Amazon Archives

Amazon will use computer vision to spot defects before dispatch

Amazon will harness computer vision and AI to ensure customers receive products in pristine condition and further its sustainability efforts. The initiative – dubbed "Project P.I." (short for "private investigator") – operates within Amazon fulfilment centres across North America, where it will scan millions of products daily for defects.

Project P.I. leverages generative AI and computer vision technologies to detect issues such as damaged products or incorrect colours and...

4 June 2024 | Amazon

Amazon trains 980M parameter LLM with ’emergent abilities’

Researchers at Amazon have trained a new large language model (LLM) for text-to-speech that they claim exhibits "emergent" abilities.

The 980 million parameter model, called BASE TTS, is the largest text-to-speech model yet created. The researchers trained models of various sizes on up to 100,000 hours of public domain speech data to see if they would observe the same performance leaps that occur in natural language processing models once they grow past a certain...

15 February 2024 | AGI

Amazon is building a LLM to rival OpenAI and Google

Amazon is reportedly making substantial investments in the development of a large language model (LLM) named Olympus.

According to Reuters, the tech giant is pouring millions into this project to create a model with a staggering two trillion parameters. OpenAI’s GPT-4, for comparison, is estimated to have around one trillion parameters.

This move puts Amazon in direct competition with OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and others. The team behind Amazon’s initiative...

8 November 2023 | Amazon

Amazon invests $4B in Anthropic to boost AI capabilities

amazon anthropic ai artificial intelligence aws chatbot claude 2 model

Amazon has announced an investment of up to $4 billion into Anthropic, an emerging AI startup renowned for its innovative Claude chatbot.

Anthropic was founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who were previously associated with OpenAI. This latest investment signifies Amazon's strategic move to bolster its presence in the ever-intensifying AI arena.

“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder...

25 September 2023 | Amazon

MIT launches cross-disciplinary program to boost AI hardware innovation

MIT has launched a new academia and industry partnership called the AI Hardware Program that aims to boost research and development.

“A sharp focus on AI hardware manufacturing, research, and design is critical to meet the demands of the world’s evolving devices, architectures, and systems,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“Knowledge-sharing between...

31 March 2022 | Amazon

Amazon will continue to ban police from using its facial recognition AI

Amazon will extend a ban it enacted last year on the use of its facial recognition for law enforcement purposes.

The web giant’s Rekognition service is one of the most powerful facial recognition tools available. Last year, Amazon signed a one-year moratorium that banned its use by police departments following a string of cases where facial recognition services – from various providers – were found to be inaccurate and/or misused by law enforcement.

Amazon has now...

24 May 2021 | Amazon

AWS announces nine major updates for its ML platform SageMaker

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced nine major new updates for its cloud-based machine learning platform, SageMaker.

SageMaker aims to provide a machine learning service which can be used to build, train, and deploy ML models for virtually any use case.

During this year’s re:Invent conference, AWS made several announcements to further improve SageMaker’s capabilities.

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS,...

9 December 2020 | Amazon

NVIDIA chucks its MLPerf-leading A100 GPU into Amazon’s cloud

NVIDIA’s A100 set a new record in the MLPerf benchmark last month and now it’s accessible through Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) first launched a GPU instance 10 years ago with the NVIDIA M2050. It’s rather poetic that, a decade on, NVIDIA is now providing AWS with the hardware to power the next generation of groundbreaking innovations.

The A100 outperformed CPUs in this year’s MLPerf by up to 237x in data centre inference. A single NVIDIA DGX A100...

3 November 2020 | Amazon

Amazon uses AI-powered displays to enforce social distancing in warehouses

Amazon has turned to an AI-powered solution to help maintain social distancing in its vast warehouses.

Companies around the world are having to look at new ways of safely continuing business as we adapt to the "new normal" of life with the coronavirus.

Amazon has used its AI expertise to create what it calls the Distance Assistant. Using a time-of-flight sensor, often found in modern smartphones, the AI measures the distance between...