What’s Missing From Amazon’s Big New AI Product; OpenAI’s Interest in Human Brain-Inspired Chips

Over the weekend, my colleagues Jon Victor and Amir Efrati reported that Google has scrapped the launch next week of Google’s would-be GPT-4 killer, Gemini, providing further evidence that the product has been delayed until 2024. Why? It’s just not ready yet and, according to the report, recently had trouble handling some non-English queries. The AI chatbot wars are still in the early innings, but it’s remarkable that Google, with all its resources and “code red” urgency to go after OpenAI, still hasn’t gotten there.

The Question About Q

For those of you who didn’t spend last week in Las Vegas for Amazon Web Services’ Re:Invent conference, I’m here to fill you in on Q, an artificial intelligence chatbot and assistant that the company hopes will change the public perception that it’s behind in AI. Q aims to compete with Microsoft’s AI tools, dubbed “copilots,” and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. On price, Q will undercut Microsoft’s productivity copilot by $10 per person per month.

Q, which isn’t yet broadly available to customers, is expected to serve several different purposes. One of them is particularly striking: AWS said customers can connect Q to their corporate data so that employees can use it to answer business-related questions, summarize documents and draft emails. AWS doesn’t sell productivity apps (a longtime Achilles heel), but Q will be able access information from applications such as Gmail, Slack, Jira, and Microsoft 365. Those apps already have embedded generative AI features, but AWS hopes Q will be attractive because it can access information across all of them. That assumes enterprises want AWS to access all their data, which has to be a question in a time of pitched concerns about data leakage via large-language models.

Early testing about Q might reinforce those concerns. In the days following the Q launch, some early testers I talked to noticed the chatbot appeared to spit out what seemed to be confidential information about AWS as well as some incorrect information. Platformer also reported that AWS employees raised the issue internally. (A spokesperson for AWS said Q has not leaked confidential information and that the company is continuing to improve the product before it becomes generally available.)