Illustration of Introducing Rufus: Amazon's New AI Shopping Assistant Revolutionizing Online Shopping

Introducing Rufus: Amazon’s New AI Shopping Assistant Revolutionizing Online Shopping

After extensive testing, Amazon is officially launching its generative AI-powered shopping assistant, Rufus, to all U.S. customers starting today.

The shopping assistant is designed to help customers save time and make more informed purchasing decisions. Just in time for Prime Day on July 16 and 17, Rufus is available through the Amazon shopping app.

Announced in January, Rufus can answer specific questions about products, such as their ease of maintenance and material composition. The AI assistant is also capable of offering product recommendations and comparisons, providing product updates, tracking packages, and reviewing past orders. Additionally, Rufus can assist with non-shopping queries, like ingredients needed for a soufflé or a summer party.

Amazon, the largest cloud provider, has introduced its own AI training and inferencing chips, as well as a platform called Bedrock for developers to create generative AI applications on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service. Despite this, Amazon has not placed as much focus on developing AI consumer products compared to competitors like Google and Microsoft.

Recently, Amazon has reportedly been developing an AI chatbot named “Metis,” intended to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This chatbot will be accessible via a web browser and powered by Amazon’s internal AI model, Olympus, which is said to be more powerful than the publicly available AI model, Titan.

In March, Amazon completed a significant $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, marking its largest investment in an external company to date. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider, with plans to utilize Amazon’s AI chips for building, training, and deploying future models.

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