AWS Unveils Major AI Advancements at re:Invent 2023: New Chips, Models, and Platform Tools

AWS refreshes AI story with new Trainium 2 chip, Bedrock upgrades, and SageMaker Studio

The big picture: One thing that's become clear when it comes to Generative AI is that we're still in the early days of the technology. Major evolutions and refinements of existing products are going to be a standard part of the tech industry news cycle for some time to come. At their annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon's Web Services (AWS) exemplified this trend with a series of product and service announcements primarily focused on enhancing their existing offerings rather than introducing completely new ones. To be clear, there were a few genuinely new entries in the firehose of announcements that have become synonymous with AWS keynote speeches - particularly regarding foundation models. Even there, however, it could be argued that the focus was largely on rebranding or replacing existing products. Part of the reason for this approach is that big tech companies like Amazon initially succeeded in defining and creating a high-level framework for enabling GenAI. Over time, however, it has become apparent that these tools and processes haven't fully met the needs of many customers. Simply put, leveraging the capabilities of GenAI was, and in many cases still is, too complex for most organizations. With this in mind, AWS focused on addressing these gaps at this year's re:Invent. They refined tools and bundled existing products and services to make significant strides toward simplifying the creation and deployment of GenAI technologies. These efforts were designed to accommodate companies across a wide range of technical sophistication. Notably, they tackled this challenge across an expansive set of offerings, including custom silicon, foundation models, database enhancements, developer tools, and software platforms. Starting at the silicon level, new AWS CEO Matt Garman kicked off his keynote by highlighting the company's substantial investments in custom chips over the last decade. He pointed to the company's prescient decision to invest in Arm-based CPUs with its Graviton chip, sharing that their Graviton-based business is now larger than AWS's entire compute business was when Graviton launched. He then announced the general availability of the Trainium 2 chip and EC2 compute instances optimized for AI training and inference workloads using those chips. Taking this a step further, Garman claimed that Trainium 2 represents the first viable alternative to Nvidia GPUs - most notably at a significantly lower cost of operation. While the validity of this claim remains to be seen, initial discussions around the chip's architecture suggest it's a significant improvement over the first-generation Trainium. Interestingly, Garman also revealed early details about Trainium 3, signaling the company's deep commitment to ongoing silicon development. Despite these custom silicon efforts, AWS reaffirmed Nvidia's role as a critical partner by announcing new EC2 instances with Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs, which are set to debut soon. Of course, a critical component of any GenAI compute system is the software used to build and fine-tune models and applications that run on this hardware. In this regard, Garman introduced numerous enhancements to Amazon's SageMaker and Bedrock platforms, including the launch of SageMaker Studio, which consolidates previously independent AWS services into a unified user interface. Building on its legacy as a tool for data scientists and early AI/ML models, SageMaker has become increasingly important in the GenAI era, enabling the development, training, and fine-tuning of foundation models. Unsurprisingly, SageMaker Studio now offers enhancements that fully leverage the new capabilities of Trainium 2, positioning the combination as a competitive alternative to Nvidia's CUDA and GPUs. Enhancements