Photo: iStock | Guillaume
Amazon.com's cloud computing division last week released a suite of generative AI tools that can enable companies to build chatbots, generate and summarize text, and classify images based on a prompt. Rather than build AI models entirely by itself, Amazon is recruiting third parties to host models on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS’ new service, Bedrock, enables developers to develop generative AI-powered apps based on pre-trained models from startups including AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI, accessible via an application program interface (API). Also available is access to Amazon’s first-party language model, called Titan.
Amazon, the world's largest provider of cloud computing services, is taking a different path from its closest competitors. Microsoft has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer. Google has invested in the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic. Amazon has also not yet come with a consumer-facing AI tool, like Microsoft and Google.
Amazon said providing access to multiple large language models will allow companies to customize their generative AI applications.
Beyond AI tools, AWS is promoting its in-house chips as a cost-effective solution to power the AI. Another feature, CodeWhisperer, which generates and fixes computer code, will be accessible for free for individual developers.
"Customers have told us there are a few big things standing in their way today," said Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS' VP of machine learning, in a blog post "First, they need a straightforward way to find and access high-performing [foundational models] that give outstanding results and are best-suited for their purposes. Second, customers want integration into applications to be seamless, without having to manage huge clusters of infrastructure or incur large costs."
“Most companies want to use these large language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years, and most companies don’t want to go through that.” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC’s Squawk Box. “So what they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that’s big and great already and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that’s what Bedrock is.”