AWS GenAI strategy based on multimodel ecosystem plus Q

AWS is quietly building a generative AI ecosystem in which its customers can use many large language models from different vendors or choose to employ the tech giant's own models, Q personal assistants, GenAI platforms, and Trainium and Inferentia AI chips.

AWS says it has more than130,000 partners, and hundreds of thousands of AWS customers use AWS AI and machine learning services.

The tech giant provides not only the GenAI tools but also the cloud infrastructure that undergirds GenAI deployment in enterprises.

"We believe that there's no one model that's going to meet all the customer use cases," said Rohan Karmarkar, managing director of partner solutions architecture at AWS, on the Targeting AI podcast from TechTarget Editorial. "And if the customers want to really unlock the value, they might use different models or a combination of different models for the same use case."

Customers find and deploy the LLMs on Amazon Bedrock, the tech giant's GenAI platform. The models are from leading GenAI vendors such as Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Cohere, Meta, Mistral and Stability AI. It also includes models from AWS' Titan line.

Karmarkar said AWS differentiates itself from its hyperscaler competitors, which all have their own GenAI systems, with an array of tooling needed to implement GenAI applications as well as AI GPUs from AI hardware giant Nvidia and AWS' own custom silicon infrastructure.

AWS also prides itself on its security technology and GenAI competency system that vets and validates partners' competencies in putting GenAI to work for enterprise applications.

The tech giant is also agnostic on the question of proprietary versus open source and open models -- a big debate in the GenAI world currently.

"There's no one decision criteria. I don't think we are pushing one [model] over another," Karmarkar said. "We're seeing a lot of customers using Anthropic, the Claude 3 model, which has got some of the best performance out there in the industry."

"It's not an open source model, but we've also seen customers use Mistral and [Meta] Llama, which have much more openness," he added.

Shaun Sutner is senior news director for TechTarget Editorial's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. He is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of news experience. Esther Ajao is a TechTarget Editorial news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. They co-host the Targeting AI podcast.