Cisco offers more integrations between its ThousandEyes network analytics and Amazon’s new CloudWatch Internet Monitor
The AWS re:Invent event is running this week in Las Vegas. So far the biggest story to come out of it is Amazon Q, an AI-enabled chatbot for AWS customers. The cloudco describes it as ”a new generative artificial intelligence-powered assistant designed for work that can be tailored to your business. You can use Amazon Q to have conversations, solve problems, generate content, gain insights, and take action by connecting to your company’s information repositories, code, data, and enterprise systems.’
Apparently “Amazon Q provides immediate, relevant information and advice to employees to streamline tasks, accelerate decision-making and problem-solving, and help spark creativity and innovation at work.”
It shares some of the ways Amazon Q can be useful in this blog.
OpenAI introduced ChatGpt Enterprise in the summer but of course Amazon Q is more specialist. Its education has been based on 17 years of AWS data, so it is expert in AWS. Depending on how well it works, it could be a boon to AWS clients and cut AWS’ support costs.
Lack of progress?
Amazon has been criticised for its lack of progress with AI and Alexa for several years. Naturally, the new chatbot has already being dubbed Alexa for IT although note that its name, Q, was chosen before OpenAI’s similarly named artificial general intelligence (AGI) project, Q* (Q star). Breakthroughs in Q* were thought to be part of why OpenAI fired Sam Altman as CEO.
In September, AWS said it will invest up to $4 billion to make Generative AI company Anthropic’s models more useful to AWS’ customers as well as acquire an unspecified minor shareholding. The initial investment that secures the stake will be $1.25 billion.
SK Telecom invested up to $100 million in August to help fund the Anthopic’s development of a large language model (LLM) to help telcos leverage GenAI.This was seen as a way of AWS leapfrogging ahead in the field, after it had no takers for its own chips to train AI. Anthropic is to use AWS’ machine learning accelerators, Trainium and Inferentia, to build, train and deploy new foundation models for AWS as well as technology for AWS machine-learning chips.
More network assurance
Cisco used the event as a platform to announce more integrations between its ThousandEyes network analytics platform and Amazon’s new CloudWatch Internet Monitor. According to Cisco, ‘The first-of-its-kind integration empowers customers with unparalleled visibility into their cloud deployments, enabling them to deliver unmatched optimized digital experiences”. Cisco also stressed how the new integrations underline its commitment to “end-to-end network assurance”.