Amazon is building a more “pervasive and capable” large language Model (LLM) to power Alexa, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company’s meeting. first quarter earnings call yesterday. An LLM, such as ChatGPT, is a deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize, and generate text and other content based on knowledge from vast amounts of text data.

Jassy said that while Amazon has had an LLM that powers Alexa, the tech giant is working on one that’s more capable than its current one. The Amazon executive believes the addition of an enhanced LLM will help Amazon work toward its goal of creating “the world’s best personal assistant,” but acknowledged that it will be difficult to do so in many domains.

“I think when people often ask us about Alexa, what we tend to share is that if we were just building a smart speaker, it would be a much smaller investment,” Jassy said during the call. “But we have a vision, on which we are convinced that we want to build the best personal assistant in the world. And to do that is difficult. It’s in many domains and it’s a very wide surface area. However, if you think about the advent of large language models and generative AI, it makes the underlying models much more effective, so I think it really accelerates the possibility of building the world’s best personal assistant.”

Jassy went on to say that she thinks Amazon has a good starting point with Alexa, as it has “a couple hundred million endpoints” that are used in entertainment, shopping and smart home. She also noted that there is a lot of participation from third-party ecosystem partners.

“We’ve had a great underlying language model, but we’re building one that’s much bigger and much more pervasive and capable,” Jassy said. “And I think that will very quickly accelerate our vision of becoming the best personal assistant in the world. I think there is a significant business model underlying this.”

During the call, Jassy highlighted that Amazon has been investing in IAs and LLMs for years and while they have the ability to invest heavily in building LLMs, small businesses don’t, which is why the company released bedrock earlier this month. Bedrock provides a way to build generative AI-powered applications through pre-trained startup models that include AI21 Laboratories, anthropic and AI stability. Available in a “limited preview”, Bedrock also offers access to Titan FM (base models), a family of models trained in-house by AWS.

Since its launch last year, ChatGPT has dominated the Internet and has become increasingly popular. With all the buzz surrounding ChatGPT, it’s no surprise that major tech companies are looking to incorporate LLM-based enhancements into their own offerings to keep up with the fast-paced AI space. For example, Information reported yesterday that Apple is developing LLM-based enhancements to Siri. It’s not worth it that Google is probably doing something similar for Assistant.

Amazon wasn’t the only company to mention AI during its quarterly investor call, as Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta also emphasized their investments in large language models. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google would continue to incorporate AI for advanced search, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company would continue to invest in AI, noting that Microsoft has already seen an increase in usage. from Bing after the search engine was updated with a ChatGPT integration. Additionally, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company will invest in AI and introduce new AI-related updates to its apps.

Amazon reported first-quarter earnings that beat expectations and initially boosted shares, but then reversed course after executives raised concerns about continued weakness in cloud growth. Revenue for the quarter increased 9.4% to $127.4 billion, while operating income was $4.8 billion.