Amazon releases AI chatbot called ‘Q’

The logo of Amazon is pictured inside the company’s office in Bengaluru, India, April 20, 2018. (File photo by ABHISHEK N. CHINNAPPA / Reuters)

WASHINGTON — Amazon on Tuesday (Wednesday in Manila) released its own AI chatbot intended for businesses, about one year after ChatGPT took the world by storm.

“Q” will be available only to Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud computing customers and will be in direct competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s copilots that also run on OpenAI’s technology.

Chatbots targeted at businesses have become the main battleground for generative AI, a year after ChatGPT wowed the world with its ability to churn out expert and human-like content instantaneously.

READ: AI vital to companies if used properly, say execs

READ: Meta to bar political advertisers from using generative AI ads tools

More secure

GPT stands for “generative pretrained transformer,” which refers to how AI formulates responses.

Costing $20 (around P1,107.91) monthly per user, Amazon Q will perform various tasks, including summarizing uploaded documents and answering questions about specific data sitting on a company’s servers.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy plugged Amazon Q as a more secure version of an AI chatbot in which access to content will be more closely controlled.

This was designed to reassure companies put off by the technology’s tendency to churn out incorrect or inappropriate answers, sometimes called hallucinations.

“If a user doesn’t have permission to access certain data without Amazon Q, they can’t access it using Amazon Q either,” Jassy said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

AWS CEO Andrew Selipsky insisted that cloud customers using Q could also limit their chatbots to a very limited and predetermined data source.

Veiled swipeWhile presenting the company’s latest AI developments, Selipsky also took a veiled swipe at Microsoft, which has been AWS’s biggest rival.

For AI tasks, Microsoft depends on OpenAI, which suffered an embarrassing boardroom dustup this month that saw CEO Sam Altman fired and rehired five days later.

Selipsky said the tumult showed that businesses needed to depend on various AI providers.

“You need a real choice. The events of the past 10 days have made that very clear,” Selipsky said at the event in Las Vegas.