Amazon’s announcements about collaboration with Microsoft on Gluon (a deep learning interface), the opening of ML Solutions Lab to develop AI solutions and new features of Amazon Rekognition (deep learning-based image recognition platform) such as real-time face recognition and text recognition in images, may be a preface for more AI news at Amazon’s AWS division Re:invent conference (November, 2017), or an implication that AI shall not be a focus, at this year’s conference. These developments highlight Amazon’s expanding work on AI as well as business consultancy whereby IT services are provided to corporate customers like IBM.

Swami Sivasubramanian, the vice president of Amazon AI, states that, “Amazon ML Solutions Lab will help customers get up to speed on machine learning quickly, and start putting machine learning to work inside their organizations.” The Washington Post, Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical division Janssen, and the World Bank Group are counted among the early customers.

Pinterest has millions of Pins stored in an Amazon S3 cloud. It is exploring Rekognition features to scale a subset of Pins in AWS S3 while having a visual discovery team building technologies within the company as well. The speed and quality of images are vital for visually-driven Pinterest but the text behind images is equally important for making Pins actionable and for providing context to the site’s above 200 million Pinners. Working with Amazon Rekognition Text in Image enables better extraction of rich text captured in images, at scale with low latency for the Pins stored in Amazon S3. “We look forward to continuing to develop the partnership with AWS for high quality and fast experiences for Pinners and businesses on Pinterest,” says Vanja Josifovski, the CTO of Pinterest.