AWS launches Amazon Bedrock to enter the generative AI race

Amazon Web Services has partnered with 3 top AI startups to offer their generative AI models to its customer through the Bedrock API. Jurassic-2 and Claude AI models from AI21 Labs and Anthropic will help with processing and generating text while Stability AI's Stable Diffusion will help with text-to-image.

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT generative AI has gained massive popularity and the big tech companies including Microsoft and Google have been quick to jump on it. Amazon has been slow on the matter but it seems the company was developing a winning strategy.

Unlike its competitors, Google and Microsoft, who integrated generative AI into their search and productivity suites, Amazon has launched their AI offering as a cloud API. Better yet, the company has joined three AI models that users were using and paying for separately into a single unit.

“Customers have told us there are a few big things standing in their way today," the VP of Database, Analytics and ML at AWS, Swami Sivasubramanian wrote in a blog post. "First, they need a straightforward way to find and access high-performing [foundational models] that give outstanding results and are best suited for their purposes. Second, customers want integration into applications to be seamless, without having to manage huge clusters of infrastructure or incur large costs."

And that is exactly what AWS Bedrock is offering. Apart from building their own generative AI-powered products and services off Bedrock, developers can also use their own labelled training data to create custom applications that are tailored to their specific organizations. All without worrying that the private training data will leak, be misplaced, or be used to train other large language models.

Amazon has also taken advantage of the moment to push its family of custom-designed machine-learning acceleration chips Trainium and Inferentia. The company claims that, among other things, its Trainium-powered EC2 instance can help developers save up to 50 percent on training costs compared to other EC2 instances.

Also as part of the AI revolution in the company, Amazon is making its AI pair-programming tool CodeWhisperer generally available and free to use for qualifying developers. The AI programming assistant has been revamped to support 5 new languages which include Go, Kotlin, Rust, PHP, and SQL.