Not to be outdone: Amazon pervaded by generative AI

In the 1990s, Amazon, which created the first Internet business miracle by selling books online, failed to take the lead in this generative AI boom. An Amazon employee said: "Now all companies are busy with generative AI, and Amazon is afraid of falling behind in this market." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also said at the plenary meeting: "Generative AI will be embedded in every business and customer experience."

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

Earlier this year, as ChatGPT took the world by storm, Amazon managers asked employees to brainstorm how they could use artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot technology to improve their products and workflows.

Some of these ideas were shared in an internal document titled "Generative AI - Impact and Opportunity Analysis for ChatGPT." The document lists a total of 67 potential use cases for ChatGPT and similar applications across various teams at Amazon.

As early as the 1990s, Amazon created the first real business miracle in the Internet world by selling books online.

Subsequently, the Kindle reader brought a revolutionary experience, Alexa and Echo smart speakers brought voice computing, and AWS created the cloud computing industry, on which ChatGPT runs.

But in this upsurge, it is Microsoft, which is also a major technology company, that has gained the first-mover advantage. Microsoft is now the financial backer behind OpenAI, and is still busy integrating ChatGPT's underlying technology into Microsoft products and services.

An Amazon employee said: "Now that all companies are busy with generative AI, Amazon is afraid of falling behind in this market."

According to Amazon's official caliber, the company is not panicking, but it is indeed joining quickly. An Amazon representative said in an email to the media that the company has been using machine learning and AI for more than 25 years for almost everything. "

The representative also said: "By any standard, Amazon is at the forefront of the industry in the field of AI, and AWS machine learning business capabilities are the strongest in the industry, with the largest number of customers and partners."

"While generative AI is still in its very early stages, Amazon is investing across all of its businesses and is already delivering some unique capabilities to customers and will continue to do so in the near future," the representative said.

Brainstorm about ChatGPT

Inside Amazon, a frank discussion is underway about whether Amazon is missing something and what resources it can leverage to address the trend.

An employee wrote on an internal forum dedicated to ChatGPT: "Although we also have the ability to use language models to generate and analyze content like ChatGPT, it has not been made public or used internally."

Amazon is also frantically finding other ways to make full use of AI chatbots, such as using crowdsourcing to improve productivity and launching new generative AI projects. Employees even proposed to integrate ChatGPT into a core part of Amazon's creative process.

Employees even proposed integrating ChatGPT into a core part of Amazon’s creative process. Amazon has a famous "six-page paper", that is, in order to prevent employees from ignoring the content while only focusing on the fancy PPT, the employees who preside over the meeting are required to make a six-page document before the meeting. Some employees are now proposing that this job could be handed over to ChatGPT.

Amazon's internal document records the idea of ChatGPT application in many aspects, such as automatically generating code and marketing materials, and optimizing customer support experience.

According to members of Amazon's sales team, ChatGPT can be used to quickly search company and competitor financial reports to help them target strategic targets; it can also be used to help employees conduct customer sentiment analysis-deciphering customers' sentiments about products from perhaps euphemistic terms. true feelings.

Members of Amazon's customer support team expect that ChatGPT will be able to tailor the response content for customers, resulting in higher conversion rates and satisfaction, as well as better handling of some inquiries from Amazon's third-party marketplace sellers. It can even predict best-selling products and explain the popularity of a viral video.

ChatGPT can also help Amazon AWS automatically calculate the cost of cloud services for customers. The Amazon Fresh grocery team says it hopes to one day use it to create a custom shopping list based on a recipe.

In the document, Amazon also records: "In the long run, ChatGPT can improve productivity by reducing the required manpower."

Amazon is unlikely to rely on ChatGPT for some major customer-facing products, since it is one of the few companies capable of training large AI models on its own, and it is already doing so. In addition, AWS is also a key cloud partner to help other companies create their own AI models.

Amazon's lawyers have warned employees to use ChatGPT cautiously at work: it can be used, but it cannot be used to share confidential information such as internal emails and source code. Internal documents show that Amazon has the same attitude towards Microsoft's Bing search engine that integrates ChatGPT technology.

Some managers also said that Amazon strongly discourages employees from using ChatGPT at work. If members use ChatGPT on their work computers, the system will send out an alert.

In full swing

Exactly how many of the ideas shared in this internal document will actually materialize is unknown, but some of them are already in the bud — no fewer than 11 internal projects have reached the prototype stage.

One of the ideas is a ChatGPT-type search bar for Amazon shoppers. "Create a conversational interface to guide users in purchasing products online, compare the pros and cons of different brands, cite and summarize user reviews, and provide a personalized product buying guide," the document says.

Amazon also posted job openings, hinting at a major overhaul of its search bar, adding ChatGPT-like functionality.

A security automation tool that uses features similar to ChatGPT is in the planning stage, and an engineering tool that can quickly answer AWS-related questions will soon enter the prototyping stage, employees said.

Some employees say ChatGPT is more advanced than a similar machine learning service offered by Amazon. One of the employees said that compared with ChatGPT, Amazon's natural language processing service Amazon Comprehend is very cumbersome in extracting opinion summaries from survey data; another employee said that Amazon's robot development tool Lex is much more boring than similar services .

"Integrate into every business"

Amazon is also gathering ideas from employees through other channels. Amazon also held an internal “hackathon” this year on generative AI, which attracted about 140 people, according to an internal email.

Amazon wrote in the email: "Given the popularity of generative AI, we decided to include it as a theme of the event, and the project that best demonstrates generative AI will receive a special award."

That crown was eventually taken away by a smart assistant project. It uses a large language model to optimize the setup process of Amazon's voice assistant Alexa, and can answer common questions about WiFi connections in a concise manner, which seems much more convenient than the current complicated and error-prone manual setup.

Of course, ideas don't always translate into products. It's unclear whether Amazon has developed this feature yet.

Amazon recently released a new AI-building platform, BedRock, and its own base model, Titan, and is also developing a series of consumer apps with ChatGPT-like capabilities, including a new Alexa voice assistant, and a home robot project called Burnham.

Employees are still curious about the company’s response to ChatGPT and generative AI, often bringing up the topic in internal meetings.

At a meeting in March, an employee asked AWS Cloud CEO Adam Selipsky what the company's response to ChatGPT was and how AWS planned to embrace the new model. Selipsky didn't go into specifics, according to a meeting transcript, saying: "It's not just AWS, the whole company is doing a lot of work around ChatGPT."

At another all-hands meeting that month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was asked a similar question. Jassy highlighted Amazon's deep expertise in machine learning and AI, noting that the latest generative AI applications are easier to access and use. He also said: "Generative AI is an important area of focus for us, and the company's top leadership team is very excited about it."

Jassy also said at the meeting: "I also want to tell everyone that generative AI will be integrated into every business and customer experience you are responsible for, and will become a key part of the future customer experience."