Amazon’s AI Strategy Is Built On Bedrock

Amazon’s Bedrock Is A New AI Product to Enable Companies to Build Any Product Using Any AI Model

Amazon’s absence from this year’s generative AI bonanza has been a bit puzzling. The company invented Alexa, intuiting people’s interest in speaking with computers. Yet, when OpenAI released ChatGPT, it seemed to cede the territory.

However, Amazon is not sitting out the game; it is just waiting to play on its terms. Instead of building one AI product, Amazon wants a piece of all of them. And it’s not shy about its ambition. Amazon VP Matt Wood said in an interview at the Amazon Web Services Summit last week that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if just the AI part of its cloud computing business was larger than the rest of AWS combined!

The key to understanding Amazon’s strategy is to see them as an enabler, not a founder. Rather than releasing just one product or a large language model by itself, Amazon wants to enable companies building with generative AI to create any product using any model. In other words, instead of developing only one ChatGPT or GPT-4, Amazon wants to empower every would-be ChatGPT developer to use any GPT-like model and get going. Amazon will provide the model access, customisation, and raw computing power to developers, and make its money as they build.

Here’s The Thing: This makes a ton of sense, building on Amazon Web Service’s leadership position in cloud computing. Rather than invest billions in developing unique capabilities, as OpenAI, Google and Meta have done, Amazon can let the others do the heavy lifting and focus on build value add services on top of their already highly profitable web business.

Amazon’s AI Strategy Built On Bedrock

At the core of Amazon’s effort is a new product called Bedrock. Available inside AWS, Bedrock lets developers select from a range of AI models, including from Anthropic, AI21 Labs, and Stability AI. Using these models, developers can build their own products, such as AI chatbots, and then run them on AWS’s infrastructure.

Bloomberg, for instance, built BloombergGPT, a bot for financial information, on a Bedrock precursor called Sagemaker. To do it, the company took four decades of unstructured financial data and analytics, loaded it into AWS, added some other training material, and tuned the model. Bedrock should make such a process faster with pre-loaded models in a catalog. Once built, Amazon then supports the products. When people chat with BloombergGPT, for example, it uses Amazon’s storage to work, so Amazon gets paid every step of the way.

While competitors such as Microsoft and Google offer similar capabilities, Amazon has a few advantages. Without its own consumer chatbot or a multi-billion dollar attachment to an AI research house, Amazon pitches itself as a company with more neutrality and pragmatism than its peers. This could be compelling for developers looking for more customisability or assurances that their data stays at home, a pressing issue for many. It’s also helpful for Amazon that so many internet companies already have their data on its cloud.

Having said all of that, Amazon does have its own AI model called Titan that it offers alongside its menu of others. The company also develops its own AI-specific chips, which underlie some of the computing, but it doesn’t sell them like NVIDIA does. Both efforts are meant to enhance the core service offering rather than be customer facing products and services.

Amazon have made a virtue out of turning internal cost centres into profitable, externally facing businesses, with AWS as the leading example. By building on the capabilities of others, Amazon’s strategy looks set to further increase the profitability and returns for the e-commerce giant.

Source: Big Technology

About The Author

Rick Huckstep is a write, podcaster and YouTuber with a passion for emerging technologies and the way they will shape tomorrow’s digital world.

🤔 Get Wiser! every week (newsletter): https://rickhuckstep.substack.com/

📽️ Follow on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@rickhuckstep

🎙️ Listen to Big Tech Little Tech: https://btltpod.com

Originally published at https://rickhuckstep.com on August 2, 2023.