Amazon’s Cloud Computing Division Releases Amazon Bedrock, AI Technologies for Chatbots and Image-Generation Services
On April 13th, Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing division released, Amazon Bedrock, a suite of technologies aimed at helping other companies develop their own chatbots and image-generation services backed by artificial intelligence. The move comes as Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc are adding AI chatbots to consumer products like their search engines, while also targeting the market of selling the underlying technology to other companies through their cloud operations.
Amazon Bedrock: Web Services with a Different Approach
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s biggest cloud computing provider, has taken a different approach. AWS has launched a suite of its proprietary AI technologies called Bedrock that allows businesses to customize foundation models, which are core AI technologies that respond to queries with human-like text or generate images from a prompt, with their own data to create a unique model. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT creator also offers a similar service, letting customers fine-tune the models behind ChatGPT to create a custom chatbot.
Customizable Foundation Models
The Bedrock service lets customers work with Amazon’s own proprietary foundation models called Amazon Titan. It will also offer a menu of models offered by other companies. The first third-party options will come from startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI alongside Amazon’s own models.
The Bedrock service lets AWS customers test-drive those technologies without having to deal with the underlying data center servers that power them.
Removing Unnecessary Complexity
“It’s unneeded complexity from the perspective of the user,” said Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS. “Behind the scenes, we can abstract that away.”
Those underlying servers will use a mix of Amazon’s own custom AI chips as well as chips from Nvidia Corp. Nvidia is the biggest supplier of chips for AI work but recently had a tight supply this year.
Release Valve for Supply-Chain Concerns
“We’re able to land tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these chips, as we need them,” said Dave Brown, vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at AWS, referring to the company’s custom chips. “It is a release valve for some of the supply-chain concerns that I think folks are worried about.”
