Bedrock, an API platform introduced by Amazon Web Services, is now home to generative AI models developed by multiple startups including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI.
The popularity of generative AI has skyrocketed thanks to the emergence of models that can create images and text. Companies like OpenAI and Midjourney have created tools that have attracted millions of users, which has left behemoth tech companies scrambling to keep up.
Both Microsoft and Google are racing to integrate generative AI chatbots into their search and productivity suites, but Amazon is taking a more impartial approach – akin to a machine-learning Switzerland, as it offers access to the latest models on its platform.
“We are truly at an exciting inflection point in the widespread adoption of ML, and we believe most customer experiences and applications will be reinvented with generative AI,” said Amazon.
In addition, startups that have partnered with the e-commerce giant are in a uniquely advantageous position that allows them to access AWS’ infrastructure to manage and provide their services, while developers pay to use APIs that connect to their models.
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’ VP of machine learning said in a blog post, “Customers have told us there are a few big things standing in their way today.
“First, they need a straightforward way to find and access high-performing [foundational models] that give outstanding results and are best suited for their purposes. Second, customers want integration into applications to be seamless, without having to manage huge clusters of infrastructure or incur large costs.”
Leveraging the power of generative AI
Amazon’s Bedrock currently offers large language models capable of processing and generating text – AI21 Labs’ Jurassic-2 and Anthropic’s Claude – and Stability AI’s text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. The API platform will also provide two of the e-commerce’s own foundation models under the Titan brand.
Developers have the opportunity to create their own products and services using Bedrock-managed APIs, which are powered by generative AI. They can also customise a model for a specific task by supplying their own labeled training examples.
The e-commerce company also said that the customisation process will allow organisations to personalise neural networks for their specific applications without any concerns about their private training data being leaked, misplaced, or used to train other extensive language models.
In addition, Amazon is promoting its proprietary machine-learning acceleration chips, Trainium and Inferentia, which are specifically designed for training and executing generative models in the cloud. This allows users to create and operate these models themselves on the Amazon platform.
Lastly, Amazon has made its AI-based pair-programming tool, CodeWhisperer, widely accessible and free of cost for eligible developers. The tool has now been enhanced to include support for an additional ten programming languages, such as Kotlin, Rust, PHP, SQL, and others, in addition to Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#.
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
