By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc’s Cloud Computing Division (AMZO34) on Thursday launched a suite of technologies aimed at helping other companies develop their own AI-backed chatbots and imaging services.
Microsoft and Alphabet are adding AI chatbots to consumer products like their search engines, but they’re also eyeing another big market: selling the technology to other companies through their cloud computing operations.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider, entered the race on Thursday with a suite of proprietary AI technologies, but is taking a different approach.
AWS will offer a service called Bedrock, which allows companies to customize so-called base models – the core artificial intelligence technologies that enable tasks such as responding to queries with human-like text or generating images from a user request. user. The business model foresees the use of the customer’s own data for its exclusive chatbot.
ChatGPT creator OpenAI, for example, offers a similar service, allowing customers to tweak the models behind the tool to have a personalized chatbot.
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The Bedrock service will allow customers to work with Amazon’s proprietary models called Amazon Titan, but 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, along with Amazon’s own models.
Bedrock allows AWS customers to test these technologies without having to deal with complexities related to the data centers where they are housed.
“It’s unnecessary complexity from a user perspective,” Vasi Philomin, vice president of generative AI at AWS, told Reuters. “Behind the scenes, we can abstract that.”
Those servers will use a combination of Amazon’s own custom microprocessors, as well as chips from Nvidia, the biggest supplier for artificial intelligence tasks.
“We’ve been able to get tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these chips as we need them,” Dave Brown, vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at AWS, said of the company’s custom microprocessors. “It’s an outlet for some of the supply chain concerns that I think people are concerned about.”