At AWS: re-Invent, Amazon tips a slew of upgrades in everything from storage and databases to new computing chips and various AI tools, mostly aimed at reducing cost and complexity.
Watching sessions from last week’s AWS: re-Invent conference, what stood out was Amazon’s insistence that AI, rather than something that stands on its own, is fast becoming part of applications, meaning developers need to focus on things like cost and efficiency.
“My view is generative AI inference is going to be a core building block for every single application”, said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services. “In fact, I think generative AI actually has the potential to transform every single industry, every single company out there, every single workflow out there, every single user experience out there.”
To that end, Garman announced a slew of upgrades in everything from storage and databases to new computing chips and various AI tools, mostly aimed at reducing cost and complexity.Generative AI
Unsurprisingly, generative AI tools received the most attention. Garman pushed Bedrock, the company’s AI platform, saying: “Every application is going to use inference in some way to enhance or build or really change an application.”
I was impressed by the addition of model distillation features in Bedrock. This lets you use prompts and the output of a very large model to train a much smaller model that covers only a specific subject matter that is much smaller and much cheaper to run. Garman said such models can be 500% faster and 75% less expensive.
Other features he mentioned included better guardrails and security, including a preview of a new automated reasoning system that is supposed to prove a system is working the way it’s intended to, thus preventing hallucinations. Other new tools in Bedrock include improved retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) tools, including using better tools for ingesting and evaluating knowledge bases.
Agents are getting a lot of attention this year – see Microsoft Ignite – and Garman talked about a preview version of new agent services, including multi-agent collaboration and orchestration. We are in “the earliest days of generative AI”, he said.
That point was reinforced by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who took the stage to talk about customer experiences and to announce new models.
“The most success that we’ve seen from companies everywhere in the world is in cost avoidance and productivity”, Jassy noted.
