AWS invests $100 million to help customers succeed with generative AI

AWS 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 worldwide to speed up generative AI innovation, deployment and success.

The new AWS Generative AI Innovation Center includes a team of strategists, data scientists, engineers and solutions architects who will work step-by-step with customers to build bespoke solutions that use AWS generative AI services. These services include Amazon CodeWhisperer and the recently-announced AmazonBedrock cloud service, which allows developers to build and scale generative AI chatbots and other applications in the cloud, using internal organizational data to fine-tune on a variety of leading pretrained large language models (LLMs) from Anthropic, AI21 and Stability AI, as well as two new LLMs in Amazon’s Titan model family.

Proactive generative AI help for enterprise customers

Sri Elaprolu, senior leader, generative AI at AWS, told VentureBeat that the company’s teams realized that customers were “super eager” to get going with generative AI, but didn’t know how. “We clearly saw that more proactive help to customers is going to be critical,” he said. “Also, many customers already using AWS, whether in the AI/ML space or more broadly, have been reaching out to ask for prescriptive guidance.” AWS already has over 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 announced Amazon Bedrock, and continues 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 around generative AI news from Google and Microsoft, Amazon was overdue to follow suit.

“Amazon had to do something,” he said. “The cloud providers are obviously best suited to handle data-heavy generative AI, because they are the ones that have these hyperscale cloud computing storage offerings.” Bedrock, he explained, provides a meta-layer of usability for foundation models on AWS. Amazon is also notably calling out its ability to provide a secure 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’ll see more and more of that,” he said.

AWS to offer free workshops, engagements and training

AWS said that the Generative AI Innovation Center will offer free workshops, engagements and training to help customers “imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, based on best practices and industry expertise.”

Elaprolu pointed to companies like Fox, which is using natural language generation capabilities to help broadcasters on live sports telecasts generate compelling storytelling content, and Ricoh, a workplace solutions company that uses natural language generation to help internal teams put together sales proposals.

“Over the coming weeks and months, you’ll start seeing a lot more customers with public releases and stories about what they’re doing with generative AI on AWS,” he said. “We’re excited to be in the middle of all of that, to help customers continue to leverage this integration to get business value.”