It was form of an odd AWS re:Invent this week in Las Vegas. As soon as once more, there wasn’t an enormous quantity of reports popping out of the huge buyer occasion; the most important bulletins had been associated to AI, in fact. However the actual story might be that Amazon has discovered itself within the uncomfortable place of chasing Microsoft in terms of AI.
And that’s regardless of the drama that performed 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 low-cost pictures at AWS’ cloud rival throughout the primary keynote on Tuesday.
To be clear, being behind, if that’s what’s taking place, is just not essentially deadly for Amazon. It has dominated the cloud because it invented the concept in 2006. And the generative AI panorama continues to be so nascent, and the market is shifting so rapidly, that the notion amongst buyers and a few within the media, that Microsoft is forward, might be moot in 12 or 18 months.
Like final 12 months, the actually newsworthy bulletins had been skinny with maybe probably the most attention-grabbing 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, the truth is, 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 the least $10 billion in OpenAI. That has put it in place to benefit from the generative AI wave corporations have been driving this 12 months.