Amazon is entering the AI ​​race far too late

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Now it's official. After a long strange silence from Amazon, a recent leak revealed that the company is working on an AI model called “Remarkable Alexa.” The idea behind this model is that it will work as an LLM, similar to ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Apple's Siri. Just one problem – Amazon is a little late to the AI ​​race.




Amazon had a great opportunity to build on its existing AI assistant, Alexa. It had the established technology and the ability to introduce an LLM into the mix. However, the company seems to have been hesitant to capitalize on the AI ​​boom, letting other companies get ahead of it. Because of this, Amazon's chances of making an impact are pretty slim.


Amazon is already late to the party and has not even publicly announced its plans

Not even fashionably late


So here's the problem with Amazon's plan with Remarkable Alexa. This announcement would have been much better received if it had been released sometime in the early months of 2024, when companies started testing their own AI models. We saw Google begin its plans with Gemini, Microsoft begin rolling out Copilot to its products, and even Adobe PDF get its own chatbot.

But here we are, months into the massive AI gold rush, and companies already have fully fleshed out and tested models for people to use. Even Apple, which had been silent for a long time, broke the news with its own Apple Intelligence AI. Amazon was nowhere to be seen in this rush, and the fact that we had to learn of its plans through a leak of all things shows how far behind the company is. We don't even have an official announcement that Remarkable Alexa is on the way—we just happened to see an internal leak.


Amazon could have been part of the AI ​​boom from day one

It had all the chips on its side of the table

Sam Altman speaks at OpenAI’s DevDay.

Source: OpenAI

The thing is, I'm not convinced that Amazon needed that much time to develop Remarkable Alexa. In fact, I'd argue that it could have been there from the start.

After all, the company is by no means inexperienced with AI. Its Alexa model can already help people a lot in their everyday lives. The company has built a smart home empire with its Echo devices and its Ring doorbells, both of which are very popular. And you can interact with both of them through Alexa.


When LLMs came along with ChatGPT, I would have thought that Amazon would jump at the chance to use it to improve Alexa. After all, given that so many of its smart home products rely on Alexa, it would have been a good move. However, I suspect that Amazon delayed its plans for internal reasons, meaning that the company missed its chance to be on the front foot of this new technology.

People will just stick with regular Alexa

Satya Nadella Copilot-1


The idea behind Remarkable Alexa is that it can be your daily news source. Ask it to summarize the day's news, and Remarkable Alexa will search through your preferences and pick out everything that happened. That seems convenient, and Amazon wants to charge $10 a month for it.

Do you know where else you can get AI-powered news digests? Copilot, in the free version. Copilot not only gives you all the latest news without you having to pay a cent, but also links to each news article as a source. Want to read more? Just click the link and you're there.


It's going to be really hard for Amazon to convince people to spend $10 a month on a feature like this. We're not even sure if it will work on current Echo devices or not. All we know is that Amazon was smart enough to keep the current Alexa model (which it calls “Classic Alexa”), so people might continue to use that instead of the Remarkable variant.

Amazon was not prepared for the AI ​​revolution

While Remarkable Alexa will be interesting, I feel like it's too little, too late. The company had the foundation and funding to get in early, but it seemed to waste its time a little too long. Now it's entering a saturated market with a paid plan that other models offer for free, and it still has to overcome all the teething issues that AI models usually have. I'm sure it will have its fans, but I don't think it will be the AI ​​revolution that Amazon wants it to be.


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