AWS re:Invent 2023 Preview: What the Cloud Giant Is Bringing to AI

AWS re:Invent takes place in December. The buildup in 2023 is more AI-focused than any previous year. The services AWS is developing and the partnerships it is announcing throughout the year signal what the December announcements will consolidate.

Amazon Bedrock

AWS launched Amazon Bedrock in general availability in September 2023. Bedrock is AWS's managed AI model service: it provides API access to foundation models from Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Cohere, Meta, and Stability AI alongside Amazon's own Titan models, all through a unified API that stays within AWS's security and compliance boundary. The positioning is similar to Azure OpenAI Service: frontier models without leaving the enterprise cloud.

The Anthropic investment

Amazon announced a $4 billion investment in Anthropic in September 2023, with a commitment to make AWS the primary cloud for Anthropic's model training. This is AWS's answer to Microsoft's OpenAI relationship. Claude on Bedrock gives AWS customers access to Anthropic's models under AWS's compliance framework. The investment also gives Amazon seats in Anthropic's strategy and access to model training insights.

SageMaker evolution

AWS SageMaker has been the enterprise ML platform for training, deploying, and monitoring models since 2017. In 2023, SageMaker expanded significantly into the LLM era: LLM fine-tuning via PEFT, JumpStart's collection of deployable foundation models, and SageMaker Pipelines for orchestrating multi-step ML workflows. The investment in SageMaker as the ML operations platform positions it as the control plane for organisations running AI workloads on AWS.

The enterprise AI differentiation

AWS's differentiation in enterprise AI is the breadth of services and the existing enterprise relationships. Organisations that have invested in AWS infrastructure, data lakes in S3, analytics in Redshift, and compute in EC2, have a natural path to AWS AI services that avoids duplicating the integration work they have already done. The AWS AI strategy is not the best model but the most integrated platform.