What Did Amazon Do This Week? - 16-04-2023 [+40 LINKS]
AMAZON GETS INTO GENERATIVE AI GAME
Amazon, or more accurately AWS (the world's largest cloud provider), is positioning itself as a neutral AI partner and introducing a generative AI tool called 'Bedrock'. Bedrock will provide access to AWS's two proprietary LLMs models, Titan, and large language models created by Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs. The big move? It's free, although the report says Amazon isn't designing its own ChatGPT-like interface (right now, at least).
The move essentially means that Amazon wants you to pay to build OpenAI disruptors that allow users to build chatbots, summarise text, create images and more based on text prompts. Amazon also announced a preview of Amazon CodeWhisperer, its AI-powered coding assistant (think GitHub Copilot and Replit Ghostwriter). Amazon also announced CodeWhisperer would be free for individual use and immediately made it available for the nerdier amongst us to salivate over. Amazon also noted that customers and developers can determine how their models work based on input which won’t be used to train the models, which may go some way to belay all the privacy concerns this move by Amazon throws up for businesses who have a ton of sensitive data Amazon wants to be pumped into these tools. Pricing was not disclosed, but Amazon says Pegasystems, Accenture and Deloitte are lined up to try Bedrock. You can apply here.
Per Andy Jassy (who mentioned it all in his annual shareholder’s memo), speaking to CNBC; “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. 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.”
Amazon is, of course, tooting the 'we're democratising stuff again' horn loud and proud. The move means that +100k companies now have a free tool in a place they trust or are committed to using. With the safety and security issues that OpenAI and others have seen, a move like this makes sense for both Amazon and those companies from multiple angles. The biggest one is that it saves them billions of dollars rather than sinking billions into a company that may or may not work long-term and which is definitely not training its major competitive advantage(!). Amazon says it will allow companies to train AI on customers' data rather than the web, although most AI languages are trained from massive amounts of scraped data from...the internet. Amazon also wants to sell companies AI-optimised chips and can quickly launch a public ChatGPT competitor any day it likes; AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky, is quoted in the WSJ as saying, "…it truly is day one in generative AI."
SO WHAT?
Projected to reach $126.5 billion by 2031, the Generative AI industry is a blisteringly hot area now, with almost all the main players showing their plans/cards. Only Apple has yet to do something of note. Amazon's move is a smart one that will excite shareholders that AWS's woes are on the way out.
Gen AI's pervasiveness is due to its core ability to do what technology set out to do: make human lives better and easier. A great sentiment, but not one that doesn’t come with significant issues. AI will change things, a lot of things, some better, some worse. The ability to make things better for some should not come at the cost of others. Will it? Of course, it will. The moves made now by the US, China and EU governing bodies will determine the path for Amazon and its competitors in this space. Amazon has positioned itself for success thanks to this flexibility-offering strategy. Ensure you stay updated with aggregators and services like 'What Did OpenAI Do This Week'.
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