Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN is stepping into the generative AI arena with a new product called Bedrock, which offers its Amazon Web Services (AWS) clients the ability to use and adapt generative AI tools for their needs.
Starting Thursday, AWS is making this on-demand AI service — first announced in April — generally available.
The offering is oriented towards businesses and Amazon said that it's already being used by companies such as Adidas ADDYY, BMW Group BMWYY, Merck & Co Inc MRK, and the PGA Tour.
Amazon's Bedrock will compete with generative AI offerings from Microsoft Corp.’s MSFT Azure and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGLGOOG Google Cloud, which also provides customizable AI tools within their cloud services arms.
The trend shows the formation of a new ecosystem that reveals how the recent developments in AI are becoming widely implemented across the business space: AI companies offer their models to businesses through API marketplaces, hosted in big cloud services.
While most regular consumers interact with Amazon's e-commerce business, the company makes about 70% of revenue from its cloud services arm.
Earlier this week, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, a deal that binds the latter to use AWS as its primary cloud partner.
Anthropic is the maker of Claude, a conversational AI assistant and large-language model capable of generating text in a similar way to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The model will now be offered to AWS clients alongside models from Amazon and other AI companies, including AI21 Labs, Cohere, Meta Platforms Inc META and Stability AI.
Amazon now offers a suite of pre-trained machine learning models that clients can adapt to their own needs. Bedrock is making available Amazon’s Titan FMs, a family of pre-trained large-language models the company is calling "foundation models." They can be used for text generation and content creation as well as other text-based activities like summarization and answering questions.
In recent months, Amazon struck a series of deals with AI companies, with those products now becoming part of the Bedrock suite. They included a deal made last November with Stability AI's, which is now bringing its image generator Stable Diffusion to Amazon's Bedrock.
Another deal from February 2023 with AI startup Hugging Face includes provisions that allow Hugging Face to use Amazon's in-house AI accelerator chips for future AI training. Anthropic will also rely on Amazon chips for future training.
Amazon is one of a handful of big tech companies developing their own semiconductors for artificial intelligence training. These also include Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Microsoft.
The trend to develop custom chips could dig a hole in Nvidia Corp.’s NVDA business, which at the moment is the leading developer of chips for large-language model training.
Meta's Llama 2 large-language model will soon be available in Bedrock too, according to a blog post by Amazon developer Antje Barth.
On Thursday, Meta Platfoms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company's chat applications — like Instagram, Messenger and Whatsapp — will include AI assistants that can be made to sound like celebrities like Kendall Jenner, Charli D’Amelio, Dwyane Wade, Snoop Dogg, MrBeast and Paris Hilton.
Meanwhile, OpenAI announced on Wednesday that ChatGPT can now access the internet in real-time, a big feature that the leading platform was missing to catch up with competitors.
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