AWS is investing $100 million to help customers succeed with generative AI

AWS has announced it will invest $100 million in a new program that connects AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) experts with enterprise customers and partners around the world to drive generative AI innovation, deployment and – accelerate success.

The new AWS Generative AI Innovation Center includes a team of strategists, data scientists, engineers and solution architects who will work step-by-step with customers to build custom solutions that leverage AWS generative AI services. These services include Amazon CodeWhisperer and the recently announced Amazon Bedrock cloud service, which enables developers to build and scale generative AI chatbots and other applications in the cloud, using internal organizational data to build a variety of leading pre-trained large language models (LLMs) of Anthropic, AI21 And Stability AIas well as two new LLMs in Amazon’s Titan model family.

Proactive generative AI assistance for business customers

Sri Elaprolu, senior leader, generative AI at AWS, told VentureBeat that the company’s teams realized that customers were “super eager” to get started with generative AI, but didn’t know how. “We clearly saw that more proactive assistance to customers will be critical,” he said. “In addition, many customers already using AWS, whether in the AI/ML space or more broadly, have reached out to ask for regulatory guidance.” AWS already has more than 100,000 customers using AWS for artificial intelligence and machine learning, he added, so it’s a “natural extension” for those customers to start exploring generative AI.

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The $100 million announcement comes two months after AWS Amazon announced Bedrock, continuing to expand what many see as the cloud AI wars that have been heating up over the past year.

Gartner analyst Sid Nag told VentureBeat in April that with the buzz and excitement surrounding generative AI news from Google and Microsoft, Amazon was too late to follow suit.

“Amazon had to do it something,” he said. “The cloud providers are clearly best suited to handle data-intensive generative AI because they are the ones who have these hyperscale cloud computing storage offerings.” Bedrock, he explained, provides a metal layer of usability for foundation models on AWS. Amazon also particularly calls out for its ability to provide a safe environment for organizations to use this type of AI, he added. “Organizations want to create their own walled garden in a generative AI model, so I think you’re going to see more and more of that,” he said.

AWS offers free workshops, assignments and training

AWS said the Generative AI Innovation Center will offer free workshops, assignments and training to help customers “imagine and reach for the use cases that will create the greatest value for their business, drawing on best practices and industry expertise. “

Elaprolu pointed to companies like Fox, which uses natural language generation capabilities to help live sports broadcasters generate engaging narrative content, and Ricoh, a workplace solutions company that uses natural language generation to help internal teams build sales proposals.

“In the coming weeks and months you will see a lot more customers with public releases and stories about what they are doing with generative AI on AWS,” he said. “We’re excited to be in the middle of that, helping customers continue to leverage this integration to gain business value.”