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Amazon joins ChatGPT race with its own generative AI service called Bedrock, targeting cloud customers

  • Amazon’s large-language models, called Titan, will be made available on AWS and can help draft blog posts or answer open-ended questions
  • The popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has set off a fierce competition to capitalise on the technology, and Amazon thinks its in-house chips give it an edge

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Amazon Web Services has launched its ChatGPT-like service called Bedrock for cloud customers. Photo: Reuters
Bloomberg
Amazon.com is joining Microsoft Corp and Google in the generative artificial intelligence race, announcing technology aimed at its cloud customers as well as a marketplace for AI tools from other companies.
The e-commerce giant’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit on Thursday announced two of its own large-language models, one designed to generate text, and another that could help power web search personalisation, among other things. Amazon announced no plans to release a chatbot like the ones Microsoft and Google have debuted to mixed reviews.

Amazon’s large-language models, called Titan, were trained on vast amounts of text to summarise content, write a draft of a blog post or engage in open-ended question-and-answer sessions. They will be made available on an AWS service called Bedrock, where developers can tap into models built by other companies plugging away at generative AI, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI.

In an interview with Bloomberg Television, AWS chief executive Adam Selipsky said customers asked: “‘What you can do to help us with generative AI?’” While conceding that the technology is at an early stage, Selipsky said the company’s in-house chips mean Amazon can provide cost-effective solutions and performance.

Generative AI – software that can create text, images, or video based on prompts from a user – has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley, setting off a fierce competition to capitalise on the technology. Proponents of chatbots like ChatGPT and image-generation tools such as Dall-E believe generative AI will revolutionise the kinds of tasks performed by software.

Amazon shares rose 4.6 per cent to US$102.31 at 3.42pm in New York.

Microsoft, through a partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has integrated generative AI technology into its Bing internet search service and plans to deploy those tools across the software maker’s products. Alphabet’s Google is racing to make similar moves. Meta Platforms has released its own large-language model and said similar work will expand across the company.
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