The next-generation cloud is here, as generative artificial intelligence has become a big driver of new experiences and expectations. The role of data, the chip wars and discussion around price and performance are among the big topics theCUBE has been tracking in recent months.

Various companies have been staking out their positions in the market, including during Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Adam Selipsky’s recent keynote address at AWS re:Invent. If there’s one thing that Amazon needs to do better, it’s marketing its AI, according to Zeus Kerravala (pictured, middle), founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.

“They’ve been using AI for as long as they’ve been around, so to say they’re behind on AI, I think it’s a little trite,” Kerravala said. “Certainly, their Redmond-based competitor there, in fact, the whole debacle with OpenAI. They say there’s no such thing as bad press. That raised the awareness of what Microsoft was doing better than anything else Microsoft could have done.”

Kerravala and Shelly Kramer (left), managing director and principal analyst with theCUBE Research, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier (right) at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, as part of the Analyst ANGLE series on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the ongoing battle for AI supremacy and what comes next.

What comes next

In analyzing the news that has come out of this week’s AWS re:Invent conference, Kerravala said he liked what the company offers with Bedrock. It gives customers a choice, and it will be interesting to see how the market plays out. 

“Generally, if you give customers a choice, that’s better for them and you wind up the winner. I’ve talked to a couple of customers here that had started using OpenAI and they moved to Bedrock because they didn’t want to be locked into one model,” he said. “The one thing that I can tell you is we have no idea what’s coming, so the ability to go pick and choose the model you want for the specific use case is actually better for the customer.”

The guardrails announced for Bedrock are also a “huge deal,” according to Kramer. There’s a big role when it comes to the importance of security and having security baked in foundationally.

“I think that’s what we see, safe user experiences. That’s what everybody wants and needs. I think that was a really important announcement,” she said.

During AWS re:Invent, AWS announced the preview of Amazon Q, a new generative AI-powered assistant that can be tailored for a company’s business. It’s been used with Amazon QuickSight for a while, according to Kerravala.

“I was just talking to QuickSight, and they said, ‘Q grew up,’” he said. “Instead of it being used for a tool just for database analysis, now it’s being used for everything across Amazon.”

The product was named after Q, a character in the James Bond films, who is proficient with gadgets. That’s a metaphor that ties over to the product.

“I do think having a single generative AI client there that works across all your products [provides consistency],” Kerravala said. “One of the things Amazon’s doing better now is they’re having better integration across all their building blocks, and I think Q’s a good example of that.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE