Source: Most Talking FunTalk, Author: He Yiran, Editor: Wang Fangjie
Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool
"'AI assistant' will become the standard configuration of the public life, it will subvert consumption and production methods, people will no longer use search engines, and they will no longer use Amazon."
On May 22 local time, Microsoft founder Bill Gates published his predictions for the future society in an event discussing artificial intelligence. Gates believes that fierce competition in the technology industry is accelerating the pace of AI assistants fully entering consumers' lives, and he hopes that Microsoft can go the furthest in this AI war.
Gates certainly has confidence. After all, in this competition dominated by generative AI, Microsoft, which is deeply bound to OpenAI with only $1 billion, has already taken the lead.
Amazon, which has been reduced to a shadow, is naturally unhappy. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on Gates' remarks,media reported.
To some extent, Amazon should not have lost its voice at the "iPhone moment" of AI. On the one hand, the construction and training of large models need to be based on computing power. Therefore, the mainstream players in the current market are basically large cloud service providers or their Allies, and Amazon's AWS is the world's largest cloud service provider; on the other hand, if you look at it from a broader perspective, Amazon is the company that productized AI technology earlier.
Back in 2014, the first generation of Echo devices powered by AWS' Alexa system came out.
Alexa can perform tasks according to consumers' commands and open software and hardware services. At that time, its interactive experience in the consumer market was significantly ahead of its competitors, which set off a wave of smart speakers. According to data provided by Amazon, by the end of 2021, one in four households in the United States will have at least one Alexa device.
Alexa is the beginning of many consumers' exposure to the idea of an AI assistant and the conversational mode of an AI robot. At that time, who would have thought that Amazon would actually become a "underachiever" in the field of AI.
01
Amazon founder Bezos directly participated in the testing and development of Alexa, and even designed the appearance and language himself.
Bezos had two wishes in mind.
The first is that Alexa should be ubiquitous in consumers’ lives, not only in fixed homes and office spaces, but also with consumers at any time, becoming a daily necessity like a smartphone. In recent years, Alexa has actively integrated with third-party devices. Partners have created more than 140,000 Alexa-compatible products and control more than 300 million smart devices, Amazon said.
The second wish is that Alexa can play a counter role and drive consumers to shop through dialogue mode, so as to return to Amazon's core business and create greater business value. At present, more than 50% of Alexa users will use it to shop, but official statistics do not show how much sales Alexa has driven. It seems that the biggest achievement is just an additional way to log in to the platform.
For a long time, Alexa has been an important part of Amazon's strategic layout. Amazon sells hardware devices almost at cost price, aiming at the added value brought by smart services. However, Alexa's difficulty in making profits has not been improved.
The command and control system used by Alexa can understand a limited list of questions and requests, but once it handles complex conversations, it will be reduced from artificial intelligence to "artificial mental retardation."
In 2019, the news that Alexa was citing maliciously modified Wikipedia to instigate suicide when talking to users once made a lot of noise. In order to improve the user experience, Amazon introduced real employees to identify consumers' voice clips and assist AI in processing data, which also ignited market concerns about voice assistants encroaching on privacy.
The dialogue between users and Alexa basically stays in simple dialogues such as switching music on and off and asking about the weather. Amazon has also tried to expand, but the flexibility of the system adopted by Alexa is far less than that of generative AI. Adding simple dialogues can lead to a lot of problems. bug, a small snowflake brings a snowball workload.
The embarrassing user experience has led to a gradual increase in Alexa's user churn rate, and Amazon has wasted its leading position in the AI field. In the face of media interviews, insiders directly described Alexa as a "huge failure of imagination" and "a wasted opportunity."
In 2022, the global digital service business sector where Alexa is located will lose 10 billion US dollars. Amazon's Worldwide Digital division, which includes everything from Echo smart speakers and Alexa voice technology to its Prime Video streaming service, is posting an operating loss of more than $3 billion through the first quarter of 2023.
Therefore, at the end of 2022, Amazon carried out the largest layoffs in history, and Alexa's department was the hardest hit area for layoffs.
