On the heels of a shareholder letter in which CEO Andy Jassy promised the company was working on generative AI, Amazon has unveiled its Bedrock AI platform.
As Microsoft, Google, Meta, and others have raced to deploy generative AI, Amazon was noticeably absent from much of the discussion. Jassy reassured investors in his second annual shareholder letter that the company was indeed investing heavily in the tech, and now the company has unveiled the result of that investment just hours after Jassy’s letter:
Today we are excited to announce Amazon Bedrock, a new service that makes FMs from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon accessible via an API. Bedrock is the easiest way for customers to build and scale generative AI-based applications using FMs, democratizing access for all builders. Bedrock will offer the ability to access a range of powerful FMs for text and images—including Amazon’s Titan FMs, which consist of two new LLMs we’re also announcing today—through a scalable, reliable, and secure AWS managed service. With Bedrock’s serverless experience, customers can easily find the right model for what they’re trying to get done, get started quickly, privately customize FMs with their own data, and easily integrate and deploy them into their applications using the AWS tools and capabilities they are familiar with (including integrations with Amazon SageMaker ML features like Experiments to test different models and Pipelines to manage their FMs at scale) without having to manage any infrastructure.
Amazon touts the customization options available to Bedrock users, giving them the ability to tailor the AI platform to their specific needs:
One of the most important capabilities of Bedrock is how easy it is to customize a model. Customers simply point Bedrock at a few labeled examples in Amazon S3, and the service can fine-tune the model for a particular task without having to annotate large volumes of data (as few as 20 examples is enough). Imagine a content marketing manager who works at a leading fashion retailer and needs to develop fresh, targeted ad and campaign copy for an upcoming new line of handbags. To do this, they provide Bedrock a few labeled examples of their best performing taglines from past campaigns, along with the associated product descriptions, and Bedrock will automatically start generating effective social media, display ad, and web copy for the new handbags. None of the customer’s data is used to train the underlying models, and since all data is encrypted and does not leave a customer’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), customers can trust that their data will remain private and confidential.
Bedrock is currently in limited preview, but customers with access to it are already singing its praises.
“As a longtime happy AWS customer, we’re excited about how Amazon Bedrock can bring quality, scalability, and performance to Coda AI,” said Shishir Mehrotra, Co-founder and CEO of Coda. “Since all our data is already on AWS, we are able to quickly incorporate generative AI using Bedrock, with all the security and privacy we need to protect our data built-in. With over tens of thousands of teams running on Coda, including large teams like Uber, the New York Times, and Square, reliability and scalability are really important.”
