Amazon announced a new generative AI feature today that summarizes product reviews. Available initially to "a subset of mobile shoppers in the U.S. across a broad selection of products," the artificial intelligence tool creates a recap paragraph highlighting common themes from customer feedback. The company first confirmed in June it was testing an AI-powered summarization tool, but it now begins its official rollout. CEO Andy Jassy said earlier this month that AI is "at the heart of what we do." The idea behind the ML-generated summary is to let shoppers get the gist of their peers' impressions without having to file through a swath of reviews manually.

On Thursday, an Amazon AWS blogpost announced that the company has moved most of the cloud processing for its Alexa personal assistant off of Nvidia GPUs and onto its own Inferentia Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). AWS Inferentia is a custom chip, built by AWS, to accelerate machine learning inference workloads and optimize their cost. Each NeuronCore implements a high-performance systolic array matrix multiply engine, which massively speeds up typical deep learning operations such as convolution and transformers. NeuronCores are also equipped with a large on-chip cache, which helps cut down on external memory accesses, dramatically reducing latency and increasing throughput. When an Amazon customer--usually someone who owns an Echo or Echo dot--makes use of the Alexa personal assistant, very little of the processing is done on the device itself.