Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
AWS is stepping up its AI accelerator efforts via a $100 million Generative AI Innovation Center.
Why it matters: This is a two-fold play by Amazon — to diversify generative AI interest away from this year's obsession with ChatGPT, and to grow AWS's share of the cloud computing market for running generative AI services.
- "There is no single model that's going to be the ruling model for all of the use cases," the head of the new center, Sri Elaprolu, told Axios.
What's happening: Part AI sandbox and part tutoring service, the center will connect AWS AI strategists, data scientists, and engineers with customers.
- The goal is getting AWS customers "going in the right direction," per Elaprolu, so they go on to build and deploy their own custom generative AI products and services.
- Customers are encouraged to first clean up their data and then brainstorm and build prototypes with AWS.
What they're saying: AWS expects use cases to focus on improving customer experiences, optimizing business operations, and ramping up creative production.
- "Most enterprises will want to try it out internally first, to get experience and confidence," Elaprolu said.
- "Cloud computing is critical because you're training on internet-scale data: you're not going to effectively do it in a data center or a server farm," he said.
Flashback: Amazon has been running AI accelerator programs since 2016, and debuted a 10-week program for generative AI startups in April.
- Fox Sports has used AWS AI support to develop better live sports commentary narratives since 2021.