Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com-owned cloud business, announced on Thursday it will invest $100 million in a new program to connect its machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) experts with global customers.
The aim of this center will be to speed up enterprise innovation and success with generative AI, a next-gen technology that has created havoc on Wall Street this year. The program will offer technical assistance to AWS’ customers to develop and implement generative AI solutions. Amazon also said it will boost its human capital by hiring more data scientists, engineers, and solutions architects.
This way, Amazon is utilizing its multi-year experience in developing AI applications. The tech titan highlighted Highspot, Lonely Planet, Ryanair, and Twilio as a few customers that will be using services of its “AWS Generative AI Innovation Center.”
All Aboard AI Train
Among other things, the team of experts working at the center will help customers develop generative AI applications with step-by-step instructions. In addition to its AWS cloud unit playing a major rule in the generative AI revolution, Amazon is making sure that it fully utilizes its technical expertise to successfully build next-gen tech solutions.
“Amazon has more than 25 years of AI experience, and more than 100,000 customers have used AWS AI and ML services to address some of their biggest opportunities and challenges. Now, customers around the globe are hungry for guidance about how to get started quickly and securely with generative AI,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services at AWS.
Garman added that AWS will provide “cost-effective generative AI services”. One of the key drivers behind the ongoing Wall Street rally is the belief that generative AI technology can help companies cut costs and boost productivity.
Along these lines, AWS said that its team of experts will showcase best practices for applying generative AI and ML technology to reduce costs. Some of the in-house built tools that AWS customers can use include Amazon CodeWhisperer – an AI-focused coding companion. Similarly, Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Titan will also be available to customers.
“The potential generative AI brings is huge and at Highspot we’re leveraging it to transform sales enablement and continue leveling up the value we give our customers. The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center is providing us with novel solutions and creative guidance for some of the most complex challenges and opportunities involved in bringing generative AI workloads to life at scale,” said Kurt Berglund, vice president of Science at Highspot, a sales-enablement business.
While a $100 million investment is a relatively small investment for a company that had $64 billion in cash at the end of the January quarter, it still showcases the importance that AWS is placing on utilizing the generative AI opportunity.
The company’s PR machine has also made sure that the investment community understands the importance of AI and ML for nearly all Amazon’s business segments.
“AI and ML have been a focus for Amazon for over 20 years, and many of the capabilities customers use with Amazon are driven by ML. Our e-commerce recommendations engine is driven by ML; the paths that optimize robotic picking routes in our fulfillment centers are driven by ML; and our supply chain, forecasting, and capacity planning are informed by ML,” AWS said in a recent press release.
This PR piece focused on new tools that Amazon presented, which are focused on building with generative AI on AWS. Among other tools, Amazon presented Bedrock and Titan models, tools developed to help customers build and scale generative AI applications. The former makes Foundation Models (FMs) from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Amazon accessible via an API. The initial set of FMs is mostly for text and images.
Moreover, the world’s largest cloud services provider also presented its Amazon Titan FMs, which consist of two new LLMs (language learning models). Both tools have a clear aim – help AWS customers to build and scale generative AI-based applications.
AWS – One Stop Shop, Even for Day Traders
Amazon raised many eyebrows when it launched AWS in 2006. Dubbed as “the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud,” AWS continues to dominate the cloud market. According to latest estimates, AWS had a 32% market share at the end of Q1, which is nearly the total of the combined market share of the second-placed and third-placed Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, respectively.
AWS’ success is also a result of the fact that today it has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, ML and AI, Internet of Things (IoT), virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), trading, etc.
AWS is even gaining popularity in the world of day trading. Amazon is using its services to give traders the tools needed to identify various trading trends across numerous asset classes from stocks, options, and even forex. The software is built for retail traders who wish to learn how to day trade. But they’re not the only individuals using it.
For instance, financial services businesses use AWS to analyze day trading activity. The goal is to generate new insights and improve the decision-making process. Amazon Finspace offers data analysis services for trading-focused companies. Similarly, Amazon Redshift is used for storing and querying data, including trade transactions. This blog post discusses how to use and connect both tools to generate insightful data.
AWS also offers algorithm trading services, which allow users to create different solutions. Financial and trading businesses can use different AWS tools to architect an algorithmic trading solution. In this context, AWS Data Exchange and Amazon SageMaker play the key role.
The latter allows users to find and use third-party data stored on the cloud in an easy manner. The data is provided by providers such as Reuters, ADP, TSX, and others. On the other hand, the former enables developers and data scientists to build, train and deploy ML and AI models quickly.
Summary
Amazon’s AWS announced this week that it invested $100 million in its generative AI program to enable customers to utilize the company’s vast AI and ML technical expertise. Such projects show why many see AWS as very well-positioned to capitalize on a massive generative AI revolution that is playing out.
Shane Neagle is the EIC of The Tokenist. Check out The Tokenist’s free newsletter, Five Minute Finance, for weekly analysis of the biggest trends in finance and technology.
