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Amazon, keen to avoid being left behind in the fiercely competitive AI race, is launching a new program to invest in startups and enterprises focused on generative AI.
Called the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, the program will allocate $100 million to connect AWS data scientists, strategists, engineers, and solution architects with customers and partners to — as Amazon puts it in a press release — “accelerate enterprise innovation and success through generative AI.” “.
“Through free workshops, sharing, and training, AWS will help customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the most value for their business, based on best practices and industry expertise,” Amazon wrote in a press release.
What exactly does that mean? I asked Sri Elaprolu, Head of Generative AI Innovation Center and Senior Director of Data Science at AWS, to elaborate.
Via email, Elaprolu explained that the $100 million investment will specifically fund “people, technology, and processes” around generative AI. This is still a bit of a mystery. But the idea, he said, would be to support work with AWS customers that helps them think about, design, and launch new AI products and services.
“We’ve heard from our enterprise customers that they are very interested in generative AI — and they look to AWS for help and guidance,” Elaprolu added. “The Innovation Center will help them build their generative AI plan, identify and prioritize generative AI use cases that align with business value, develop proof-of-concept solutions and a path to deliver solutions for production-ready case, along with measurable steps.”
Participants in the Generative AI Innovation Center program will benefit from free workshops, interactions, and training, as well as access to AWS products such as CodeWhisperer and the Bedrock platform to serve up code generation for script generation models.
As for from The Generative AI Innovation Center will initially prioritize working with customers who have previously accessed AWS with “plans, goals, or requests for assistance” with generative AI, Elaprolu says. Furthermore, the program will prioritize organizations in the financial services, healthcare, life sciences, media and entertainment, automotive, manufacturing, energy, utilities, and communications sectors.
“Strategies and science experts from the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center will work with customers to brainstorm and formulate problems, help them identify best use cases for generative AI, work through the challenges involved and define a clear path to success,” said Elaprolu. “It will also provide a wide range of expert services from advisory functions, such as exploring the best foundation model candidates to meet business goals, and practical engagement, such as adjusting foundation models to meet specific needs.”
The launch of the Generative AI Innovation Center comes months after AWS launched a 10-week program for AI startups and launched Bedrock, a platform for building AI-powered applications through pre-trained third-party and first-party models. AWS also recently announced that it will work with Nvidia to build a “next-generation” infrastructure for training AI models – complete with its own internal Trainium hardware.
With these moves, AWS is trying – hard – to prove that its platform is the only one to beat when it comes to building and hosting generative AI applications. its power? That remains to be seen, especially given Bedrock’s rocky start. bloomberg mentioned In May, six weeks after Amazon trialled the technology with an unusually obscure compression tool and only one certificate, most cloud customers still didn’t have access.
To Amazon’s credit, however, AWS has managed to land a number of high-profile clients in the generative AI space, including Stability AI (which has chosen AWS as its cloud provider of choice) and AI21 Labs. This runs counter to — but probably not the best, depending on who you ask — Google Cloud’s partnerships with Cohere and Anthropic and Microsoft’s association with OpenAI.
Fortunately for Amazon, the market is large and growing. Grand View Research estimates Generative AI products and solutions could be worth nearly $110 billion by 2030.
“Generative AI will be one of the most transformative technologies of our generation, tackling some of humanity’s most challenging problems, increasing human performance and increasing productivity,” said Elaprolu. “Our customers have always been at the forefront of innovation, and there are endless possibilities and use cases for generative AI. It’s just the beginning.”
Amazon is only the latest to commit significant resources to generative AI initiatives, it should be noted.
Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital division of Salesforce, plans to pour $500 million into startups developing generative AI technologies. a work day newly It added $250 million to its existing venture capital fund to support AI and machine learning startups. Open AIThe company behind the viral chatbot, ChatGPT, has raised $175 million to invest in AI startups. And just this week, Dropbox launched a $50 investment fund focused on artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, Accenture and PwC announced that they plan to invest $3 billion and $1 billion, respectively, in artificial intelligence.
Funds have steadily increased their positions in AI over the past few years, driven most recently by growth in generative AI. according According to GlobalData, AI startups received more than $52 billion in funding via more than 3,300 deals last year alone.
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