AWS reaping the rewards of Bedrock generative AI approach

AWS is so far reaping the rewards of its broader approach to generative AI development with the launch of its Bedrock service, a company executive has claimed.

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP for database, analytics, and machine learning at the cloud giant, told Reuters that the company has drawn “thousands of customers” since its launch in April. 

Speaking off the back of an appearance at the 2023 AWS Summit in New York, Sivasubramanian said the company’s key objective with Bedrock is to “make every company an AI company” through its offering. 

Sivasubramanian’s claim that the firm has attracted a raft of users to the service also suggests that the approach is working. 

Although exact numbers weren’t cited, a host of organizations, including Sony, Lonely Planet, and Ryanair are already using Bedrock to build generative AI applications, according to the firm. 

The announcement of the Bedrock service in April this year was met with excitement from industry stakeholders and hailed as a dynamic approach through which the firm can leverage its expansive customer ecosystem. 

Crucially, the Bedrock service provides access to a broader range of both proprietary and third-party foundation models. At the center of this lies the ‘Amazon Titan’ foundation models, announced during the April launch. 

However, access to third-party models from startups such as AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI was hailed as a key differentiator for the service and one that will likely set it apart from competitors such as Google and Microsoft in the ongoing generative AI ‘race’. 

AWS’ market share and its position as the largest cloud provider also separates it from competitors in this regard, Sivasubramanian told Reuters.

Sivasubramanian previously suggested that a key factor in the appeal to customers is the variety of models offered through this confluence of third-party and proprietary offerings. 

“Different customers, depending on their use cases - price profile, performance - end up picking the right tool,” he told ITPro at the AWS Summit in London this year. 

“That’s one of the reasons we designed Bedrock to provide access to the best-in-class models and provide the ability to customize these foundation models with their data.”

The firm is continuing to expand the burgeoning ecosystem of foundation models it already offers through Bedrock, as well. 

At the AWS Summit yesterday, the firm announced the addition of Cohere as a foundation model provider alongside new models from both Anthropic and Stability AI. 

Under the plans, Cohere will add its text generation model, Command, as well as Cohere Embed, a multilingual text understanding model. Meanwhile, Anthropic updates will see Claude 2, the latest version of its language model, offered to customers. 

Sivasubramanian told Reuters that the Bedrock service will become generally available to all customers “very soon”, but did not provide an exact timeline on when this is expected to be announced. 

Before such an announcement, he suggested that the firm aims to fine-tune issues relating to cost allocation and enterprise controls and best practice.