Amazon joins the generative AI train with three announcements
Bedrock cloud models service, new instances and a free tier for CodeWhisperer
Amazon is launching a new cloud-based generative AI service called Bedrock. The tech giant also announced new EC2 cloud instances geared towards model training and AI applications, and a free tier to its CodeWhisperer service.
Bedrock provides a selection of AI foundation models - AI models pre-trained on a massive data sets - that users can choose according to their requirements. These models can then be customised using the customer's own data, and integrated with other applications on AWS, according to Amazon.
Key use cases suggested by Amazon include search, chatbots text and generation and personalised recommender systems.
Foundation models (FMs) from third-party AI companies AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI, are accessible via an API. Amazon's own Titan models are also available through the Bedrock service.
AI21 Labs' offering is a multilingual large language model (LLM); Anthropic's specialises in question answering and workflow automation; while Stability.ai's model is an image generator along the lines of Stable Diffusion.
Amazon also announced two new Titan models, both currently being previewed by a limited number of customers. One is a LLM suited for text summarisation, classification, Q&A and similar tasks, while the second is an embeddings model, which translates input text into numerical values depending on context, for applications such as personalisation and search.
In a blog post, Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of data and machine learning at AWS, said: "Customers want it to be easy to take the base FM, and build differentiated apps using their own data (a little data or a lot)."
Perhaps in the light of recent announcements about the real and potential dangers presented by large AI models, Sivasubramanian's blog post emphasises the safety provisions and the pursuit of "responsible AI" in its models.
"Titan FMs are built to detect and remove harmful content in the data, reject inappropriate content in the user input, and filter the models' outputs that contain inappropriate content (such as hate speech, profanity, and violence)," he wrote.
Bedrock is currently in limited preview. No pricing information is yet available.
Amazon also announced the general availability of EC2 Trn1n instances, powered by AWS Trainium chip and optimised to distribute machine learning training across multiple servers, and EC2 Inf2 instances powered by AWS Inferentia2 chips, which are optimised for large-scale generative AI applications.
In a third AI-related announcement, Amazon said it would make its CodeWhisperer AI-powered code-generating service, the company's answer to GitHub Copilot, free for individual developers.
"We know generative AI is going to change the game for developers, and we want it to be useful to as many as possible. This is why CodeWhisperer is free for all individual users with no qualifications or time limits for generating code," said Sivasubramanian.