Amazon adds foundation models to its AI portfolio
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AWS CEO Matt Garman. Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services
Amazon announced a new series of foundation models that aim to rival those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as part of a slew of AI announcements from the tech giant on Tuesday.
Why it matters: Amazon has been a key player in generative AI largely on the strength of its web services business, but its new moves are designed to give it a larger footprint.
Driving the news: Amazon used its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to unveil new chips, models, services and customers. Among the announcements:
- The company debuted its Nova family of foundation models that range from very lightweight text-only models to larger language models, as well as models capable of creating images and videos.
- Amazon said it is building "Project Rainier," a huge supercomputer running hundreds of thousands of its homegrown Trainium2 chips, with Anthropic as the first customer.
- It also said its Trainium2 chips are generally available for AI customers, with Trainium3 due next year.
Between the lines: Apple gave a rare public endorsement of one of its suppliers, appearing on stage at re:Invent to say that it is using Amazon's custom AI chips to power search services and is eyeing Amazon's latest chips for use in pre-training Apple's AI models.
The big picture: The announcements are part of a strategy that AWS chief executive Matt Garman outlined for Axios earlier this year, aiming to position Amazon as a key infrastructure provider to the entire AI industry.
- "Everybody launched chatbots," Garman told Axios. "We took a step back and said, 'What is the infrastructure and the platform that we think that our broad swath of millions of enterprises and startups are really going to want to build on?'"
- Custom chips are a big part of what Garman believes will give Amazon an edge over the long term. "We knew that cost and performance were going to be incredibly important there, and so five years ago, we started building our own custom silicon to support AI models," he said.
What we're watching: The next generation of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant with additional AI-powered smarts debuts next year.
Meanwhile: Amazon is in talks with news agencies to license their content for genAI answers to user prompts about the news, Axios media correspondent Sara Fischer reports.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Amazon made these announcements on Tuesday (not Monday).