In fact, the dilemma of smart speakers is not only encountered by Amazon. There are various signs that if the technical core of the product is not innovated, it will be regarded as a product of the previous era on a global scale.
According to relevant data from Luotu Technology, the sales of smart speakers in China have also declined for two consecutive years. In the first quarter of this year, it fell by more than 20% year-on-year.
Just when the outside world thought that the voice assistant had become a yellow flower of yesterday, the appearance of ChatGPT changed everything. Generative AI got rid of the embarrassment of "artificial mental retardation", and made AI robots an industry trend with hundreds of millions of monthly active users in just three months.
Amazon wants to find a more suitable starting point for itself amidst the fluctuations.
According to an Amazon employee: “The emergence of ChatGPT caused a stir. Some executives issued a directive for the team to brainstorm how to make Alexa smarter.”
02
"Given the current challenging macroeconomic conditions, AWS faces short-term headwinds." In early 2023, as the CEO of AWS, Adam Selipsky said in a letter to employees.
In 2022, Amazon will have a net loss of US$2.7 billion, the worst performance in the company's history, and the decline in net profit far exceeds market expectations.
More importantly, AWS cloud services have seen operating profit margins shrink for four consecutive quarters. Although in terms of absolute scale, AWS only accounts for 16% of Amazon's business volume, but it carries the outside world's expectations for Amazon's imagination and development potential.
In the first quarter of 2023, the year-on-year growth rate of AWS is only 16%, which is the lowest value since the establishment of AWS. "Companies large and small are evaluating how to optimize their cloud spending in the face of tough macroeconomic conditions," acknowledged Amazon's CFO Olsavsky.
For comparison, Microsoft's cloud business Azure and Google's cloud computing division achieved growth of 27% and 28%, respectively, in the most recent quarter. It seems inappropriate to attribute the decline in growth rate to the cost reduction of enterprises. In the explosion of generative AI, budget-minded enterprises prefer companies that are leading in the field of AI and large-scale models.
If AWS continues to decline, it will severely damage the market's confidence in Amazon. Amazon naturally needs to reverse the pessimism of the outside world-the current is a transition period, and pain is inevitable.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy believes that large-scale language models and generative AI are the core that will allow Amazon to innovate in every business area in the next few decades. He took the well-performing advertising business as an example, "The strong growth is mainly due to our continuous investment in machine learning. The addition of AI and large models provides technical support for more precise marketing. It has brought exceptionally strong sales results for the brand .”
When Gates expects AI to replace Amazon's online platform, Amazon is also thinking about taking advantage of Echo's penetration rate to find its own generative AI landing place, integrating AI into the physical environment of real life, and depicting a more imaginative world. The future of space.
From the perspective of the industry, it is only a matter of time before the integration of generative artificial intelligence and voice assistants. For example, in April, following the release of Ali Tongyi’s large model, Tmall Genie announced full access to “Tongyi Qianwen”.
At the earnings conference, Jassy emphasized that Amazon has sold more than 100 million Alexa-equipped devices worldwide, and that the company is building a "bigger, more general, and more powerful" big language model as the basis for Alexa.
"I think it's going to massively accelerate our vision of being the best personal assistant in the world, and there's a big business model behind that."
According to reports, Jassy plans to transform Alexa with ChatGPT-like generative AI technology, making it more like thinking about user questions rather than extracting information directly from a database.
According to sources, Amazon is integrating resources, assessing benefits, and even shifting "part of the retail business expenditure to the cloud service department" for "strengthening the development of generative AI and large language models." Currently, Amazon's transformation plan for Alexa is mainly focused on entertainment. Convenience, including video search for a smoother conversational experience, personalized recommendations, and the ability to communicate more interactively and condense information.
Amazon's goals definitely don't stop with entertainment.
According to leaked internal documents, Amazon is secretly developing an upgraded version of its domestic robot Astro "Burnham". Burnham Robotics will introduce technology based on "situational understanding" involving large language models (LLM) and other advanced AI models. It is conceived that it can keenly observe the surrounding environment, intelligently receive and understand what it hears, and have a dialogue with the user, based on which it can take appropriate actions.
