Amazon bets on AI to beat cloud rivals
Amazon.com Inc unveiled new machinelearning tools, including algorithms that automate decisions and speech recognition, seeking to solidify its dominant position over Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc in the fast-growing and profitable cloud-computing market.
Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy announced more than 20 new functions on Wednesday at the company’s annual event expected to draw 40,000 people this week to Las Vegas. The machine learning capabilities are intended to make the technology more accessible to developers who don’t have the time or resources to experiment with it on their own.
AWS has top customers in every industry, but Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google are using their experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning to go after some of Amazon’s market share. While customers are interested in machine learning, many lack the resources and expertise that the cloud companies can provide.
The products introduced Wednesday further the evolution of AWS from its origins. Cloud-computing began as a way to cheaply gain computing power and data storage, letting customers rent space in data centers accessed via the internet rather than maintaining their own servers. The industry has turned into a race to provide customers tools and functions to use that data in new ways. Those tools are helping speed the transition to the cloud, since companies that don’t have access to them will be at a competitive disadvantage, Jassy said.
“We are in a transition stage right now,” he said. “Relatively few companies will own their own data centres, and those who do will have significantly smaller footprints. That means all of that data is moving to the cloud.”
Amazon introduced SageMaker, which provides popular tools for helping developers write, tune and deploy algorithms for tasks such as parsing data or recognizing images and speech. Amazon also showed off AWS DeepLens, a $249 device to help developers understand and experiment with machine learning. — Bloomberg