Amazon may still be the king of the cloud, but in recent months it has watched as its two closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, steal the spotlight with brilliant but error-prone chatbots that use sophisticated “generative” artificial intelligence models.
Today, Amazon announced that it is entering the generative AI race. Not by launching their own chatbot, but by making two new AI language models available through the cloud platform Amazon Web Services, which customers can use to build their own bots.
The past few months have seen the tech industry froth at the mouth over the potential of generative AI: algorithms that learn to produce text, code, images, and more. The boom has been inspired by the remarkable success of OpenAI’s text-generating bot, ChatGPT, as well as the success of AI image generators.
The proliferation of these services also threatens to shake up the cloud market as companies, from construction to law, race to build their own generative AI technology or integrate it into existing products. As investors and entrepreneurs devise ways to use generative AI across industries, they are creating demand for the basic tools companies can use to build their own applications.
“Many customers have a strong interest in generative AI solutions,” said Adam Selipksy, CEO of AWS. “I would say that questions about Generative AI now come up in most of my customer conversations, with the leading question being, ‘When can we get the solutions we want?'”
Amazon remains the global market leader in cloud computing, followed by Microsoft and then Google. Microsoft has teamed up with OpenAI and is making the technology behind the ChatGPT available through its Azure cloud platform. Google, which has been developing the underlying language model technology for years, recently launched its own PaLM model, which is available through Google Cloud.
Microsoft, which invested $10 billion in OpenAI, provides access to GPT-3.5, one of the language models that powers ChatGPT, through an application programming interface that allows developers to access the model directly from their code. Google’s PaLM is similarly capable and accessible through its cloud API.
Amazon today announced it is launching a platform called Bedrock, which will provide access to advanced language models from Anthropic and AI21, two startups developing language models that rival those of OpenAI and Google.
“It is very unlikely that there is one model that is the right answer for all customers and for all use cases,” says Selipksy. “We want to offer choice and flexibility.”
Amazon has two generative language models. Titan Text can generate text from a prompt, and Text Embeddings generates a mathematical representation of text that can be used for tasks such as translation and searching.
AWS also provides access to Stable Diffusion, an AI image generation model, from Stability AI, a startup developing a suite of open source generative AI models.
“Bedrock removes significant friction from companies using generative models,” said Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, the company behind the image model. “[It] is ideal for our open models that can easily access customer data.”
