Amazon has internal sales guidelines that disparage the AI capabilities of its biggest rivals, including Google.
For example, salespeople at Amazon Web Services are instructed to highlight the company's history of building custom silicon processors and AI chips as a competitive advantage over Google and Microsoft, while also pointing out that Google offers a limited number of foundational models.
Google wasn't too impressed.
“We're honored that they care about us, but just because something is talked about doesn't make fiction fact,” Google spokesperson Atl Erlingsson said in an email to Business Insider.
He added that Google's AI infrastructure offers the “best of breed” performance and widest range of AI models.
“Not only do we offer over 150 first, third and open source models through Vertex AI, but our AI infrastructure also offers the best overall performance, best price/performance, uptime and security,” Erlingsson wrote.
Google is in a fierce battle with Amazon, Microsoft, and OpenAI for AI supremacy. Behind-the-scenes badmouthing by salespeople is common in the tech industry, but when it becomes public, it can have negative repercussions. Google has long been considered a leader in AI, but the sudden emergence of ChatGPT and OpenAI's underlying models has put it in a more precarious position.
Similarly, Amazon is a leader in the lucrative cloud computing market. But the explosive popularity of OpenAI has given the company a lead in generative AI. According to internal sales guidelines, some AWS customers have started their first AI projects using OpenAI technology instead of AWS.
An Amazon spokesperson told BI that much of AWS' growth has been “driven by customer adoption of generative AI,” and highlighted that the company's cloud-computing business is on track to surpass $100 billion in revenue this year.
“It's no secret that generative AI is an extremely competitive space. But AWS is a leader in the cloud, and customer adoption of our AI innovations is a major driver of our continued growth. AWS offers more generative AI services than any other cloud provider, which is why we generate billions of dollars in revenue from our AI services alone,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
“Because generative AI is still in its early stages and many companies offer different services, we are committed to providing our sales team members with the information they need to help customers understand why AWS is the best, easiest, and best-performing place to build generative AI applications,” they added. “To interpret this as meaning anything less or to misinterpret our leadership position is false speculation.”
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