Amazon Web Services invests $100 million in generative AI initiative
Amazon’s hosted cloud services division is making a major commitment to the development of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI).
Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is launching the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, a new program to help its customers build and deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Based on machine learning (ML), generative AI can create new content and ideas, including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music.
AWS is investing $100 million in the program, which will connect AWS AI and ML experts with customers around the globe, in an effort to help them envision, design, and launch new generative AI products, services, and processes.
The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center team of strategists, data scientists, engineers, and solutions architects will with customers to build proprietary solutions that utilize generative AI. Offerings will include no-cost workshops, engagements, and training.
“Amazon has more than 25 years of AI experience, and more than 100,000 customers have used AWS AI and ML services to address some of their biggest opportunities and challenges. Now, customers around the globe are hungry for guidance about how to get started quickly and securely with generative AI,” said Matt Garman, senior VP of sales, marketing, and global services at AWS. “The Generative AI Innovation Center is part of our goal to help every organization leverage AI by providing flexible and cost-effective generative AI services for the enterprise, alongside our team of generative AI experts to take advantage of all this new technology has to offer. Together with our global community of partners, we’re working with business leaders across every industry to help them maximize the impact of generative AI in their organizations, creating value for their customers, employees, and bottom line.”
AWS debuts generative AI platform
AWS is launching its generative AI innovation center not long after previewing its new proprietary generative AI model called Bedrock. While Bedrock is not based on the recently released leading-edge ChatGPT AI platform, it is clearly intended to provide the same type of leading-edge, human-type capabilities offered by ChatGPT.
Bedrock is based on proprietary foundational models, which are very large ML models are pre-trained on vast amounts of data, provided by AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon accessible to developers via an API.
According to Amazon, Bedrock foundational models can be customized to fit the workflows of specific industries and perform a range of tasks including writing blog posts, generating images, solving math problems, engaging in dialog, and answering questions based on a document.
As part of its Bedrock preview, Amazon is also providing a limited release of Amazon CodeWhiperer, an AI-based coding assistant that uses a foundational model to generate code suggestions in real-time based on developers’ comments in natural language and prior code.