AWS expands scope of GenAI with new offerings
AWS has unveiled new technology offerings on the GenAI platform developed on its own as well as through partnerships.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) remained the dominant theme at re:Invent 2023, the flagship event of Amazon Web Services (AWS) at Las Vegas, as the global cloud company showcased new technology offerings developed on its own and through partnership with other companies.
“Reinventing is in our DNA,” said AWS CEO Adam Selipsky during the inaugural keynote address as the cloud company made perhaps the most important announcement of the day with the introduction of Amazon Q--a GenAI chatbot which is expected to assist individual developers and enterprises.
Selipsky said, “Amazon Q is a generative AI powered assistant for work that is tailored to your business which provides interactive answers, generates content, and takes action.”
He emphasised that this is the culmination of its seventeen years of experience as an AI company that reduces time taken to perform tasks and improve efficiency. He remarked that Amazon Q would follow the principles of responsible AI.
AWS also unveiled newer technology platforms, which include two designed chip families--AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium 2. The company said these chips are advancements in price performance and energy efficiency, which will be deployed for a broad range of customer workloads including machine learning training and generative artificial intelligence applications.
The cloud company also strengthened its partnership with key companies such as Salesforce, Nvidia, BMW, and Pfizer to name a few. These partnerships encompass areas where both companies engage in joint technology development or go to market. It also includes companies which are leveraging AWS platforms for their services and products.
For example, AWS partnership with Graphics Processor Unit company Nvidia is for the last 13 years and at the Summit they expanded the scope. Now, AWS will offer the first cloud AI supercomputer with NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip and AWS UltraCluster Scalability.
Selipsky noted that the core focus of AWS will be on providing the technology platform and tools that will further expand the scope of foundational models as well as large language models (LLMs) of GenAI.
AWS also showcased its partnership with Anthropic, a highly-valued GenAI startup that has raised billions of dollars of investment from both Google and Amazon besides other technology companies.
AWS and Anthropic noted that their goal of working together was not only to deliver solutions which are quick and innovative, but also to ensure that GenAI is handled in the most responsible manner.
AWS also announced that it is committed to building guardrails in a responsible manner for its technology platform Amazon Bedrock, which offers a choice of foundational models along with a set of capabilities to build GenAI applications.
As the company noted that with Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock, there is an additional level of control on top of any protections built into foundational models. This is done to ensure that undesirable and harmful content are removed in interactions between users and applications.
However, AWS CEO noted the developments centering around GenAI were still at early stages.
(The correspondent is attending the AWS re:Invent summit in Las Vegas at the invitation of the company)
Edited by Megha Reddy