to Bedrock - a platform tailored for GenAI application developers looking to work with existing foundation models - include new well-known models and the introduction of a Bedrock Marketplace for broader model selection. Two particularly intriguing Bedrock additions are its model distillation feature and a method for reducing hallucinations. Bedrock Distillation allows for the compression of large frontier models - such as a 405-billion-parameter Llama model - into something as compact as an 8-billion-parameter version using specialized customization techniques. While this process shares similarities with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), it employs distinct methods that may yield even more effective results. Meanwhile, Bedrock Guardrails now include an Automated Reasoning check, a mathematically verifiable technique designed to substantially reduce hallucinations in GenAI outputs. While details on how it worked were sparse, it certainly sounded like a potentially very important breakthrough. Bedrock also incorporates some fine-tuning capabilities previously exclusive to SageMaker but presented at a higher level of abstraction. While this improves Bedrock's versatility, it can create overlap and confusion regarding which tool is best suited for a specific task or user type. Amazon faced the same kind of confusion over the role of Sagemaker, Bedrock and their Q agent capabilities when they first introduced Q at last year's re:Invent (see "The Amazon AWS GenAI Strategy Comes with a Big Q" for more). Since then, I believe they've improved the positioning of each option in their development stack, but it's still extremely complex and worthy of even more message simplification and clarification. To better address the challenges that companies have in organizing their data for ingestion into GenAI foundation models, AWS introduced notable enhancements to their S3 storage and database offerings. Highlights include support for managed Apache Iceberg data tables to accelerate data lake analytics and the automated creation of searchable metadata. These, along with other announcements, underscore AWS's commitment to improving data preparation and organization. For developers, AWS unveiled Amazon Q Developer, a suite of AI-powered capabilities to assist with writing new code, modernizing legacy Java and mainframe code, automating code documentation, and more. Two of the biggest surprises from the AWS keynote were the return of former AWS CEO (and now Amazon CEO) Andy Jassy and the unveiling of the company's new foundation models, branded Nova. This range includes four tiers of multimodal models alongside specialized models for image and video creation. Together with the Trainium chip, SageMaker and Bedrock enhancements, and improved database tools, the Nova models form a comprehensive GenAI portfolio. AWS believes this positions them as a leading full-solution provider for GenAI. That said, Nova's introduction raises questions. The Nova models replace Amazon's Titan models, which were heralded not long ago as a key part of their AI strategy. This sudden shift may muddy the messaging for companies and developers already working with Titan. However, discussions with AWS representatives suggest that Nova represents a significant leap forward in architecture and performance. While the decision to pivot from Titan may raise eyebrows, it reflects the fast-moving and dynamic nature of the GenAI space. As I walked away from the event, I couldn't help but be impressed at the comprehensive range of enhancements that AWS has made to its GenAI tools and services. While the technology will undoubtedly continue to evolve, as we migrate from the era of GenAI proof-of-concepts to enterprise-wide GenAI deployments, having access to full suite of tools from a major cloud computing provider that addresses a number of early pain points is bound to be a game-changer. Bob O'Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech

