be truthful, Google’s outage was extreme.
“Others would have you think that all clouds are the same, but that’s just not true,” he stated. “I mean, imagine if you had a region supported by a single data center, or if you thought your provider had multiple AZs in France, for example, and you thought were resilient, but it turned out that they are actually in the same location. I mean, one incident like a water leak followed by a fire could take down an entire region for days.”
Subsequent, in launching its new Graviton chips, Selipsky additionally burdened that “we’re now on our fourth generation in just five years. Other cloud providers have not even delivered on their first server processors yet.”
However it’s generative AI the place Amazon is most weak proper now. For the primary time in a very long time, it doesn’t have a first-mover benefit within the cloud. Unsurprisingly, the latest OpenAI drama supplied loads of materials for AWS’ CEO to take swipes on the competitors, together with the information that Microsoft briefly stopped its staff from utilizing OpenAI’s ChatGPT due to safety issues.
“You won’t actually use any of this in a serious way if it isn’t secure and private,” Selipsky stated. “When I think about it, I can’t conceive of other cloud providers trying to offer general AI services or customers using gen AI applications. They’re not confident in their models and that their data is secure.”
And whereas Microsoft Azure is providing entry to dozens of proprietary and open supply fashions, too, Selipsky tried to capitalize on the truth that the corporate is so carefully linked with OpenAI: “Things are moving so fast — and in that type of environment, the ability to adapt is the most valuable capability that you can have. There is not going to be one model to rule them all. And there’s certainly not going to be one company providing the models that everybody uses. So you don’t want a cloud provider who’s beholden primarily to one model provider.”
In the course of the keynote, Selipsky introduced Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei out onstage to speak concerning the shut partnership between the 2 firms and famous how AWS customers will get unique early entry to some options in Anthropic’s Claude mannequin. AWS additionally plans to take a position as much as $4 billion in Anthropic, making that look a bit like the connection between Microsoft and OpenAI. However I suppose that is determined by your perspective.
Speaking about CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s competitor to GitHub’s considerably extra profitable Copilot, AWS’ CEO famous that “other providers who have launched tools, they’ve launched them without data privacy and security capabilities that virtually every enterprise requires.”
I feel AWS’ rivals would take challenge with that.
Factor is, AI is inflicting companies to rethink their cloud methods. Microsoft’s shut relationship to OpenAI gave it an early benefit. Google has lengthy had a status on the planet of AI and machine studying typically. With instruments like SageMaker, Bedrock and now its Q assistant, AWS is arguably on equal footing, but it surely’s not in its pure ingredient — and its rhetoric exhibits that.