In his keynote speech at the 2023 AWS Summit in New York, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said he expects that AWS services and capabilities will democratise the use of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI)—broadening access for all types of customers, across all lines of business—from engineering to marketing to customer service to finance and sales.
“Generative AI has captured our imaginations,” Sivasubramanian said. “This technology has reached its tipping point.”
What is generative AI? It’s a type of machine learning (ML) powered by ultra-large models, including large language models (LLMs). These models are pre-trained on a vast amount of data and are known as “foundation models” (FMs).
Generative AI will help improve experiences for customers as they interact with virtual assistants, intelligent customer contact centres, and personalised shopping services. An employee might see their productivity boosted by generative AI–powered conversational search, text summarisation, or code generation tools. Business operations will improve with intelligent document processing or quality controls built with generative AI. And customers will be able to use generative AI to turbocharge the production of all types of creative content.
Sivasubramanian underscored how all this value for generative AI will be unlocked with AWS—and how AWS customers will bring these AI-powered experiences to life.
First, model choice will be paramount. No one model will rule them all. Rather, organisations will need to be able to choose the right model for the right job. Then, customers will need to be able to securely customise these models with their own data. For example, an advertising company may want to fine-tune a model by showing it the company’s top performing ad copy, while an online retailer may want to give the model access to its inventory details so it can pull up the right information when a customer asks.
Easy-to-use tools are also a key part of democratising AI within organisations—along with the ability to deliver responses that are low cost and low latency, thanks to purpose-built ML infrastructure. Much of this innovation will be built with Amazon Bedrock, a service offered by AWS that helps organisations of any size and across all industries around the world easily build and scale their own generative AI applications. It does this by giving customers easy access to a wide range of FMs through a simple API and making it easy to leverage existing data stores to customise them.
Amazon has been developing AI and ML technology for more than 25 years, and recent ML innovations have made the capabilities of generative AI possible.
Here are seven generative AI updates announced at the 2023 AWS Summit in New York.
