The AWS Empire Strikes Back; A Week of LLM Jailbreaks

Swami Sivasubramanian. Photo by Getty.

Amazon Web Services, the king of renting cloud servers, is facing an unusually large amount of pressure. Its growth and enviable profit margins have been dropping, Microsoft and Google have moved faster—or opened their wallets—to capture more business from artificial intelligence developers (TBD on whether it will amount to much), and Nvidia is propping up more cloud-provider startups than we can keep track of.

It’s no wonder AWS CEO Adam Selipsky last week came out swinging in an interview in response to widespread perceptions his company is behind in the generative AI race.

With Amazon reporting second quarter earnings Thursday, the company undoubtedly is trying to get ahead of any heat coming its way from analysts wondering what’s up with AWS and AI. The company dropped some positive news Wednesday last week at a New York summit for developers. AWS servers powered by the newest specialized chips for AI, Nvidia H100 graphics processing units, are now generally available to customers, though only from its North Virginia and Oregon data center hubs.