Amazon is working on infusing generative AI features akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard AI to its shopping application and website in an effort to provide a more conversational experience, job postings on the company’s career section indicate.
The job postings sought a senior development engineer for machine learning and another engineer to “rearchitect” the search engine or feature inside Amazon’s shopping application.
“We’re working to improve shopping on Amazon using the conversational capabilities of large language models, and are searching for pioneers who are passionate about technology, innovation, and customer experience, and are ready to make a lasting impact on the industry,” one of the job postings read.
Another job posting, according to a Bloomberg report, sought a software engineer who would be part of “a new AI-first initiative to re-architect and reinvent the way we do search through the use of extremely large-scale next-generation deep learning techniques.”
Amazon’s intent to overhaul its search feature inside its application comes at a time when rivals such as Microsoft and Google have been adding their own generative AI engine across their product portfolio.
Microsoft was one of the first companies to showcase the power of generative AI by bringing ChatGPT's underlying AI engine into Bing Chat, which is now being made more widely available.
Bing Chat is a conversational interface built inside the Microsoft Edge browser that lets users search the internet in a conversational manner.
Last week, Google also said it was adding generative AI features to Google search in the US. These features include summarizing search content and helping users with shopping.
Rivals adding generative AI features and consumer demand may be the two reasons behind Amazon’s push in revamping the search engine of its retail application.
In the US, about 56% of product searches start on Amazon, more than on search engines or Walmart, according to a survey of 1,000 consumers conducted by Jungle Scout, which provides SaaS-based tools for search, market analytics, sales intelligence and inventory management to Amazon resellers.
Technology giants, such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, previously contended with the same rigor during the rise of voice computing in 2016, which saw these giants release their AI assistants, including Cortana, Google Assistant, and Alexa.
Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), already has a service, dubbed Amazon Bedrock, that provides large language models to other enterprises to build generative AI based use cases as per their individual requirements.