• Amazon announced last week the launch of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Generative AI Innovation Center, described as "a new program to help customers successfully build and deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
"AWS is investing $100 million in the program, which will connect AWS AI and machine learning (ML) experts with customers around the globe to help them envision, design, and launch new generative AI products, services, and processes. This builds on more than 25 years of deep investment in developing AI technologies for customers and is just one part of AWS’s overall generative AI strategy to bring this technology to customers and partners around the world. Companies of all kinds are excited about the potential of generative AI to transform their offerings and operations. The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center can help them make their ideas a reality faster and more effectively."
According to the announcement, "AWS Generative AI Innovation Center team of strategists, data scientists, engineers, and solutions architects will work step-by-step with customers to build bespoke solutions that harness the power of generative AI. For example, healthcare and life sciences companies can pursue ways to accelerate drug research and discovery. Manufacturers can build solutions to reinvent industrial design and processes. And financial services companies can develop ways to provide customers with more personalized information and advice.
"Through no cost workshops, engagements, and training, AWS will help customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, based on best practices and industry expertise."
• From Reuters:
"Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com plans to open retail grocery stores through the merger of its 7Fresh supermarket unit with other business lines such as its group-buying arm Pinpin, a company spokesperson said on Monday.
"Beyond opening actual stores, the new division will explore innovative retail models, the spokesperson told Reuters … This latest development comes after JD.com laid out an ambitious 20-year blueprint earlier this month to build seven enterprises that will be valued at more than 100 billion yuan ($13.83 billion) each.
"The company faces an increasingly competitive landscape, with Chinese consumers able to choose from a growing range of platforms including JD's main rival Alibaba Group, PDD Holdings' Pinduoduo and ByteDance's Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok."
