AWS’ AI clearinghouse faces competition beyond Microsoft and Google

The news: On Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) released Bedrock, an AI toolkit for the enterprise.

• Bedrock provides AWS customers a suite of generative AI tools, including tech for companies to build their own chatbots, per Insider.
• The platform grants access to a variety of AI models from different companies including Anthropic’s Claude, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, AI21’s Jurassic-2, and Amazon’s Titan.
• A preview of Bedrock is currently available to a few AWS customers like Uber, The New York Times, and Coda.

A strategic road less traveled: Amazon has been more gun shy about diving into commercial generative AI compared with rivals Microsoft and Google, but Bedrock could be a turning point.

• The ecommerce giant has a partnership with startup Hugging Face, but Bedrock’s collection of models from different startups shows that it’s casting a wider collaborative net than big cloud competitors—giving clients a one-stop shop for trying out different tools.
• Another key strategic difference is that Amazon is focusing on corporate customers instead of deploying generative technologies—like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard—to individual consumers.
• Focusing on the enterprise helps Amazon avoid some of generative AI’s social pitfalls, like effects on mental health, while still capitalizing on the tech’s hype.
• More corporate access to AI tools could exacerbate rising concern about widespread AI-induced job losses, including among sales professionals.

Fresh competition: Cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google are betting on generative AI to help bolster revenues, but on-prem alternatives could weaken the outlook.

• Software startup Databricks just released its Dolly 2.0, an open source, instruction-following large language model (LLM) as well as free training data to help companies cheaply develop AI chatbots in-house.
• Meanwhile, Meta’s new family of small, efficient generative AI models called LLaMa could be a precursor to a class of advanced LLMs that can run on mass-market hardware.
• Incidents like Samsung employees leaking corporate secrets to ChatGPT are a sign of a growing need for custom AI tools that keep IP data secure.
• Although Amazon’s Titan model could be a safer choice because clients can adapt it with their own training data, some customers may eventually prefer to keep generative AI capabilities on-prem.

This article originally appeared in Insider Intelligence's Connectivity & Tech Briefing—a daily recap of top stories reshaping the technology industry. Subscribe to have more hard-hitting takeaways delivered to your inbox daily.

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