They Invent, Amazon Re-invents

The big techs have been in an announcement battle of sorts, almost lining up to unveil new technologies at their flagship events. This year, companies like Google, Apple, OpenAI, Microsoft and AWS, in the same order, announced technologies, apparently better than each other.

At the fag end of the year, Amazon is hosting AWS re:Invent, on the second day of which, CEO Adam Selipsky reinvented the entire innovation of OpenAI and Microsoft combined.

Right on the heels of OpenAI’s Q* that came out last week, AWS announced Q, a chatbot for AWS customers, which can be used to chat, generate content and much more. AWS users have the flexibility to set Q up by integrating and tailoring it with organisation-specific applications and software, including Salesforce, Jira, Zendesk, Gmail, and Amazon S3 storage instances.

All the features of Q sound much like ChatGPT Enterprise or Microsoft’s Copilot Studio. Leveraging OpenAI's models, Copilot Studio empowers users to generate standalone copilots, customise GPTs, integrate generative AI plugins, and manage manual topics. It provides precise access controls, efficient data management, user controls, and comprehensive analytics.

In the LLM segment, AWS was so far known for AWS Bedrock hosting Anthropic, Stability AI, Cohere, AI21 Labs, LLaMA and other models. However, at this event, they introduced three new models — Titan Text Lite, Titan Text Express, and Titan Text Embedding Model. Recently, Microsoft also introduced an open source small language model, Phi-2.

Amazon unveiled the latest generation of its chips for model training and inferencing — AWS Trainium2 and AWS Graviton4. This came after Microsoft’s custom in-house CPU series called Microsoft Azure Cobalt CPU, an Arm-based processor tailored to run general-purpose compute workloads on the Microsoft Cloud was announced.

During the event, Amazon also gave a big stage to Anthropic and Selipsky personally interviewed Anthropic’s founder Dario Amodei for about 10 minutes. Amazon seems really interested in the AI research company, which is a competitor of OpenAI and founded by its former employees.

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Pika-Chu

When RunwayML was launched, it fascinated everyone with the kind of things one could do in the video-editing space using generative AI. Last week, StabilityAI launched Stable Video Diffusion that can animate a still image. While people were still trying to grasp the development in the generative AI video space, a new company called Pika has dropped a new innovation. 

The latest generative AI platform excels at editing and creating content across diverse styles, encompassing anime, cinematic, and 3D animation. The company has raised $55 million from Lightspeed Ventures and investors like Adam D’Angelo, founder and CEO of Quora; Andrej Karpathy, research scientist at OpenAI; Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face and others. 

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How Popular are Indian Tech Leaders?

Prominent Indian tech leaders like Sridhar Vembu of Zoho, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, and Kunal Shah of CRED stand out for their exemplary leadership styles. Vembu's commitment to employees and innovation has fostered a startup-friendly culture at Zoho, birthing successful ventures. Sharma's inclusive leadership and foresight propelled Paytm's success in digital payments. 

Shah's relaxed yet creative culture at CRED reflects his philosophical approach to entrepreneurship. Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola and Nithin Kamath of Zerodha showcase visionary leadership, driving impactful advancements in transportation and fintech, respectively. These leaders, admired for their humility and adaptability, symbolise India's thriving tech ecosystem.

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AMD’s Big Plan

AMD has announced that its upcoming MI300X processor will fetch $2 billion for the company by next year. The high-performance GPU can be scaled out to accommodate huge cluster sizes. The processor is set for a release at the AMD Advancing AI event, on December 6. 

Ahead of its launch, the chipmaker has partnered with many companies. For instance, at Ignite 2023, Microsoft announced that it would be using MI300X for its AI workloads.

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