A digital assistant capable of imitating any voice after listening to less than a minute of audio “to make the memories last” of those who are no longer there. A plan to bring one hundred thousand tourists a year into orbit and finance other space missions that will colonize space by exploiting its natural resources. An artificial intelligence system capable of helping programmers write code. Autonomous robots that move in logistics centers, moving between warehouse workers and transporting millions of packages, as in a complex symphony. And dozens of other small and big news.
The return to the stage “in the presence” of Amazon was a succession of little big surprises. The re: Mars event of the AWS division (the one that deals with cloud computing and produces one of the main sources of profit for the company of Jeff Bezos, with $ 18.5 billion in 2021) was held these days in Las Vegas and attracted more than five thousand developers and analysts in the sector. Re: Mars was born in 2019 as the “younger brother” of re: Invent, the big gathering dedicated to the cloud held in December, but it has a different goal.
What does re: Mars
The acronym, which winks at the planet Mars (Jeff Bezos’ obsession as well as Elon Musk’s), is in fact the acronym for Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space. From artificial intelligence (which was the real protagonist of this edition) to the logic of exploiting the solar system as an alternative to the dying resources of our planet, there was no theme that was not touched upon in three days of keynote , seminars, meetings.
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The conquest of space explained it clearly by Brent Sherwood of Blue Origin: “Space is important on an existential level: we live on a very large planet with a very thin and weak biosphere. With limited resources. We don’t know how many people it can support: maybe 15 billion. Maybe 10. Maybe 5, and so we’ve already gone beyond the carrying capacity of the biosphere. Jeff Bezos says there are two paths: allocating increasingly limited resources in increasingly conflicting ways, or opening the way to space for unlimited growth ”.
Colonizing the Moon for its raw materials
The philosophy of Amazon and Blue Origin, Bezos’ aerospace company, is simple: exploit space not in the perspective of exploration and peaceful expansion, but in that of exploitation and experience. That is: tourism on the one hand and mines to collect precious elements on the other. “The Moon has an area equal to that of Africa. It is the eighth continent and is a four day trip from Cape Canaveral, ”explains Sherwood.
The goal is to colonize it and collect precious materials from the surface. There are agreements with companies to develop cheaper rovers, to boost the loads of Blue Origin’s launchers. But also to build a space station: Orbital Reef, which flies over the Earth in a low orbit and must replace the International Space Station. A station capable of welcoming 100,000 visitors and workers per year. Democratize space.
“Our approach – says Sherwood – is to build the capacity to do all this, turnkey: from the cloud for simulation models to transmission equipment, from launchers to station modules. All at increasingly lower prices, to attract companies and start the conquest of space “.
Alexa, Astro and ‘synthetic data’
On a completely different front, a dozen engineers and artificial intelligence specialists alternate on the stage of the Aria Resort convention center. From Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, to the little robot Astrofrom the AWS cloud to robot management systems in the factory, Amazon is determined to invest more and more in the combination of cloud and machine learning.
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The training of artificial intelligences takes place through the analysis of infinite data packets that must be collected at significant costs. This is why the company invests in “Summary data”, that is, procedurally generated and used to train artificial intelligences with the work of other artificial intelligences. “They are the real gold of the future,” says Swami Sivasubramanian, head of the Data and Machine Learning section of AWS.
Proteus works alongside humans
Here, too, Amazon wants to solve problems it is facing, democratize artificial intelligence and at the same time do business. So it offers systems for third parties that allow you to use the cloud to generate, for example, the data necessary to train the artificial intelligences of a factory, and at the same time use them internally to grow its robots that work in logistics centers: they are more half a million and these days Proteus is added, transporting large carts full of goods to the various sectors of Amazon’s logistics and sorting centers. “The difference – he explains to Italian Tech Tye BradyChief Technologist for Amazon robotics – is that before robots moved in dedicated and protected spaces, now they move together with our staff, without problems ”.
