Amazon's Biometric Surveillance and AI Computing: Impact and Tools
TLDR; Surveillance-driven AI economy powered by Amazon Web Services offers biometric authentication, AI chips, chatbot, and image generator tools.
⚖️ Social Decay and Biometric Surveillance
In many American cities, social decay has led to items like deodorant and toothpaste being kept behind lock and key. Amazon's biometric surveillance-driven AI economy, powered by Amazon Web Services, promises to make shoplifting a thing of the past.
Amazon's cashier-less store, announced in 2018, automatically charges the Amazon account of the shopper, leading to widespread personal surveillance. Additionally, Amazon provides tools for building dystopian shopping experiences, including a palm identity service for authentication and payment.
💻 AI Computing Power
The advancement in AI technology requires substantial computing power. Amazon's announcement of the latest generation of AWS tranium chips, capable of training massive AI models, is part of a race among big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia to build specialized chips for AI model training.
⚙️ SageMaker HyperPod
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, which leverages tranium chips or Nvidia GPUs, allows users to easily distribute work across hundreds or thousands of chips. This results in the creation of custom GPT-4 like foundational models, with the potential for significant cost implications.
🤖 Q Chatbot and AI Assistance
Amazon's Q, a chatbot for AWS customers, is designed to understand the context of users' AWS accounts, providing assistance in analyzing, writing code, generating reports, and data analysis. This AI feature aims to simplify complex AWS operations and improve user experience.
🖼️ Bedrock Image Generator
Amazon Bedrock offers a range of foundation models like stable diffusion and Titan, providing a playground for users to try out different models. It allows for fine-tuning with personal data and offers them as a fully managed API, making it a lucrative proposition for AI software as a service businesses.