How Amazon is competing against Microsoft, Google in AI race
What's the story
Amazon has entered the generative AI race. The cloud giant joining the fray is expected to crank up the intensity of an already fierce race.
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, has announced a suite of AI technologies to help businesses build chatbots and image-generation technologies.
Chief among them is Amazon Bedrock, which could put up a big challenge to Microsoft's and Google's AI ambitions.
Context
Why does this story matter?
The generative AI market is expected to be worth around $110 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research. The OpenAI and Microsoft tandem is leading the market currently, courtesy of GPT-4.
Google is closely following them. Now, Amazon's entry is going to make things even more interesting.
It needs to be seen how the generative AI space takes shape in the coming days.
Bedrock
Bedrock provides access to 'foundation models' from AI companies
Amazon Bedrock provides businesses with a way to build generative AI-powered apps easily. Bedrock is based on pre-trained foundation models (FM), including AI21's Jurassic-2, Anthropic's Claude, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan.
Customers of AWS will be able to use them to create generative AI apps based on their specific needs. Bedrock will challenge enterprise offerings of OpenAI and others in generative AI.
Need-based
It makes it easy to develop customized models
According to AWS, Bedrock makes it easy to customize AI models based on the customer's needs. For instance, a content manager can use the service to create a targeted ad campaign by feeding it a few labeled examples.
If the content manager provides Bedrock examples of best-performing taglines and product descriptions, it will automatically generate social media posts, display ads, and web copy.
Titan FM
Amazon is offering 2 Titan models
Amazon is providing its own Titan FM on Bedrock.
There are two Titan models. One is a generative large language model (LLM) that can perform tasks such as "summarization, text generation, classification, and open-ended Q&A."
The second model, on the other hand, is an embedding LLM that translates text into numerical representations that "contain the semantic meaning of the text."
Challenge
Bedrock will challenge Azure OpenAI Service
Amazon is targeting customers building enterprise-level AI apps with Bedrock. Notably, Microsoft has found success with Azure OpenAI Service, its generative AI model suite, which hosts OpenAI models.
Azure OpenAI Service lets businesses apply OpenAI's models to their business applications. Bedrock can mount a significant challenge to Microsoft's offering, as AWS leads the cloud market with a 33% share.
Other offerings
Amazon has made CodeWhisperer free for developers
Meanwhile, Amazon has also made CodeWhisperer, its AI-powered "coding companion," free for developers.
The company aims to challenge Microsoft-owned GitHub's Copilot by making this service free.
It has also launched EC2 Inf2 instances powered by AWS Inferentia2 chips and Trn1n instances powered by AWS Tiranium chips for AI training.
Both compete with similar offerings from Google and Microsoft, including Google's TPU chips.