Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a $100 million investment in a new program called the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, which will connect AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) experts with enterprise customers and partners worldwide. The aim of the program is to speed up generative AI innovation, deployment, and success. The new center includes a team of strategists, data scientists, engineers, and solutions architects who will work step-by-step with customers to build bespoke solutions that use AWS generative AI services.
The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center
According to Sri Elaprolu, senior leader of generative AI at AWS, the company’s teams realized that customers were “super eager” to get going with generative AI but didn’t know how. He said, “We clearly saw that more proactive help to customers is going to be critical. Also, many customers already using AWS, whether in the AI/ML space or more broadly, have been reaching out to ask for prescriptive guidance.”
AWS already has over 100,000 customers using AWS for artificial intelligence and machine learning, making it a natural extension for those customers to start exploring generative AI. The $100 million announcement comes two months after AWS announced Amazon Bedrock, which allows developers to build and scale generative AI chatbots and other applications in the cloud. It uses internal organizational data to fine-tune on a variety of leading pretrained large language models (LLMs) from Anthropic, AI21, and Stability AI, as well as two new LLMs in Amazon’s Titan model family.
Expansion of Cloud AI Wars
The announcement of AWS’s Generative AI Innovation Center continues to expand what many see as the cloud AI wars that have been heating up over the past year. Gartner analyst Sid Nag told VentureBeat in April that with the buzz and excitement around generative AI news from Google and Microsoft, Amazon was overdue to follow suit. He said, “The cloud providers are obviously best suited to handle data-heavy generative AI because they are the ones that have these hyperscale cloud computing storage offerings.”
Amazon is also notably calling out its ability to provide a secure environment for organizations to use this type of AI. “Organizations want to create their own walled garden in a generative AI model, so I think you’ll see more and more of that,” Nag said.
The Future of Generative AI
The Generative AI Innovation Center will offer free workshops, engagements, and training to help customers “imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, based on best practices and industry expertise.” Companies like Fox and Ricoh are already using natural language generation capabilities to help broadcasters on live sports telecasts generate compelling storytelling content and to help internal teams put together sales proposals, respectively.
Elaprolu said, “Over the coming weeks and months, you’ll start seeing a lot more customers with public releases and stories about what they’re doing with generative AI on AWS. We’re excited to be in the middle of all of that, to help customers continue to leverage this integration to get business value.”
AWS’s investment in the Generative AI Innovation Center is a significant move in the cloud AI wars, providing customers with more proactive help to explore the potential of generative AI. With the ability to build bespoke solutions that use AWS generative AI services, the center offers customers the opportunity to create value for their businesses based on best practices and industry expertise.
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