In a few months Proteus will begin working in tandem with Cardinal, Amazon’s robotic arm that can lift up to 23 pounds. Computerized vision systems, object recognition, manipulation, intelligent and autonomous management of movements, are the heart of these tools that are used to multiply the efficiency of the warehouses where a million people work today.
Develop code with AI
Activities in Amazon’s fulfillment centers echo what happens with the developer sector: on the cloud, Amazon has prepared CodeWhisperer, AWS’s answer to GitHub’s CoPilot (owned by Microsoft). A complex system, trained using free code and Amazon’s internal code to learn how to correct and above all help programmers to find solutions quickly. Just press a button and CodeWhisperer joins the programmer by offering solutions, alternatives, suggestions.
But even in the world of commercial products, those aimed directly at consumers (which Jeff Bezos defines as the “obsession” of his company), the novelties revolve mainly around artificial intelligence. From Astro, the little robot that Amazon presented and then launched only in the US and only by invitation six months ago, to Alexa, the ubiquitous digital assistant (which in a few months will also be sent to space for a usability test as a assistance for astronaut missions) who learns to do new things almost daily, there is no shortage of news.
“Alexa is not alive”
In particular, as Prem Natarajan, head of Alexa AI explained to us in this exclusive interview, Alexa’s artificial intelligence is becoming widespread, context-aware, capable of orienting itself and learning independently, activating itself proactively. We are light years away from the idea of consciousness or “life” that has been talked about in the newspapers in recent weeks, but in any case it is a significant evolution of the role of what at first seemed to be an answerer to predetermined questions and is now in able to carry out structured conversations in a sophisticated way.
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Amazon is alert to many of the things that are happening around it, and like all tech greats, it can afford the luxury of having some of the best scientists as consultants and making targeted investments in frontier technologies. Starting from quantum computing, where Google and Ibm are also moving rapidly, but also in the electric vehicle sector, with the purchase in 2020 of Zoox, the small startup that produces self-driving vehicles with a funny and squared shape but from the deadly efficiency that are being tested without supervision (practically left to themselves) in some American cities.
Is the future of robots?
Amazon also keeps the robot card hidden in its cuff, which the company believes will be one of the most important products of the next few years and which, to be done well, must solve a series of problems and instabilities. A job in which Astro, the “little” robot for the house, represents the first step. He is small, he is not humanoid but resembles a puppy with big eyes and a nice face and he does everything he can not to scare. Unlike Spotthe robot dog of Boston Dynamics which instead inspires a certain fear because it is large and devoid of reassuring movements or traits.
Amazon also continues to work on the reinvention of the physical store business, with a new opening also in the clothing sector. They have not yet arrived in Italy but there are a series of innovations “that every year – Dilip Kumar, Amazon’s vice president for Physical Retail tells us – we improve and bring them closer to customers”. Like Amazon Dash Cart, an automatic shopping cart for supermarkets, Amazon One to enter and shop in a contactless way and Amazon Style to buy personalized clothing. It is all managed by sophisticated artificial intelligence systems that, both in Amazon’s stores and in those of British partners, allow you to have a very different experience from that of a traditional store: you buy simply by taking and leaving, to understand how much we have to pay for it. then think of the cloud.
The flower that grows in space
Amazon draws on a group of allies and partners, such as Lunar Outpost and Orbital Reef, but also Aurelia (which in archaic English means “chrysalis”) and is the work of a young scientist, Ariel Ekblaw, with a double doctorate in engineering aerospace and architecture, and today director of the Space Exploration of MIT. Ariel is experimenting with hexagonal panels that can be brought into orbit by rockets. Then, as organic structures (“I learned by studying how plants grow”, she says) the panels orient themselves and organize themselves, creating hexagonal structures in orbit without the need for the intervention of astronauts.
In a few hours they can build a base five times the size of the International Space Station. Works? Ancora is an experimental prototype. But Amazon does not give up: we need to think about the future and then go back inventing the technologies necessary to get there. Even those that make space stations grow like flowers in space, why not.