If an elderly person slips and falls, Burnham can check that he is safe, automatically call the police and call for others to help.
03
From an objective point of view, in the field of cloud computing, Amazon's 34% market share is still far ahead. It's just that under the AI frenzy, Amazon has become a "underachiever". It is an inevitable choice for Amazon to catch up and let AWS follow the technical route of generative AI to further intelligentize.
In April, AWS announced the launch of a generative AI service called Bedrock to select users.
Jassy said: "Most companies want to use a large language model, but a really useful language model requires billions of dollars and years of time to train. But not all companies have such conditions. What everyone expects is from Take an already huge base model and customize it for your own purposes."
Bedrock's goal is to lower the barriers to entry for generative AI.
This is a service for building and expanding generative artificial intelligence applications. It mainly consists of two parts: AWS's own model Titan, and basic models from startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI. AWS enterprise customers can use their own data to customize the basic model, design and build generative artificial intelligence applications.
Amazon hopes that Bedrock will become a basic tool for small and medium-sized enterprises to enter the generative AI, allowing itself to earn additional benefits far beyond the consumer side.
Collaborative document software company Coda was one of the first adopters, and Coda's chief executive said in an interview that he gave Bedrock an "unfinished" rating. He believes the tool is in its early stages and that Amazon is "building on and repackaging existing services," but he believes the service will be competitive in the long run.
Judging from the existing feedback, Bedrock's performance has not yet achieved the expected results, and Amazon has been delaying the expansion of Bedrock's trial range, which seems to be adjusting to wait and see.
After years of explosive and rapid development, Amazon has returned to the preparation period of accumulating potential energy.
Applying the "flywheel theory" advocated by Bezos, in the competition of generative AI, Amazon, a behemoth, must make changes and build a new flywheel. Although it takes a lot of effort to get the flywheel spinning again, if you stick to it at the right point, the potential energy of the flywheel will eventually become part of the driving force.
The wave of generative AI has just begun, and Amazon, which started half a beat later, has unlimited possibilities.
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Amazon, which was publicly dissed by Gates: the "underachiever" of generative AI
Source: Most Talking FunTalk, Author: He Yiran, Editor: Wang Fangjie
"'AI assistant' will become the standard configuration of the public life, it will subvert consumption and production methods, people will no longer use search engines, and they will no longer use Amazon."
On May 22 local time, Microsoft founder Bill Gates published his predictions for the future society in an event discussing artificial intelligence. Gates believes that fierce competition in the technology industry is accelerating the pace of AI assistants fully entering consumers' lives, and he hopes that Microsoft can go the furthest in this AI war.
Gates certainly has confidence. After all, in this competition dominated by generative AI, Microsoft, which is deeply bound to OpenAI with only $1 billion, has already taken the lead.
Amazon, which has been reduced to a shadow, is naturally unhappy. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on Gates' remarks,media reported.
To some extent, Amazon should not have lost its voice at the "iPhone moment" of AI. On the one hand, the construction and training of large models need to be based on computing power. Therefore, the mainstream players in the current market are basically large cloud service providers or their Allies, and Amazon's AWS is the world's largest cloud service provider; on the other hand, if you look at it from a broader perspective, Amazon is the company that productized AI technology earlier.
Back in 2014, the first generation of Echo devices powered by AWS' Alexa system came out.
Alexa can perform tasks according to consumers' commands and open software and hardware services. At that time, its interactive experience in the consumer market was significantly ahead of its competitors, which set off a wave of smart speakers. According to data provided by Amazon, by the end of 2021, one in four households in the United States will have at least one Alexa device.
Alexa is the beginning of many consumers' exposure to the idea of an AI assistant and the conversational mode of an AI robot. At that time, who would have thought that Amazon would actually become a "underachiever" in the field of AI.
01
Amazon founder Bezos directly participated in the testing and development of Alexa, and even designed the appearance and language himself.
Bezos had two wishes in mind.
The first is that Alexa should be ubiquitous in consumers’ lives, not only in fixed homes and office spaces, but also with consumers at any time, becoming a daily necessity like a smartphone. In recent years, Alexa has actively integrated with third-party devices. Partners have created more than 140,000 Alexa-compatible products and control more than 300 million smart devices, Amazon said.