AWS Expands AI Services to Challenge Microsoft's Generative AI Leadership

Amazon Web Services (AWS) showcased significant generative artificial intelligence (AI) advancements at its annual re: Invent conference in Las Vegas. This can be attributed to an effort to establish a closer distance with Microsoft regarding AI technology. Experts in the IT sector believe that AWS has integrated AI into its cloud computing system, which has improved the performance of many services by incorporating new AI technologies. AWS's increasing integration of AI technology points to the need to transform how businesses might utilize AI in time-sensitive business operations. During the event, AWS unveiled the third generation of Trainium processors for training large language models (LLMs). These processors indicate the direction of technological development in AWS data centers for infrastructure that supports AI functionality. Apple has tried these processors and reported enhanced performance results.

Amazon Refreshes AI Story With New Chips, Models And Platform Tools

Garman unveiled a number of enhancements to Amazon's Sagemaker and Bedrock platforms, including the announcement of Sagemaker Studio, which brings together a number of previously independent AWS services into a single UI. One thing that's become very clear when it comes to Generative AI (GenAI) is that we're still in the early days of the technology, and major evolutions and refinements of existing products is going to be a standard part of the Bob O'Donnell is the founder and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a technology consulting and market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.

AWS looks to generative AI tools as battle with Microsoft intensifies

Microsoft was able to steal a march on the rest of the technology industry in the booming field of generative artificial intelligence due to its close alliance with OpenAI. But to judge by the number of announcements at Amazon Web Service's annual tech showcase event in Las Vegas this week, the AI gap in the cloud computing world has narrowed. Microsoft's biggest cloud rival has now embedded generative AI deeply into its computing platform and infused the technology into many of its services, according to analysts. Like Microsoft and others, AWS is pushing deeper into a new era of AI-powered automation. The question now is whether customers are ready to trust generative AI with some of their most critical functions, or commit serious money to the technology. Amazon said on its last earnings call that AI is already a "multibillion-dollar" business and growing at more than 100 per cent. According to AWS chief executive Matt Garman, AI is on the way to becoming a core function in every corporate application, potentially fuelling a new wave of demand for the company's core computing infrastructure. "It's going to need compute, it's going to need storage, it's going to need databases and it's going to need inference as a key part of that application," he said in an interview with the Financial Times. Yet Garman conceded that in the two years since the launch of ChatGPT, the flurry of interest in generative AI has yet to lead to serious use of the technology in business. "A lot of customers did a lot of experimentation," he said. Most are now trying to identify the handful of uses for AI that might justify deeper investment. Announcements by AWS at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday included a third generation of its Trainium processors, used in training large language models. Apple said it had used AWS chips to run some of its services, and had achieved strong results in testing Trainium to train its in-house AI models. Like other cloud companies, AWS is still heavily reliant on Nvidia's general processing units. But the latest developments show that it was now on a par with Google, which trains its Gemini models on the in-house chips it has been using for nearly a decade, said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. Along with its other chips, including ones for running as well as training AI models, Amazon now had "the broadest array of homegrown silicon" of any of the big cloud companies, he added. AWS had also narrowed the gap with Microsoft and OpenAI when it comes to the models that act as a foundation for its AI services, according to analysts. Garman said AWS had talked to OpenAI about trying to offer their models to its own cloud customers. Though OpenAI's exclusive alliance with Microsoft stands in the way, he said he believed the two would find a way to work together in the longer term. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella no longer talks about its hosting of OpenAI as a crucial competitive weapon. Instead, he claimed recently that LLMs were becoming a commodity and that most of the value would come from the tools and services on top, suggesting that competition with its main cloud rivals, AWS and Google, was shifting to a different level. Meanwhile, at the event in Las Vegas, AWS demonstrated how it has been pushing AI into more of its own technology and services, in an effort to get customers to bring more of their applications and services to its cloud. "The biggest challenge with AWS is how complex it is and how many services it provides," said Steven Dickens, principal analyst at HyperFRAME Research. Adding AI to simplify things had led to "200 small achievements", he added. "None of this very sexy, but it's absolutely vital on a day-to-day basis." In one sign of how AI could shift the competitive balance between cloud companies, AWS is trying to use the technology to wrest customers away from Microsoft. It unveiled new AI-powered tools to automate the laborious and time-consuming task of rewriting applications that run on Microsoft's Windows operating system so that they can run in the AWS cloud. AWS's direct targeting of Windows customers follows news, first reported in the FT, that the US Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into whether Microsoft has used licensing restrictions to prevent customers from moving to rival cloud providers. Echoing complaints from others in the industry, Garman said Microsoft had offered its customers preferential terms if they kept their applications in its own cloud rather than picking one of its big rivals, and claimed it had made "fake concessions" to head off an EU investigation into the issue last year. But he also claimed that Microsoft's actions risked backfiring: "In some ways it's a tailwind for us, because it's not earning any trust." In the latest attempt to push generative AI deeper into business life, meanwhile, AWS also announced new tools to organise and co-ordinate groups of AI agents so that they could carry out more complex functions. Many of the tasks companies want to automate involve multiple steps, meaning they require a number of specialised agents to complete, said Vasi Philomin, vice-president of generative AI at AWS. Yet even Garman admits that most customers were only just starting to think about how AI tools like these might be integrated into their processes, or about how to manage the risks. "We're still so early in where a lot of these things are going to go," he said. "Users have to decide when agents can be fully autonomous, when agents still need humans in the loop, when agents need guardrails around them."

