• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 28, 2024

Amazon Web Services (AWS) next week at its annual developers’ conference re:Invent in Las Vegas is expected to announce a search engine for video that uses generative artificial intelligence (GAI) to find content. 

The large language model (LLM), code-named Olympus, can search for and identify images in scenes and videos using simple text prompts. A scene might include a winning basketball shot, according to the report.

The goal is to make Amazon less reliant on the AI startup Anthropic, which Amazon has invested in.

The partnership also supports clients. Amazon's total investment in Anthropic comes to about $8 billion, Anthropic announced earlier this month.

The news, related to video search and initially reported by The Information, is not unexpected, but this is the first major video search tool supported by GAI coming from the Amazon division.

Google has a search tool that allows people to identify information and items within YouTube videos, but it is not known how it is supported by GAI.

Google DeepMind, an AI-focused research lab, in June announced the use of AI tech to generate soundtracks for videos.

In a post, the company described technology for short “video-to-audio” translations to make synchronized audiovisual generation possible. V2A combines video pixels with natural language text, as well as prompts to generate rich soundscapes for the onscreen action.

Anthropic also has launched its own multimodal AI technology for images and videos.

Amazon has a large repository of video archives to support developers and consumers that could be used to train the AI model.

The report provides examples such as videos for sports analysis to geological inspections for oil and gas companies.

Search analysis for developers and advertisers are the important concepts in this description in terms of how Amazon will compete not only with AI companies, but also Google as GAI becomes embedded deeper into technology.

It makes sense that AWS would announce something like this the week after Thanksgiving at its annal developers’ conference.