Google says 'we're flattered they're worried about us,' after Amazon sales guidelines diss rival's AI capabilities

• Amazon's AI sales guidelines criticize rivals including Google and Microsoft.
• Amazon guidelines highlight its custom silicon processors and AI chips as competitive advantages.
• Google disputes Amazon's claims, emphasizing its AI infrastructure's superior performance.

Amazon has internal sales guidelines that deride the AI capabilities of some of its biggest rivals, including Google.

For example, Amazon Web Services salespeople are instructed to highlight the company's long history of building custom silicon processors and AI chips as a competitive edge versus Google and Microsoft. It also points out Google's limitations in the number of foundation models offered by the search giant.

Google wasn't too impressed.

"We're flattered they're worried about us, but fiction doesn't become fact just because it's in talking points," Google spokesperson Atle Erlingsson wrote in an email to Business Insider.

He added that Google's AI infrastructure offers the "best" performance and a wide array of AI models.

"Not only do we offer more than 150 first, third and open-source models via Vertex AI, our AI infrastructure offers best overall performance, best cost performance, as well as uptime and security," Erlingsson wrote.

Google is engaged in a fierce battle against Amazon, Microsoft, and OpenAI for AI supremacy. Behind-the-scenes smack talk by salespeople is common in the tech industry, but when this stuff goes public that can be detrimental. For Google, the company has long been considered a leader in AI, but the sudden emergence of ChatGPT and OpenAI's foundation models has put it in a more precarious position.

Similarly, Amazon is the market leader in the lucrative cloud computing market. But OpenAI's explosive popularity gave the startup a headstart in generative AI, with some AWS customers launching their first AI projects using OpenAI's technology instead of AWS's, according to the internal sales guidelines.

An Amazon spokesperson told BI that much of AWS's growth is "fueled by customer adoption of generative AI," stressing that its cloud computing business is on pace to surpass $100 billion in sales this year.

"It's no secret that generative AI is an extremely competitive space. However, AWS is the leader in cloud and customer adoption of our AI innovation is fueling much of our continued growth. AWS has more generative AI services than any other cloud provider, which is why our AI services alone have a multi-billion dollar run rate," the Amazon spokesperson said.

"It's still early days for generative AI, and with so many companies offering varied services, we work to equip our sales teammates with the information they need to help customers understand why AWS is the best, easiest, most performant place to build generative AI applications," they added. "To parse the language as anything more than that or mischaracterize our leadership position is misguided speculation."

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