Amazon.com’s The cloud computing division on Thursday released a suite of technologies aimed at helping other companies develop their own chatbots and image-creation services backed by artificial intelligence.
Microsoft And Alphabet adding up oh chatbots for consumer products like their search engine, but they’re also eyeing another huge market: selling the underlying technology to other companies through their cloud operations.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider, jumped into that race on Thursday with a suite of its own proprietary AI technologies, but it’s taking a different approach.
AWS will offer a service called Bedrock that lets businesses customize what they call foundational models — core AI technologies that answer questions with human-like text or generate images from a prompt — to create a unique model. With my own data for. chatgpt creator OpenAIFor example, offers a similar service, allowing customers to fine-tune the model behind ChatGPT to build custom chatbots.
The Bedrock service will let customers work with Amazon’s proprietary foundation model called the Amazon Titan, but it will also offer a menu of models offered by other companies. The first third-party options will come from startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI, as well as Amazon’s own model.
The Bedrock service lets AWS customers test those technologies without having to deal with the underlying data center servers that power them.
“It’s unnecessary complexity from a user perspective,” Vasi Filomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS, told Reuters. “Behind the scenes, we can pull it off.”
Those underlying servers will use a mix of Amazon’s own custom AI chips as well as chips from Nvidia Corp., the biggest supplier of chips for AI work but whose chips are in tight supply this year.
“We’ve been able to get tens, hundreds of thousands of these chips off the ground,” Dave Brown, vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at AWS, said of the company’s custom chips. “It’s a release valve for some of the supply-chain concerns that I think people are concerned about.”
© Thomson Reuters 2023