Amazon's AWS CEO Teases Major AI Advancements - Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)

AWS faces competitive pressure from Microsoft and Google in cloud services. Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon.com, Inc AMZN cloud unit, has described artificial intelligence (AI) as an ongoing and transformative technology. In an interview before the Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference, Garman emphasized AI's endless potential, stating, "It's just a thing that's going to happen forever." The annual event, which kicks off in Las Vegas, is expected to showcase significant AI and cloud computing updates. Also Read: Baidu Takes on Tesla, Secures License To Test Self-Driving Tech in Hong Kong The upcoming conference marks Garman's first keynote since assuming his role in June. He plans to unveil "real, needle-moving changes" in AI, computing, and other vital areas, The Wall Street Journal reports. These advancements are critical as AWS faces mounting pressure from competitors like Microsoft Corp MSFT and Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL. According to Gartner, Amazon has seen its global cloud market share dip slightly, falling to 39% in 2023 from 39.9% in 2022. Meanwhile, rivals Microsoft and Google have gained traction, with respective market shares increasing to 23% and 8.2% during the same period. Garman acknowledged this competitive environment but stressed AWS's role as a platform offering diverse AI models, likening its approach to "a bit of everything for everyone." Amazon recently doubled its investment in the AI startup Anthropic to $8 billion, signaling its commitment to staying at the forefront of AI development. The collaboration will leverage AWS's Trainium chips, which Garman claims are cost-effective solutions for training AI models. Bank of America Securities analyst Justin Post deems the expanded partnership mutually beneficial for the companies. Amazon gains a strong AI partner to help maintain the AI moat, and Anthropic gains more capital. Post also expects the co-development of Amazon's Trainium chip capabilities could accelerate progress and build credibility for the chips. Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik considers Amazon a substantial investment opportunity. Despite planned increases in infrastructure spending next year, Shmulik emphasizes Amazon's ability to generate returns on such investments, particularly in areas like Prime Video. Shmulik told Yahoo Finance, "Amazon feels like the name that you can put money to work in and get excited about," highlighting AWS revenue showing momentum heading into the fourth quarter, Prime Video investments, and more. In July, JMP Securities' Nicholas Jones flagged AWS gaining ground as Microsoft Azure grappled with softness in some European geographies and capacity constraints. Investors can gain exposure to Amazon through ProShares Online Retail ETF ONLN and SPDR Select Sector Fund - Consumer Discretionary XLY. Price Action: AMZN stock is up 2% at $212.08 at last check Monday. Also Read: Amazon And Walmart Dominate Black Friday As Online Sales Soar 14.6% Photo by Sundry Photography via Shutterstock This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

AWS CEO: Companies Zero in on Most Valuable AI Applications | PYMNTS.com

Two years into the generative artificial intelligence (AI) boom, CEOs and chief information officers are looking to focus on the use cases that deliver the best return on investment, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman told The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Garman said that "almost every" one of these executives has done at least 100 proofs of concept and now aims to focus on five or fewer that are most valuable, according to an interview posted Monday (Dec. 2) by the WSJ. On Tuesday (Dec. 3), Garman will deliver a keynote address at the annual AWS re:Invent conference and will share "real, needle-moving changes" among the company's offerings in AI and computing, he said, per the interview. Garman became CEO of AWS in June and the keynote he delivers will be his first in that role, according to the report. The re:Invent keynote typically includes announcements of many new features and products being introduced by Amazon's cloud unit. Recent developments highlighted in the report include AWS' investment of another $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the company to $8 billion; Anthropic's uses of Amazon's in-house AI chip, Trainium; and Amazon's plans to spend over $100 billionover the next center on data centers -- an amount that's higher than that the company will be spending on its eCommerce warehouses. The AWS Trainium chips are designed to be cost-effective for AI training and will help lower the cost of AI, thereby helping boost the ROI for companies, Garman said, per the report. In the first news announcement to come out of its re:Invent conference, AWS said Sunday (Dec. 1) that it has made new generative AI enhancements to its cloud contact center solution, Amazon Connect. These enhancements allow users to segment their audience to deliver personalized and timely communications, improve the self-service experience with a generative AI-powered assistant, add customizable AI guardrails and gain AI-driven insights to help managers improve service quality.