Amazon AWS expands generative AI efforts with Bedrock and CodeWhisperer updates Posted on : Apr 13 - 2023

Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced today that it is expanding its generative AI services in a bid to make the technology more available to organizations in the cloud.

Among the new AWS cloud AI services is Amazon Bedrock, which is launching in preview as a set of foundation model AI services. The initial set of foundation models supported by the service include ones from AI21, Anthropic, and Stability AI as well as a set of new models developed by AWS known collectively as Amazon Titan. In addition, AWS is also announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 Inf2 cloud instances powered by the company’s own AWS Inferentia2 chips, which provide high performance for AI. Rounding out the updates, the Amazon CodeWhisperer generative AI service for code development is now generally available, with AWS making it free for all individual developers.

“One of our key goals behind all of these announcements and launches is to democratize the use of generative AI,” Bratin Saha, VP of ML and AI Services at Amazon, told VentureBeat.

The expanded AI push from AWS, comes as its cloud rivals including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud continue to roll out their own respective sets of services and organizations of all sizes look to benefit from AI.

Amazon Bedrock lays a new foundation for AI in the cloud

With the Amazon Bedrock service the goal is provide users with a set of foundation models that they can pick and choose from.

The models can then be customized with additional training in AWS to suit whatever a user needs. Saha emphasized that a key benefit is the fact that Bedrock service is integrated with the rest of the AWS cloud platform. That means organizations will have easier access to data they stored in Amazon S3 object storage services as well as being able to benefit from AWS access control and governance policies.

“The fact that customers will be able to use foundation models with the AWS enterprise security and privacy guarantees we think makes it much easier for using these models at scale,” Saha said. “Customers will be able to use Amazon Bedrock in the same environment and with the same AWS services that they’re already comfortable with using.”

AWS enters the foundation model arena with Titan

As part of the Bedrock announcement, AWS is also making its own Titan model available.

Saha explained that AWS built Titan on its own to provide an alternative model for organizations. At launch there are two different flavors of Titans, one being a text model for content generation the other is what Saha referred to as an embedding model. He explained that the embedding models create vector embeddings and can be used for things like creating highly efficient search capabilities. View more