Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced many updates to its AI offerings, aiming to stay ahead of its competition in the cloud industry.
AWS, traditionally a leader in cloud computing, is feeling the pressure as its lead narrows. The company hopes rapidly developing AI products will enhance the appeal of the appeal of its cloud services. "We've done over 320 generative AI major feature launches into general availability this year," Matt Wood, AWS' vice president of AI products, said in an interview. This is more than twice the number of similar launches by all large cloud providers combined.
Wood noted that 90% of these launches stem from customer needs to keep up with the fast-evolving technology. He emphasized the rapid pace of change in AI, comparing six months in generative AI to a "half-life" of the technology.
One significant update is for AWS Bedrock customers, who can now fine-tune large language models using their data, including Anthropic's Claude 3. This fine-tuning capability aims to improve the models' accuracy and relevance for specific tasks. Additionally, AWS has introduced features to combine private data sources for better results and a guardrail feature to detect and filter out AI-generated "hallucinations," improving the reliability of AI outputs.
AWS also launched AWS App Studio, a generative AI-powered service that allows users to create enterprise-grade applications through natural language instructions. According to the company, users simply describe the application they need, its functions, and the data sources it should integrate. App Studio builds the application within minutes. This tool aims to simplify the development process and significantly reduce the time required to create applications.
Amazon's AI efforts are part of its broader strategy to make it easier for companies to develop generative AI products. The company is on track to generate $100 billion from AWS this year, driven by the strong demand for AI capabilities. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky mentioned that AWS customers are increasingly signing longer and larger deals, many of which include generative AI components.
Despite these advancements, there is some uncertainty. Analysts at Bernstein have pointed out Big Tech's massive investments in AI computing power, suggesting that it remains to be seen whether these investments will yield positive returns. However, not investing in AI could leave these companies vulnerable to disruption.