Amazon launches ChatGPT-like chatbot for business. Here’s all you need to know about Amazon Q

Amazon AWS has announced its generative AI chatbot Amazon Q, similar to ChatGPT but aimed specifically at businesses, at the re:Invent conference on Tuesday. The latest move by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leader in cloud computing technology, comes at a time when rivals such as Microsoft and Google are already using their own generative AI technology in their products.

Amazon is marketing Q as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ that can answer employees' questions, generate content and take action using the company's data.

Meanwhile, in a blogpost explaining the purpose of its new generative AI offering, Amazon noted that the new chatbot is “designed for work that can be tailored to your business. You can use Amazon Q to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and take action by connecting to your company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems. Amazon Q provides immediate, relevant information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, accelerate decision-making and problem-solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work.”

Speaking about the importance of generative AI at the conference, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said, “GenAI will reinvent every application we interact with, at work and at home...From startups to enterprises, organisations of all sizes are getting going with Generative AI. They want to take the momentum that they are building with early experimentation, and turn it into real-world productivity gains,”

Amazon's foray into artificial intelligence: 

Amazon is trying to regain lost ground in artificial intelligence against rivals such as Microsoft. The Redmond-based company has relied heavily on OpenAI for its generative AI offering, investing more than $10 billion in the company. Search giant Google also rushed its generative AI chatbot Bard to market after the launch of ChatGPT, while also adding generative AI to its other offerings such as Google Search, Gmail and YouTube.

As part of its efforts to find a place in the fast-changing AI landscape, Amazon had pledged to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthopic - maker of another ChatGPT rival bot Anthropic - and also deepened its relationship with Nvidia, the maker of most of the chips required to run large language models.