Amazon 
Amazon The company on Wednesday announced incremental improvements to several of its artificial intelligence (AI) products in an effort to keep competitors at bay amid continued investor enthusiasm for the technology.
Retailers are worried that their competitor, Google, 
GoogleMicrosoft 
MSFT And OpenAI has been leading the development of generative AI that can respond to complex prompts and queries with complete sentences and images almost instantly.
The improvements Amazon unveiled at the New York conference include the ability to add extra memory to the so-called agents that automate tasks for companies, allowing new requests to build on previous ones, said Basi Philomin, Amazon's vice president of generative AI.
“This enables agents to provide a more personalized, more seamless experience, especially for complex tasks,” Philomin said in an interview Tuesday.
He said, for example, that the updated AI agent can now remember a user's subsequent request for an aisle or window seat on a plane, which wasn't possible before.
Amazon also said it has updated its Q chatbot, which it launched last November, to provide improved suggestions for writing software code, addressing one of the more common uses of generative AI.
Amazon also said it has made improvements to help customers of its Bedrock service, which allows companies to create applications using different AI models, detect and filter out so-called hallucinations, where an AI creates incorrect or misleading answers to a question or request.
Hallucinations are a thorny issue for AI systems because they create distrust among users. Google, for example, came under fire earlier this year when an AI-powered search feature recommended users add glue to pizza sauce to help the cheese stick.
Matt Wood, vice president of AI products at Amazon Web Services, said in an interview that the new controls could reduce the occurrence of hallucinations by about 75% in certain applications.
AWS, which oversees much of Amazon's AI development, is on track to reach $100 billion in annual revenue, the company announced in April.
