Lesson one: Generative AI is the future – and AWS is battling to get to the head of the queue.

AWS boss Adam Selipsky came out swinging for his keynote speech on Tuesday morning. 

The battle is hotting up among cloud providers over who will have the best roster of generative AI tools. And Mr Selipski took no prisoners as he littered the two-and-a-half hour talk with thinly veiled swipes at its biggest rivals, – Google and, in particular, Microsoft. He struck a confident tone as he listed off why he believed AWS had the strongest GenAI stack, from top to bottom.

One of the key reasons is the large range of foundation models AWS offers from the world’s leading AI firms, including Meta, Cohere, Stability AI, its own two Titan models, and a near exclusive $4bn agreement with Anthropic. Come meet Robert and the rest of the team at VeUP, an official partner of AWS, at booth  #264 today. Selipski said customers wanted a choice – and not a cloud provider that was ‘beholden primarily to just one model provider’. It was an obvious dig at the heavily Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its recent boardroom troubles.

And the punches kept rolling in as Mr Selipski emphasised the safety placed on its GenAI offerings compared to its competitors.  At one point an article popped up on screen about Microsoft briefly stopping its employees from using OpenAI’s ChatGPT because of security concerns. Mr Selipski told the audience that no customer data would ever be used to train the models, and it would never find its way onto the open internet. Responsible AI was AWS’s ‘North Star’, he said, announcing Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock to help customers protect their own users.

But the biggest announcement was saved for last as he revealed Amazon had joined the chatbot race with an AI assistant of its own. It will be called Q, a play on the word ‘question’ and a reference to both the James Bond and Star Trek figures, and can be tailored to every business to save hours of work with just one simple prompt, he said. With one final punch thrown at his rivals, he added: ‘You won’t find another major cloud provider that can do that.’