Amazon releases new cloud tools to help create chatbots

Using artificial intelligence and chatbots, Amazon‘s cloud computing division on Thursday announced a suite of technologies designed to help other companies build their own chatbots.

While Microsoft and Alphabet are adding AI chatbots to consumer products like their search engines, they are also aiming at another huge market: selling the underlying technology to other companies.

On Thursday, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud computing provider, announced its own proprietary AI technologies, but the company is taking a different approach.

AWS is offering a service called Bedrock that allows businesses to create custom models based on their own data to answer queries in human-like text and generate images from prompts.

The creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI, offers a similar service, which allows customers to create custom chatbots using the models behind ChatGPT.

Bedrock will offer customers the option of working with Amazon’s own proprietary foundation models, which it calls Amazon Titan, as well as other companies’ models. Alongside Amazon’s own models, startups AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI will offer third-party options.

Bedrock allows AWS customers to test drive those technologies without dealing with the underlying servers in their data centers.

Vasi Philomin, Vice President of generative AI at AWS, told Reuters, “It’s unneeded complexity from the perspective of the user. Behind the scenes, we can abstract that away.” 

Amazon’s servers will use both its own AI chips and chips from Nvidia Corp, the biggest supplier of chips for AI, but whose chips have been hard to find this year.

Dave Brown, Vice President of Elastic Compute Cloud at AWS, said of the company’s custom chips, “We’re able to land tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these chips, as we need them. It is a release valve for some of the supply-chain concerns that I think folks are worried about.”