Amazon unleashes Q, an AI assistant for the workplace

On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled Amazon Q, an AI chatbot much like ChatGPT that’s tailor-made for company environments. Developed by Amazon Internet Providers (AWS), Q is designed to help staff with duties like summarizing paperwork, managing inner help tickets, and offering coverage steering, differentiating itself from consumer-focused chatbots. It additionally serves as a programming assistant.

In response to The New York Times, the title “Q” is a play on the phrase “query” and a reference to the character Q within the James Bond novels, who makes useful instruments. (And there is apparently a bit little bit of Q from Star Trek: The Subsequent Era thrown in, though hopefully the brand new bot will not trigger mischief on that scale.)

Amazon Q’s launch positions it in opposition to present company AI instruments like Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Duet AI, and ChatGPT Enterprise. Not like a few of its rivals, Amazon Q is not constructed on a singular AI massive language mannequin (LLM). As a substitute, it makes use of a platform known as Bedrock, integrating a number of AI methods, together with Amazon’s Titan and fashions from Anthropic and Meta.

“Builders can use Amazon Q to elucidate particular programming logic by asking questions (e.g., “Present me with an outline of what this software does and the way it works”),” writes Amazon in a press launch. “And Amazon Q will give particulars like which companies the code makes use of and what completely different features do (e.g., “This software is constructing a fundamental help ticketing system utilizing Python Flask and AWS Lambda”), together with an outline of the appliance’s core capabilities, how they’re applied, and extra.”

Notably, Amazon didn’t reveal efficiency benchmarks for Q that may permit us to guage its capabilities versus chatbot options to different suppliers. As of press time, we have now not experimented with Q but.

Following vital investments in AI, together with a partnership with AI-startup Anthropic and the event of AI-tuned GPU chips, Amazon has intensified its AI focus. The Q announcement got here as a part of a sequence of reveals at Amazon’s annual cloud-computing convention, re:Invent 2023, together with plans to create yet another new AI chip for its information facilities.

Amazon Q is priced at $20 per person per 30 days, which is decrease than Microsoft and Google’s enterprise AI options, that are priced at $30 per person per 30 days. Amazon Q is offered now “in preview in AWS Areas US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon),” in response to the corporate.

It is value noting that the Amazon Q title is seemingly unrelated to recent rumors about an OpenAI breakthrough known as “Q*” (pronounced “Q-star”) that brought on untimely hype over the event of AGI (synthetic normal intelligence), with consultants calling the claims largely overblown.