GenAI battles it out in the cloud

Amazon made a few crucial announcements at its Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in New York last week. One of them was the unveiling of HealthScribe, a generative AI platform that healthcare software developers can integrate into their systems to create transcripts, summarize, and extract details from patient-doctor interactions. It enables medical professionals to cut out a lot of the laborious paperwork.

But the more important development was Amazon bringing its genAI foundational model Amazon Bedrock together with other foundational models – Cohere, Stability AI, Anthropic, and AI21 Labs – under one API. All of them will be tied together with AI agents to help developers by eliminating the need for manual coding.

While Amazon has been a late entrant into the genAI race, this move looks to be a way to play catch up to Microsoft, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and to Google with its LaMDA model. For Amazon, genAI is a must-have if it wants to ensure its breadwinner AWS maintains its leadership in the cloud computing space.

Just a few days before Amazon’s announcement, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella bragged during the company’s earnings call that while Microsoft isn’t the largest provider of cloud infrastructure for companies, it is No. 1 when it comes to selling cloud-based AI services. Overall, he said that Azure has grown to become “a strong No. 2” player.

Image credit: Timmy Loen

Though Amazon’s AWS still leads the cloud infrastructure space worldwide with a dominant 32% market share, that’s down from the 40% share it once had. Azure, on the other hand, has grown its market share to 23% as of Q1 2023 from 21% in the same quarter last year. During the same period, Google Cloud has also seen its market share grow to 10% from 8%.

The demand for Azure and Google Cloud has been growing with the introduction of genAI into their existing cloud services. While Google Cloud may be a distant rival for Amazon, Microsoft’s OpenAI-infused offering is something the Jeff Bezos-founded firm will have to worry about.

HealthScribe, too, follows other similar healthcare products from Amazon’s competitors. Nuance Communications and Microsoft have developed an AI-automated clinical documentation app in March. Google has also been developing Med-PaLM, designed to provide doctors with medical information quickly.

But Amazon won’t be undone easily. Its AWS Summit reportedly drew thousands of customers to try out its AI cloud services. The company said that clients such as Sony, Sun Life, Ryanair, and Coda are already using Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon’s advantage is the large number of existing AWS customers that it can offer its genAI products to. Expanding these to include other foundational models will help plug any weaknesses in Amazon Bedrock.

That said, Amazon’s genAI offerings are currently only available to existing business clients. The real test will be how effective it is in comparison to the genAI cloud service capabilities of Azure and Google Cloud.

This was published as a part of AI Odyssey, a section on generative AI developments featured in Tech in Asia’s emerging tech newsletter.

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