It was form of an odd AWS re:Invent this week in Las Vegas. As soon as once more, there wasn’t an enormous amount of news popping out of the huge buyer occasion; the most important bulletins had been associated to AI, after all. However the actual story may very well be that Amazon has discovered itself within the uncomfortable place of chasing Microsoft on the subject of AI.
And that’s despite the drama that played out at OpenAI final week, wherein Microsoft was squarely within the center.
The rivalry turned clear when Amazon CEO Adam Selipsky took some not-so-subtle cheap shots at AWS’ cloud rival throughout the primary keynote on Tuesday.
To be clear, being behind, if that’s what’s taking place, just isn’t essentially deadly for Amazon. It has dominated the cloud since it invented the idea in 2006. And the generative AI panorama continues to be so nascent, and the market is shifting so shortly, that the notion amongst traders and a few within the media, that Microsoft is forward, may very well be moot in 12 or 18 months.
Like final yr, the truly newsworthy announcements had been skinny with maybe essentially the most fascinating being Amazon Q. It helps builders join a generative AI layer to enterprise software program and was being billed by some on the occasion as Amazon’s reply to Microsoft Copilot. And that might give credence to the concept that the cloud big is, in reality, enjoying catch-up right here.
Scott Raney, a associate at Redpoint, says that Microsoft made a few nice strikes, like shopping for GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018 and investing at least $10 billion in OpenAI. That has put it in place to benefit from the generative AI wave firms have been driving this yr.
