Amazon Q (Preview)(aws.amazon.com)
aws.amazon.com
Amazon Q (Preview)
https://aws.amazon.com/q/
61 comments
The US FTC made that a rule earlier this year: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...
I am also annoyed by these online services with basically no customer service.
But, what do you mean by “take action on the entire customer account?” “Trick or bribe a human” is not a very difficult task, so it must be the case that there are some things a customer service agent can’t do.
Granting access, clearly a no-go for any service that might hold important private documents. But also, canceling an account on that sort of service could be pretty catastrophic… which means they can’t resolve problems in a direction that stops them from billing you…
But, what do you mean by “take action on the entire customer account?” “Trick or bribe a human” is not a very difficult task, so it must be the case that there are some things a customer service agent can’t do.
Granting access, clearly a no-go for any service that might hold important private documents. But also, canceling an account on that sort of service could be pretty catastrophic… which means they can’t resolve problems in a direction that stops them from billing you…
California adopted the rule that unsubscribe has to be the same process as subscribe a few years ago, then recently it was adopted nationally.
For a while some sites only let you unsubscribe online if your address was in California, so people would change their address and then unsubscribe online.
For a while some sites only let you unsubscribe online if your address was in California, so people would change their address and then unsubscribe online.
"Amazon Q offers 40+ built-in connectors to popular enterprise applications and document repositories, including S3, Salesforce, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Gmail, Slack, Atlassian, and Zendesk"
Having a direct link to S3 + existing connectors built in feels like a strong competitive moat. Interested to see how far they can expand on this
Having a direct link to S3 + existing connectors built in feels like a strong competitive moat. Interested to see how far they can expand on this
"Connectors" are only a differentiator for customers who haven't fallen for "connector" promises in the past.
> Having a direct link to S3 + existing connectors built in feels like a strong competitive moat.
Not really; the hard part is processing the data from each of these sources, not downloading the data from the source. Sure, any company that wants to compete is going to need to raise at least $30m just to get to the same minimal baseline level of support, but that was already the case even without this announcement.
In terms of whether this product will win the market, I honestly doubt it. Figuring out how to best process the data from each source to yield good results is going to be highly subjective, and Amazon's culture makes it unlikely that it will succeed here.
(As someone with a company that offers an API to pre-process email for LLM ingestion, fwiw.)
Not really; the hard part is processing the data from each of these sources, not downloading the data from the source. Sure, any company that wants to compete is going to need to raise at least $30m just to get to the same minimal baseline level of support, but that was already the case even without this announcement.
In terms of whether this product will win the market, I honestly doubt it. Figuring out how to best process the data from each source to yield good results is going to be highly subjective, and Amazon's culture makes it unlikely that it will succeed here.
(As someone with a company that offers an API to pre-process email for LLM ingestion, fwiw.)
Fair. I'm biased as someone who has worked with public and private enterprise clients in F500 security/healthcare/government sectors where there's been reluctance to adopt some of these solutions. Amazon offering this natively might mean:
1) I won't have to rely on a smaller third party to have access to my data for connecting & processing that may or may not match my data regulatory requirements (compliance, protection, residency, etc) and
2) it's one less vendor to deal with at a price that's hard to beat in a time when many companies are consolidating systems spend.
This feels strange (maybe I got it wrong).
It's probably because Amazon has all the money in the world they need to develop their products, but I would expect to launch a new product with some minimal but strong features to attract customers. Q offers 40+ built-in connectors from day zero. Like I can imagine the engineers/managers working on connector number 25: "Man, we have implemented already 24 connectors and we don't even know if the product will be a success or not...".
It's probably because Amazon has all the money in the world they need to develop their products, but I would expect to launch a new product with some minimal but strong features to attract customers. Q offers 40+ built-in connectors from day zero. Like I can imagine the engineers/managers working on connector number 25: "Man, we have implemented already 24 connectors and we don't even know if the product will be a success or not...".
I see "connector" and hear "you'll spend weeks trying to get this feature to work before you give up and write it in Python in an afternoon."
15 connectors was the bare minimum. Brian, for example, has 37 connectors, okay. And a terrific smile.
Weird that I read a story about OpenAI's mysterious "Q" model, open up Hacker News, and read about Amazon's Q model. It will be interesting to see the business expertise functionality that they tout.
The [possibly bogus] recent news were about a thing called Q* ("Q star"). I think the branding is just a coincidence, where it stands for "Question".
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It's just his complex conjugate
I see a lot of these data providers investing in chat style interfaces too, the main plus with aws is all the extra data a Confluence chat interface won’t have for example. Not sure how you reconcile inconsistent data from say slack and confluence. If they get it right though, this will be the top of the stack for AI for a lot of companies
Reconciling inconsistent information across systems is the truly hard part. Sometimes I feel that a large part of our jobs are simply detective work.
Interesting approach to cast the net so wide in a single release.
I mean, I can imagine it makes a lot of sense for a company to just dump a bunch of documents into S3 and then expect an LLM to be able to answer questions on that corpus. In some sense, you don't even really care about what is happening in the background, i.e. is it RAG, fine-tuning, LoRA, etc.
Also, I can imagine a debugging scenario for AWS where you might want an AI assistant to have access to your Cloudwatch, ECS, EC2, etc. so you can ask questions like "X service is down, what interesting logs/metrics are worth looking at more closely". And instead of the truly terrible AI "smart" alerting solutions you can play a game of 20 questions with a GPT-3.5 level LLM.
