Amazon Rufus AI Assistant Launches in Beta
BigTech Riding AI Wave, Amazon announces Rufus
Rufus, Amazon’s Shopping AI assistant, the same name as the company’s corgi mascot.
Hey Everyone,
So let’s give credit where credit due, BigTech showboating A.I products, research, R&D and billions in A.I. chip purchases has really boosted their market cap. The NASDAQ 100 is up 40% in the past year, and it’s all concentrated at the top. The AI wave for the majority of index funds means these companies are getting overvalued measured by a historical P/E ratio reversion to mean baseline.
How Meta’s stock went up 20% META 0.00%↑ is a case in point in early February, 2024.
A chart bathed in A.I. hype looks like this:
Meta Stock
The momentum for Nvidia and Meta’s stock in since the advent of ChatGPT has been phenomenal. Of course A.I. chips, Nvidia investments in A.I. startups and Meta’s partially open-source Llama-2 helpd all of this happen, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was just a catalyst to much bigger things.
What is Rufus?
Rufus is an expert shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s product catalog and information from across the web to answer customer questions on shopping needs, products, and comparisons, make recommendations based on this context, and facilitate product discovery in the same Amazon shopping experience customers use regularly. - Amazon blog
So on February 1st, 2024 Amazon on Thursday announced Rufus, a shopping assistant that uses generative artificial intelligence to help users search for products. Amazon’s product video Beta launch on Rufus does not appear to have audio.
“I am thrilled to share what our team has been working on — Rufus, a gen AI-powered expert shopping assistant. A diverse group of interaction, conversation, and visual designers came together with research to create this experience. It has been such a blast collaborating with science, product, engineering, and editorial experts to build a natural extension of the Amazon experience customers know, love, and trust.
We always want to hear from customers, make it easier for them to tell us what they want, and help them discover and explore all we have to offer at Amazon. Now we are excited to create new ways for customers to express themselves by asking shopping question naturally, doing research, and diving deep into details with Rufus. Our namesake is the sweet and helpful Corgi who was part of Amazon's early launches, and started our humane dog culture at the company. We aim to be that loyal, trustworthy, and endearing to our customers.” - Cassandra Rowan, LinkedIn post.