Amazon Web Services gives access to a range of AI models.
Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services
The competition to release artificial-intelligence models is moving at a dizzying pace.
Amazon.
com and
Samsung
Electronics are the latest companies hoping to challenge market leaders
Microsoft
and Google.
Microsoft
(ticker: MSFT) established an early lead in the AI race via its investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The latest OpenAI model, GPT-4, is helping to power Microsoft’s commercial AI applications.
The chief rival to their partnership so far has been Google-parent
Alphabet
(GOOGL), which developed an in-house AI model called PaLM that is now on its second version. Google was reported by The Wall Street Journal in July to be working on an AI model called Gemini that can rival GPT-4 and which is expected to be ready for release in the coming months.
However, the race could be about to be blown open.
Amazon
(AMZN) is investing in its own AI model, code-named ‘
Olympus,
’ which could top both OpenAI and
Alphabet’s
technology, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Barron’s early Wednesday.
Comparing AI models is tricky, as they can vary widely in their performance on different tasks. However, the most widely used metric is the number of parameters they have—a measure of the size and complexity of the model.
Amazon’s Olympus is set to have two trillion parameters compared with a reported one trillion for GPT-4, according to Reuters. OpenAI hasn’t publicly disclosed GPT-4’s size or details of its training.
Google’s original PaLM model had 540 billion parameters. Google has said its current version, PaLM 2, is smaller but more efficient. It’s a useful reminder that while the number of parameters is one way to measure model complexity, their performance also depends on speed and cost efficiency.
Amazon shares were flat in premarket trading. Microsoft was up 0.1% and Alphabet was down 0.1%.
Amazon could upend the AI race in the U.S. but competition is also heating up internationally. South Korea’s
Samsung Electronics
(005930.Korea) unveiled its own AI model, named Gauss, on Wednesday at a company event. The company didn’t give technical details but said it could generate text, images and assist with coding.
Samsung said Gauss is currently being used internally but it will expand it to several its products in the near future.
That raises the prospect of Samsung’s range of Galaxy smartphones having AI capabilities, bolstering its challenge to
Apple
(AAPL) and its iPhones.
Apple
has been quiet about its own AI goals but is expected to spend billions on developing the technology, including a revamped version of its virtual assistant Siri.
Apple shares were down less than 0.1% in premarket trading. Samsung stock fell 1.4% in local trading in South Korea on Wednesday.
Write to Adam Clark at [email protected]
Read the full article here