Amazon's Olympus AI-powered Video Processing: Explained

With video content becoming increasingly central to digital communication, commerce and entertainment, the ability to effectively process and analyse video data has become a crucial differentiator with AI.

As the technology industry continues to grapple with the implications of increasingly powerful AI models, Amazon's latest development suggests a push toward greater technological self-reliance.

Amazon has developed a sophisticated video AI model that could potentially address these growing market demands while strengthening its competitive position in the rapidly evolving AI scene.

The development arrives amid growing competition in the AI industry, where companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have made substantial strides in Gen AI capabilities.

Amazon's move appears particularly strategic given the evolving demands of enterprise customers who increasingly seek advanced AI solutions for handling complex data types, especially video content - an area that has historically presented unique challenges in AI development.

Amazon's new AI model: Olympus

Amazon’s new Gen AI model, codenamed Olympus, is capable of processing images, videos and text.

This multimodal AI model is an advancement in Amazon's AI capabilities and could potentially reduce the company's reliance on external AI providers.

Olympus’s capabilities and features

Olympus is designed as a LLM with 2 trillion parameters, making it one of the largest models currently being trained.

The model's ability to understand scenes in images and videos could enable users to search for specific content using simple text prompts.

For example, customers might be able to locate a particular moment in a video, such as a winning basketball shot, through text-based queries.

Amazon's strategic implications

The development of Olympus is part of Amazon's broader strategy to strengthen its position in the AI market.

By creating its own advanced AI model, Amazon aims to enhance the appeal of its AWS offerings to enterprise clients who require access to high-performing models.

This move could potentially reduce Amazon's dependence on AI startup Anthropic's Claude chatbot, which is currently a popular offering on AWS.

Amazon's investment and partnerships

While developing Olympus, Amazon has not neglected external partnerships.
The company recently invested an additional US$4bn in Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, bringing its total investment to US$8bn.

This dual approach of internal development and external investment demonstrates Amazon's commitment to securing a strong position in the AI market.

Amazon's leadership and team

The Olympus project is led by Rohit Prasad, formerly the head of Alexa and now serving as the Head Scientist of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) at Amazon.

Rohit has assembled a team of researchers with expertise from Alexa AI and the Amazon science team, consolidating AI initiatives across the company.

Olympus's market impact and competition

Olympus is seen as a response to the perception that competitors such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have taken the lead in Gen AI.

The introduction of Olympus could potentially increase Amazon's market share in the highly competitive AI field and solidify its position as a leader in cloud computing services.

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, emphasises the importance of Gen AI for the future: "Gen AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages) and perhaps since the Internet.”

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