Amazon and Apple: brothers in arms?

We’ve seen Microsoft absorb ChatGPT and the impact that has made on search. Google responded by integrating their Gemini AI into search. But search was just the start. AI is taking over every nook and cranny of the internet and life. A great example is how chatbots seem to have more empathy than human bots:

Recent research published in Scientific Reports has found that certain advanced AI chatbots are more adept than humans at making judgments in challenging social situations. Using a well-established psychological tool known as a Situational Judgment Test, researchers found that three chatbots—Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and you.com’s smart assistant—outperformed human participants in selecting the most effective behavioral responses.

Then there is image generation, with seven great platforms to try out:

• DALL·E 3 for an easy-to-use AI image generator
• Midjourney for the best AI image results
• Ideogram for accurate text
• Stable Diffusion for customization and control of your AI images
• FLUX.1 for a Stable Diffusion alternative
• Adobe Firefly for integrating AI-generated images into photos
• Generative AI by Getty for usable, commercially safe images

Oh, and now there's Google's Veo and OpenAI's Sora for video generation.

Much of this is driven by the stellar rise of NVIDIA in the AI space – whilst Intel is dying (Only The Paranoid Survive) – with a valuation that is topping the charts, slightly ahead of even Apple on occasion. That’s why it was obvious that it would only take a little while for Apple to respond, and the response is fascinating as it seems to be working with Amazon.

The Amazon’s and Apple’s of this world would obviously wake up and shake up the AI market when they were ready and, it seems, this week is the week they were ready.

Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) annual conference named re:Invent took place this week and the big surprise? Apple’s artificial intelligence executive, Benoit Dupin, took the stage to talk up AWS. More than this, Apple are using AWS’s custom-made chips for AI, putting Amazon head-to-head with NVIDIA.

In fact, the announcements this week were like a coordinated attack on every major AI battlefront by Amazon simultaneously challenging OpenAI/Microsoft in foundation models; NVIDIA in chips; xAI in supercomputing; and securing powerful allies like Anthropic and Apple.

Amazon’s foundation model is called Nova, and it’s 75% cheaper than competitor’s systems.

Amazon are offering Trainium2 chips which claims to improve performance by a factor of four whilst slashing costs by 50% compared to Nvidia; Project Rainier is focused on building the world’s greatest supercomputer as a direct challenger to xAI's Colossus; and it will be the world's largest distributed AI computer cluster, five times more powerful than today’s best (Anthropic).

Talking of Anthropic, Amazon isn’t trying to replace them but augment them with a massive $8 billion investment to maintain AWS’s leadership in cloud computing.

All of this may sound overwhelming but you have to wonder why the big guys – Apple and Amazon – hadn’t responded to the other big guys – Google/Alphabet and Microsoft – moves in AI (Gemini, ChatGPT).

More than this, and the most interesting and nuanced part for me, is the fact that Apple and Amazon are brothers-in-arms. I’ve already mentioned that Apple’s AI exec Benoit was on stage at the event yet, what you may not know, is that Apple is one of Amazon’s biggest clients for AWS services as it is for Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

A similar brothers-in-arms move has happened in other areas though, like Amazon Prime Video now streaming Apple TV+ shows; Apple has its own store on Amazon’s retail platform, and get special treatment for that such as zero adverts; and Apple are using Amazon’s chips.

For more information, checkout these resources:

• AWS News Blog: Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr and colleagues keep you posted on the biggest and best new AWS offerings.
• What’s New with AWS: A comprehensive list of all AWS launches.
• The Official AWS Podcast: A podcast for developers and IT professionals looking for the latest news and trends from AWS.

Meanwhile, what’s Meta doing? Oh …

Meta plans to build a $10B subsea cable spanning the world | TechCrunch