In an ambitious attempt to ensure robots no longer sound like awkward interns pitching at a company all-hands, Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday it will invest a tidy $230 million into GenAI startups as part of a program clearly designed to make machines marginally better at pretending to be human. The fund will target early-stage companies whose dreams are big and whose bank accounts are not, particularly those developing generative artificial intelligence that can whip up everything from marketing copy to code suggestions with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated college student during finals week.
The investment, described loftily as an “AI Ready” initiative, is not just a charitable gesture toward the future overlords of digital conversation. Rather, it is a strategic bid to stake a larger claim in the ongoing gold rush of generative AI, where tech companies are tossing billions at anything that looks vaguely like the next ChatGPT, hoping that one might one day invent poetry or at least a halfway decent PowerPoint outline. This is not AWS’s first rodeo either. Amazon has been setting up cloud services and tools for startups to build, train and deploy AI models with more ease and less panic since at least 2023, so they are now simply sweetening the pot.
Recipients of the new funding will not only receive money but also credits for AWS cloud services, which in a classic move could be compared to giving out house keys but only if the rent is paid in Amazon gift cards. The intention, presumably, is to keep these startups loyal and building on Amazon’s infrastructure rather than defecting to Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, which are each cultivating their own AI gardens complete with promises and probably just as many bugs.
All of this follows Amazon’s larger chessboard jockeying, including its juicy $4 billion partnership with AI company Anthropic, which builds large language models that sound like they read a lot of 19th century newspapers. Amazon wants to make sure it is not relegated to the role of the polite cousin trying to organize the photo album while the rest of the tech giants hog the AI spotlight.
Whether this $230 million results in a meaningful breakthrough in artificial intelligence or simply more creatively written calendar invites remains to be seen, but Amazon seems determined to make sure the next generation of generative AI is trained, deployed and monetized on its cloud.
When in doubt, give machines money until they start to sound interesting.