An Amazon team is racing to launch new AI products similar to those from Microsoft GitHub, leaked email shows

• AWS’s new VP of Next Generation Developer Experience praised his team by comparing them to Microsoft’s GitHub.
• A leaked email hinted that AWS is building products that are similar to what GitHub announced last week.
• AWS is working on a conversational AI assistant that can help developers get answers about AWS features and support issues.

Last week, an Amazon cloud VP sent a motivational email to his team after GitHub, Microsoft’s developer code-sharing site, held an artificial intelligence event and released a slew of new products.

The email, obtained by Business Insider, was sent last week by Deepak Singh, vice president of Amazon Web Services’ newly formed Next Generation Developer Experience team.

In it, he mentioned that the products announced at the GitHub Universe developer conference were similar to what his team is working on right now. He praised his team for being able to build those products in much less time than GitHub and urged them not to be discouraged by competitors beating them to market.

One of the major announcements at GitHub Universe was the general availability of its Copilot Chat, a chatbot that assists developers in answering questions and identifying bugs. Among other things, it released a new enterprise product and more AI security features.

According to a person directly involved in the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press, AWS is currently working on a Copilot Chat-like conversational AI assistant that will allow developers to ask questions about AWS features and support issues. According to this person, AWS refers to this as the AWS Knowledge engine in general. Singh mentioned this effort in his email.

“One of our competitors held an event today and made a number of announcements.” “If you look at everything they’ve announced, you can almost read off all of our code names,” Singh wrote in an email, referring to GitHub Universe. “But here’s the twist. They’ve most likely been working on these features for a long time, whereas we only started a few months ago. The amount of work you’ve all done in the last 4-5 months is simply incredible.”

Amazon and Microsoft representatives declined to comment.

According to BI, Amazon is internally scrambling to capitalize on the generative-AI boom as rival companies race ahead with popular consumer apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

Meanwhile, AWS has introduced new products such as Bedrock, a service that makes foundation models more accessible, and CodeWhisperer, a coding assistant app.

Singh’s team, which was established earlier this year, is tasked with assisting developers in building new products on top of AWS’s cloud infrastructure, as previously reported by BI. According to a person familiar with the project, the new chatbot for AWS developers is one example of this strategy, as it is intended to guide developers toward more AWS services when building AI products.

This strategy is further explained in a separate internal document obtained by BI. According to the document, AWS’s overarching goal in the AI field is “to reimagine how applications are built on AWS using generative artificial intelligence.” As part of that, AWS is investing in “delightful developer experiences” and “enabling the next generation of AWS builders,” according to the document.

Singh noted in his email last week that the race for AI supremacy is still in its early stages.

“This space is heating up and sometimes it feels like our work is just starting,” Singh wrote in a blog post. “There’s a lot of innovation in front of us and a need to relentless execution, but I wanted to thank all of you for being awesome and doing so much in a very compressed timeframe.”