Tech Giants One lingers in Silicon Valley among the many questions that ChatGPT has posed about the future of artificial intelligence: Why couldn’t the biggest technology companies in the sector develop a cutting-edge service with a comparable level of impact, especially after amassing some of the biggest AI teams in the world?
Exclusive new data from a London-based analytics startup reveals that the five top tech companies have an estimated army of 33,000 individuals working directly on AI research and development, with Amazon having the largest pool with 10,113 personnel.
According to Glass.ai, which utilized machine-learning technologies to examine tech business websites and thousands of LinkedIn profiles of their AI-focused personnel, Microsoft Corp. has 7,133 AI staff members and Google has 4,970. The figures may not yet take into account Amazon’s recently announced layoffs, which were anticipated to affect AI workers, but they also represent a conservative estimate because they do not include software engineers, who may also be working on AI.
The statistics show how seriously the largest technology companies in the world have been taking their work on artificial intelligence, as well as how cautious and slow to develop services using the technology they had been until a small company, San Francisco-based OpenAI, prodded them to act.
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The chatbot became the fastest-growing online service of all time just a few months after research lab OpenAI released ChatGPT, setting off a race between Google and Microsoft to integrate generative AI into numerous components of their software. (Microsoft collaborates with OpenAI and has made a $10 billion investment in the start-up.)
In the meantime, Adobe Inc. has released an AI image generator in response to the success of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. Facebook’s Meta Platforms Inc. and Snap Inc. are competing to create “AI personas” that are similar to ChatGPT. Most of this is a result of the efforts of the minuscule team of 154 artificial intelligence specialists at OpenAI, according to Glass.ai.
The rumour in the AI world is that OpenAI’s success is largely due to astute marketing. The company has been heavily promoting its earlier works, such as its language model GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, for the past two years. The public’s direct access to its most specialised researchers is another factor in the organisation’s success.
OpenAI is a research and development centre rather than a product company. As a result, it was able to launch ChatGPT without the hordes of engineers and product managers that a larger tech company would typically employ, whose involvement in the creation of a product might unintentionally lead to bottlenecks that impede the advancement of new technologies.
An intriguing alternative case study for transforming AI research into marketable products is Amazon. Although it boasts the largest team of AI researchers in the sector, it has had varying degrees of success in translating its AI research into well-liked or ground-breaking products.
Amazon unveiled Alexa as a brand-new virtual assistant to the globe about ten years ago. However, the free service, which is offered through the $99 Echo speaker, has been a financial disaster for the corporation, costing it billions of dollars. The majority of Alexa’s users merely use it to play music or set timers.
Why are chatbots like ChatGPT more lifelike and adaptable compared to Alexa and other digital assistants like Siri and Google Assistant? As a result of the later technologies’ usage of big language models, which are taught to produce text using vast amounts of web-scraped data. A more constrained command-and-control system that is intended to understand specific requests, like “What time is it?” powers Alexa.
An Amazon spokesperson denied that the corporation believed its capabilities were restricted. She continued by pointing out that AI is integrated across every aspect of Amazon’s business operations, including product suggestions, its cloud computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS), and its warehouse logistics systems.
Stability AI, which leveraged AWS’s computer infrastructure to develop and launch its image-generating tool Stable Diffusion, is one of the hottest names in machine learning that Amazon’s cloud computing company AWS has lately partnered with. Hugging Face, which is developing a ChatGPT competitor on Amazon’s cloud computing technology, and Amazon teamed up in February.
These intriguing alliances may provide the business with a fresh strategic direction after its internal efforts to develop expansive AI services failed.
In addition to the 18,000 previously acknowledged job cutbacks, Amazon revealed on Monday that it would be letting go of 9,000 more employees in the coming weeks. However, the business has been expanding its AI staff for many years, even going on a hiring rampage in the last five years. According to data from Glass.ai, Amazon surpassed Google, Microsoft, Meta Platforms Inc., and Apple in terms of hiring more AI specialists after 2018.
The majority of Amazon’s most recent layoffs may probably target the ailing Alexa division. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon had roughly 10,000 employees working on Alexa in November 2022. While this number is likely to include a large number of sales and marketing personnel, there will also be a large amount of overlap with the 10,000 AI-focused employees that Glass.ai discovered.
The drawback of OpenAI’s direct-to-market strategy is that it is making a potent yet mostly unproven tool available to the general people. The corporation runs the risk of causing social problems it didn’t intend by treating its initial millions of consumers like test subjects. Before being released into the wild, GPT-4, its most recent language model, underwent six months of safety testing. However, it is still unknown whether or how much these technologies may spread false information, ruin lives, or be abused by evil guys.
Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, is currently working to optimise the company’s operations to match its efficiency. He may need to consider more carefully where to focus Amazon’s army of AI specialists, but exercising some caution isn’t always a terrible idea.
FAQs
What is Amazon planning?
Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, is currently working to optimise the company’s operations to match its efficiency. He may need to consider more carefully where to focus Amazon’s army of AI specialists, but exercising some caution isn’t always a terrible idea.
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