Amazon is hosting its annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, taking over the entire strip. The company — which recently made investments in generative AI companies like Anthropic and offers access to large language models like Llama 2 — is expected to announce new partnerships, more generative AI capabilities, and new AI models.
There’s already been some big AI-focused news from the show, including that the company’s Amazon Transcribe product is now powered by generative AI and that AWS will deploy Nvidia’s powerful GH200 AI chips. Amazon likely has some other notable announcements in the pipeline as it strives to show potential customers that it can compete with AI offerings from other big cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft and Google.
re:Invent is set to run through December 1st. Here’s our coverage from the show.
Nov 29
Amazon will offer human benchmarking teams to test AI models
Noah BergerAmazon wants users to evaluate AI models better and encourage more humans to be involved in the process.
Read Article >During the AWS re: Invent conference, AWS vice president of database, analytics, and machine learning Swami Sivasubramanian announced Model Evaluation on Bedrock, now available on preview, for models found in its repository Amazon Bedrock. Without a way to transparently test models, developers may end up using ones that are not accurate enough for a question-and-answer project or one that is too large for their use case.
Nov 29
Amazon joins AI image creation fray with new model
AWS vice president of database, analytics, and machine learning Swami Sivasubramanian in front of an image generated by Titan Noah BergerAmazon is joining the AI image generation fray with the release of its Titan text-to-image AI model. Announced during the AWS re:Invent conference, Titan Image Generator can create “realistic, studio-quality images” and is supposed to have built-in guardrails against toxicity and bias. Titan isn’t a standalone app or website but a tool that developers can build on to make their own image generators powered by the model; to use it, developers will need access to Amazon Bedrock.
Read Article >Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS vice president of database, analytics, and machine learning, previewed Titan Image Generator during his keynote, pointing to the model’s ability to not just create an image from a natural language prompt but also change out backgrounds. It’s aimed squarely at an enterprise audience, rather than the more consumer-oriented focus of well-known existing image generators like OpenAI’s DALL-E.
Nov 29
AWS says its new AI chip will train foundation models faster.At re:Invent 2023, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said the second generation of the company’s Trainium chip can train models four times faster than its predecessor. Trainium 2 has three times the memory as the first chip.
Nov 28
Amazon’s Q AI assistant lets users ask questions about their company’s data
AWS CEO Adam Selipsky Noah BergerAmazon’s cloud business AWS launched a chat tool called Amazon Q, where businesses can ask questions specific to their companies.
Read Article >Announced during a keynote speech by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Q acts like an AI assistant where users can ask questions about their businesses using their data. For example, employees can query Amazon Q on the company’s latest guidelines for logo usage or understand another engineer’s code to maintain an app. Q can surface the information instead of the employee sifting through dozens of documents.
Nov 28
AWS and Nvidia expand partnership in generative AI.AWS will be the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia’s GH200 chips, originally announced for release in 2024. Nvidia said GH200 has triple the memory of the popular H100 chips.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a surprise guest during AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s keynote at the AWS re:Invent conference, also announced Nvidia’s AI “factory” DGX Cloud is coming to AWS.
Nov 28
AWS is experimenting with a chip that can solve key quantum computing problems.Peter Desantis, general manager of AWS EC2, announced during a re:Invent keynote that the new chip helps figure out how to correct errors — like flipping a binary code from a 1 to a 0 — that occasionally pop up when working with quantum computing queries. If quantum computing errors are mitigated, it could pave the way for more usable quantum computing, Desantis said.
“We are still in the very early stages, but this chip represents an important step in error correction for quantum computing.”
Nov 28
AWS’s transcription platform is now powered by generative AI
Photo by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto via Getty ImagesAWS added new languages to its Amazon Transcribe product, offering speech foundation model-based transcription for 100 languages and a slew of new AI capabilities for customers.
Read Article >Announced during the AWS re: Invent event, Amazon Transcribe can now recognize more spoken languages and spin up a call transcription. AWS customers use Transcribe to add speech-to-text capabilities to their apps on the AWS Cloud.
Nov 27
Amazon’s new virtual desktop link is a Fire TV Cube for businesses.Instead of relying on hard drives, thin clients like the cube offload most computing power to the cloud and can connect virtual desktops remotely. AWS’ Melissa Stein said the company wants to provide a low-cost option for clients in high employee turnover spaces, like call centers, to provide access to enterprise applications.
“We looked for options and found that the hardware we used for the Amazon Fire TV Cube provided all the resources customers needed to access their cloud-based virtual desktops. So, we built an entirely new software stack for that device, and since we didn’t have to design and build new hardware, we’re passing those savings along to customers.”
The AWS thin clients will cost $195, or $280 bundled with a hub to connect a second monitor, with a monthly $6 management and maintenance fee.
AWS’ thin client is a FireTV Cube that connects desktops AWS
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