Report: Amazon's new $5/month Alexa to use Anthropic's tech, in ...
Amazon is moving closer to its expected launch of a premium, $5-10/month new Alexa assistant. But according to a new report from Reuters, plans to use Amazon’s own in-house AI have failed, leading the company to turn to Anthropic’s Claude instead.
The Shift to Anthropic's Claude
AI assistants and chatbots continue to grow in usefulness. ChatGPT recently passed 200 million weekly users, for example. But some of the early intelligent assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa, have gotten left behind in this recent AI gold rush. That’s why Amazon has been working toward launching an upgraded, AI-infused version of Alexa. October is the expected release date.
It turns out, though, that not everything has gone according to plan. According to a report by Reuters, Amazon has turned to Claude, an AI chatbot developed by startup Anthropic, as it performed better than the online retail giant’s own AI models.
Potential Challenges and Competition
It remains to be seen whether there’s a market for a premium version of Alexa. The question arises considering the popularity of Amazon's Echo devices due to their affordability. Business model challenges aside, what Amazon’s doing by outsourcing its AI tech is not all that different from Apple’s upcoming ChatGPT integration.
This idea is gonna crash and burn. People aren't going to pay a monthly fee to use something that others like Apple and Google offer for free. Amazon continues to fumble. Apple no doubt considered building its own version of Siri that could compete with ChatGPT on ‘world knowledge,’ but decided it was better off partnering with OpenAI instead.
Amazon's Statement and Future Directions
Amazon shared the following statement with 9to5Mac: “Amazon uses many different technologies to power Alexa. When it comes to machine learning models, we start with those built by Amazon, but we have used, and will continue to use, a variety of different models—including Titan and future Amazon models, as well as those from partners—to build the best experience for customers. That’s one of the key advantages of Amazon Bedrock—it makes it easy for application developers to seamlessly use the world’s highest-performing models, and multiple models, through a single API.”
Are you interested in a paid Alexa service? Let us know in the comments.
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