Amazon's cloud launches blitz of new AI products
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Illustration: Annelise Capossela/Axios.
Amazon Web Services announced updates across several of its AI products on Wednesday as it aims to outpace competitors.
Why it matters: AWS' lead in cloud has been narrowing, and the company is betting that speedy development of AI products will make its cloud services more attractive to customers.
What they're saying: "We've done over 320 generative AI major feature launches into general availability this year, and that's more than twice than all of the other large cloud providers combined," Matt Wood, AWS' vice president of AI products, told Axios in an interview earlier this week.
- The vast majority of the launches — 90% — come directly from customers wanting to respond to fast-moving developments in the technology, he added.
- "Six months old in generative AI is kind of the half-life of some of this technology," he said.
Driving the news: AWS announced that its Bedrock customers will have the ability to adjust the behavior of large language models — including Anthropic's Claude 3 — using their own data in a technique called fine-tuning.
- AWS is also making it easier to combine privately held data to improve accuracy and provide specialized results.
- Also on the accuracy front, AWS is launching a guardrail feature that detects "hallucinations."
- "Contextual grounding checks can detect and filter over 75% hallucinated responses," Amazon says in a blog post.
The big picture: One of Amazon's primary goals is to make it easier for companies to build their own generative AI products.
- To that end, the company Wednesday also announced AWS App Studio — a generative AI-powered service that can create enterprise-grade applications through natural language instruction.
- "A user simply describes the application they want, what they want it to do, and the data sources they want to integrate with, and in just minutes, App Studio builds an application that could have taken a professional developer days to build from scratch," the company says.
Between the lines: AWS is on track to bring in $100 billion for Amazon this year, driven in part by strong demand for AI capabilities, the company says.
- Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts this spring that AWS customers are signing "longer deals and larger commitments, many with generative AI components."
What we're watching: Amazon and its Big Tech peers and competitors are spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI computing power to support new capabilities.
- "TBD on whether there's enough incremental revenues to deliver a positive [return]," Bernstein analysts wrote to clients earlier this year. "But if Big Tech doesn't invest, they leave themselves exposed to disruption."
