Amazon announced Thursday it’s launching its own generative AI service through its cloud computing platform, targeting corporate customers who want to incorporate AI into their businesses, a split-off from other tech giants’ consumer-focused approaches to AI.
Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky delivers an address in 2021.
Getty Images for Amazon Web Services
Key Facts
The AI service Amazon Bedrock offers companies tools to build and grow their own artificial intelligence applications designed for their business needs, according to an announcement from Amazon Web Services.
The tools offered by Bedrock include two Amazon-designed large language models: Titan Text, which is a chatbot similar to ChatGPT that can create text for things like blog posts and emails, and Titan Embeddings, which helps with search personalization.
Bedrock will also include models from startups AI21, Google-backed Anthropic and Stability AI, which turns text into images, Amazon said.
Clients will be able to customize the Titan models to their own data and needs, but the information they input doesn’t train the Titan models, so all data remains secured from other customers and competitors, CNBC reported.
Software firm Pegasystems and enterprise tech company Salesforce, which owns the corporate messaging app Slack, are among the companies looking to use Bedrock, Swami Sivasubramanian, a vice president at AWS, told CNBC.
Amazon said its goal is “democratizing access” to AI development by offering a secure online service so companies can build their own applications, which the company says can run AI software more efficiently and cheaply than competitors.
Further Background
Amazon Web Services is the largest cloud computing provider in the world, ahead of Microsoft, Google and China-based Alibaba, all of which have put generative AI—a system that creates text or images in response to prompts—at the center of their investment strategies over the past year. Microsoft has a substantial head-start in the AI race thanks to its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of AI chatbot ChatGPT, while Google has invested hundreds of millions in the startup Anthropic, which will be offered as part of Amazon Bedrock’s services. ChatGPT, Google’s chatbot Bard and Alibaba’s new chatbot Tongyi Qianwen are all consumer-facing, however. By offering a platform for businesses that want to incorporate generative AI features, Amazon’s strategy is distinct as it is focusing on corporate clients rather than consumers and is largely avoiding heavy investment in any one AI startup.
Tangent
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy released a letter to shareholders on Thursday expressing an optimistic tone after “one of the harder macroeconomic years in recent memory.” Amazon’s sales grew year-over-year in the last three months of 2022, but net income fell, and the company warned growth could slow. While the company stripped back many areas in 2022, including closing several brick-and-mortar book and grocery stores and laying off roughly 27,000 employees, it invested more heavily in its cloud computing business. In January, the firm announced a $35 billion investment in data centers across Virginia to house Amazon Web Services’ expansion.
This article was first published on forbes.com.
