Amazon headquarters in Silicon Valley.
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Amazon has added generative artificial intelligence models into Amazon Web Services. Generative AI is the type of artificial intelligence that can create text or images, similar to ChatGPT.

With Amazon Bedrock, customers can build and scale generative AI-based applications through an API. From there, the libraries of Amazon Titan FMs, which include two large language models, will be open as well as other models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI.

Amazon Bedrock is now available in limited preview.

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What is Amazon Bedrock?

Amazon Bedrock is a service that provides access to generative AI on the cloud. Technically, Amazon Bedrock is a library of foundation models, all of which provide similar content-generating abilities. Since Amazon Bedrock’s models are hosted by AWS, existing clients can access them through their usual channels and not have to worry about hosting the model’s large amounts of data on their own infrastructure. However, enterprise clients will be able to feed data sets of their choice into the models.

Perhaps mindful of worries about security, Amazon reassured people that data fed into a training model in this way would not be used to train future iterations back at Amazon HQ.

Customers will also be able to use familiar AWS controls for the new AI. It connects to the cloud-based machine learning platform SageMaker ML, which includes an environment in which to test different models and a feature for managing foundation models at scale.

SEE: Looking to get started with the public version of ChatGPT? 

What are Amazon Titan FMs?

While Amazon Bedrock is the service, Amazon Titan is the content. Amazon Titan offers two AI models: one that creates text and one that improves searches and personalizations. In addition to creating new text such as blog posts or emails, Amazon Titan can sort items into different classifications, hold open-ended conversations and extract specific information from chunks of text.

The latter enhances searches by tailoring the results to more relevant and contextual responses, Amazon said. A model similar to this one is already at work in Amazon’s product search.

How will businesses use Amazon Bedrock?

Once organizations have the AI hooked up to their existing AWS, Amazon said they can customize a model by feeding it just 20 examples of the kind of task that particular organization might want the AI to complete.

“We predict that most businesses’ long-term approach will be to customize large language models to their needs and data instead of out-of-the-box model usage,” a Slalom representative told Amazon.

Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys and Slalom are early integration partners.

Coda is one of the organizations using Amazon Bedrock in preview. “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,” said Shishir Mehrotra, co-founder and CEO of Coda.

CodeWhisperer now includes free tier

Another possible use case specifically for developers comes from CodeWhisperer, an AI-based coding assistant. On Wednesday, Amazon announced CodeWhisperer now has a free tier. The no-cost Individual tier provides access to automated code-writing that lives inside a developer’s existing integrated development environment.

CodeWhisperer works well for “creating code for routine or time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks, working with unfamiliar APIs or SDKs, making correct and effective use of AWS APIs, and other common coding scenarios such as reading and writing files, image processing, writing unit tests,” Amazon wrote in a press release. A professional tier offers more features, such as SSO and IAM Identity Center integration and higher limits on security scanning.

Competition continues in the AI space

It’s hard not to see the AWS announcement as a response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, the generative AI service that became a household name with its public model, ChatGPT. In a blog post, Amazon reminds potential customers that AWS has been involved in the machine learning space for a long time: “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.”

Amazon Bedrock’s major competitors are the enterprise subscription for ChatGPT (run by Microsoft and OpenAI) and Google’s PaLM model, which is also not yet available for enterprise customers.

When will Amazon Bedrock be available, and how much will it cost?

Amazon Bedrock is not currently available for new customers, and Amazon has not announced how much the service will cost. Visit Amazon’s Generative AI information page with an AWS account ID to sign up to learn when Bedrock will be more widely available.