By Greg Bensinger
LAS VEGAS, Dec 4 (Reuters) – Amazon.com on Wednesday touted new capabilities for its SageMaker AI service that it says will help customers expedite customizing their artificial intelligence software models.
For Peter Nikoloff, a different type of sage-making took precedence. He was sure to be first in line Wednesday morning at the most popular booth at Amazon’s annual AWS cloud computing confab in Las Vegas that attracts some 60,000 attendees, paying up to $2,100 each for tickets.
Nikoloff, 37, waited nearly two hours to be first in line to make a custom fragrance for his wife using Amazon’s Nova generative AI software. The voice-powered service spun a fragrance with hints of mint, sandalwood and, yes, sage.
“Oh it was totally worth it,” said Nikoloff, who was attending the weeklong conference, put on by Amazon Web Services, to pick up tips to help with his information technology job with the federal government. “There’s quite a lot of perfume here, for free.”
Sessions dispensing advice on arcane fields such as cloud modernization, data lakes and container migrations are popular among software engineers at the conference, but none has drawn a crowd like the AI perfumery. On the third day of the event, the line for the Fragrance Lab had not abated, drawing upwards of six dozen hopefuls at a time and waits of one hour or more.
The scent lab is a gimmick, but meant to demonstrate the broad applications for AI software, Amazon said. Users are guided through a series of voice prompts on a screen that relies on four different AI models — all Amazon’s — and a scent is generated for human perfumers to prepare. Thirty scents ranging from coffee to tobacco to jasmine can be combined for the final output.
Amazon prompts users to describe their favorite activities, preferred environments and other characteristics before spitting out scents that are meant to match the user’s mood and fragrance profile. A promotional website promises a “uniquely curated” aroma with “rich base notes” or “ethereal top notes.”
Recently mixed scents included Alpine Reverie, Terra Venture, Metropol and Tranquil Pulse, all mixed by (human) perfumers, shipped in from France.
Tech firms have boasted of nearly innumerable benefits from the broad rollout of AI, including the speedy creation of new startups, supercharged research reports and the automation of painstaking rote tasks. The conference this year is being used as a platform to demonstrate Amazon’s prowess in AI amid some market concerns that it is lagging rivals.
Since generative AI burst onto the scene about three years ago, it has been deployed to help write novels from scratch, craft movies and commercials, replace engineers and advise budding investors on the market, among thousands of other uses.
AI perfumes, however, should probably be kept in the bottle, said Anthony Walker. He waited about three hours in total on Wednesday for his Amazon Nova-designed cologne but said the output really stinks.
“It was pretty unimpressive: It just didn’t come out as I expected,” said Walker, a 30-year-old engineer working in nuclear power. He had described himself to the AI as nature-loving and creative, but the resulting bamboo- and mint-based aroma named “Sylvan Craft” was, he said, “very feminine.”
“I like more earthy scents or nutty scents,” he said. “I’ll give this to my girlfriend, she’ll be happy with it.”
(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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