Amazon has announced its plans for further world domination this week. Not content with taking 50% of the US’s total Black Friday revenue, it has designs on being the all-conquering market leader in Artificial Intelligence.
By building its equivalent of a Lego Kit for AI.
From their press release;
“Amazon SageMaker makes it easy to build, train, and deploy machine learning models
AWS DeepLens is the world’s first deep learning-enabled wireless video camera built to give developers hands-on experience with machine learning
Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Rekognition Video allow app developers to easily build applications that transcribe speech to text, translate text between languages, extract insights from text, and analyze videos.“
In the same way as the AppStore really made the iPhone successful, giving developers easy access to plug-and-play AI capabilities that they can then use to build a wide range of applications upon is guaranteed to make Amazon a more attractive place to start your AI forays than its competitors Google or Microsoft.
I think we will see these competitors soon responding with opening up their own AI play packs now that Amazon has thrown down this gauntlet. This is fantastic news for the pace at which I think we will see AI become practically useful. For example, Bloomberg reports that Amazon demonstrated DeepLens at their reInvent event:
“Amazon also showed off AWS DeepLens, a $249 device to help developers understand and experiment with machine learning. In a demonstration, the camera recognized a smile to be a positive reaction to a music album cover and a frown to be a negative reaction, enabling it to fine tune a customized playlist for the user.”
I am looking forward to seeing how the unbound imagination of creative human endeavour finds ways to use this. The AppStore has not disappointed in the range of crazy things we human can spend our time on — and I expect utilisation of Amazon’s bounty will yield the amazing.