Amazon enters AI battlefield with its new Cloud tools

April 15, 2023

2 min read

The cloud computing division of Amazon Inc. on Thursday unveiled a set of tools to assist other businesses in creating their own chatbots and AI-powered image-generation services. As they integrate AI chatbots into consumer products like their search engines, Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. are also keeping an eye on a sizable untapped market: selling the underlying technology to other businesses via their cloud operations.

The largest cloud computing company in the world, Amazon Web Services (AWS), entered that race on Thursday with a number of its own proprietary AI technologies, but it is going in a different direction.

AWS will provide a service called Bedrock that enables companies to use their own data to create custom foundation models from the fundamental AI technologies that do things like respond to queries with text that sounds human-like or produce images in response to a prompt. For instance, OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, provides a similar service that enables customers to customise the ChatGPT models to produce a unique chatbot.

Customers of the Bedrock service will be able to work with Amazon Titan.

It is a set of the company’s own proprietary foundation models, but it will also provide a menu of models provided by other businesses. Along with Amazon’s own models, the first third-party options will come from startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI.

AWS customers can use the Bedrock service to test those technologies without having to deal with the underlying data centre servers that power them. “It’s unneeded complexity from the perspective of the user,” Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS, told Reuters. “Behind the scenes, we can abstract that away.”

Those underlying servers will use a combination of Amazon’s custom AI chips and chips from Nvidia Corp, the largest supplier of AI chips but whose chips have been in short supply this year.

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