Amazon joins the race for generative AI
Amazon may still be king of the cloud, but in recent months it has had to watch its two closest rivals, Microsoft And Googlesteal the show with brilliant but error-prone chatbots that use state-of-the-art “generative” artificial intelligence models.
Today, Amazon announced that it is joining the generative AI race. Not by launching its own chatbot, but by making two new AI language models available through its cloud platform, Amazon Web Servicesthat customers can use to create their own bots.
The past few months have seen the tech industry foaming at the mouth on the potential of generative AI— algorithms that learn to produce text, code, images, etc. The boom was inspired by the remarkable success of OpenAI’s text generator bot, ChatGPTas well as the success of AI image generators.
The proliferation of these services also threatens to disrupt the cloud market, as companies from construction to law rush to create their own generative AI technology or integrate it into existing products. As investors and entrepreneurs are imagining ways to use generative AI in all kinds of industries, they are creating demand for the basic tools companies can use to build their own apps.
“Many customers are intensely interested in generative AI solutions,” said Adam Selipksy, CEO of AWS. “I would say that in most of my conversations with customers, questions about generative AI come up, with one main question: ‘When are we going to be able to get the solutions we want? “”
Amazon remains the world leader in the cloud computing market, followed by Microsoft and then Google. Microsoft has partnered with Open AI, and makes the technology behind ChatGPT available through its Azure cloud platform. Google, which has been developing the underlying language model technology for years, recently launched its own PaLM model, available through Google Cloud.
Microsoft, which invested $10 billion in OpenAI, provides access to GPT-3.5, one of the language models that powers ChatGPT, through an application program interface that allows developers to make model access calls directly from their code. Google’s PaLM is also capable and accessible through its cloud API.
Today, Amazon announced the launch of a platform called Bedrock, which will provide access to state-of-the-art language models from Anthropic and AI21two startups developing language models that compete with those of OpenAI and Google.
“It’s highly unlikely that there’s a single model that’s the right answer for all customers and for all use cases,” says Selipksy. “We want to offer choice and flexibility.”
Amazon has two generative language models. Titan Text can generate text from a prompt, and Text Embeddings generates a mathematical representation of text that can be used for tasks such as translation and research.
AWS will also offer access to Stable Diffusion, an AI model for generating images, from Stability AIa startup developing a range of open source generative AI models.
“Bedrock removes significant friction from companies deploying generative models,” says Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, the company behind the image model. “[It] is ideal for our open models that can easily access customer data.
