Amazon latest tech giant to announce AI chatbot

Amazon, a leading technology corporation, has announced the development of a new chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI), named Q. The chatbot is designed to assist businesses in tasks such as summarising lengthy documents or managing group chats, thereby enhancing productivity. This announcement comes a year after OpenAI's bot, ChatGPT, disrupted the market, prompting a surge in chatbot adoption among tech firms.

Amazon has pledged to safeguard companies from potential copyright issues that may arise from the use of its chatbot. This assurance follows high-profile lawsuits filed against OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, over allegations of copyright infringement during the system's training. Amazon anticipates that the gradual integration of Q into its primary business applications will attract more companies to utilise its cloud computing services. Q is equipped with capabilities to respond to customer inquiries, generate charts, analyse data, and assist businesses with their coding requirements.

The competition among tech giants to innovate in the field of AI is intensifying, with Microsoft currently leading the pack due to its substantial investment in ChatGPT. In September, Amazon announced its plan to invest up to $4bn in Anthropic, an AI firm established by former OpenAI employees. Amazon also owns Mechanical Turk, a service that facilitates the crowdsourced training of AI models. As it launches Q, Amazon has reiterated its commitment to protect businesses from copyright claims, such as the lawsuit filed by comedian Sarah Silverman against OpenAI and Meta, the owner of Facebook, in July. Silverman, along with two other authors, alleged that their books were used to train ChatGPT and that Meta's Llama AI system was also utilising their work. However, a US judge dismissed much of Silverman's lawsuit in November. Nevertheless, other authors, including Margaret Atwood and Philip Pullman, have urged AI companies to compensate them for the use of their work.