Amazon jumps into the generative AI race with its new cloud service and its large language models.
Amazon is launching a cloud platform called Bedrock that programmers can use to integrate text-generating AI systems into their applications, much like the technology that powers the well-known ChatGPT chatbot developed by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI.
The revelation suggests that the biggest cloud infrastructure provider won’t be handing over a growing market to rivals like Google and Microsoft, both of which have started providing developers with sizable language models they can use. Large language models are often AI systems that have been trained on vast amounts of data and are capable of producing text that resembles that of a human being in response to user input.
Access to language models from startups AI21 and Google-backed Anthropic, as well as a model for converting text into images from firm Stability AI, will be available through Amazon Web Services Bedrock generative AI service. One Titan model can produce text for emails, documents, and blog postings. The other can assist with customizing and searching.
The Bedrock project was launched one month after OpenAI unveiled GPT-4, a sizable language model that drives ChatGPT, a chatbot that gained popularity after its November introduction. The most formidable rival to Amazon’s AWS division is Microsoft, which has made significant investments in OpenAI and provides the firm with computer resources via its Azure cloud.