AWS Launches Bedrock’s Generative AI Service, Titan LLMs

Amazon launches a cloud service called Bedrock that allows developers to enhance their software with artificial intelligence systems that can generate text, similar to the engine behind popular chatbot ChatGPT, powered by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI.

The announcement suggests that the largest provider of cloud infrastructure is a trending growth area unmatched by challengers such as Google And Microsoft, both of which have started offering developers large language models to use. In general, large language models are AI programs that are trained on large amounts of data and can compose human-like text in response to prompts that humans type.

Through its generative AI service Bedrock, Amazon Web Services offers access to its own first-party language models called Titan, as well as language models from startups AI21 and Google-backed Anthropic, and a text-to-image model from startup Stability AI. A Titan model can generate text for blog posts, emails, or other documents. The other can help with search and personalization.

“Most companies want to use these big language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years, and most companies don’t want to go through that,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Thursday in the “Squawk Box” by CNBC. “So they want to work on a base model that’s already big and awesome, and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes. And that is what Bedrock is.”

The Bedrock initiative comes a month after OpenAI announced GPT-4, a large language model powering ChatGPT, a chatbot that went viral after its launch in November. The biggest competition for Amazon’s AWS business comes from Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI and powers the startup through its Azure cloud.

Andy Jassy, ​​Chief Executive Officer of Amazon.Com Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S. on Tuesday, October 5, 2021.

David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images

People using ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot based on OpenAI language models have sometimes encountered inaccurate information due to a behavior called hallucination, where the output can seem convincing but actually has nothing to do with the training data. Amazon is “really concerned about” accuracy and ensuring its Titan models deliver high-quality answers, Bratin Saha, an AWS vice president, said in an interview with CNBC.

Customers can customize Titan models with their own data. However, this data is never used to train the Titan models to ensure other customers, including competitors, do not benefit from this data, said another vice president.

Sivasubramanian and Saha declined to discuss the size of the Titan models or identify the data Amazon used to train them, and Saha declined to describe the process Amazon followed to identify problematic parts of the model training data removed.

Amazon isn’t disclosing the cost of the Bedrock service as it launches a limited preview for now. Customers can be put on a waiting list, a spokesman said. Microsoft and OpenAI have announced pricing for using GPT-4, starting at pennies per 1,000 “tokens,” where one token is roughly four characters of English text. Google has not published prices for its PaLM language model.

Sivasubramanian, who has been with Amazon since the mid-2000s, said Amazon has been working on AI for more than two decades and that AWS has won over 100,000 AI customers. Amazon used a fine-tuned version of Titan to serve search results through its homepage, he added.

But Amazon is just one of the big companies that rushed to release generative AI capabilities after ChatGPT appeared and became a hit. ExpediaHubSpot, Paylocity and Spotify are among the companies committed to integrating OpenAI technology.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a note Wednesday that based on a February survey of chief information officers, they expect AI to become a bigger part of cloud spending, with Google and Microsoft being the biggest beneficiaries, not Amazon.

“We actually always launch when things are ready, and all of these technologies are super early,” Sivasubramanian said. He said Amazon wants to make sure Bedrock is easy to use and inexpensive thanks to the use of custom AI processors.

C3.ai, Pegasystems, Accenture and Deloitte are among the companies looking forward to Bedrock, he wrote in a blog post.

REGARD: Cramer on Microsoft: ChatGPT is good for the company

Correction: C3.ai, Pegasystems, Accenture, and Deloitte are among the companies looking forward to using Bedrock, Sivasubramanian wrote in a blog post. In an earlier version, the names of the companies were given incorrectly.