Amazon, Microsoft, And Google’s AI Armies Are Huge But Struggle To Innovate

(CTN News) – It’s difficult to ignore Amazon’s question about artificial intelligence’s future, especially after amassing some of the world’s biggest AI teams. Why couldn’t the industry’s largest technology firms create innovative services with similar impact?

Amazon boasts the largest pool of AI-focused employees, with 10,113, according to new data from a London-based analytics startup.

Glass.ai analyzed tech company websites and LinkedIn profiles of AI-focused employees to determine Microsoft Corp. has 7,133 and Google has 4,970 AI staff. However, the numbers are a conservative estimate, not including layoffs at Amazon that are expected to affect AI staff.

Despite taking artificial intelligence so seriously, the world’s biggest tech firms have been slow and cautious to create services using the technology until San Francisco-based OpenAI prodded them.

In just a few months, OpenAI released ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing online service of all time. This sparked a race between Google and Microsoft to integrate generative AI. Among the companies that OpenAI has invested in, Microsoft is also in a partnership.

After the success of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Adobe Inc. has launched an AI image generator. Facebook’s Meta Platforms Inc. and Twitter launched a chatbot similar to ChatGPT.

According to Glass.ai, OpenAI’s tiny team of AI experts, numbered just 154, are racing to create similar “AI personas.”
According to AI rumor, OpenAI’s success is mostly due to clever marketing. Media coverage for earlier projects like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 has been glowing for the last two years. Public access to its most specialized researchers also contributes to its success.

OpenAI isn’t a product company, but rather a research lab. As a result, ChatGPT was launched without the army of engineers and product managers that larger tech firms typically employ – and who inadvertently bottleneck innovation.

A successful product based on AI research is Amazon. While it has the largest AI research team in the industry, it has had mixed success turning its research into products.

Alexa was introduced by Amazon nearly a decade ago. With billions drained from the company by the free Echo speaker, the service has been a flop. Music and timers are the most common uses of Alexa.

How can chatbots like ChatGPT be so humanlike and versatile when Alexa and Siri are so limited? They are powered by large language models trained on data scraped from the web to generate text. It recognizes commands such as “What time is it?” using a command-and-control system.

An Amazon spokeswoman disagreed that Amazon was limited. AI is pervasive throughout Amazon’s operations, she said, including product recommendations, cloud computing and warehouse logistics.

Among AWS’s partnerships are Stability AI, which used AWS’s computing infrastructure to build and deploy its image-generating tool Stable Diffusion using AWS’s computing infrastructure. Amazon partnered with Hugging Face, which is building a rival to ChatGPT on Amazon’s cloud.

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