The second wish is that Alexa can play a counter role and drive consumers to shop through dialogue mode, so as to return to Amazon's core business and create greater business value. At present, more than 50% of Alexa users will use it to shop, but official statistics do not show how much sales Alexa has driven. It seems that the biggest achievement is just an additional way to log in to the platform.
For a long time, Alexa has been an important part of Amazon's strategic layout. Amazon sells hardware devices almost at cost price, aiming at the added value brought by smart services. However, Alexa's difficulty in making profits has not been improved.
The command and control system used by Alexa can understand a limited list of questions and requests, but once it handles complex conversations, it will be reduced from artificial intelligence to "artificial mental retardation."
In 2019, the news that Alexa was citing maliciously modified Wikipedia to instigate suicide when talking to users once made a lot of noise. In order to improve the user experience, Amazon introduced real employees to identify consumers' voice clips and assist AI in processing data, which also ignited market concerns about voice assistants encroaching on privacy.
The dialogue between users and Alexa basically stays in simple dialogues such as switching music on and off and asking about the weather. Amazon has also tried to expand, but the flexibility of the system adopted by Alexa is far less than that of generative AI. Adding simple dialogues can lead to a lot of problems. bug, a small snowflake brings a snowball workload.
The embarrassing user experience has led to a gradual increase in Alexa's user churn rate, and Amazon has wasted its leading position in the AI field. In the face of media interviews, insiders directly described Alexa as a "huge failure of imagination" and "a wasted opportunity."
In 2022, the global digital service business sector where Alexa is located will lose 10 billion US dollars. Amazon's Worldwide Digital division, which includes everything from Echo smart speakers and Alexa voice technology to its Prime Video streaming service, is posting an operating loss of more than $3 billion through the first quarter of 2023.
Therefore, at the end of 2022, Amazon carried out the largest layoffs in history, and Alexa's department was the hardest hit area for layoffs.
In fact, the dilemma of smart speakers is not only encountered by Amazon. There are various signs that if the technical core of the product is not innovated, it will be regarded as a product of the previous era on a global scale.
According to relevant data from Luotu Technology, the sales of smart speakers in China have also declined for two consecutive years. In the first quarter of this year, it fell by more than 20% year-on-year.
Just when the outside world thought that the voice assistant had become a yellow flower of yesterday, the appearance of ChatGPT changed everything. Generative AI got rid of the embarrassment of "artificial mental retardation", and made AI robots an industry trend with hundreds of millions of monthly active users in just three months.
Amazon wants to find a more suitable starting point for itself amidst the fluctuations.
According to an Amazon employee: “The emergence of ChatGPT caused a stir. Some executives issued a directive for the team to brainstorm how to make Alexa smarter.”
02
"Given the current challenging macroeconomic conditions, AWS faces short-term headwinds." In early 2023, as the CEO of AWS, Adam Selipsky said in a letter to employees.
In 2022, Amazon will have a net loss of US$2.7 billion, the worst performance in the company's history, and the decline in net profit far exceeds market expectations.
More importantly, AWS cloud services have seen operating profit margins shrink for four consecutive quarters. Although in terms of absolute scale, AWS only accounts for 16% of Amazon's business volume, but it carries the outside world's expectations for Amazon's imagination and development potential.
In the first quarter of 2023, the year-on-year growth rate of AWS is only 16%, which is the lowest value since the establishment of AWS. "Companies large and small are evaluating how to optimize their cloud spending in the face of tough macroeconomic conditions," acknowledged Amazon's CFO Olsavsky.
For comparison, Microsoft's cloud business Azure and Google's cloud computing division achieved growth of 27% and 28%, respectively, in the most recent quarter. It seems inappropriate to attribute the decline in growth rate to the cost reduction of enterprises. In the explosion of generative AI, budget-minded enterprises prefer companies that are leading in the field of AI and large-scale models.
