Amazon CEO says ChatGPT is 'exciting,' but that Amazon has been working on similar tech for a long time

• Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy said generative AI like ChatGPT presents "exciting" possibilities.
• He told the Financial Times that Amazon has been working on generative AI for a long time.

Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy chimed in on the conversation about generative AI and ChatGPT in an interview with the Financial Times, published on Monday.

"I think it's exciting, what's possible with generative AI," Jassy told the FT. "And it's part of what you're seeing with models like ChatGPT. But most large, deeply technical companies like ours, have been working on these very large, generative AI models themselves for a long time."

While Amazon already has AI and machine learning technology in place — like Alexa, its voice assistant, and CodeWhisperer, a code recommendation generator — company supporters are concerned that the tech giant is falling behind in the generative AI department, per the FT.

Generative AI refers to algorithms trained to produce new text, images, code, video, or audio.

"Microsoft is clearly in the lead and has won a lot of mindshare here," Matt McIlwain, managing director of Madrona Venture Group – an early investor in Amazon – told the FT.

He added that Amazon has to be cognizant of the trend toward intelligent and generative apps.

It "needs to have its strategic response," he said.

Jassy pointed out that the company is also pursuing opportunities to partner with smaller firms to develop this area of the business, but didn't share details.

The most prominent example is Stability AI — a competitor to Microsoft-backed OpenAI – which recently declared Amazon its "preferred cloud partner," to train and build its AI models.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Insider's request for further comment about its plans for AI.

Amazon's ventures into generative AI include Alexa — launched in 2014. David Limp, senior vice president for devices and services at Amazon, told the Times of London that the company is improving Alexa by making it more conversational because it is currently very "transactional" and can only respond to questions.

Limp said that while ChatGPT is a "healthy competitor" to Alexa it lacks the personality, memory, and knowledge of current events that Alexa has.

"If you were to ask Alexa details about the World Cup, who scored what goal in what match, Alexa would know," he said, adding that as of now, ChatGPT doesn't.

"Real-time knowledge is equally as important as the ability to write a screenplay, which GPT does pretty well. Alexa is pretty personalized today. It remembers things like your favorite music," he said.

According to Insider's Eugene Kim Amazon employees have recently used internal Slack channels to seek guidance about how they should use ChatGPT at work. A company lawyer advised workers not to share any confidential company data with ChatGPT after instances of responses looking similar to Amazon's internal data.

Kim reported that some employees have used the chatbot as a "coding assistant" by requesting that it improves internal lines of code.

At the time, the lawyer said that Amazon is broadly developing similar technology to ChatGPT, Kim reported.