These services are the tip of the iceberg compared to what will come in the next couple of years. I bet Azure will have similar offerings very soon. Maybe Amazon is working here to beat them to the punch?
I mean, I can imagine it makes a lot of sense for a company to just dump a bunch of documents into S3 and then expect an LLM to be able to answer questions on that corpus. In some sense, you don't even really care about what is happening in the background, i.e. is it RAG, fine-tuning, LoRA, etc.
Also, I can imagine a debugging scenario for AWS where you might want an AI assistant to have access to your Cloudwatch, ECS, EC2, etc. so you can ask questions like "X service is down, what interesting logs/metrics are worth looking at more closely". And instead of the truly terrible AI "smart" alerting solutions you can play a game of 20 questions with a GPT-3.5 level LLM.
These services are the tip of the iceberg compared to what will come in the next couple of years. I bet Azure will have similar offerings very soon. Maybe Amazon is working here to beat them to the punch?
This was scooped a week ago by BI:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-vp-ai-race-developers...
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-vp-ai-race-developers...
I could see the value add for IAM alone, give me a chatbot to deal with that nonsense.
Better use case: an AI chatbot trained on your AWS setup, so it can tell you exactly where that damn misplaced config lives
Unusual pricing for AWS, minimum 10 users.
Any details on what model powers this? Is it Anthropic? Or an OSS model? Or something home-grown?
Probably one of the Bedrock models (which includes Anthropic.)
Is this why Amazon bought MGM? So they can use a James Bond movie character name?
You cannot trademark or copyright individual letters of the alphabet and prevent other people from using them. So no.
How many startups doing exact same thing are going out of business now?
Bye bye gpt wrappers
I always found it strange that VCs were so focused on GPT for X companies. In my view, there is no reason why GPT for X isn't just GPT. Once the model is fine tuned for this task, there isn't anything terribly special about a given X.
That being said, enhancing existing products to be chat friendly will definitely be an improvement.
That being said, enhancing existing products to be chat friendly will definitely be an improvement.
Naming choice feels a lil sus considering the existing mindshare on "Q" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
QAmazon
But Q is just one letter no one can appropriate it.
But Q is just one letter no one can appropriate it.
Q send me.... Ahem... Q* sent me /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(James_Bond)
I've always thought QAnon's name was a reference to this character, but I don't care enough to confirm or deny.
Either way, the letter Q is more significant than the recent conspiracy theories.
I've always thought QAnon's name was a reference to this character, but I don't care enough to confirm or deny.
Either way, the letter Q is more significant than the recent conspiracy theories.
It's a reference to the Department of Energy "Q" clearance, which, to people who don't understand anything, is an "Above Top Secret" clearance for super-duper secret deep-state nefarious activities.
Obviously it is not that, it permits one to access all classes of SNM and Restricted Data covered by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
Obviously it is not that, it permits one to access all classes of SNM and Restricted Data covered by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
Likely chosen to preempt OpenAI's rumoured "Q*" model
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Q learning predates Q anon by a lot
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning
Swastika predates the nazis by a lot too but I wouldn't put one on my leather jacket. Seniority is a weak position when trying to guess what meaning people might infer from a word.
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The swastika is associated with a group that waged a major war against many nations and committed genocide and other atrocities. Avoiding it, at least in most contexts, is just good sense these days. "Q" in "QAnon" is associated with a bunch of idiots believing nonsensical conspiracy theories. These aren't quite the same things.
Congrats on Godwin'ing the thread, though.
Congrats on Godwin'ing the thread, though.
Giraffe makes a good point. Idiots believing nonsensical conspiracy theories became Nazi's after all. It's a slippery slope. It is completely fair to compare them. Crazy is crazy, regardless of which one is "worse".
So let's stop using the letter Q for systems related to "Q&A" services because some idiots might associate the Q with another group of idiots who have managed to accomplish nothing of value and most people know are idiots? That's idiotic.
Yes, he always was a bit of a dick - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)
Only for the terminally online.
Unfortunately the votes of terminally online conspiracy theorists have the same weight as the rest of ours, which can interact with the real world.
Edit: actually, I phrased this poorly in reflection. It is good that everyone gets a vote, even people I disagree with. The unfortunate thing is the influence of online weirdness on people.
Edit: actually, I phrased this poorly in reflection. It is good that everyone gets a vote, even people I disagree with. The unfortunate thing is the influence of online weirdness on people.
They are an extreme minority. In the real world most people have no idea what QAnon is outside of maybe a weird thing they saw on the news and laughed at.
I don’t think this is true, but I see how either of us could possibly prove it either way.
You'd be surprised. Venture outside of a population center and into the heartland.
from the NYTimes article:
The name Q is a play on the word “question,” given the chatbot’s conversational nature, Mr. Selipsky said. It is also a play on the character Q in the James Bond novels, who makes stealthy, helpful tools, and on a powerful “Star Trek” figure, he added.
I guarantee a large swath of the population will draw a connection to the conspiracy stuff. I am not claiming that there is a connection - but others will.
If you're building an entirely new product and can choose any name in the world - why would you choose one that had the remote potential to be misconstrued? Seems foolish, particularly in the current political climate where fervor is building over AI regulation and a huge chunk of our politicians are in the MAGA camp.
If you're building an entirely new product and can choose any name in the world - why would you choose one that had the remote potential to be misconstrued? Seems foolish, particularly in the current political climate where fervor is building over AI regulation and a huge chunk of our politicians are in the MAGA camp.
At least in France we passed a law that says that if you subscribed to a service online, you can unsubscribed online too (no idea if we're first, or last).