If AWS continues to decline, it will severely damage the market's confidence in Amazon. Amazon naturally needs to reverse the pessimism of the outside world-the current is a transition period, and pain is inevitable.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy believes that large-scale language models and generative AI are the core that will allow Amazon to innovate in every business area in the next few decades. He took the well-performing advertising business as an example, "The strong growth is mainly due to our continuous investment in machine learning. The addition of AI and large models provides technical support for more precise marketing. It has brought exceptionally strong sales results for the brand .”
When Gates expects AI to replace Amazon's online platform, Amazon is also thinking about taking advantage of Echo's penetration rate to find its own generative AI landing place, integrating AI into the physical environment of real life, and depicting a more imaginative world. The future of space.
From the perspective of the industry, it is only a matter of time before the integration of generative artificial intelligence and voice assistants. For example, in April, following the release of Ali Tongyi’s large model, Tmall Genie announced full access to “Tongyi Qianwen”.
At the earnings conference, Jassy emphasized that Amazon has sold more than 100 million Alexa-equipped devices worldwide, and that the company is building a "bigger, more general, and more powerful" big language model as the basis for Alexa.
"I think it's going to massively accelerate our vision of being the best personal assistant in the world, and there's a big business model behind that."
According to reports, Jassy plans to transform Alexa with ChatGPT-like generative AI technology, making it more like thinking about user questions rather than extracting information directly from a database.
According to sources, Amazon is integrating resources, assessing benefits, and even shifting "part of the retail business expenditure to the cloud service department" for "strengthening the development of generative AI and large language models." Currently, Amazon's transformation plan for Alexa is mainly focused on entertainment. Convenience, including video search for a smoother conversational experience, personalized recommendations, and the ability to communicate more interactively and condense information.
Amazon's goals definitely don't stop with entertainment.
According to leaked internal documents, Amazon is secretly developing an upgraded version of its domestic robot Astro "Burnham". Burnham Robotics will introduce technology based on "situational understanding" involving large language models (LLM) and other advanced AI models. It is conceived that it can keenly observe the surrounding environment, intelligently receive and understand what it hears, and have a dialogue with the user, based on which it can take appropriate actions.
If an elderly person slips and falls, Burnham can check that he is safe, automatically call the police and call for others to help.
03
From an objective point of view, in the field of cloud computing, Amazon's 34% market share is still far ahead. It's just that under the AI frenzy, Amazon has become a "underachiever". It is an inevitable choice for Amazon to catch up and let AWS follow the technical route of generative AI to further intelligentize.
In April, AWS announced the launch of a generative AI service called Bedrock to select users.
Jassy said: "Most companies want to use a large language model, but a really useful language model requires billions of dollars and years of time to train. But not all companies have such conditions. What everyone expects is from Take an already huge base model and customize it for your own purposes."
Bedrock's goal is to lower the barriers to entry for generative AI.
This is a service for building and expanding generative artificial intelligence applications. It mainly consists of two parts: AWS's own model Titan, and basic models from startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI. AWS enterprise customers can use their own data to customize the basic model, design and build generative artificial intelligence applications.
Amazon hopes that Bedrock will become a basic tool for small and medium-sized enterprises to enter the generative AI, allowing itself to earn additional benefits far beyond the consumer side.
Collaborative document software company Coda was one of the first adopters, and Coda's chief executive said in an interview that he gave Bedrock an "unfinished" rating. He believes the tool is in its early stages and that Amazon is "building on and repackaging existing services," but he believes the service will be competitive in the long run.
Judging from the existing feedback, Bedrock's performance has not yet achieved the expected results, and Amazon has been delaying the expansion of Bedrock's trial range, which seems to be adjusting to wait and see.
After years of explosive and rapid development, Amazon has returned to the preparation period of accumulating potential energy.
Applying the "flywheel theory" advocated by Bezos, in the competition of generative AI, Amazon, a behemoth, must make changes and build a new flywheel. Although it takes a lot of effort to get the flywheel spinning again, if you stick to it at the right point, the potential energy of the flywheel will eventually become part of the driving force.
The wave of generative AI has just begun, and Amazon, which started half a beat later, has unlimited possibilities.